andygoodliff

Four New Books From Baptists

In the last month and a bit, four new books from British Baptists have been published - history, theology, ministry and spanning 17th, 18th and the 20th century.

  

 

40 Days of Eucharist: Day 27

Walter Brueggemann on the Eucharist as alternative, dangerous bread.

What if Christians began to notice that certain kinds of bread enslave and are the bread of affliction? The most elemental faith decision we make concerns who feeds the body, and if the truth be told we are in various ways into 'eating disorders' of a theological kind. We must reflect on bread and alternative bread. We may begin our reflections with the Eucharist, the relentless enactment of our conviction that only broken bread feeds, only poured out wine contains the power of new life. But we daily resist the brokenness and refuse the poured-out-ness. We have become victims of junk food, the junk of social ideology, the attractiveness of consumerism, the killing seductions of security and despair; we are domesticated, silenced in our satiation. We scarcely notice that all these ersatz bakers have made promises they cannot keep.

What freedom there would be for us exiles if we left off the dominant hopes of our society, if we refused the dominant fears all around us, if we ate bread that hopes only evangelical possibility and that fears only the truth of God's faithfulness, utterly free of every other hope and every other fear! The problem, of course, is that we mostly eat imperial bread and do not notice its costs, that we wind up belonging and being owned, denied freedom for obedience. There will not be genuine freedom until, having new bread, we refuse the offer of Pharaoh's tasty bread. The new bread is, however, happening among us. We are seeing that we have neglected gospel bread and opted for imperial bread; we are left with the deep eating disorder of isolation, despair, and anxiety. The Eucharist is dangerous bread, as that dramatic act mediates to us a fresh way in the world now under the rule of God.

Walter Brueggemann, Cadences of Home: Preaching among Exiles (WJK, 1997), p.131.

40 Days of Eucharist: Day 26

Today is an extract from a sermon given by Isaac Villegas, a Mennonite pastor  of Chapel Hill Mennonite Fellowship, North Carolina.

As we eat the bread and drink from the cup, we are eating at the table of our tortured saviour - the one the powers of this world wanted to make go away. At the Lord's Table we gathered our lives around the wounded one and learn that in God's kingdom the dead will come back to life, the tortured will be able to speak the truth. As we celebrate the death and resurrection of Jesus through this holy meal, we are being drawn into what Johann Metz calls 'a dangerous memory.' We remember what the powers of violence want us to forget: that, in Jesus, the tortured one comes back, and with him comes all of the others. In paradise the tortured come back and are invited to eat. Thus, Luke's crucifixion story poses a question for us: Do we want to be part of that party, of that heavenly banquet? Or, will we have to excuse ourselves because we can't bear the thought of sitting at the same table not only with the enemies of society we see on the news, but also with the people who have hurt us and the people we have wounded?

At this table, with this bread and this cup, we open ourselves to God's forgiveness, which is a flow of love and grace that dissolves the hostility of this world - the rivalry that organises our reality in terms of friend and enemy, the rivalry that organises our lives according to hates and grudges that run deep within us. For as Paul says in our passage from Colossians: 'Though Christ, God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.'

Isaac Villegas, 'Our Tortured King' in J. Alexander Sider and Isaac S. Villegas, Presence: Giving and Receiving God (Cascade, 2011), p.49. Originally 'Our Tortured King' was a sermon delivered on Nov 21, 2010.

40 Days of Eucharist: Day 25

Eugene Peterson does his usual thing of getting to the heart of the matter.

Remember and proclaim are the magnetic poles of the Eucharist: they operate simultaneously but in polarity, the 'remember' a continuous reorientation to the North Pole in the action of Christ on the cross that accomplishes salvation, and the 'proclaim' a continuous reorientation to the South Pole, the articulation of that crucified Christ in kerygmatic words and acts, for 'how are they to hear without someone to proclaim him?' (Rom 10.14). If the 'remember' and the 'proclaim' get isolated from one another, the eucharist compass that keeps our salvation participating lives headed the same direction and in step with the salvation accomplishing life of Christ malfunctions.

The Eucharist stands as a bulwark against reducing our participation in salvation to the exercise of devotional practices before God or being recruited to run errands for God. It is hard to get through our heads, but the fact is that we are not charge of our salvation and we can add nothing to it ... At the Supper we renew our understanding and obedience in this salvation reality and receive over and over again what we cannot take or perform for ourselves but only receive. 'Do this.' This Supper, receive in the fear-of-the-Lord, is the remembrance and the proclamation that keep salvation rooted and grounded in Christ, and only Christ.

... 

Without the Eucharist as focal practice, it is very easy to drift off into imagining Jesus as our Great Example whom we will imitate, or our Great Teacher from whom we will learn, or our great Hero by whom we will be inspired. And without the Eucharist it is very easy to drift into a spirituality that is dominated by ideas about Jesus instead of receiving life from Jesus. The Eucharist says a plain 'no' to all that. The Eucharist puts Jesus in his place: dying on the cross and giving us that sacrificed life. And it puts us in our place: opening our hands and receiving the remission of our sins, which is our salvation.

Eugene Peterson, Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places (Hodder & Stoughton, 2005), pp.201-203.

40 Days of Eucharist: Day 24

Today is a brief reflection from Norman Wirzba.

The Eucharist, in other words, is not an occasional nibbling session in which Christians recall the violence done to their Lord. It is the table where we go to die to ourselves. It is the regular time when we learn to put to death all the self-serving impulses that distort and degrade the world around us. Here we learn to live our baptism in which we die and are buried with Christ, so that we can also be raised with him into the newness of life that glorifies God rather than ourselves.

... It is tempting to confine eucharistic eating to a ritual realm. When this happens, the table around which Christians gather stays in a sanctuary. This is a serious error. The life and ministry of Jesus is not a pious idea. It is an economic revolution that has multiple practical effects, such that the tables in our kitchens and the dining tables in restaurants and cafeterias become places of eucharistic eating. Recall that the members of the early Christian community who gladly and generously ate together were also known to sell their possessions, give to those who had need and hold things in common. In a line that ought to astound us, Luke wrote, 'there was not a needy person among them' (Acts 4.34). To eat in such a way that we abide in Christ and Christ abides in us means that we will give ourselves - our attention, our skills, our energy and our possessions - to others so that we all flourish. Eucharistic table manners result in sacrificial forms of living, in which meeting the needs of others is a defining concern.

Norman Wirzba, 'Reconciliation Through Eating' in Fred Bahnson and Norma Wirzba, Making Peace with the Land (IVP, 2012), pp.123-135.

40 Days of Eucharist: Day 23

Scott Bader-Saye reminds us of the importance of seeing the Eucharist in Jewish terms.

By re-Judaizing this sacrament and reclaiming its Jewish elements, Christians will come to see what it means to be Jews with the Jews or, in Paul's terms, to be grafted into Israel. In this way our experience of the Word in the bread and wine may transform our reading of the Word in the text.

... for [Eucharist] celebration has long ago fallen prey to Israel-forgetfulness. Just to the extent that this practice has come to be understood primarily as a transaction imparting divine grace to the individual soul, it has been not only de-Judaized but de-politicized. By abstracting the Eucharist from the context of Passover and Exodus, we have left behind the politics of liberation and community formation that were central to the Last Supper. Further, by ignoring the Jewishness of the eucharistic body, we have dissociated the practice from God's election and covenant with the flesh of Israel. So, as often as we partake of this non-Jewish body of Jesus at the table, we become trained to see a non-Jewish Jesus in the Gospels.

... by reflecting on the significance of the fact that the eucharistic body of Christ is a Jewish body, and by reconnecting the Lord's Supper to the celebration of the Passover ... the Eucharist will come to instantiate for us the figurative relationship between the Old and New Testaments in which Jesus is received not as the replacement or repudiation of Israel, but as the confirmation and salvation of an Israel now extended to the Gentiles.

Scott Bader-Sayer, 'Post-Holocaust Hermeneutics: Scripture, Sacrament, and the Jewish Body of Christ', Cross Currents 50.4 (Winter 2000), 466, 468.

40 Days of Eucharist: Day 22

Baptists can write hymns. Here's a third, this time from Charles Spurgeon.

Among us our beloved stands,
and bids us see his nail-pierced hands,
points us to his wounded feet and side,
bless emblems of the crucified.

When at his table sits the Lord,
what generous food adorns his board;
when Jesus comes his guests to meet,
the wine how rich, the bread who see!

If now with eyes earth-bound and dim,
we see the signs, but see not him,
then may his love the veil displace
and help us see him face to face.

C. H. Spurgeon (1834-92), altd. Baptist Praise and Worship, 427 (Oxford, 1991)

40 Days of Eucharist: Day 21

In this extract from Desiring the Kingdom, James K. A. Smith draws attention to how the Eucharist is forward looking.

'there's a certain sense in which the celebration of the Lord's Supper should be experienced as a kind of sanctified letdown. For every week that we celebrate the Eucharist is another week that the kingdom and its feast have not yet fully arrived. And every week the words of institution remind us of this fact, for we do it "until he comes." By this I don't mean to denigrate the peace, joy, and nourishment that is found in the Supper; rather, the point is to emphasise that the Eucharist is an eschatological supper. It's sort of a meal "to go", or at least a meal on the way. It's a table in the wilderness (Ps 78.19) and in the presence of our enemies (Ps 23.5), and so there's a certain sense in which we eat it "on the run" - not because of the frenetic pace of consumption and distraction that so often finds us in the drive-thru and eating fast food in the car, but rather because the Lord's Supper is an anticipatory meal that we eat while we sojourn in the earthly city, looking forward to the marriage supper of the Lamb (Rev 19.9). So the Lord's Supper is a foretaste of the feast in the kingdom, which means its meaning has to be situated within an eschatological horizon. It is a meal that constitutes us as an eschatological people: while it recalls and recapitulates Christ's death, burial, and resurrection, the Supper looks ahead to the feast in the kingdom. As such, "the Eucharist should be understood as a sign of the renewed creation. The Eucharist is our model of the eschatological order, a microcosm of the way things really ought to be" (Leithart). Thus it is a normative meal: by showing us a foretaste of how things ought to be, the practice of the Lord's Supper carries norms in it, and these norms constitute both a basis of critique for the present order, as well as hints as to how the church should order itself as a polis that is itself a foretaste of the coming community.

James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Baker, 2009), p.200.

40 Days of Eucharist: Day 20

We're back with William Cavanaugh today, but different book, different thought.

There is no question about whether or not to be a consumer. Everyone must consume to live. The question concerns what kinds of practices of consumption are conducive to an abundant life for all. In the Catholic tradition, the Eucharist is a particularly important locus for the Christian practice of consumption.

In the Eucharist, Jesus offers his body and body to be consumed. "Jesus said to them, 'I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry.': (John 6.35). The insatiability of human desire is absorbed by the abundance of God's grace in the consumption of Jesus' body and blood. "Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life' (6.54), that is, they are raised above mere temporal pursuit of novelty. "Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life" (6.27).

It would be easy enough to assimilate the consumption of the Eucharist into a consumerist kind of spirituality. The presence of Jesus could become another kind of commodity to be appropriated for the benefit of the individual user. Indeed, much of what passes for Christianity in our culture today is addressed to fulfilling the spiritual needs of individual consumers of religion. Many kinds of religion - or more commonly, "spirituality" - are largely about self-help, using God to cope with the stresses of modern life. The practice of the Eucharist is resistant to such appropriation, however, because the consumer of the Eucharist is taken up into a larger body, the body of Christ. The individual consumer of the Eucharist does not simply take Christ into herself, but is taken up into Christ. Jesus says, "Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them" (6.56). Paul writes to the Corinthians: "The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a sharing in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not sharing in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread" (1 Cor. 10.16-17).

The act of consumption is thereby turned inside out: instead of simply consuming the body of Christ, we are consumed by it ... In the Christian view, we do not simply stand apart, as individuals, from the rest of creation - appropriating, consuming, and discarding. In the Eucharist we are absorbed into a larger body. The small individual self is de-centred and put in the context of a much wider community of participation with others in the divine life. At the same time we do not lose our identities as unique persons, for as Paul says, each different member of the body is valued and needed for the body to function (1 Cor. 12.12-27).

If we remain satisfied with the unity of our own communities, however, we have not fully grasped the nature of the Eucharist. For becoming the body of Christ also entails the we must become food for others. And this often involves moving beyond our own communities and comfort zones. Jesus teaches this lesson in a dramatic way in his depiction of the Last Judgment in Matthew 25.31-46 ... What is truly radical about this passage is not that God rewards those who help the poor; what is truly radical is that Jesus identifies himself with the poor ... In the Eucharist, Christ is gift giver, and recipient; we are simultaneously fed and become food for others.

William T. Cavanaugh, Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire (Eerdmans, 2008), pp.53-56.

40 Days of Eucharist: Day 19

Vincent Donovan shares introducing the eucharist to the Masai people.

... I was extremely cautious in passing onto the people the liturgy of the eucharist ...

... To take the first step in directing them how to do this ritually was filled with dangers. Any symbols or gestures I might choose, as proper liturgical celebration, could easily seem a cultural encroachment to them ...

... So the first Masses in the new Masai communities were simplicity itself. I would take bread and wine, without any preceding or following ritual, and say to the people: 'This is the way it was passed on to me, and I pass on to you that on the night before he died, Jesus took bread and wine into his hands, blessed them and said, "This is my body. This is the cup of my blood of the New Covenant, poured out for the forgiveness of sins. Do this in my memory."'

... The people took it from there. It is extraordinary the way people will play the gosepl back to you, if it is presented to them in an uninterpreted way.

... Masai men had never eaten in the presence of Masai women. In their minds, the status and condition of women were such that the very presence of women at the time of eating was enough to pollute any food that was present. Hence, men could never eat with women. How then was eucharist possible? In their minds it was not. If ever there was a need for eucharist as a salvific sign of unity, it was here. I reminded them that beside the law of love which I had preached to them and they had accepted, I have never tried to interpret for them how they must work out this law in their homes and in in their lives, and in their treatment of their daughters and wives and female neighbours (as sorely tempted as I had been to do just that). But here, in the eucharist, we were at the heart of the unchanging gospel that I was passing on to them. They were free to accept that gospel or reject it, but if they accepted it, they accepting the truth that in the eucharist, which is to say 'in Christ, there is neither slave nor free, neither Jew nor Greek, neither male or female.'

They did accept it, but it was surely a traumatic moment for them, as individuals and as a people, that first time when I blessed the cup, or gourd in this case, and passed it on to the woman sitting closest to me, told her to drink from it, and then pass it on to the man sitting next to her. I don't remember any pastoral experience in which the 'sign of unity' was so real for me. And I was not surprised some time later when a group of teenage girls told me privately that the 'ilomon sidai' (good news), that I talk about so constantly, was really good news for them.

Vincent J. Donovan, Christianity Rediscovered: An Epistle from the Masai (SCM, 2001 [1978]), pp.97-99.