Dear friends,
This Sunday we will celebrate an instructed eucharist – it is useful to do this on occasion, as it helps us to remember the tradition and meanings of our liturgy. We will talk about what each step in the eucharist represents, and why it is there.
I’ve mentioned this before, but I recall being interrogated by a bishop at a pre-ordination interview as to the meaning of the eucharist – I may have said that there were two poles in Anglican thought – one pole is that we are Protestants and thus the Eucharist is more or less a remembrance, a re-enactment of the Last Supper; the other pole is that the Eucharist is a far more mystical and charismatic sacrament, representing an inner union with the body and blood of Christ. When pressed on this, as to what I thought, my answer to the bishop, after an uncomfortably long period of thought, was this: “It is not just the re-enactment of the Last Supper, the Resurrection is also present, as is the encounter between good and evil, the temporal and the eternal.”
And then I stopped.
The bishop responded that these were important points. But underpinning my thoughts was something that I had read thirty years before, written by Aidan Kavanaugh in his book, “On Liturgical Theology:”
“…the liturgy presumes that the world is always present in the summoned assembly, which although not of ‘this world’ lives deep in its midst as the corporate agent, under God in Christ, as its salvation… What one witnesses in the liturgy is the world being done as the world’s Creator and Redeemer will the world to be done. The liturgy does the world and does it at its very center, for it is here that the world’s malaise and its cure well up together, inextricably entwined.”
But then we are left wondering, after reading these beautiful words, the question that my seminary mentor would ask, “So what?”
Which I will answer with questions to all of us:
Does the Eucharist change our world?
Does the Eucharist change how we are in the world?
Does the Eucharist elicit the Eternal, and the Eternal Presence, in its moment?
Does the Eucharist change us? Does it change you?
I bid that we carry these questions into Sunday’s Eucharist and into the thoughts that the instructions and learnings might cause within you. But, as you do so, please consider these words from the late Archbishop Anastasios:
“Mission is the Liturgy after the Liturgy. The extension of Christ’s saving presence in the world.”
All Peace,
CJ+
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