William Yagel

Grace Radford

October 9, 2022

Proper 23, Year C

Communion Table, St. Edward’s, Cambridge

The Centuries have settled on this table,

Deepened the grain beneath a clean white cloth

Which bears afresh our changing elements. 

Year after year of prayer, in hope and trouble,

Were poured out here and blessed and broken, both 

In aching absence and in absent presence.

This table too the earth herself has given

And human hands have made.  Where candle-flame

At corners burns and turns the air to light

The oak once held its branches up to heaven,

Blessing the elements which it became,

Rooting the dew and rain, branching the light.

Because another tree can bear, unbearable

For us, the weight of Love, so can this table.

Amen

Malcolm Guite from The Singing Bowl

 

For some of you the recent use of Morning Prayer over the past few years has been quite easy.  It was returning to a way of worship that you grew up with.  Morning Prayer was the typical service in most Virginia churches from the colonial period into the 1980’s.  In my early childhood we only had Eucharist one Sunday per month, just like we have been doing here for the past few months.  It was the proponents of the Liturgical Movement who, much to the dismay of the snake-belly-low Virginia Churches, shifted away from Morning Prayer in the creation of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, or BCP, which is the version resting in the rack in front of you now.  

I say snake-belly-low not to indicate informality.  God knows we are not now, nor has Virginia ever been, casual when it comes to worship.  The term “low church” seems to have come from England as far back as the 1700s.  Low churches were those that emphasized robust scriptural readings.  They would also emphasize sermons and reflections on the readings while putting less emphasis on sacramental theology, or Communion.  

Protestants wanted to distance themselves from our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters whose devotion to the Pope was suspect at best.  The Catholic Church has always focused on the Mass, so from the time of Martin Luther in the 16th century, our Church moved away from that practice, leaning on scripture and sermon.  This is still clear today even if you look across other protestant denominations.   For example, Baptists typically have much longer sermons, and they put little emphasis on Eucharist.  That said, they do tend to like the other main sacrament of Baptism…  Lutherans like the Eucharist, but with less focus on the Common Cup, which is quite central to our theology.  The religious habits of our country alone reveals how these deep fissures in practice have developed.

Anyway, the creators of the 1979 Prayer book tilted the scale ever so slightly, they studied who we are called to be, and they made course corrections.  Because of that, the Episcopal Churches in the USA, as well as VA churches, have been growing into the changes the 1979 book brought.  It is one of the favorite criticisms of the Episcopal Church that we can’t pray without our BCP, a criticism that can be well earned, but the beauty of our book is that it allows us to enter into thanksgiving with consistent ritual and liturgy that is consistent theologically and thoughtfully considered.  

After prayerful reflection liturgical theologians helped us better define who we are as a people.  And over the last forty or so years our changing theology has returned us to the practice of the Eucharist as central to our worship.  This transition is in keeping with the very early days of the church where we were people of the table.  Where the earliest Christians gathered, remembered sacred words, ate bread and wine, and gave thanks.  So too do we, 2000 years later.

If you want to, you can open that BCP in front of you to page 13 and look at the first sentence.  It reads: “The Holy Eucharist (is) the principal act of Christian worship on the Lord’s Day.”  It then basically goes on to say the other offices are fine too.  For contrast, the 1928 BCP lists Communion, Daily offices, and the litany as “regular services”.  This means that our embedded theology in 1928 did not recognize the Eucharist as a central or principal or primary act as a community.   In fact, we didn’t even call it Eucharist, we called it communion.  But in 1979 the we turned back to ancient practice and we turned the object of our communal gathering into a celebration of what theologians call the Paschal Mystery.  That is, the miracle of the passion, death, and resurrection of Christ as absolutely central to the Christian faith.  Each week under normal circumstances, when a priest is present, we celebrate God’s sacrifice for us in our liturgy.  We join in Eucharistic celebration of God’s unfailing Love.  

And it is just that word, “Euchariston”, that the oldest Greek manuscripts of our gospel today use.  When the tenth leper returns to Jesus and prostrates himself at Jesus’ feet, the tenth man gives thanks.  Eucharist means to give thanks; it is as simple as that.  Now, Communion and Lord’s Supper are synonymous with Eucharist, but that is not what they “mean”.  We have changed our language around our primary gathering as a people to say that we gather fundamentally To Give Thanks. There are surely other things happening, and each of us experiences the holiness of our liturgy and sacraments differently, but from the time we exchange the peace in our Eucharist liturgy everything is about appreciation hear the words of the Sursum Corda:

The Lord be with you

And also with you

Lift up your hearts

We lift them up to the Lord

Let us give thanks to the Lord our God

It is right to give God thanks and praise.

Yes, even for the poorly tuned, the Euchairsitic prayer is intended to be sung, all of liturgy is intended to be thankful, lived out by lifting our voices in praise.  This is the shift we made in 1979.  We now mark our normal Sunday gathering principally with gratitude.  With Eucharist.

Rowan Williams, the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury said it a little differently when he was speaking in post Katrina New Orleans in 2007, he offered:

We are indebted to one another. I am indebted for your existence. Because I would not be myself without you.

And a society, a community, a city that can get to that level of recognition, is one that lives from a deeper place than one that simply talks about contract or even respect.

And it's this perspective which I believe, this perspective above all that the church brings to bare. Because the church is a community which lives from and in gratitude.

And if the church does not live by thanksgiving, I don't know what the church lives by. And when the church fails as it so often does to live from thanksgiving, I wonder whether it lives at all.

During this season of Stewardship, I ask that you give yourself the time to reflect with gratitude on the wonders that surround you.  I do hope that your budget allows you to give the gift you desire to Grace, but what I am asking is truly more than that.  Money will grow programs, but it will never grow passion.  Your passion in this place, and your passion in thanksgiving for the mystery that is the life, death, and resurrection of Christ are the goal.  Focus and wonder on God’s call in your life.  

I ask you to look at the deep rhythms in your life, like the deep rhythm of the Eucharist, that can go unnoticed if you don’t pause and consider.  I invite you to consider where God is calling you, and what talent you may want to focus upon anew.  I pray that when you do pause and consider the wonders in all of God’s creation that you can joyfully give thanks for those wonders and celebrate them with me in the coming year.  

Thank you.

Amen