Blackburn Cathedral
Cathedral Eucharist : Sunday 8th July 2012
The Eucharist : Anticipation
This morning we come to the fourth and last address in a series about the Eucharist.
Having thought about Presence, Thanksgiving and Communion, our theme today is
Anticipation.
There are different types of anticipation. There is joyful anticipation: the young child
on Christmas Eve; the young couple prior to the birth of their first child. There is
fearful anticipation: the person living with domestic violence; the prisoner on deathrow.
What of anticipation in the context of the Eucharist?
It is, I think, true to say that ever since Christians were first given that name, there has
never been a day when some of them, somewhere, have not met to break bread. They
have done so because Christ told them to: ‘Do this in remembrance of me’. ‘This’
consists of a four-fold action: taking, blessing, breaking and giving.
At every Eucharist bread is broken. In breaking the bread we remember the broken
body of Christ on the cross. But the breaking of the bread relates to us, too. For in the
Eucharist we offer ourselves in union with Christ’s offering of himself to the Father –
and we do so as broken people, in need of his forgiveness and healing grace.
Two years before he died, Michael Mayne, a former Dean of Westminster, wrote an
article about remembering. He wrote that remembering isn’t just about not
forgetting. Put a hyphen between the first ‘e’ and the first ‘m’ of ‘remember’ – and
you have the word ‘re-member’. To re-member is the opposite of dis-member. To
dismember a body is to take it apart, limb by limb, like a person being cut down by
gunfire, blown apart by a mine, or decapitated. To re-member someone is to do what
all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t do to Humpty Dumpty: to put
him together again; to re-member him.
When, wrote Michael Mayne, I bring to mind someone I love who has died, I don’t
think of a corpse. Rather do I think of a loved human being, restored in all their
precious individuality. It is this sort of re-membering which lies at the heart of the
Christian faith. To put us together again, to re-member us, after death has
dismembered us, is to do what only God can do.
We cannot know what form that re-membering will take. But we have a hint of it in
the resurrection body of Jesus Christ.
Later in this Eucharist, bread will be broken. It is the practice of many of those who
preside at the Eucharist, as they break the bread, to place a tiny piece of the bread in
the wine of one of the chalices. This mingling of bread and wine symbolises the
coming together again of flesh and blood in the resurrection of Christ. In Christ’s
resurrection we have the first fruits of God’s new creation, of that new body which
the resurrection life will give us.
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It is important to recognize that, in the Christian understanding of things,
‘resurrection’ does not mean ‘going to heaven when we die’. It isn’t, says Bishop
Tom Wright, about ‘life after death’; rather is it about ‘life after life after death’. We
die. We go to be with Christ (‘life after death’); but our body remains dead.
‘Describing where and what [we] are in that interim period is difficult, and the New
Testament writers mostly don’t try. Call it ‘heaven’ if you like’, says Tom Wright,
‘but don’t imagine it’s the end of all things. What is promised after that interim
period is a new bodily life within God’s new world’ (‘life after life after death’)
(Simply Christian, p186).
What we must keep in our minds is that ‘the earth shall be filled with the glory of
God as the waters cover the sea’. ‘The great drama will end, not with ‘saved souls’
being snatched up into heaven......but with the New Jerusalem coming down from
heaven to earth, so that ‘the dwelling of God is with humans’ (Revelation 21:3)
(Wright op cit, p185). That, says Tom Wright, is ‘the note that should sound like a
clear, sweet bell through all Christian living, summoning us to live in the present as
people called to that future, people called to live in the present in the light of that
future’ (Wright op cit, p186). ‘Earth and heaven are made to overlap with each other,
not fitfully, mysteriously and partially as they do at the moment, but completely,
gloriously and utterly’ (Wright op cit, p185). The great Christian theme is of the
launching of the new creation in the present, and our vocation is to be the people
through whom the rest of the world comes to hear and respond to that theme and that
call.
The Christian faith speaks of a God who created us and who can and will re-create
us, re-member us. And it speaks of a God who calls us to work with him in the task
of re-creating, of re-membering, of building his Kingdom on earth. What we are
called to do is to live in such a way that ‘a fallen world of darkness shimmers once
more with flickers of the divine light refracted through people and places where real
re-membrance has happened or is happening’ (Canon Chris Chivers). That task must
begin with individuals like you and me. But the process of re-membering is not
something only between me and God. For I am not a solitary Christian. Rather am I
baptised into a body of people who are committed to a certain pattern of life –
Christ’s pattern. It is the community, the body of the Lord, which comes together on
the Lord’s Day to show the world that in Christ you can be re-membered, mended,
made new; and to model for the world a community which is in the process of being
re-membered; a community which seeks to practise, both in its own life and in its
service of the world, the Kingdom values of love, compassion, mercy, generosity,
inclusivity, justice and peace; a community which gives to the world a foretaste of
the Kingdom.
In celebrating the Eucharist, we remember; we pray to be re-membered; and we
anticipate God’s new world, the Kingdom. In that new world, Jesus will be the
central figure. We talk about his second coming or about his reappearing. ‘He is, at
the moment, present with us, but hidden behind that invisible veil that keeps heaven
and earth apart, and which we pierce in those moments, such as prayer, the
sacraments, the reading of scripture and our work with the poor, where the veil
seems particularly thin. But one day the veil will be lifted; earth and heaven will be
one’ (Wright op cit, p187), because the Kingdom will have come in its fullness. In
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the meantime, we commit ourselves to the Christian way of life – the Jesus-shaped
way of being human, the cross and resurrection way of life, the Eucharistic way of
life. It is a Eucharistic way of life because, as St Augustine said, ‘we, like the
elements in the Eucharist, are to be taken, consecrated, broken and distributed, to be
the means of grace and vehicles of the eternal charity.’ It is the Eucharist, and the
Eucharistic way of life which we are called to live, ‘which anticipates, in the present,
the full, rich, glad human existence which will one day be ours when God makes all
things new’ (Wright op cit, p189). It is the way which calls us to practise, here in the
present, ‘the tunes we shall [one day] sing in God’s new world’ (Wright op cit,
p189). Amen.
Revd Steven Harvey
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