Corpus Christi

Corpus Christi
Preached at St Paul's Cathedral on the Feast

“Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” John 6.53

Think of all the things that have changed in our world since Jesus spoke those words nearly two thousand years ago.

Some have been shallow changes – hair styles, shoes, music, MacDonalds. They have not greatly affected the world we live in.

Other changes have been deep and far reaching – paradigm shifts – the way we understand the universe, the nature of time, our ability to manipulate the human body and the human mind, the rise of science and technology.

These changes continue to shape our world for better or for worse.

And all these changes mirror what goes on in our own lives.

There are superficial changes over the years: hair styles (if you have any hair left to style) and clothes, putting on a bit of weight, needing glasses to read, voting for Boris instead of Ken.

And then there are the deep changes: learning to accept ourselves for who we are; coming to faith or losing our faith; loving someone so much that it changes the way we live; personal suffering and illness; or the changes wrought by years of loneliness.

Our journey through life is marked constantly by these changes: both the superficial ones, and sometimes without realising it, the deep changes.

And what is true of ourselves, is true of this meal, of this bread and wine, of the Eucharist, the Mass, the Holy Communion.

Since Jesus first took Bread and Wine nearly two thousand years ago, the form of this service has undergone many superficial changes: whether in Aramaic or Latin or English; whether in soaring cathedrals with sublime music or in homes with a handful of believers simply sharing the bread and wine.

But beyond the form of this service, and all the outward changes we can trace back through Christian history, there is the deep change which this bread and wine effects in our lives.

The church has struggled over the years to try and give theological explanations of what is going on.

Transubstantiation was the doctrine developed most fully by St Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century. He had been educated in Aristotelian metaphysics, and so he taught that although the elements still appeared to be Bread and Wine (the ‘accidents’ as Aristotle would have called it) they were, in a deeper reality, the Body and Blood of our Lord (the ‘substance’ in Aristotle’s terms.)

Martin Luther re-interpreted this in the 16th century and used the word Consubstantiation: the Body & Blood of our Lord coexist in the Bread & Wine. But there is no transformation of the elements.

At the same time, Ulrich Zwingli was the People’s Preacher in Zurich. He stressed the purely symbolic value of the bread and wine. In contrast to the Anglican ‘harmonisation’ described as the Real Presence, Zwinglianism, or Memorialism as it became known, was caricatured as the Real Absence.

Of course you will still find all these views, and others, represented in the Christian church today.

ARCIC (which is the Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission) tried to avoid all troublesome descriptions of process in their report of 1971. They simply referred to ‘the mysterious and radical change’ which takes place at the consecration of the bread and wine.

And this deep or radical change is not just about the physical bread and wine, but about how it deeply changes us.

This was why Jesus used such stark language: “Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.”

He had already, in the earlier verses of this chapter, linked this ‘life’ with ‘believing’: “ Very truly, I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life”. (John 6.47)

John is stressing that Christian mystery is not like pagan mystery, nor is it like the magic of the many cults around in the first century. There is no hocus pocus, no hoax – both phrases derived from the words of the Latin Mass, hoc est corpus meum - this is my body.

The miracle of this meal, is not in what changes happen to the bread and the wine when the priest says the words of consecration.

No the miracle of this meal, is what changes happen to us as we eat and drink in obedience to Christ’s command.

Jesus said that he came so that we might have life and have it more abundantly.

This meal, this Eucharist is a constant reminder of all that Jesus did so that we can enjoy fullness of life.

And more than that, in a way that we cannot fully understand, we are drawn into the life of God as we take the very life of Jesus into ourselves.

As we shall sing in the recessional hymn: “Faith alone the true heart waketh to behold the mystery.” (Of the glorious body telling.)

This is a deep change. This is being born again. This change, changes the way we deal with all other changes of our life.

We may have very little faith. We may not always believe what we think we should believe. We may think ourselves to be poor examples of Christianity. All the more reason why we should take the bread and wine, trusting in the love God, daring to believe the words of Jesus.

We come to this table not because we must, but because we may.
Not because we are strong, but because we are weak.
Not because we have any claim on God’s blessing, but because we stand in constant need of God’s mercy.

In this Feast, we eat the Bread from heaven, until one day we will drink with Christ and all the saints in Glory.

Thanks be to God for this Most Blessed Sacrament.

Trinity - Dancing with Angels

Trinity - Dancing with Angels

Preached at Hertford College Oxford

“This grace of the Holy Spirit enables them... to dance with the angels.” St Basil the Great On the Holy Spirit (Divine Office Bk II p.670)

I went to the sort of old fashioned boys grammar school that taught ballroom dancing to the Upper Sixth. It was the nearest we got in the 1960s to sex education.

We hated it. Yet there was, and is, something immensely enjoyable in the social patterns of dancing: the partnerships, the community, the shared knowledge, the complementarity of the steps, the public intimacy.

What else could explain the resurgence of that absurdity known as Line Dancing? Or the fact that almost as many people voted in Graham Norton’s Strictly Dance Fever as in the General Election!

Some have argued that contemporary, club-scene dancing is yet another sign of postmodernity: individualism and self-expression; no rules and no partners; the breakdown of social coherence and mutual responsibility.

They see the difference between modernity and postmodernity as the difference between Foxtrot and Industrial Techno; The Little House on the Prairie and Sex in the City; or, if you’re into it, the difference between the original Star Trek & Deep Space Nine.

But clubbing is supremely a social pursuit with codified rules of conduct and dress, not obvious to the outsider - but that is why they are an ‘outsider’. It serves the age-old purposes of waltzes and Morris dancing; of Stripping the Willow and Charleston; of ballet and ballroom.

Wherever we turn in the world, in whatever age, there is an instinct both to worship and to dance. Perhaps with the exception of the Southern Baptists. The old Texan joke: “Why are Southern Baptists against sex standing up? Because it may lead to dancing!”

So what of St Basil’s contention that “This grace of the Holy Spirit enables us... to dance with the angels”.

In the early discussions of the church fathers, one of the words used to describe the interrelatedness of the Trinity was ‘perichoresis’: the inter-animation of the persons of the Trinity.

The late Professor Colin Gunton at King’s London took up the word again more recently. In “The One, The Three and The Many” he writes that the word ‘perichoresis’ is “heavy with spatial and temporal conceptuality, involving movement, recurrence… and a dynamic, mutual reciprocity.”

We might put it more simply than the good Professor - dancing. The ‘choresis’ of perichoresis, comes from a similar root to choreography - the mapping of dances.

The dynamic of the Christian God, whom we honour today as Blessed Trinity, is the loving dance of eternity: Father, Son and Holy Spirit caught up in the wordless communication which we mimic in all our human dances.

You find it in mediaeval poetry. In the Christmas Carol, Tomorrow shall be my Dancing Day, as Christ talks about his incarnation:

Then was I born of a virgin pure,
Of her I took fleshly substance;
Thus was I knit to man’s nature,
To call my true love to my dance.
Sing, O my love, my love,
This have I done for my true love.

Or here is Evelyn Underhill writing in the middle of the First World War in Theophanies:

Heaven’s not a place…
No! ’tis a dance
Where love perpetual,
Rhythmical,
Musical,
Maketh advance
Loved one to lover.

Then of course there is that old Shaker favourite, Lord of the Dance:

Dance then wherever you may be,
I am the Lord of the dance says he…

And as we are drawn into the sacred choreography, so we take on the characteristics of the other dancers in the Trinity. Dancing is a great act of solidarity, of togetherness. That’s part of the buzz of clubbing, of dancing, of being part of the throng of people.

And in that solidarity with the Holy Trinity, the fruit of the Spirit produces in us the traits of the Father and the Son: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.

Then the charismata, the gifts of the Spirit, reproduce in us the works of the Father and the Son.

So together as the people of God we bring healing and wholeness, wisdom and truth, freedom and justice to a world that remembers how to dance, but has forgotten why it dances.

I had a message on Facebook yesterday from one my old students. His fellow students all called him affectionately Gammy Gav because he had a wonky leg. He never wanted to come dancing with us. (I taught a course on theology and culture and it was de rigeur to go clubbing on Friday night.)

We finally persuaded him, but he stood at the edge, watching. Then a gaggle of girls pulled him into the dance - and he danced!

And he realized that we all look a bit gammy when we’re dancing. And he didn’t look too gammy at all! It worked wonders for his self-esteem.

The God we worship, the Holy Trinity, is a loving fellowship of three in one.
He is not remote and alone, but an intimate community. They are so wrapped up in each other, that they are indistinguishable. One in three and three in one.

But not so wrapped up that they have no time for us. Easter was when Jesus the Son, came to call us into the dance of the Trinity.

And although we feel all unworthy, and spiritually akimbo, gammy, in comparison, yet God the Father’s love draws us into the fellowship, into the dance.

And as we are caught up in the joy of the Blessed Trinity, we are transformed into the likeness of God: we become noble humankind and not brutish animals. Or as St Basil puts it, with great theological daring:

"So is their joy unending… so do they acquire likeness to God, so - most sublime of all - do they themselves become divine."

Ezra Pound once remarked: “Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance.”

Christianity begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the unpredictable dynamic of the Holy Trinity.

So, don’t sit around the edges of the dance: the cynical onlookers of church life. We have enough of those. You’ll atrophy! You have been baptized in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

“And this grace of the Holy Spirit enables you... to dance with the angels.”

Living in Between - Sunday after Ascension

LIVING IN BETWEEN

"the end of all things is near..." 1 Peter 4.7

There was an architect, a surgeon, an anaesthetist and a politician, arguing about the nature of God.

“He was clearly a surgeon” said the surgeon. “His first act was removing Adam’s rib to create a woman.”

“Ahhh” said the anaesthetist, “but first he caused a deep sleep to come upon the man. He was an anaesthetist!”

“But that’s Genesis chapter two,” said the architect, “in Genesis chapter one, he first designed and built the universe. He created it out of chaos.”

“And there you have it,” said the politician, “who created that chaos?!”

Well, the waiting of the last few months has ended at last. Boris is our new Mayor. (And that has nothing to do with the choice of my text…)

Of course the speculation has now begun as to who will win the General Election in two years’ time. No sooner one arrival than another destination.

Christians are arguably always caught up in the 'in-between times'. They never arrive. It is in the nature of our faith. And although we would sometimes like to know our future, it is better that we should not know. The Bible tells us all we need to know about the future and about living 'in between'.

First there was the time between the Garden of Eden and the giving of the Law to Moses.

Then between the giving of the Law and the coming of the Messiah, the fulfilment of the Law.

And for the early disciples there was the wait between the events of Holy Week, and the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost.

And some years after Pentecost Peter is able to announce that the Church was still 'in between', but that the end was nigh. The apparent delay of the Lord's Second Coming was always a problem for the early church which Peter and Paul sought to address.

So here we are on an 'in-between' Sunday - with Ascension last Thursday and Pentecost still a week away. In the drama of the liturgical year we are to wait until the Spirit comes.

When I was but a young man in Sussex I went with my Pentecostal friends to 'tarrying meetings' - from the words of our Lord to his disciples in Luke's Gospel: "but tarry ye in the city of Jerusalem, until ye be endued with power from on high." (Lk 24.49) - we were to pray, and wait for the Spirit to fall - or for 9pm - whichever came earliest.

I remember inviting the local Pentecostal pastor to preach at my church in Camberwell and explaining that the service had to finish by noon. He looked at me as if I were mad and exclaimed: "But sometimes the Holy Ghost don't get here till 12.30!"

So was the Holy Spirit inactive until the day of Pentecost? Or to speak of another member of the Trinity, did God the Son do nothing until he was born in Bethlehem?

The revelation of God in Trinity has had particular foci - historical events - over the past five thousand years. But the work of Father, Son and Holy Spirit has been evident, retroactively if you like, throughout all of history.

So before the Law was itemised on Mt Sinai, men and women still had consciences, and societies drew up their own laws. St Paul talks about this in the opening chapters of his letter to the Romans.

And before the saving work of Christ's passion, men and women were still saved through faith in a merciful God. The letter to the Hebrews makes it clear.

And before the day of Pentecost, God's Holy Spirit was at work through prophets and kings, through harlots and pagan dictators. Scripture bears witness to it.

Now on this Sunday in the year of our Lord, 2008, we are in between that first Pentecost nearly 2000 years ago, and the end of the world, or our own death, whichever comes sooner.

Does that mean that we will see nothing of the kingdom of heaven until 'the end of all things', the consummation of the age, the dissolution of the cosmos?

No! Before that time, retroactively, the kingdom of God is the ideal towards which we must struggle. As we will say in a moment: "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, in earth as it is in heaven."

This was the objective of Adam and Eve as they were cursed and expelled from the garden. They would not re-enter the kingdom of heaven through the garden gate, guarded by the angel with the flaming sword.

They would only move towards paradise regained through the passion of Christ and with the help of the Holy Spirit.

It's not as if God was holding out on everyone until the day of Pentecost. As if he commanded them to love God with heart and soul and mind, and neighbour as self, way back in Deuteronomy; but had no intention of giving them the means to do so for a thousand years!

The in-between times have always been as potent as the special events. Becoming is every bit as important as arriving. All of our life, as human beings, is caught up with 'in between', which is one reason that we are so preoccupied with the passing of time. When we are young we cannot wait till the next event. When we are old we wait with some apprehension for the one and only event left for us.

Peter puts it in these practical words of wisdom: "The end of all things is near; therefore be serious and discipline yourselves for the sake of your prayers. Above all, maintain constant love for one another, for love covers a multitude of sins." (1 Peter 4.7,8)

A consistent theme through Scripture is to live as if life matters; to make our life count for God and for others. In the words of our Lord: "I have come that ye might have life, and have it more abundantly."

Peter's little summary here may be paraphrased that we are to live thoughtfully, prayerfully and lovingly. This will cover a multitude of sins. Sin is that destructive agent at work in our life and in our world. It is trapped in the 'in between' time with us.

But Christ has dealt with sin, and if we will live by the Spirit, then sin will not have dominion over us.

A policeman stops a man driving the wrong way up a one way street. "Didn't you see the arrows?" he asks. The driver replies "I didn't even see the Indians!"

What is important about living in the ‘in between’ time, is seeing the arrows. It is knowing where we have come from and where we are heading. Of course we don't always get it right, which is why we need the constant reminders of which way the arrows are pointing.

The whole of this mass is a restatement of the saving acts of God which punctuate our history and motivate our day by day living 'in between'. And the mass points us to the future - Christ has died; Christ is risen; Christ will come again.

It is the future, whose power is present now, that draws us on, to the time when there will be no more 'in between'; to the eternity of God.

Meanwhile, we are the 'becoming' ones, always growing and moving on. I'm reminded of that now rather quaint description of this process as it is described in the 1920s children's story The Velveteen Rabbit by Marjory Williams:

The Skin Horse had lived longer in the nursery than any others. He was so old that his brown coat was bald in patches and showed the seams underneath, and most of the hairs in his tail had been pulled out to string bead necklaces. He was wise, for he had seen a long succession of mechanical toys arrive to boast and swagger, and by-and-by break their mainsprings and pass away, and he knew that they were only toys, and would never turn into anything else. For nursery magic is very strange and wonderful, and only those playthings that are old and wise and experienced like the Skin Horse understand all about it.
"What is REAL?" asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. "Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?"
"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real."
"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.
"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."
"Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?"
"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse.
"You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

Margery Williams
The Velveteen Rabbit, Heinemann 1989 (1922)

In the 'in between' we are becoming - drawing closer to Christ personally, and trying to shape our society on the coming kingdom principles of justice and mercy.

Christian hope is the ability to hear the music of the future.

Faith is the courage to dance to it in the present.

"The end of all things is near; therefore be serious and discipline yourselves for the sake of your prayers. Above all, maintain constant love for one another, for love covers a multitude of sins." (1 Peter 4.7,8)