Visiting That New Testament World of Wonder
Corpus Christi, Year B : 10 June 2012 :
Father Hugh Bowron, 2012One of the most unusual and outstanding shops of Wellington was the Fairy shop in the seaside suburb of Seatoun, which alas no longer exists. There - the owner Dorothy presided over a world of wonder for children. The chief glory of this place was the fairy grotto, a kind of three-dimensional immersion in a forest glade inhabited by the imaginative creatures of childhood literature. Many little girls came here on their birthdays to be photographed - for as they did so, the flash light set off a light and sound extra dimension to this place of childhood longing. No wonder children wrote in the wish book at the entrance to the shop, "When I grow up I want to be like Dorothy."
In a recently published biography of Pugin, the architect who persuaded the Victorian public that gothic was the only acceptable style of church building, it turns out that his initial career was as a set designer at Covent Garden. Like the designers of modern day movie sets he had the ability to create the illusion of richly conceived alternative worlds, in which the stars of musicals and operas could enchant their audiences. This approach, and these skills, were at the heart of his gothic church building. No gothic churches had been built in centuries, and no medieval furniture actually existed. They were brought into being as imaginative reconstructions.
The power of his vision has reached out to us in these surroundings at St Peter’s, Caversham. The gothic vision has created for us a sacred world which we temporarily inhabit each week. This is a stage, a theatre, in which the divine drama is played out every Sunday morning.
But we don’t just leave it to the stage set to do all the work. The beautiful costumes and vestments, the stylised movements and ritual gestures, the singing and chanting, the use of incense and processions, many of which are cultural borrowings from the world of Byzantine court ritual, flesh out and embody our weekly excursion into the world of New Testament realities. Penetrating even deeper into the reality of what goes on in the liturgy - we can notice the back and forth dialogical rhythm of God speaks we respond, we praise and God blesses, that is at the heart of the texts we use, and which is a direct borrowing from the Jewish world of Synagogue worship.
So is this all-amateur dramatics and artifice, a curious mixture of high camp and movie set motifs designed to generate the impression of a Divine presence? Such a reductionist view ignores three truths.
Whenever human beings come together in public assembly to connect with God an element of drama and theatre is involved. Even if the worship assembly consists of a preacher dressed in a business suit monologueing the congregation at great length, interspersed with the odd gospel chorus, this is still a dramatic experience - it may be bad theatre, dull theatre, but it is still a contrived cultural product, no matter how much it masquerades as sincerity and simplicity.
The other reality is that the liturgy, with all its cultural borrowings from earlier cultural epochs, has achieved classical form. In other words, it does the job better than any other conceivable vehicle for worship. Just as the New Testament writings say who God is better than any other forms of literature, so the liturgy makes the Kingdom real in our midst more effectively than any other kinetic arranging of text, movement and gesture could.
Most important of all, this is not just human beings engaged in an odd set of shamanistic rituals, because the Holy Spirit lights on what we do here to make it come alive with his Shekinah presence. The liturgical action has been shaped and perfected by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit working through the evolving tradition of the Church. And the Spirit visits each celebration of the Eucharist to make the risen presence of Jesus available to us.
The feast of Corpus Christi began in the Middle Ages as a way of encouraging greater reverence and devotion to the body and blood of Christ in communion. It was a way of thinking about what went on in Holy Communion that concentrated on the end product, the final result of the Eucharistic action. This was a static way of understanding the presence of Christ in the Eucharist, but one which fitted in with an age that thought that the priest had the power to confect Christ with his hands. The feast sparked off extraordinary scenes of Eucharistic devotion as the Blessed Sacrament was processed around under a canopy, with rose petals being strewn in its way. Such scenes caused an equally sharp reaction amongst Protestant reformers, who were sure that the presence of Christ in the sacrament amounted to a less operatic reality than this.
Now we see that both sides had failed to appreciate the richness and the depths of what goes on in this sacred meal. The Eucharistic Liturgy, when it is done well, makes the Kingdom of God come alive in our midst. As we come through the doors of the Church and make our quiet preparations to pray and worship we are in the process of making a transition from the ordinary world into the sacred world. As the Scriptures are read aloud, and are brought alive through song and ritual gesture, we are moving into a world of New Testament realities. What Jesus spoke about and did is now powerfully present through this combination of symbolic actions. We are enveloped in this New Testament world for an hour for the purposes of inspiring us, consoling us, energising us, and confronting us, so that we can be effective Christians for the rest of the week.
In one of the most striking scenes in the Old Testament the prophet Ezekiel is handed the scroll of the Torah and ordered to eat it. Though he dreads the task, he finds to his astonishment that it is sweet to the taste - the words of the Lord are the best meal he has ever had. That is what is happening to us this morning. The word read aloud is the same word that is used to give thanks over the bread and wine to change it, so that we take the Word of God inside us in material form. We become, as it were, radio active with the words of God, brimming over with the gospel of power and joy, that has become our meat and drink.
What is more these words have changed us as a group of people, have shaped and moulded us away from the disparate group of individuals we arrived here as, to become the collective presence of Christ here in Caversham. As we turn to our neighbours with the words. "The peace of Christ be with you," we are stating a fact - we have become him for this time we are together. That is what Augustine was getting at when he wrote: "If, then, you are the body of Christ and its members, it is your own mystery which is placed on the Lord’s table; it is your own mystery which you receive…You hear, "The Body of Christ," and you answer, "Amen." Be a member of the Body of Christ so that your "Amen" will be true."
It means too, that we have an opportunity as the bread and wine is placed on the table, to put ourselves, and those we love, into the centre of the Eucharistic action, by means of an intentional prayer. In this prayer of offering we present to God the mystery of who we are at present, in all our unresolved ambiguities, to be transformed by God through the life, death and resurrection of Christ, into who we shall become as the fully realised person that God his it in mind for us to be, as part of his mystical body. Whatever, whoever, is offered to God comes back in this abundantly blessed way.
During the 19th century the philosopher Feuerbach came up with a wisecrack saying, "Man is what he eats." He was a materialist who thought that the only reality we can know is the physical stuff that makes up the world - there was no room in his thought world for the spiritual. But what he failed to reckon with is that Christianity is a religion that anchors an intensely spiritual account of reality in the material world. Right at the start of the Bible man is presented as a hungry being with the whole world at his disposal as food. And at the centre of our Sunday worship is the act of eating and drinking. But there is more to it than "yummy, yummy, yummy, I’ve got God in my tummy."
As we take communion a connection is established between God and us. The risen life of his Son flows into us. Fresh resources of being are supplied to us in this transaction, more than are available at any other access point in the world. And these resources of being assist us to expand and develop intellectually, emotionally, relationally and spiritually. They help us to grow into becoming the son or daughter of God that he has in mind for us to become. And what God has in mind for us is a high destiny, a noble vocation, as sharers in the divine nature.
Yes, we are what we eat. Consuming the risen life of Christ in material form we become a little more like him. He changes us as we absorb him. It is a process going on at many levels, even those beneath the surface level of our conscious awareness. But there is plenty to hear and see and touch and taste and think about too. For Christ has provided here also, through the liturgy, an imaginative reconstruction of the Kingdom he proclaimed in Galilee, now locally available in the Caversham version. What Dorothy did for the children of Wellington in the fairy shop, Christ does for us here in this gothic take on the world of New Testament realities.
Last Monday night, at the close of our Church architecture film season, we saw the modern church of St Paul’s, Bow Common, which has in large letters above its main entranceway, "This is none other than the house of God and the gate of heaven." Until recently there was a bus stop right outside it. Those of you who have ridden on London’s double decker buses will be aware of the habit of cockney bus conductors calling out destination points as they are reached. As the bus pulled in at St Paul’s they cried out, "Gates of ’evean," a wonderful description of any Church.
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