SS Simon & Jude, West Bank Demerara Evensong ‘Sacrifice’ 15 March 2022

 

I’m speaking to you from Haywards Heath, a town in between London and Brighton, where I have permission to officiate as a priest across Sussex and London. I also have permission to officiate in the Diocese of Guyana because I have a stall at St George’s having been made a Canon by Bishop Moss in 2013. Some of you know me as a Bible Reading Fellowship author and as a broadcaster on UK’s Premier Christian Radio. Some of my series have been broadcast on Church Calling. My wife Anne and I were married by Fr Edwin Rogers at St Mary’s Yupukari in 1988. My Canonry marked service training Amerindian priests between 1987 and 1990 at the Alan Knight Training Centre, as well as my role for many years as the Bishop of Guyana’s Commissary in the United Kingdom. This year we say farewell to the UK’s Guyana Diocesan Association of which I am acting Secretary. We’re looking forward to a Mass of Thanksgiving for its 90 years of service led by the Bishops of Guyana and Kamarang in July before their attendance at the Lambeth Conference in Canterbury. This broadcast, along with last week’s from Fr Amos, indicate how engagement between the Church of England and the Diocese of Guyana will survive GDA through many personal links, like my own and his, between the two through the friendship and invitation of Fr Ayo. 

How did I get involved in Guyana? Through the late Canon John Dorman who died 18 July 1998 whose ashes are buried in Kamarang and whose name some are thinking of submitting for inclusion in the Calendar of the Church in the Province of the West Indies. Though Fr John was awarded an MBE by Queen Elizabeth his distinction is in another league, that of holiness which the writer Pascal describes as  ‘the most powerful influence in the world’. In 1976 I joined the UK Company of Mission Priests of which John Dorman was a founder member, someone we looked up to as a veteran missionary full of tales of the beauty and peril of Guyana’s interior, though as with all ‘saints’ some found his enthusiasm disconcerting. In social gatherings Canon Dorman was a striking figure with a direct gaze that seemed to go to the heart of each one of us in his company. His evangelical fervour linked to the prayerful anglocatholic faith typical of CMP. His own mission had been fuelled by encountering another holy man of robust faith, Archbishop Alan Knight, who did so much to establish our Diocese.  

In 1985 Canon Dorman wrote to me to share how the Holy Spirit had laid on his heart to write from Guyana asking me to consider continuing the running of a theological college for Amerindian priests, The Alan Knight Training Centre at Yupukari. It was a job for two single priests and married priests were not under consideration. The problem was that though I was in CMP, who make annual promises to stay single, I had been praying about marriage! So it was with some reluctance that I came to see Fr John’s letter as the voice of the Holy Spirit. How could I see the hinterland of Guyana deprived of the eucharist because I wouldn’t leave my comfort zone! 

I needed to go. I went and as I went, in God’s loving kindness, I met Anne, a widow with two young boys. She was at the USPG - United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel’s -  College of Ascension in Birmingham where Fr Allan Buik and I went to train before going to Guyana. Though Anne was going to Argentina to serve in the Anglican diocesan office after she’d served a year there the Bishop of Argentina intervened as he felt the buoys needed a dad. Bishop Randolph, of blessed memory, agreed to our marriage, as did Fr Allan, who I helped Fr Rogers celebrate it on Pentecost Sunday 1988 at St Mary, Yupukari by the Alan Knight Training Centre of which I was Principal. 

It was a great Pentecost Day. The whole village came to the celebration which began with the slaughter of a cow at dawn and cost me a bag of rice, sugar and flour! A Hindu business man I played squash with at Georgetown Club provided a plane to fly in our parents. The Holy Spirit was there working to smooth the logistics of marriage in the jungle! I’m telling you all this because I know the Holy Spirit is the soul of the Church. He is all powerful. He also writes straight through crooked lines as Anne and I have discovered. After the ordinations in 1990 we returned to the UK with the boys where James, our 32 year old youngest son, conceived in Guyana, was born. Since 1990 I have visited the Diocese on six or seven occasions helping training here under the auspices of the Guyana Diocesan Association though I haven’t been over since attending Bishop Davidson’s consecration and enthronement six years ago in March 2016. Since then I’ve been working on a book called ‘Guyana Venture - A Church of England Mission’ commemorating Guyana Diocesan Association framed by my service in the Diocese whilst addressing two centuries of missionary enterprise especially Alan Knight, John Dorman and Derek Goodrich also of blessed memory. Mindful of past failures I’m sharing pride in the Church of England’s venture I have been part of, especially helping raise up priests to serve Guyana’s vast interior, crowned in 2021 by the consecration of Bishop Alfred David. 

Jesus said to his disciples: ‘This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many’. Mark 14:24 [12-26]

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

My involvement with Guyana links to loving Jesus and desiring to make him loved across the world. In particular loving him through the Eucharist in which we are caught up into his eternal sacrifice of Christ and the profound challenge of that to our self-interest. I could not stand by and miss an invitation to help provide the Eucharist more fully across Guyana’s interior.

This gathering across the world for evensong is part of an eternal gathering stretching back to Abraham and beyond and stretching forward to the consummation of all things. 

Through this evening’s scripture we are touching reality - we are drawn to recall the events represented at the altar Sunday by Sunday, day by day, which institute God’s covenant with us, drawn into a love which touches every concern upon the earth.

To the outward eye we are a small gathering of religious people doing their own thing at evensong or Mass. To the eye of faith we are Christians, caught up once more, on behalf of the whole creation, into the eternal sacrifice of Jesus Christ, most fully at Mass, ‘through whom,and with whom and in whom in the unity of the Holy Spirit, we give glory to our Father in heaven’.

The Old Testament reading from Genesis 15:1-18 describes an awesome encounter between Abraham and the Lord. In the holy eucharist we too should be in awe as we approach the same Lord in the Eucharistic sacrifice. This is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, happy are those who are called to his supper.

One role of a preacher is to awaken, sensitise and draw God’s people afresh into this great mystery of the Christian religion centring upon the Lamb of God our Saviour truly present in the sacrifice and sacrament of the altar. A Lenten evensong is an excellent opportunity to deepen our appreciation of this staple of our Christian lives Sunday by Sunday. The Lord’s people gather on the Lord’s day in the Lord’s house around the Lord’s table. If we more fully realised what was going on in this rite our amazement would better infect others to join in the most significant happening any day on West Bank, Demerara!

Jesus, St John says, is ‘the lamb slain from the foundation of the world’ (Revelation 13:8). The sacrifice once offered on Calvary and made present at this altar is rooted in the history of God’s people and the eternal covenant.

Genesis Chapter 15 describes the institution of that covenant with Abraham by the shedding of blood, an agreement between man and God pledging loyalty even unto death. In the ancient world, when a covenant was ‘cut’ with the slaughter of lambs its breaking could be punishable by death. It also symbolised a death to independent living and the coming alive of a relationship or covenant. In the covenant God made with Abraham there was a special sign.  The sacrificed animals were consumed by a supernatural intervention interpreted as an anticipation of the new covenant.  

As the animal sacrifice was consumed by fire from heaven, so Jesus is to see his body and blood separated in death and then transformed by power from heaven in the glory of the resurrection. So it is that in the Eucharist we witness the separate consecration of Christ’s body and blood. We pause devotionally on two occasions - bells ring, incense is offered - to recall and honour the sacrificial sundering of the Lamb of God - ‘this is my body...this is my blood...of the new covenant, which is shed for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins’

This picture Lamb of God is a copy of an oil painting completed between 1635 and 1640 by the Spanish Baroque artist Francisco de Zurbarán. It’s housed in the Prado Museum in Madrid, Spain. It is an image that often appears on Nativity scenes, the Shepherds’ offering which anticipates Christ’s sacrifice.  Seasoned BBC broadcaster Jeremy Paxman once wrote of it in the Church Times: ‘no image I know so perfectly captures the astonishing force of the Christian story’.

The sacrificial imagery in our Old Testament reading links to this symbol of Christ as Lamb of God so familiar to us from the liturgy of the Eucharist - familiar and yet often rather empty of meaning to many of us until we examine the Old Testament roots as we are doing this evening.  

How often do we hear those words ‘Lamb of God’, linked of course to the Old Testament sacrificial system, illuminated through Abraham in our reading and more especially in the Passover ritual instituted later on by Moses? How much we need to ‘inhabit the words’ of our prayer and liturgy and not be empty ritualists!

There is a Church in Norway, I’m told, which has the image of a sheep sculpted half way up its tower. Only when people enter that Church and hear something of its history do they discover the full Christian significance of the sculpted sheep.

Years before the sculpture was erected some renovation work was occurring on the Church steeple in this rural community.  One day a workman slipped from the steeple to almost certain death.  At the same time by a remarkable twist of providence a flock of sheep was being driven past the Church.  

The steeplejack fell on a sheep and his fall was cushioned. The sheep died to save him - an awesome happening! The workers expressed their gratitude to God by adorning that Church tower with a sculpted sheep.

Jesus is the Lamb of God whose voluntary sacrifice takes away our sin.  Our Lord on Calvary takes the full impact of sin and death for us at the cost of his life.

Our Lord has soaked up all the evil that would defeat me and offered me life to the full - life that cancels sin with forgiveness, sickness with healing, bondage with deliverance and even doubt with the gift of faith through the mighty Redemption he has won.  

All of this is powerfully present to me in every celebration of the Eucharist.

I cannot understand it but I will accept it. I cannot understand the way electricity works but that does not stop me switching on the lights. I take both on authority and it works to do so.

Jesus died in my place so that he might live in my place. Jesus died in my place to carry off the impact of evil upon me, through the gift of the Eucharist. 

Jesus lives in my place, cooperating with my will by his Spirit, as I welcome him again and again into my heart in this Sacrament!

At Mass we make the memorial of the Offering of Jesus and enter into that Self-Offering! It is through the sacrificial Lamb of God that we can make a perfect offering to the Father, ‘our sinful bodies made clean by his body..our souls washed through his most precious blood’.

There is a deep continuity between the sacrifices of Abraham and Moses, the offering of Jesus the Lamb of God, the Eucharistic Sacrifice and our own sacrificial living as Christians.  They all hang together. In a culture so full of self-interest what we are about in Christianity is powerfully counter-cultural. Sunday by Sunday, in union with Christ, we offer ‘our souls and bodies to be a living sacrifice’. 

No wonder the eucharist has been described as ‘a meeting of rebels in a mammon-oriented society’. Sacrifice goes against the grain of our contemporary culture in many ways, especially voluntary sacrifice.  People can make sacrifice when absolutely necessary - I did when I came to Guyana years ago -  but to choose to give your life away Sunday by Sunday - well that’s heavily counter-cultural! Faithful attendance and active participation in the eucharist is our great reminder day by day of God’s call for us to direct our energies more and more away from the service of self and more and more towards his service.  This self-offering is, in the words of the Eucharistic Prayer both ‘right’ and also ‘a good and joyful thing’.

Sacrifice is at heart about this voluntary choice about how we direct our lives - it is about love before it is about death. It is about ‘joyous living’ just as sure as ‘God loves a cheerful giver’. It is not so much about forgoing what we desire but of binding our energies to what God desires. 

In the Eucharist week by week we’re drawn into such a school of sacrifice, into a love which touches every human concern upon the earth. We are caught up again and again into the loving sacrifice of Christ and its profound challenge to our self-interest. In offering our lives we entrust them afresh into the hands of God, renewing our covenant with him, so as to be employed to his praise and service in every situation we shall face in the coming week. 

May such thoughts inspire us as we keep Lent so that our participation in Sunday and weekday Masses comes from hearts aflame with generous love. 

Jesus died in our place so he might live in our place. Jesus died in our place to carry off the impact of evil upon us, through the gift of the Eucharist. 

Jesus would live in our place, cooperating with us by his Spirit, as we welcome him again and again into our heart in the Most Holy Sacrament!

‘This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many’. 

Father, calling to mind the death your Son endured for our salvation.. look with favour on your church's offering.. may your Son make of us a perpetual offering to you and enable us to share with all who stand before you in earth and heaven in songs of everlasting praise: Blessing and honour and glory and power be yours for ever and ever. Amen.

Canon Dr John Twisleton

Diocese of Chichester, Church of England

Former UK Commissary of the Bishop of Guyana and Principal of the Alan Knight Training Centre

Lent 2 Sacrifice 21 February 2016

Jesus said to his disciples: ‘This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many’. Mark 14:24

In this Eucharist we are being caught up into the eternal sacrifice of Christ and its profound challenge to our self-interest.

This gathering in the parish Church is part of an eternal gathering stretching back to Abraham and beyond and stretching forward to the consummation of all things.

This morning we are touching reality - we are drawn to the events represented here which institute God’s covenant with us, and we are drawn into a love which touches every human concern upon the earth.

To the outward eye we are a small gathering of religious people doing their own thing upon their weekly holy day. To the eye of faith we are Christians, caught up once more, on behalf of the whole creation, into the eternal sacrifice of Jesus Christ, through whom,and with whom and in whom in the unity of the Holy Spirit, we give glory to our Father in heaven.

The Old Testament reading from Genesis describes an awesome encounter between Abraham and the Lord.  In this holy eucharist we too should be in awe as we approach the same Lord in the Eucharistic sacrifice. This is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, happy are those who are called to his supper.

One role of a preacher is to awaken, sensitise and draw God’s people afresh into this great mystery of the Christian religion which centres on the Lamb of God our Saviour truly present in the sacrifice and sacrament of the altar. If we fully realised what was going on in this rite our amazement would soon infect others to join in the most significant happening on any day in Horsted Keynes!

Jesus St John says is the lamb slain from the foundation of the world. The sacrifice once offered on Calvary and made present at this altar is rooted in the history of God’s people and the eternal covenant.

Genesis Chapter 15 describes the institution of that covenant with Abraham by the shedding of blood, an agreement between man and God pledging loyalty even unto death.  In the ancient world, when a covenant was ‘cut’ with the slaughter of lambs its breaking could be punishable by death. It also symbolised a death to independent living and the coming alive of a relationship or covenant.

In the covenant God made with Abraham there was a special sign.  The sacrificed animals were consumed by a supernatural intervention interpreted as an anticipation of the new covenant.  As the animal sacrifice was consumed by fire from heaven, so Jesus is to see his body and blood separated in death and then transformed by power from heaven in the glory of the resurrection.

So it is that in the Eucharist we witness the separate consecration of Christ’s body and blood. We pause devotionally on two occasions to recall the sacrificial sundering of the Lamb of God - this is my body...this is my blood...of the new covenant, which is shed for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins

Some of us possibly visited the ‘Seeing Salvation’ exhibition at the turn of the Millennium 16 years ago at the National Gallery. One of the many images of Christ was this  (show) - ‘The Bound Lamb’ by Francisco de Zurbarin who lived in the 17th century.  It is an image that often appears on Nativity scenes, the Shepherds’ offering which anticipates Christ’s sacrifice. 

As Jeremy Paxman wrote in the Church Times of this painting: ‘no image I know so perfectly captures the astonishing force of the Christian story’.

The sacrificial imagery in today’s Old Testament links to this symbol of Christ as Lamb of God so familiar to us from the liturgy of the Eucharist - familiar and yet often rather empty of meaning to many of us until we examine the Old Testament roots as we are doing this morning. 

How often we hear those words ‘Lamb of God’? How much we need to ‘inhabit the words’ of our prayer and liturgy and not be empty ritualists!

There is a Church in Norway, I’m told, which has the image of a sheep sculpted half way up its tower.  Only when people enter that Church and hear something of its history do they discover the full Christian significance of the sculpted sheep.

Years before the sculpture was erected some renovation work was occurring on the Church steeple in this rural community.  One day a workman slipped from the steeple to almost certain death.  At the same time by a remarkable twist of providence a flock of sheep was being driven past the Church. 

The steeplejack fell on a sheep and his fall was cushioned. The sheep died to save him - an awesome happening! The workers expressed their gratitude to God by adorning that Church tower with a sculpted sheep.

Jesus is the Lamb of God whose voluntary sacrifice takes away our sin.  Our Lord on Calvary takes the full impact of sin and death for us at the cost of his life.

Our Lord has soaked up all the evil that would defeat me and offered me life to the full - life that cancels sin with forgiveness, sickness with healing, bondage with deliverance and even doubt with the gift of faith through the mighty Redemption he has won. 

All of this is powerfully present to me in every celebration of the Eucharist.

I cannot understand it but I will accept it. I cannot understand the way electricity works but that does not stop me switching on the lights. I take both on authority and it works to do so.

Jesus died in my place so that he might live in my place. Jesus died in my place to carry off the impact of evil upon me, through the gift of the Eucharist. Jesus lives in my place, cooperating with my will by his Spirit, as I welcome him again and again into my heart in this Sacrament!

This morning we make the memorial of the Offering of Jesus and enter into that Self-Offering! It is through the sacrificial Lamb of God that we can make a perfect offering to the Father, our sinful bodies made clean by his body..our souls washed through his most precious blood.

There is a deep continuity between the sacrifice of Abraham, the offering of Jesus the Lamb of God, the Eucharistic Sacrifice and our own sacrificial living as Christians.  They all hang together. In a culture so full of self-interest what we are about this morning is powerfully counter-cultural. Here, in union with Christ, we are offering our souls and bodies to be a living sacrifice

No wonder the eucharist has been described as ‘a meeting of rebels in a mammon-oriented society’. Sacrifice goes against the grain of our contemporary culture in many ways, especially voluntary sacrifice.  People can make sacrifice when absolutely necessary - but to choose to give your life away Sunday by Sunday - well that’s heavily counter-cultural!

Faithful attendance and active participation in the eucharist is our great reminder day by day of God’s call for us to direct our energies more and more away from the service of self and more and more towards his service.  This self-offering is, in the words of the Eucharistic Prayer both ‘right’ and also ‘a good and joyful thing’.

Sacrifice is at heart about this voluntary choice about how we direct our lives - it is about love before it is about death.  It is about ‘joyous living’ just as sure as ‘God loves a cheerful giver’. It is not so much about forgoing what we desire but of binding our energies to what God desires. 

Here in this Eucharist week by week we’re drawn into such a school of sacrifice, into a love which touches every human concern upon the earth. We are caught up again and again into the loving sacrifice of Christ and its profound challenge to our self-interest. In offering our lives once again this morning we’re entrusting them afresh into the hands of God, renewing our covenant with him, so as to be employed to his praise and service in every situation we shall face in the coming week. In the name of the Father…

Epiphany 4.1.15 Incense

The wise men knelt down and paid him homage. Then, opening their treasure-chests, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Matthew 2:11 As the wise men offered worship at his birth, so Christians have for centuries burned incense in worship. 

What is Incense?  Incense is made from various aromatic resins and gums taken from trees and other plants. When burned it gives off scented smoke. In church it is normally burned in a censer or thurible. Because it is difficult to burn on its own, it is burned along with charcoal.

Why use incense in worship?  At the heart of worship in the Temple at Jerusalem was sacrifice. The sacrificial offering was usually a living thing such as a lamb or bird, but the fruits of the earth were also offered, including incense. In the Temple there was even an altar specially set aside for the burning of incense. With the destruction of the Temple by the Romans in A.D. 70 the sacrificial worship of the Old Testament came to an end. The necessity for much of it had already been brought to an end, several years before, by the all-sufficient sacrifice of Christ on the Cross.

Why did incense continue in Christian worship? Our human need to offer thanksgiving and sacrifice to God remains. In our daily lives, Christians have the opportunity to give the best of themselves back to God in the service of each other. St Paul reminds us that we are like incense.  We Christians are to be a sweet smelling  savour as we live surrendered like incense to God.  (2 Corinthians 2:15)

O worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness …with gold of obedience and incense of lowliness, kneel and adore. As incense makes for a special atmosphere in Church the surrendered lives of Christians are to have something very special about them, drawing the curiosity and heart searching of those who share our life. Incense is of course a symbol of rising prayer.

One of the elements of good liturgy is the use of colour and movement provided by the use of colourful vestments, processions and the like. Singing and chanting which stimulates the sense of hearing. The use of incense enables even fuller participation in the liturgy by stimulating the sense of smell. It also provides colour, movement and sound as the thurible is swung and its chain 'chinks' and 'tinkles'.

Another aspect of Christian worship is honouring God’s royal presence. Macmillan horse smells. Used in processions before dignitaries. Compostela. In the Eucharist the use of incense draws attention to the royal presence of Christ among his people.  "Incense owns a Deity nigh", The Bible is censed to honour Christ in his word.  The Sacrament receives signal honour as his Body and Blood.  The congregation are greeted with incense to honour Christ among them.

In the Book of Revelation the burning of incense appears to be an important part of the worship of heaven. In ch.5 v.8 we read of "golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the Saints".

This whole book is symbolic, and was never intended to be taken as literally accurate. Many commentators, though believe that the writer of the book was strongly influenced by the worship, or liturgy, of his own church. When we burn incense we remind ourselves that our prayers, like the incense, ascend to the throne of God and mingle with the prayers of the Saints in heaven

Which Churches use incense? Most of Christianity use, or have used, incense in worship. All the Eastern Orthodox Churches burn incense at most of their services, or liturgies. In the 'west' the Roman Catholic Church burns incense at many of its services. The Church of England used incense throughout its history, until the mid 1600's, when it fell into disuse generally. From that time, though, it continued to be used in worship in isolated churches such as York Minster, and since the mid 19th century its use has spread and increased. In the Queen’s Chapel of the Savoy gold, incense and myrrh are offered on the Feast of Epiphany.  The incense is taken to be burnt in Church.  There is quite a waiting list I’m told.

Where’s the spiritual challenge here? At Epiphany we talk about the manifestation of Christ to the nations which is symbolized by the visit of wise men from afar. The manifestation of Christ in our own age we call evangelism, spreading the good news which is a matter of handing on the fact of God’s love shown in the historical Jesus. It is also a matter of manifesting Christ  personally, which is through our person, through the manner of our living. We are called not just to speak about Christ to the world but to be Christ in the world by our prayer and care and all that we are. 

As the incense grains have been consumed on the charcoal we’re meant to see our lives lost to God and neighbor in the sweet smelling savour of costly service.

Lord, as the wise men offered you incense, help us to make of our lives a fragrant offering to You. We ask this in the holy name of Jesus. Amen.

Corpus Christi June 10th 2012

Do this in remembrance of me!

"Was ever command so obeyed?

For century after century, spreading slowly to every continent and country and among every race on earth, this action has been done, in every conceivable human circumstance, for every conceivable human need from infancy and before it to extreme old age and after it, from the pinnacles of earthly greatness to the refuge of fugitives in the caves and dens of the earth"
.

Do this in remembrance of me!

"Men have found no better thing to do for kings at their crowning and for criminals going to the scaffold; for armies in triumph or for a bride and bridegroom in a little country church; for the proclamation of a dogma or for a good crop of wheat; for the wisdom of the Parliament of a mighty nation or for a sick old woman afraid to die; for a schoolboy sitting an examination or for Columbus setting out to discover America; for the famine of whole provinces or for the soul of a dead lover; in thankfulness that my father did not die of pneumonia; for a village headman much tempted to return to fetishes because the yams had failed; because the Turk was at the gate of Vienna;

Do this in remembrance of me!

"..for the repentance of Margaret; for the settlement of a strike; for a son for a barren woman; for Captain so-and-so, wounded and a prisoner of war; while the lions roared in the nearby amphitheatre; on the beach at Dunkirk; while the hiss of scythes in the thick June grass came faintly through the windows of the Church;

Was ever another command so obeyed as this?

"Tremulously, by an old monk on the fiftieth anniversary of his vows; furtively, by an exiled bishop who had hewn timber all day in a (Russian) prison camp; gorgeously, for the canonisation of (a Saint) - one could fill many pages with the reasons why men have done this, and not tell the hundredth part of them. And best of all, week by week and month by month, on a hundred thousand successive Sundays, faithfully, unfailingly, across all the parishes of Christendom, the pastors have done this just to make the holy common people of God".

Do this in remembrance of me!

Was ever another command so obeyed as this?

In these immortal words the Anglican monk, Dom Gregory Dix celebrates the awe and wonder of the Holy Eucharist we thank God for this day.

It is primarily an action, "do this"..and it has been done for 2000 years at a million altars. This is a day for standing still and taking stock of this great wonder we celebrate week by week, day by day in St. Giles lest we presume upon the grace we celebrate and receive.

As Dix puts it in his book The Shape of the Liturgy still used in Anglican Theological Colleges "the eucharistic action (is) inextricably woven into the public history of the Western world...the eucharist (has the) power of laying hold of human life, of grasping it...in the particular concrete realities of it..laying hold of them and translating them into something beyond time".

I find great depths in the words of Dom Gregory Dix. Forgive me for reading them at such length. They seemed to me to do as much as any preacher could to set the scene on the Feast of Corpus Christi.

Our Lord Jesus ordained the sacrament of the Eucharist in order that we might be able to join on earth in the pleading of His eternal sacrifice before the face of God the Father.

Then, secondly, that He might feed our souls with His sacred Body and Blood and unite us into One Body, the Church, the Body of Christ, Corpus Christi.

I wonder how many of us would remember or believe or continue to hold fresh in our memories from Confirmation training those facts - I mean: Our Lord giving us the eucharist first to allow us to plead His Memorial Sacrifice and offer our lives with Him to be consecrated lives and then second, second, note, to give us heavenly Food and make us One Bread, One Body?

Or do we rather tend to make our default  the second purpose of the Eucharist? Do we come to Church like we go to Sainsbury’s to get "tanked up" with goodies, so to speak, and to meet our friends?

That should come second. We come first to offer the eucharist - to plead Christ's Sacrifice for the needs of the living and the dead, for others as well as for ourselves.

That long list from Dom Gregory Dix reminded me how all through my life the Eucharist has been a powerful means of sanctifying the lives I minister to, of taking, blessing, breaking sometimes a situation brought on my heart or the people's hearts to the Altar for Christ to carry in Sacrifice to His Father.

As I just quoted from Dix "the eucharist (has the ) power of laying hold of human life, of grasping it...in the particular concrete realities of it..laying hold of them and translating them into something beyond time".

"Laying hold...and translating into something beyond time".

When the Eucharist has been offered for a particular intention there is a profound guarantee that it is "over to the Lord" from there. I felt this recently with Stephen & Victoria Fretten marking their marriage at the parish eucharist, with Alice Batsford last month as we celebrated a eucharist for the dying at the Hospice or as we celebrated that eucharist around Daphne Seidler’s coffin in the Lady Chapel. Last weekend’s Coronation re-enactment included Boy Bishop play acting the Archbishop giving bread and wine to the Queen and Duke at the Coronation eucharist. All are examples of the making holy of life at this service.

Each Eucharist, majestic or simple, pleads Calvary.  Pleads, note, not repeats. Christ died once for all. His death cannot be repeated but his Sacrifice abides for ever. It is that sacrifice he renews before us as he blesses bread and wine through the priest.

"This is my Body...this is my Blood" offered for you to the Father, given to you in Communion. It is a good practice to bow or bend the knee as we come into Church or leave Church, or as we approach or leave the Altar – for there is a special Eucharistic presence. Outside the eucharist, Christ is present, truly present, under the veil of the Aumbry. Even when the altar lights are blown out the light by the Aumbry burns on where the Sacrament is reserved for Communion of the housebound or for our corporate devotion as in the Benediction or blessing given from the consecrated Host at times during evensong. On Monday we were reminded of this symbol of God’s perpetual presence with his people in Horsted Keynes when the Jubilee Beacon was lit from the everlasting Aumbry light.

Incidentally to honour that perpetual presence by bowing or bending the knee when coming and going from before the Aumbry does not deny that presence elsewhere through the reading of Scripture, in Christian Fellowship, in the beauty of nature, in holy people and so on.

Yet mindful of Christ's Presence let us never forget its vital link to the first purpose of every Eucharist, which is action, sacrificial action. The Eucharist is about giving, giving to God. Jesus the Son gives himself in loving Sacrifice. We are to give our lives, our souls and bodies, our needs, our joys, our sorrows, our hopes, our fears, in union with his perfect Offering. Lives so given are lives consecrated, lives transformed by the Gift of the consecrated elements, "The Body of Christ", "Amen", "The Blood of Christ", "Amen".

Through Him, with Him and in Him, then, let us give glory to God the Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit this Corpus Christi Day, confident that God will accept our self offering and as ever give us more than we can ask or imagine in this most Holy Sacrament.