• Home
• Services at Saint Peter’s
• Theology
  • What We Believe
  • The Pulpit
  • The Caversham Lectures
• News
  • News and Opinion
  • The Rock Archive
  • News Archive
  • Our Printed Heritage
  • Photo Gallery
• People
  • Friends of Saint Peter’s
  • External Links
• About
  • Music at Saint Peter’s
  • Saint Peter’s Character
  • Our History
  • Church Groups
  • Staff and Contacts
  • How to Get Here
• Login
  • Parishioners’ login
  • Vestry Members’ login
• Search Saint Peter’s

When the manna stopped falling

Lent 4 : 10 March 2013  : Joshua 5: 9-12

Somehow I seem to have had the knack of arriving in parishes just as they are about to celebrate their 150th anniversary. The most poignant was at Holy Trinity Avonside. We were so enthusiastic about the celebrations that in the aftermath we launched a friends of Holy Trinity organisation that aimed to restore the Church back to its original glory as Benjamin Mountfort, the great gothic architect of Canterbury, had created it. How were we to know that just three years later all that he had achieved there would be totally destroyed?

The 150th celebrations at St Mary’s Addington were pretty impressive too. There was an Edwardian music hall evening. And there was an out door dramatic re-enactment of Sir Joseph Ward’s official opening of the bell tower, a memorial to Dick Seddon. King Dick was a frequent visitor to the Addington Vicarage, as one of his daughters was married to the Vicar.

These anniversary celebrations matter because, as Michael King points out in his history of New Zealand, there have now been several generations of Pakeha living in this country that do not fit in anywhere else in the world, and who have their own distinctive and unique culture. These spates of 150th anniversary celebrations are an attempt by this fledgling pakeha culture to come to terms with who we are, and the formative experiences that made us what we are.

D H Lawrence had a poetic imagination that lit up and transformed the Nottingham landscape of his youth. The protagonist of "Sons and Lovers" comes across the blazing chimneystack of a colliery at dusk and spontaneously cries out, "a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night." The Exodus story has etched its way into the imagination of many of those who have been exposed to the Bible. There is something elemental about that desert journey with its vivid symbols of being claimed by God.

There is poignancy about that scene from the book of Joshua we heard this morning. The children of Israel have just crossed the Jordan opposite Jericho. The 40-year wandering in the desert is over. They have finally entered the Promised Land. There is rejoicing in their hearts. But something is lost too. That close intimacy with God - that day-by-day reliance on the sustenance he gave. The manna stops falling -that miraculous food from heaven that could not be stored but which gave just enough strength for the next day’s march. It is a signal that they have moved into the next stage of their life with God.

What do the children of Israel do to mark this transition? They have their own anniversary celebration - the Passover that commemorates the Exodus from Egypt. They eat for the first time the produce of the country, unleavened bread and ears of corn. But this is a sacrificial meal. It culminates in the eating of the paschal lamb.

As this celebration develops into a year-by-year festival of the Jewish people it acquires a remarkable feature in its way of thinking about time. As families and friends gather together for this domestic liturgy, with its rituals and set prayers around a special meal, they are seeking to enter in to the experience of those runaway slaves as they fled Egypt assisted by stunning miracles of deliverance. They have become contemporaneous with their ancestors in the faith in the events that gave birth to the faith of Israel. This is not just remembering - not just an edifying reflection on the symbols of a far off important event. It is about recalling certain key events in the past in such a way as to make them real and effective in the faith experience of the participants. What crossing the red sea meant for the children of Israel as they escaped into freedom must now come alive for Jews many years later as they open themselves up to what God given freedom would mean for them now in their present situation.

This way of thinking about time has immense significance for us. When Jesus transformed the Passover meal, by introjecting into it the events of Holy Week, he established the pattern for what we are doing this morning. Anamnesis is the technical name for what happens as we celebrate the Eucharist. These words, these ritual actions, these symbols, our movement towards God in love and praise, recall what Jesus did in such a way as to make the effect of them real in our lives.

That quote on the front cover of the Pebble gets to the heart of the matter:

Worship is an encounter with events. The gospel is about unique events through which the human situation has been changed. These events are not dead but alive. Christian worship has a unique character which operates on the principle of the incarnation. It is sacramental. In it the events of Christ’s life, death and resurrection become truly present. Christ is not simply a human person present in our worship, he is the particular person of those events, and he is not simply present in our heads or in our feelings, but is sacramentally present.

This sacramental presence has significance for us too as in what the Church does in the ministry of healing. The laying on of hands and the anointing with oil is a sacramental act also. It connects us with the healing ministry of Jesus, those signs of the Kingdom that brought deliverance and relief to those who sought him out. As this community of faith focuses its collective spiritual energy in an appeal to God on behalf of those who come forward it is as though a bridge of faith spans the Jesus of the gospels and us now. Leo the Great expressed it in one sentence, "What was present in the Lord has passed into the mysteries."

When the manna stopped the children of Israel lost a tangible sign of God’s presence that had been as real as the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night. Immediately, in the celebration of the Passover they connected themselves to the power of the Exodus events. Here, this morning, we are doing the same as we link ourselves in a powerful act of recalling with all that Jesus did to heal, to save and to raise up.

The great biblical scholar C H Dodd was no Anglo-catholic – in fact he came from just about the opposite quadrant of English Christianity. But as he read deeply in to the Scriptures he came to some conclusions about the Eucharist that will resonate with us. He saw how each celebration of the Eucharist carries us right into the heart of the central events of Holy Week, which we are about to commemorate and recall in the most solemn and impressive Services of the year, what we call the Paschal Tridium. This is how C H Dodd put it:

In the Eucharist the Church perpetually reconstitutes the crisis in which the Kingdom of God came into history. At each Eucharist we are there - we are in the night in which he was betrayed, at Golgotha, before the empty tomb on Easter day, and in the upper room where he appeared, and we are at the moment of his coming, with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven, in the twinkling of an eye at the last trump. Sacramental communion is not purely a mystical experience, to which history would be in the last resort irrelevant; it is bound up with a corporate memory of real events.