Walbrook Talk 1

Talk 1 Coming Together

Wednesday 11th March

2009

The work of the resurrection 1. Lent and Easter We are on our way to Easter. Easter is the moment when the undying and indestructible life of God makes itself apparent. When on Easter morning Christ is raised, man is raised, and it is clear that God is with man. On Easter morning we will say ‘Christ is risen – he is risen indeed’. Lent is our preparation for Easter. The readings for the Sundays of Lent tell us about the resurrection. They do so by setting out the whole story of the redemption of man and of all creation. In these talks I am going to lay out a little of what the Church means when it proclaims the resurrection. In Christ, God has brought us out of isolation and estrangement and into relationship with himself. The covenant of God secures man for relationship, with all humanity and all creation. In the first week of Lent we learnt that God has secured man in creation by a covenant. Now in the second week of Lent we learn, in Genesis 17, that a covenant is given to Abraham and to his seed forever. In the Letter to the Romans the Apostle Paul tells us the generosity of God to Abraham has been expanded outward in Christ to include all the nations of the earth. The promise made to Abraham is opened to the Greeks, to the Romans and now even to the British. The love of God is for all. We may come into this communion that Christ has established and within which we can live in love. This love is a communion of persons, and a holy communion. 2. One Bread Every Sunday morning Christians gather together. The Lord God calls and, roused out of our everyday existence, we come together. We leave offices, homes and all preoccupations, we journey through these streets, climb these steps and come down the aisle, and take our places here next to each other. We are drawn, out of all corners of the world, into the presence of God. We come because the Lord God calls us, and calls each of us to meet and come into communion with these people. This movement of gathering and reconciliation is the first thing that is going on in the eucharist. Next the priest holds up the eucharistic bread, and we are called up to the altar to receive it. Imagine first that this bread is large and round like one of those unleavened loaves you see in the Middle East. When this is elevated it can be seen the whole length of the Church. As we move up to receive this bread, we are received by it and become integrated into it. We are the many fragments, brought together to become this one loaf. Imagine for a moment, that each of us brings something to Church, and that when we come up to altar we empty our pockets of whatever fragments have accumulated there during the week. Each crumb represents some event or relationship in which we have been involved. Now imagine that we put them on the altar and these crumbs become this single loaf. God has brought us together to be this new entity. Brought together and transformed, we become this indivisible unity which nothing can pull apart.

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This bread is the Body of Christ. That loaf is Christ, and it is Christ with us. Yes, it is Christ, and us with him. The Body of Christ, is the Church, united with its head. It is not us without him, but it is not him without us. The Church is all other Christians: we have to take hold of them and hang on to them. This body is us as we will be, all transformed and so it is our first glimpse of our redemption and future. So here is my first offering to you. The centre of the eucharist is not the breaking of bread but its coming-into-existence. The body of Christ is coming into existence here for our sake. 3. What you see in Church This eucharistic bread is Christ and his people. Christ has been raised by God for us, and he will raise us too, so that we stand before him and before each other. Christ gives each of us this fellowship that we know as the Church. The first stage is to notice the people in Church. You see the people in the pews around you. In an old church you are aware that many generations of Christians have sat here before you; the plaques on the walls tell us the names of some of them. Portrayed in windows and on walls, is the very first generation of Christians, the apostles. They look to Christ, they point us to him and they radiate his holiness. So by ‘Church’ we mean these people, the ‘communion of saints’, here in this particular place. Saints are those who are being sanctified, made holy. These people and these images preview the many encounters with the people of God ahead of us. The sequence of images in the windows around my Church, St Mary’s Stoke Newington, is fairly typical. They show us the incarnation of Christ, starting with the annunciation and birth, his presentation in the temple and baptism, Gethsemane and trial before Pilate, cross, burial and baffling empty tomb. Each image shows us Jesus and those around him who for our sake became his first witnesses. Just above the altar Christ is celebrating the Last Supper with his disciples and above it, in the East window, Christ is ascended and comforting those who gather around him. We are not on our own in Church. We are in good company. Now let us simplify what we see in Church. Imagine that when you come into the building all you see is a cross, an image of Christ crucified. Imagine a huge and gloomy church, and at the far end this cross, depicting his pain and abandonment. As we walk up the Church this image of passion and death becomes clearer and more terrible. A long walk up the Church is what Lent is. Some recoil from this horror, and decide that the Christian faith is nothing but this depicted violence and pain. The cross is the only image visible until you have come right down the nave, so those who turn and leave now are not close enough to see what is going on. For only when we reach the front and are standing under the cross, and craning up, can we see another image. Far above the cross is Christ again, but he has overcome death and has risen. He is victorious and glorious, and around him is the whole company of heaven. What is the relationship of these two images? The Gospel for the second Sunday of Lent, Mark 8, gives us the clue. He began to teach them that the

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Son of Man must undergo great suffering. The bottom image is a refraction of the top one. The glory comes to us, but we experience it as this pain. Christ comes to us, but when his glory enters our orbit it translates as this suffering and abandonment. Christ does not shed this glory, for it is there all the time, just unrecognised, by us at least. For we are the ones anguished and mired in evil, in pain and inflicting pain on one another. It is only in his person that we see our own condition. Reflected against his truth, we look like this, in this pain. But it need not be so. Christ has followed us down here into this gloom so that this darkness now appears to belong to him. The world sees this violence and death and finds it repellent, as indeed it is. But this darkness is our own. But when we stand underneath the cross, we should recognise our own face there. The crucified one shows us that this is what life looks like when lived without God and against our fellow man. That is our misery we are looking at. As long as we regard it as his, and fail to recognise it as ours, it remains ours. The cross that seems to debase him, is really only his act of coming to be with us in our debasement. When we recognise this, the darkness lifts. By the cross he lifts us up and exalts us with him. In Christ the whole glory of God has not only poured itself into the narrow compass of man, but into the unimaginably alien form of man made unrecognisable by death. Christ has gone through this alien form for our sake, and the result is that man is no longer isolated, or disfigured, but redeemed and glorified. 4. The Body of Christ for the world What do you feel when you enter a church? In light, bright St Stephen’s Walbrook, perhaps you feel a spacious, soaring feeling. But not every church or church service lifts your spirits. Many are hard to take. The degree that we find this church, or that individual Christian, repellent, is the degree to which the cross, that is, Christian discipleship, is hard. Christ is hard to take. The antipathy we feel to some groups of Christians is part of this same aversion. What do we not like about the Church? Is it the priestly hierarchies and their corruption, is the crusades or imperial triumphalism, is it the banal politics or trite contemporary worship styles? However your sensibilities are offended, they are offended because, having joined himself to us, our sin included, Christ is hard to take. That bitter taste is comes from our sin as will as theirs, so these Christians are not so horrible that we are justified in turning away. They belong to him, and however obnoxious they appear we have to receive them if we are to receive him. One more thing to say about the cross. Our society does not know how to judge itself. It bounds and rebounds from boom to bust, its optimism and pessimism equally unfounded. We cannot say whether the standard of living we have experienced all our lives is going to continue as things will pick up again, or whether it is now over and the gains of our lifetimes are about to prove unsustainable and delusory. Is the body of our society basically sound, or is it really wounded and bleeding? How should we see ourselves? The cross puts the question to everything we do. It invites us to undergo a little self-assessment. We must do a little accounting for Easter is our year-

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end. Through Lent the Lord tests and purifies his Church and each Christian receives the judgment and correction of God, so that they serve as his witnesses and thus are faithfully the body of Christ for this generation. The Church that lives under the cross, and takes this correction, represents for the world the same invitation to self-judgment, to measure itself more truly. The Church asks hard questions, and represents those questions by its very existence. That is its usefulness of the society around it. For founded in the covenant and communion of God with man, the Church is able to look up to see Christ triumphant, and with him mankind redeemed and glorious. This gives the Church the confidence to look forward with equanimity to whatever comes, and this means that the Church is able to put a name to our difficulties. If there is a darker world ahead, Christ will take his people through it, and this will work for their sanctification. The Church that celebrates the resurrection is ready to face a long Lent. 5. Worship and thanksgiving On Sunday morning, the Church celebrates the resurrection. We call this celebration the Eucharist, which means ‘thanksgiving’. In Christ we are able to see that God is our God and so we give thanks. In each event of worship we come into the presence of the Lord and of all his company, in a communion that is holy. The worship of God is a public service: anyone can come in listen and pray and confess their sins, ask for forgiveness and be reconciled. The Church is particularly public, of course, when it takes its worship out of the building and into the streets. On Palm Sunday the people of St Mary’s Stoke Newington do that. With other Hackney churches we will process along the Kingsland High Road singing ‘Hosanna, Sing Hosanna to the King of Kings’. Each onlooker can decide for themselves what they see, whether they see simply an unsophisticated people, or an unholy or even repellent sight. They can turn away, or they can decide to come nearer. Christ leads his people through the whole world. In the course of this long, long journey we sing God's worship, and tell whoever is ready to hear that God is with man. Though we doubt and fear and fly that love, it does not go away. We sing our way past people who imagine that they are without God, who strangely see themselves as on-their-own and against the world. But we tell them that the glory of God shines on them, and into them, and back out of them again to us. This is the view that we see, Christ glorified in London, and so London redeemed and glorified too. To see our city in this way our eyesight must be re-calibrated to receive this better vision, and this is what Christian discipleship is. As Church goes through London it greets it as the dwelling place of the Lord and it celebrates the long kindness of God to us, but it also sees all London suffering and putting itself through a long crucifixion. The Church sees that glory and this pain and anguish, and it tells our society that it is established by the covenant of God with man, and tells each one of us that we are loved. The Body of Christ loves the society to which it is given. The love of God sustains the Church. The confidence that flows from the altar, flows down the Church steps to the world outside and makes for a confident society. The love of God that the Church has witnessed to and embodied for 4

these many centuries, has made this just and a generous society, prepared to hear the truth. As a result this society of ours has even managed to communicate some of these attributes to the wider world. But in the last generation or two our society has come only a little way down the nave, seen nothing that it liked, and turned away. The result has been less of that generosity, and a noticeable cooling and darkening. There is no good reason why this society of ours should now take offence against the Church. We can only describe it as a morbidity and the best the Church can do is sing more gladly and pray more patiently about redemption. The Church is here – still here – because it is witness to the unchanging love and faithfulness of God to man. God raises man up. God exults in man and, in Christ, exalts man to his own right hand. God is with man, and so man is with God. This is what we tell the world, when we sing and say at Easter ‘Christ is risen’.

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