Sermons on The Sacraments : Summer 2010
1: The Eucharist
A sermon preached by Fr Michael Fuller on 6th June
Today we begin a series of sermons on the sacraments.
If I were asked what is the significance of the sacraments I would say that they are the missing link in the church today. They are what transform religion into a spiritual experience; they are what brings our own and our churches experience of God alive and without them the church is merely a religious grouping.
They are the transforming work of God in the life of you and me.
They are what this week's Newsletter calls a vehicle to provide us with a means of sanctification - a growing and a maturing in the grace that God gives to us.
We begin on this day, celebrated by the Church as the Feast of Corpus Christi with the sacrament of the Eucharist, the Holy Communion, the Lord's Supper, the Eucharist.
So today I am going to do something I should have done over 15 years ago. I am going to come out to the congregation! Come out as a died-in-the-wool, born again sacramentalist.
I do not believe that as Christians we can have a full experience of God without the seven Sacraments that Our Lord Jesus instituted, there I've said it. You are, of course, free to make what you want of that statement, but disagreeing with it will not make it any the less the truth.
As a sacramentalist I affirm that the sacraments are effectual means by which God inwardly changes a person and unites him to Christ. Those who believe in some sort of conversion experience as being all that is necessary to find their way to God seem to have all different sorts of opinions about the sacraments, but they seem one in denying that the sacraments objectively contain grace.
Therefore, those who deny that the sacraments themselves are unbreakable promises of God miss something amazing that will bring their religious observance alive. For them the crux of our inward configuration to and union with Christ must be found elsewhere.
I want to describe sacramentalism in terms of its theological touchstones: the Incarnation and its extension in and through the mystical Body of Christ. From this perspective, sacraments are understood to be objectively efficacious means of creating within us the capacities to live the spiritual life and filling the properly disposed recipient with the grace that is the essence of that life.
The Christian sacraments are rooted in and flow from the Incarnate Son and Word of God, who is immortal for our salvation. He chose to take flesh from the Virgin Mary. Therefore, the mystery of salvation, which consists of the union of God and humankind, is not an abstraction worked out in isolation from the material world.
The sacraments proceed from the Holy Trinity, through the Incarnation of the Son, by his will and institution. Sacraments cannot come into being, or be, or be administered apart from Jesus. The sacraments objectively contain the spiritual DNA of the God-man, the Good Physician and Shepherd of our souls.
On this feast day, of all days, when we come to encounter Jesus Christ in the most Holy Sacrament of the altar, we see revealed in the hands of the priest these simple, yet profound truths which speak not only to our own personal faith journeys and our own struggles to become more Christ-like, but which speak of the very purpose of the whole world: to respond to the living God in whom we live and move and have our being.
If we are to make sense of the sacraments and particularly of the Eucharist we must see the whole world as sacrament, as having been marked by the fingerprints of God, and there are times and places, rituals and objects where the barrier between the sacred and the created appears very thin indeed: where the presence of God in our midst, in almost indescribable ways is palpably real: on a deserted beach in Devon, a mountain in Columbia, knelt in the Holy House at Walsingham and, perhaps most often, when bread and wine are transformed into the Blessed Body and Precious Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.
The Reformation, that period of political and theological upheaval, that schism in Western Christendom in the 16th Century did away with many of the excesses of a Church which had lost sight of the Gospel that drove it and had retreated into the pursuit of power rather than the proclamation of love. But in doing that, it casually discarded much that enriched the faith and which we have spent the last 500 years in England slowly regaining: the sensuous, the metaphysical, the recognition of a corporate faith over an individualistic one and most of all in the Anglican Tradition, the rightful place of the Sacramental Life at the heart of the Reformed, yet Catholic Tradition that characterises true Anglicanism, and which if we actually allow ourselves to recognise it, has never actually gone away.
We return, as we celebrate this feast, to the simple recognition of Jesus Christ revealed in broken bread and wine outpoured; but not simply to remember what he did a couple of thousand years ago, but to do what he commanded us to do at the Last Supper and to bring him into our present.
Once again, English proves itself to be an inadequate language for the utterances of God: when Jesus says "Do this in remembrance of me", he uses the word anamnesis - which is much more complex a word than simply remember - it is connected to the Hellenistic concept of bringing the past into the present, and so when he says "This is my body" "This is my blood", we should take Jesus on face value.
After all, we never have a problem with any of his other sayings do we? And yet, those who claim to hold most to biblical inerrancy will gladly disavow the very words of Christ: "Take this all of you and drink from it. This is my blood of the new covenant, which will be shed for you, and the forgiveness of sins. Do this in anamnesis of me".
The mystery, the wonder, the very essence of our faith is to be seen this morning on this holy altar; the most amazing transformation takes place: the ordinary things of bread and wine become transformed into the most divine; ordinary people like you and I are transformed by our encounter with that transformation, and we ordinary people become extraordinary.
Yet we most often miss it because we treat as an ordinary, every day occurrence. Either we are too filled with our own distractions or have worked out for ourselves a different experience that denies the power of a living God. Or it is an extension of what we do outside in our day-to-day life.
We queue to receive these precious gifts as if we were in a supermarket checkout, meeting and greeting those around us, rather than reverently preparing to encounter the living Christ who can change the ordinary, the mundane into the Divine.
St. Francis of Assisi, meditated on the sacrament in these words:
Let everyone be struck with fear, the whole world tremble, and the heavens exult when Christ, the Son of the living God, is present on the altar in the hands of a priest!
O wonderful loftiness and stupendous dignity! O sublime humility! O humble sublimity! The Lord of the universe, God and the Son of God, so humbles Himself that He hides Himself for our salvation under an ordinary piece of bread!
"He hides Himself for our salvation under an ordinary piece of bread!" - what power is hidden between the molecules of this bread and this wine! Outwardly, there is no change, and yet we ought to sense as we draw near with faith, that the power of this sacrament has the power to transform.
Just as the wheat is beaten and crushed to become flour for bread, Jesus' body was scourged and crucified. Just as the juice flows from the grape to make wine, Jesus' blood flowed. The bread and wine, which we offer in sacrifice during every Eucharist and are transformed into the body and blood of Jesus in the Mystery of the Sacrament, reminds us today of the passion and death of Jesus.
For just like the wind blowing on the trees, we witness the power of the wind without seeing the wind itself; so we also see the work of the Spirit on the people who receive the sacrament without being able to see explicitly the God whose fingerprints are behind it.
And so it ought to be that with faith and joy that we come and gather around this holy altar: priests and people, God and lovers-of-God, the poor, the marginalised, the great and the weak, the wealthy and the ill, the addicted and the unsure. We come to obey his command, and be fed by the life-giving sacraments.
I would like to leave you with the shortest sermon I have ever heard preached; in fact, the shortest sermon I have ever preached, over 40 years ago now!
Jesus is God. Mary is his Mother, and so he is fully human. Go therefore to the Eucharist and absorb and be absorbed by God.