St Wilfrid’s talk on prayer before the reserved sacrament 2.12.20

I love the eucharistic lectionary in Advent. Each day we get an Old Testament prophecy leading into its fulfilment in the Gospel reading. Today, Wednesday in the first week of Advent, we heard Isaiah prophesying God preparing ‘for all peoples a banquet of rich food’ leading into St Matthew’s description of Our Lord feeding thousands on the shores of Lake Galilee. Both readings point to what we’re doing this morning online joining across the world with the day by day banquet of the eucharist.

We can’t always get to the eucharist, especially with COVID-19, but gathering in online celebrations like this takes us into its heavenwards movement and allows a very real spiritual communion in the body and blood of Christ.

In St Wilfrid’s and Presentation Church there is another sense of the eucharist being present away from the actual celebration. In both churches consecrated Bread left over from the Parish Eucharist is publicly reserved. That means each Church has an Aumbry or wall safe with a lamp burning beside it to indicate Christ’s presence in our midst. Here is a picture of the Aumbry in Presentation Church across the road from me.

Many of us find inspiration for prayer in a Church building with the Sacrament reserved. That keeping of the holy bread - by tradition bread alone is kept - serves two purposes. Holy Communion is taken from the Aumbry to the elderly and housebound. Secondly this veiled safe focusses Our Lord’s presence in the midst of his people. The ever burning light by the wall safe is an invitation to sit and kneel nearby. To go back in your mind to when you last knelt to receive the consecrated bread and wine at the eucharist.

When we receive Holy Communion we receive a special anointing in the Holy Spirit through the bread and wine. They are for us a Sacrament, a sign of the living God who comes through this food into the hearts of all who open their hearts to him through repentance, faith and baptism.

In Holy Communion we receive the body and blood of Christ, holy food for holy living. As Our Lord says in John Chapter 6 speaking of this feeding: This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.

When we come into Church and sit or kneel we are drawn to the Aumbry light as a reminder of Christ’s presence in the bread of the eucharist. Not that Christ is absent from our lives away from receiving him at the altar rail or pondering his presence at the Aumbry with its welcoming light. Show 

The beauty of the Sacraments is their being repeated signs of love. Away from our loved ones we miss them physically but are assured of their love. Away from Church we miss the physical action of God towards us in Communion or being present in the Aumbry. In Church our relationship with God is refreshed by his embrace in the banquet of the eucharist and by dwelling on his physical presence in the Reserved Sacrament

During the pandemic there are times when we can visit our church buildings to pray. In this month of prayer it seems fitting to provide a reminder of the invitation to prayer always implied in the Lady Chapel at St Wilfrid’s and to the right of the Presentation Church altar by the Aumbry safe and its welcoming light. 

There we can recapture that warm yet awesome time of silence and reflection after Communion at the eucharist. God, the Word, was made flesh in Christ who comes to be in our flesh through bread and wine. 

As the Psalmist writes, ‘Be still and know that I am God’.