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

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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’.