andygoodliff

40 Days of Eucharist: Day 33

Today's extract comes from the Baptist Anne Wilkinson-Hayes as she reflects on the Lord's Supper in light of the work of Alan and Eleanor Kreider.

"Oh by the way," concluded the worship leader at the end of the service I was visiting, "There's communion on the tables at the back - help yourself on the way out ... if you want." I was stunned, and all the more the fact that everyone around me seemed to accept this statement as normal. But was it any worse than the service I attended  on a freezing cold Christmas Eve in a beautiful twelfth-century building, where the liturgy was pared down to the absolute minimum, conducted at speed and with all the soul of a fast-food outlet, without even the perfunctory "Have a nice day"?

What have we don etc the expression of sharing the Lord's Supper that makes it such a pale shadow of the Kreiders' aspiration to 'joyful communal thanksgiving'?

I have had good experiences of communion. The church were I was a member in Australia had an unusually rich liturgical life for a Baptist church. The Eucharist was very much the focus and climax of the beautiful liturgy, but the lengthy service was not for the faint-hearted; if often lasted well over two hours. Occasionally, toward the end of a particularly demanding marathon, I was reminded of one of Alan and Ellie's stories from the London Mennonite Centre. They were enjoying a carefully constructed, thoughtful communion service, and a 'gentleman of the road' was shuffling around at the back, becoming more agitated, until he eventually exclaimed, "For God's sake, cut the crap and give us some [email protected]#$% bread!"

Probably my best experiences remain those in my university days - when charismatic renewal was sweeping the churches of all theological persuasions. I attended a packed high Anglican church where we all sensed that we were caught up together in a new movement of God. I was joyously swept up to the altar by a passionate singing of the Gloria and softly returned with the strains of 'Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world ...' It felt as though something momentous was happening among us - that God was present, and together we were being lovingly shaped for service.

Sadly, that was thirty years ago, and I have participated in or led communion services in hundreds of churches of different denominations since then, and so rarely ever have a similar sense of joyful communal thanksgiving. Why not? And does it matter? Is the sharing of communion essential to a life of committed discipleship? Eleanor believes so. She writes, 'Churches will be renewed when the Lord's Supper, graced by God's presence and Word, orientated to the living Lord and empowered by the Spirit, is fully restored to the place that it had in the early centuries - as the central communal Christian act of worship.'

Anne Wilkinson-Hayes, 'Communion: Renew the Covenant' in Forming Christian Habits in Post-Christendom: The Legacy of Alan and Eleanor Kreider edited by James R. Krabill and Stuart Murray (Herald, 2011), pp.170-171. 

40 Days of Eucharist: Day 32

Sam Wells explores how to receive communion. Where the majority of Baptists will sit and remain in their seat to receive communion, perhaps something to think about here.

One local congregation found it difficult to decide whether they should sit, stand or kneel to receive communion . Kneeling seemed appropriate to some, because it embodied humility. But some said that, without an altar rail, it asked too much of people with disabilities. It seemed that sitting was the posture that stressed equality, because everybody looked and felt much the same. But it was felt that, besides being too comfortable, remaining in one's seat suggested that God made the whole journey, with almost no response from his people. Standing in a circle became the norm. It stressed the differences of height, age, and physical ability, and it made it necessary for some to rest on the strength of others. Though some said they felt unworthy to stand, others pointed out that Christ had enabled, even commanded them to stand. and that standing was a symbol of the resurrection. By standing in  circle, the congregation realised they did not just eat of one body - they were one body.

Samuel Wells, God's Companions: Reimagining Christian Ethics (Blackwell, 2004), pp.212-213.

40 Days of Eucharist: Day 31

Today we listen to a small extract from an early book by Will Willimon on the Lord's Supper.

A friend of mine says he's skeptical  of my emphasis upon the Lord's Supper as a meal, as a time of fellowship and life, to the exclusion of some of the former stress upon Holy Communion as a time of sacrifice and death. "At Holy Communion, are we coming to the table or to the altar?" he asks.

In recent years, we have rediscovered the ancient emphasis upon the table. The old altars, which were pushed against the back wall of the sanctuary and placed on high steps away from the people in the Middle Ages, have been converted to small tables , brought out into the light, set in the midst of the congregation, as they were in the early church. My friend questions some of this. He does not mind the recovery of the Lord's Supper as a meal, but he wonders if, beneath our current emphasis upon the fellowship and the joy of the sacrament, we may be avoiding some of its more threatening, more challenging implications.

He reminds me that a table is more accessible than an altar. The table is a place of linen napkins and fine silver, of merriment and polite conversation broken only by the tinkling of knives and forks. The table is a place of good manners, warm hospitality, and a receptive and close God. The altar, on the other hand, is a mysterious place of sacrifice, of life-and-death matters. Here stands a priest in the holy of holies, knife in hand, preparing to slit the throat of some cow or goat. The altar is enmeshed in the screams of dying animals, blood trickling down the marble steps. There is talk of sin and death and sacrifice before a distant, demanding God.

...

As often as we come forward to the Lord's Supper, we come not only to a table but also to an altar. Our sin and death are real. They cannot be explained away or avoided. They must be confront. We are on the way with Jesus to the cross. 

William H. Willimon, Sunday Dinner: The Lord's Supper and the Christian Life (The Upper Room, 1981), pp.81, 88.

 

40 Days of Eucharist: Day 30

Jeremy Begbie, reflecting on the Eucharist from the perspective of music, considers how the Lord's Supper stabilises and destabilises.

The repetition of the Eucharist stabilises. Here God regularly re-calls the Christian community to know again the transforming power of the cross - here the Church's generative and inexhaustible theme is heard and sung again, here 'the Lord's death is proclaimed' (1 Cor. 11.26). At every Eucharist, in being opened to Christ by the Spirit, we are opened to his past, bearing upon us. However, the very same eucharistic repetition also destabilises. To be opened out repeatedly to Christ's past is to be opened out to a future anticipated in him, and thus to experience a re-charing of God's promise of a new future. It is to be incorporated into a forward momentum of the Spirit which activities in us an increased longing - 'until he comes.' To speak of stabilising and destabilising here is not to speak of a dialectic of opposites set against each other, or of successive phases of a process (as if we first 'look back' and then 'look forward'); in music, the accumulated tension at an upper level is generated by the repeated 'return' to the lower level(s). Repeated stabilising gives rise to instability. To be regularly re-bound to Christ who was crucified and raised from the dead is to be drawn into a stronger hope for the world.

I have used the word 'destabilise' here primarily because of the way in which this aspect of the Eucharist is to be felt by the Church. Repeated eucharistic celebration will of course provide consolation, a rooting again in the forgiveness forged at the cross. But because it settles us in Christ crucified and risen, in whom the new humanity of the future has been given in our midst, the Eucharist will provoke unsettledness, in ourselves and in relation to our surrounding reality, an acute sense that we have not yet reach out 'rest' (Heb. 4).

Jeremy Begbie, Theology, Music and Time (Cambridge, 2000), p.167.

40 Days of Eucharist: Day 29

From a sermon by the late John Webster delivered at Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, Maundy Thursday 2001.

... The memorial which is instituted tonight and which we are commanded to continue is a memorial not of the Last Supper, but of his death. Maundy Thursday is about Good Friday. And to continue week by week, day by day, to celebrate the Lord's Supper is to lodge at the heart of the Church the single fact of the death of the Lord.

This means, immediately, that there is an inescapable backward reference in every act of gathering for the Lord's Supper. The Christian Eucharist is a memorial. But what is a memorial? Clever theologians sometimes take me to one side with a kindly look in their eyes and explain to a poor benighted Protestant like me that in the Bible remembering doesn't mean calling to mind something past, but rather reactivating or re-enacting the past so that it's powerfully present among us now. But though I'm open to argument, I don't in the end think that's really right. It's not right because whenever we start talking in terms of making something present, we cannot avoid taking away from the uniqueness and unrepeatability of what happened on the cross. What do when we gather for Communion is not a re-enactment; it is a looking back to what took place once and for all.

... Celebrating Communion is thus not first of all about here and now, but about there and then; only because it's about there and then is it about here and now. That's why Paul calls it a proclamation of the Lord's death.

... Here, in this assembly at this table, God is at work. And God's work here is present to us, to make present to us, what took place on Good Friday. We don't make Good Friday real by reenacting it, or by thinking and feeling about it. God in this sacrament declares to us what Good Friday made true: that he is our reconciler; that sin is finished business; that we can repent because God has forgiven; that the promised acted out in the death of Jesus stands for all time and for each human person. In this memorial, God turns us backward; but he also makes present to us the limitless power of what the Son of God suffered.

... What then do we do now, as we assemble to remember? In one very real sense, we do nothing. That is, whatever we do does not in any way contribute to or supplement or finish off or make real what God has done ... What we do is therefore a strange kind of doing. It's doing in which we don't initiate , don't try to bring something about, don't try to make the world. It's a doing in which we receive and take into ourselves the gift of what God has already done. And that doing is called, very simply, faith.

John Webster, 'Take this Holy Sacrament', Confronted by Grace. Meditations of a Theologian ed. by Daniel Bush & Brannon Ellis (Lexham, 2015 [2011]) pp.75-79.

40 Days of Eucharist: Day 28

Rowan Williams again. For every year (I think) of his time as Archbishop, Rowan gave lectures for Holy Week in Canterbury. Many have now been published - Tokens of Trust; The Lion's World; Being Christian; Meeting God in Paul; Meeting God in Mark and most recently God With Us: The Meaning of the Cross and Resurrection Then and Now. Today comes from the chapter on Eucharist in Being Christian.

One of the most transformingly surprising things about Holy Communion is that it obliges you to see the person next to you as wanted by God. God wants that person's company as well as mine. How much simpler if God only wanted my company and that of those I had decide to invite. But God does not play that particular game. And the transforming effect of looking at other Christians as people whose company God wants, is - by the look of things - still sinking in for a lot of Christians, and taking rather a long time ...

Rowan Williams, Being Christian (SPCK, 2014), p.51.

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.