St John the Evangelist, Burgess Hill Trinity 4 (Wk 13) Eucharistic Sacrifice 2.7.23

Sunday by Sunday we have an invitation to participate in a blessing and distribution of bread and wine that impacts the cosmos through the eucharistic sacrifice of Jesus who died in our place and comes here and now, there and then, to be in our place and that of the whole world before our Father. His institution of the eucharist calls forth obedience - ‘do this in remembrance of me’ - but more profoundly obedient self-offering by ourselves into his own Offering for our salvation and that of the whole world.

When I participate in the eucharist it is like getting on a celestial lift. Though its a brief journey timewise, a few minutes when it comes to specifically pleading Christ’s Sacrifice, I am aware that people and needs already on my heart get lifted to God with powerful consequences. With our patron Saint John I see the lifting of Christ in bread and wine drawing the cosmos to him ‘the bread of God which (also) comes down from heaven and gives life to the world (John 6:33). With Saint Paul I am lifted with Christ through separate consecration and display of bread and wine imagining a showing, a piercing through the Church walls, of divine love to irradiate our suffering world. Our striking west windows expand on Paul’s teaching in 1 Corinthians 11 verse 26, one with a picture of the Crucifixion and the other of the priest at the altar enfolded by the second half of that verse ‘Ye do show the Lord’s death until He comes’. Those who built St John’s were intent it should be less a preaching house and more a temple of God so that what we do this morning is the movement to heaven of Christ’s self offering into which we are drawn, ‘our souls and bodies as a living sacrifice’.

The Old Testament reading today from Genesis 22 is profound and difficult. It is the one used on Good Friday to illuminate the offering of the Son of God upon the Cross. Abraham’s offering of his son, Isaac mirrors God the Father’s sacrifice. It is a difficult passage to read mindful as we are of contemporary abuse and even killing of children by parents and quasi-mentors. The story of how in obedience to God Abraham takes his beloved son and prepares to sacrifice him is graphic. An angel calls back his hand with the knife as it prepares to descend on little Isaac. A ram caught by its horns in a thicket is revealed to replace Isaac as a sacrifice to God. On Good Friday this scripture of a father prepared to offer his son but spared doing so is a pointer to One who actually does so. The profound action of that Day is put into a sentence by Paul two chapters on from today’s second reading: ‘God did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us’ (Romans 8:32).

For that reason we show the Lord’s death day by day at the altar, as our church windows illustrate. Unlike Abraham God did not withhold his Son for us. Rather, through God's Offering of Christ there is made as the Articles of Religion describe ‘once for all, perfect redemption, propitiation, and satisfaction, for all the sins of the whole world’ (Article 31). God who created the world and human beings in his image, seeing the havoc caused by humans through misuse of free will, provided the remedy once for all. Though that havoc continues it is countered day by day as people come to the Cross for forgiveness, healing and to offer themselves in love to God’s praise and service. This is picked up in our second reading from Romans Chapter 6 where Saint Paul reminds his readers that since they have welcomed the living Christ who has freed them from the power of sin they should live accordingly. Like us, those Roman Christians needed reminding that through Christ’s sacrifice the power of sin had been potentially countered in our lives but our own grateful sacrifice is needed to release the potential of that saving gift. ‘Just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to greater and greater iniquity, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness for sanctification… now you have been freed from sin and enslaved to God, the advantage you get is sanctification. The end is eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord’ (Romans 6:19, 22-23).

At every Eucharist in St John’s we plead Christ’s Sacrifice on Calvary made present among us in Bread and Wine and join to it the sacrifice of ourselves. ‘Pray, my brothers and sisters’ the priest invites ‘that this, my sacrifice and yours, may be acceptable to God, the almighty Father’. ‘May the Lord accept this sacrifice at your hands’ we respond ‘for the praise and glory of his name, for our good, and the good of all his holy Church’. We go on later in the service to offer ‘our souls and bodies as a living sacrifice’. 

Jesus Christ is the same yesterday today and always, across the timespan of creation, the glorious redemption effected upon the Cross displayed in the resurrection, moving on through our own engagement and that of billions, towards the end of history ‘when he will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead’ and make God everything to everyone who accepts his love. To effect today’s Gospel, which presents believers as Christ’s instruments, we need an eye to the once for all Sacrifice of Christ, its renewal in the Eucharist and our own response in self offering. ‘Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me… and whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple - truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward’ (Matthew 10:40, 42) 

Though you’ve been listening to me, I hope, and maybe feel encouraged, St John’s, as our windows warn, is built not as a preaching house but, with its heavenward-pointing spire, as a temple for the worship of God in Burgess Hill. Going to the Eucharist can sometimes be reduced to the spiritual equivalent of going to Waitrose. Whilst I hope you’ll be encouraged by your attendance this morning, it's not what you feel that matters but how real the worship of God has been to you over this hour.  In our church window - do look at it afterwards - the priest faces east to lead the people Godwards. A Waitrose type consumerist approach to the sacred mysteries is suggested by recent liturgical changes - Mass in the round - as well as the obligation to listen and reflect upon the homily or keep quiet after Communion. These helpful elements are geared more to serve our own needs than to what is historically central to the eucharist - the worship of God through pleading the Sacrifice of Christ for the suffering and triumph of the cosmos into which our own renewed self-offering Sunday by Sunday has a key part.

Seeing such profundity beyond the brief action of this hour with scripture and bread and wine has been for me a gift from teaching received and engagement with holy priests and people. Over the course of my life they have lifted for me the veil covering the sacred mysteries, not least my own mother Elsie, who, as my son John is now, was a regular attender at our Wednesday Eucharist. In recognising the power of Christ’s Sacrificial Prayer to which my intentions are joined day by day I have gained confidence in a transformative dynamic summarised in Our Lord’s promise that ‘I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself’ (John 12:32). All people, but also all things as St Paul writes of all things being ultimately put ‘in subjection under Christ, so that God may be all in all’ (1 Corinthians 15:28). Such ultimately is the power of the eucharist which draws us up to God and out into service of what the Gospel calls ‘the little ones’ of Burgess Hill.

‘May the Lord accept the sacrifice which is yours and mine for the praise and glory of his name, for our good, and the good of all his holy Church’.

St Bartholomew, Brighton Feast of St James 2022

 

19 years ago my then 12-year-old son James and I completed a foot pilgrimage to the Shrine of St James in Spain’s Santiago de Compostella covering the minimum distance required to attain the Compostella. This is the scallop shell pilgrim badge (show)

The 100km hike required weeks of preparation including walking with packs on the Downs.  We had no back up team so all we would need had to go on our backs as we travelled from refugio to refugio on the ancient pilgrim way.

The most important part of our preparation was deciding what not to take!  Trial walks with laden rucksacks helped sort our priorities.  When you're a beast of burden with a choice about that burden you soon thin your load!  Though I'm an avid reader I was forced to shed all books but the Bible.  James and I settled for little more than one change of clothes.  My luxury was a short-wave radio.  His was a Gameboy Advance.  Off we went to Santiago de Compostela, or rather to the 100km point from which we hiked day by day along the pilgrim route and with much lighter burdens than we’d first planned.

One of the great things about being a Christian pilgrim is you travel light!  Preparing to go on our pilgrimage gave me an enduring spiritual lesson.  We brought nothing into this world and we can take nothing out of it.  The lighter we travel the easier and more joyous our tread on life's pilgrimage to the city of God!

The call to detachment is part of the call to poverty intrinsic to the Christian Gospel. It goes alongside the confidence we should have as children of God in Our Father to provide for us in all circumstances.

Although today’s Gospel includes a rebuke for St James and his brother we assume that he took the message: whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant.

Or, as the Lord puts it elsewhere, blessed are the poor in spirit – those who have a right and humble assessment of themselves before God. Such folk see what they have – including any worldly status – as counting for nothing other than when it is used for service. They are detached from material possessions

Here at the Eucharist, the great thanksgiving sacrifice of the Church we can admit this truth – all things come of you and of your own do we give you.. through Christ and with Christ and in Christ!

We are to welcome Jesus in a moment in the Blessed Sacrament. God in the material order, hidden in bread and wine. As we welcome him here may he open our spiritual eyes to see him elsewhere in the material order – particularly in the run of our lives in the coming week that we may encounter him in the needy. The needy in body, mind and spirit – those who are enduring personal ordeals and badly in need of attention – our attention, our time, our money if needs be.

On this feast of St James God free us to travel lighter in our Christian pilgrimage with deeper detachment from material things, abandoned more and more to his purposes.

The Lord deepen our confidence in his provision and also our humility. We need both confidence in him and humility before him to serve him aright.

As we own up more and more to our own spiritual need and poverty may we see Jesus – Jesus on his throne in glory, Jesus in the sacrament of the altar and Jesus in the hearts of the poor and the hearts of all his faithful people! 

St John the Evangelist, Burgess Hill Candlemas 30.1.22

We come to Church to worship and to be enlightened. Jesus came first to the Temple on this day with those two ends of self offering and edification.

His parents made an offering on his behalf and they heard Simeon's prophecy of their Son becoming 'a light to lighten the nations'.

Candlemas gives us an opportunity to pause and reflect about what we do when we come to this Temple Sunday by Sunday. It is a Temple before it is a preaching house, a place of teaching, yes, but primarily not a place of edification but a place of worship. 

In this Church the worship of the eucharist has been offered day by day with a few breaks since 1863. People in their thousands have joined here to offer the unbloody sacrifice initiated by Jesus Christ we call the eucharist. They've come 'to offer themselves, their souls and bodies as a living sacrifice' with, in and through Jesus Christ.

The West Window, subject of our appeal, has two smaller windows at the bottom designed to emphasise the eucharist in this context. One has the sacrifice of the Cross. The other has the priest at the altar pleading the same sacrifice on our behalf with the text ‘ye do show the Lord's death until he comes’. Praying as we do ‘that my sacrifice and yours may be acceptable to God the Father almighty’. Our response, especially true to this Feast, is ‘may the Lord accept the sacrifice at your hands to the praise and glory of his name, for our good and the good of all his holy church’. 

Today on Candlemas, Feast of his Presentation, on his first visit to the one earthly Temple of his day, Our Lord anticipated his eternal sacrifice. The turtle doves sacrificed on his behalf in that Temple gave way, with all animal sacrifices, to his once for all offering made on a repeat visit to Jerusalem in his 33rd year. They took then no doves but an innocent Lamb, and as they did so the prophecy about his mother Mary in today's Gospel was fulfilled. 'A  sword will pierce your heart'. In St Martin’s Brighton, a Church I know well, that very image of Our Lady is provided at the foot of the Cross, graphically in black and with a sword stuck into her heart.

There is deep continuity between the sacrifices of the Old Testament, 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 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.  Sacrifice is at heart about 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 this context it is an excellent practice, helping prepare for the eucharist, to start each day with what’s called the Morning Offering. The idea is to sit on your bed as soon as you get up and, whilst letting the blood reach your head, get into gear spiritually by praying something like, ‘Lord, I thank you for who you are and your love for me and all that is. I give myself to you. Take me and use me for your praise and service and the building up of the body of Christ. Come, Holy Spirit'. When you have made such a prayer at the start of the day you recognise spiritual needs and opportunities around you and the hand of God working in your life in the hours that follow. I know this from when I forget to pray it - my day turns rather useless! The Morning Offering is linked to Christ’s Offering and invitation to join in it at Mass where we pray, ‘May he make of us an eternal offering to you’.

We come to Church to worship and to be enlightened.

Part of that enlightenment, as Mary and Joseph found, is the bringing of understanding and hence more creative involvement with the dark times of our life.

We all live with these - bereavement, chronic illness or the necessity to live with unresolved situations where there may be conflict. With Mary and Joseph this morning we welcome holy Simeon's words with gratitude since they speak of peace coming, as it does again and again, through heavenly illumination.

Jesus Christ is the light who lightens all nations and all ages.

May his light shine on us and into our various life situations this morning as we come to worship 'offering ourselves, our souls and bodies as a living sacrifice' with in and through Jesus Christ.

Like Simeon we see in Jesus one who removes the fear of death and promises perpetual light to his family as they travel forward in his light to their fulfilment in the house of the Lord together and forever.

We come to Church to worship and to be enlightened. Our Lord came first to the Temple on this day with those two ends of self offering and edification.

I end with a beautiful prayer of John Donne, sixteenth century Dean of St Paul’s which captures that aspiration: 

Bring us, O Lord God, at our last awakening into the house and gate of heaven to enter into that gate and dwell in that house, where there shall be no darkness nor dazzling, but one equal light; no noise nor silence, but one equal music; no fears nor hopes, but one equal possession; no ends nor beginnings, but one equal eternity; in the habitations of thy glory and dominion, world without end. Amen.

St Mary, Balcombe Epiphany 2 Lamb of God 19th January 2020

Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world! John 1.29

Our scripture this morning follows on from last Sunday’s continuing to centre on the mission of Jesus. The Old Testament reading from Isaiah 49 prophesies that the mission of God’s servant will extend beyond Israel to all the nations: ‘It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the survivors of Israel; I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.’ 

This passage was chosen to illuminate the holy gospel which is from John, exceptionally in this year of Matthew. This passage draws out how this mission is a sacrificial mission, that of the Lamb of God.

I’d like to dwell a little on this sacrificial image which appears week by week and day by day in the sacrificial text of the eucharist which recalls the Old Testament Passover Lamb. When we say Lamb of God, or the priest says ‘Behold the Lamb of God’ we go on ‘who takes away the sins of the world’. These words accompany the breaking of the Eucharistic bread which recalls in turn the breaking of Christ’s body on the Cross

This gathering in the parish church is part of an eternal offering of worship stretching back to the foundation of the world and stretching forward to the consummation of all things.

Our Lord is truly the lamb slain from the foundation of the world whose sacrifice on Calvary, as Revelation 13 verse 8 envisions, draws forth in heaven blessing and honour and glory and might forever and ever. 

This morning we are touching reality - we are drawn to the event represented here that reveals a love touching every human concern upon the earth. 

At the beginning of a challenging year for our nation and for many peoples the world over there is no more powerful action we can take on behalf of humankind than to plead Christ’s Sacrifice, offering God what is his own…on behalf of all.

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.

Here, as on Calvary, we see his body and blood separated in death and then transformed by power from heaven. In every Eucharist we witness the separate consecration of Christ’s body and blood. We pause twice in the Eucharistic prayer and the bells ring to recall the sacrificial sundering of the Son 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 may remember the ‘Seeing Salvation’ exhibition twenty years ago at the National Gallery. One of the many images of Christ was this  (above) - ‘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 then of this painting: ‘no image I know so perfectly captures the astonishing force of the Christian story’.

It was given greater force at the time as a symbol through the images of sheep and lambs slaughtered so uselessly in the foot and mouth epidemic. The image of the bound lamb is one of innocent suffering but, for Christians, never one of useless suffering.

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. It was welcomed as a powerful symbol of Christian Faith.

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.

I do not understand why God sent his Son to do just that for me. It is love beyond logic.

I cannot though deny the evil in the world and in my own heart. 

I will not deny that it threatens my fulfilment - not just my sin, but my fear and doubt and sickness as well as the self-serving use of my gifts. 

Neither will I as a Christian deny, though it goes quite beyond my reasoning powers, that Jesus, Christ the Son of God has taken the full impact of those evil powers for me. 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, particularly 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.

How much God needs the offering of our lives for his work here in Balcombe and its surrounds! 

Let’s pause for a minute or two to reflect on God’s word this morning as we prepare to behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.

St Barnabas, Hove Corpus Christi 23 June 2019

I want to do some thinking with you this morning about the meaning and power of the eucharist. Since this is at the heart of our life together as Christians, it's good to consider what we receive and what we put into Sunday worship on the great Feast dedicated precisely to such reflection.

The Eucharist is the Hour of Jesus. We come as the Lord's people to the Lord's house on the Lord's day around the Lord's table - to be impressed by Jesus! Just like when you miss your morning prayers the day gets jumbled, when for trivial reasons we miss this Hour, the Sunday Hour of Holy Mass, we find some disarray in our week. It’s as if the attention we give for an hour to eternity brings eternity to bear on our use of time. The urgent things give way to the important!

Nowadays the Church’s Holy Days of Obligation on weekdays run to six: Epiphany, Ascension Day, SS Peter & Paul, the Assumption, All Saints and Christmas Day. Few devout Christians though would omit New Year’s Day, Ash Wednesday and Holy Week as days to find during the week the Hour of Jesus - or maybe a half hour Mass! Some like myself come day by day. When people ask me about such devotion I explain I see the Eucharist as Jesus' embrace. When we were children we received tender loving care from our parents. As a mother consoling a hurting child the Lord embraces in this rite our hurts, as well as joys, along with those of the whole world.

The Eucharist is also the place that builds the Communion which is the church.

It is Christ's Sacrifice and ours, the memorial of his once for all redemption.

It is Christ's Presence at the table of his word and the altar of the sacrament.

The Eucharist is lastly a great Promise, the pledge of glory.

These four headings Communion - Sacrifice - Presence - Promise are  stated poetically in the refrain for Corpus Christi on the pew sheet. Let’s start by looking at and reading the refrain together and see what thinking emerges. Have a look through the antiphon. It was written by St Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century from a scripture base and possesses noble simplicity.

You might recognise the four themes of Communion - Sacrifice - Presence - Promise

Let me read it: O Sacred feast in which we partake of Christ, his sufferings are remembered, our minds are filled with his grace, and we receive a pledge of the glory that is to be ours.

Let’s look more closely at four phrases in this antiphon addressing the four headings I mention:

O Sacred feast in which we partake of Christ… The Eucharist is firstly the place that builds the Communion which is the church. We are made one not by having the same feelings but by sharing one bread in penitence, not trusting in our own righteousness but in God's manifold and great mercies. Christians share the same doctrine - or should do! We share a good variety of spiritual experience but, against certain forms of Evangelicalism and Pentecostalism, there is no subjective experience held in common within mainstream Christianity save sharing the one bread. As the Apostle Paul says in the chapter before today’s set reading from 1 Corinthians 11, we who are many are one body, for we all partake  of the one bread. (1 Corinthians 10:17) As today’s prayer over the gifts expresses it, this unity is a gift both expressed and effected at the celebration of Mass. We come united to be made more united in our sense of need for God’s grace which is itself the secret of a church that’s together. God deepen our sense of need for him, especially in the inevitably troubled seas of a pastoral vacancy! I speak as retired priest covering one 3 years old at St Bart’s - God spare you that!

His sufferings are remembered… The Eucharist is Christ's Sacrifice and ours. It is the memorial of his once for all redemption. As we heard in the second reading Until the Lord comes… every time you eat this bread and drink this cup you are proclaiming his death. (1 Corinthians 11.26). We stand at the Cross.

Obedient to Jesus we take, bless, break and share. It is our grand invitation to enter into the movement of his self-offering. I’m grateful to holy priests and people who over the course of my life have lifted the veil covering the sacred mysteries for me by their teaching and example. They’ve helped me see beyond this brief action with scripture, bread and wine the power of Christ’s Sacrificial Prayer to which my intentions are joined day by day I’ve gained confidence in a transformative dynamic summarised in Our Lord’s promise that ‘I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself’ (John 12:32). All people, but also all things as St Paul writes of all things being ultimately put ‘in subjection under Christ, so that God may be all in all’ (1 Corinthians 15:28). Such ultimately is the power of the eucharist expressed in a verse of George Bourne’s Communion hymn: Paschal Lamb thine offering finished once for all when thou wast slain in its fullness undiminished shall forever more remain cleansing souls from every stain.

Our minds are filled with his grace… The Eucharist is Christ's Presence at the table of his word and the altar of the sacrament. How else can people come close to Jesus in this world other than through word and sacrament? My flesh is food indeed Jesus says to us. We come here for the empowerment Holy Communion effects just as in the days of his flesh the hungry were fed by Our Lord in the Gospel from Luke Chapter 9. We note a parallel with the Lord’s action at the eucharist as we read how Jesus raised his eyes to heaven, and said the blessing over bread, breaking and handing them to the disciples. To this day priests, Jesus’ men, imitate that action lifting their eyes upwards before they say the Lord’s words at this sacred meal, This is my Body...this is my Blood offered for you to the Father, given to you in Communion. It’s good Anglican practice to bow or bend the knee as we come into Church or leave Church, or as we approach or leave the Altar, practice honouring the Real Presence of Christ. Outside the eucharist, it’s believed Christ is present, truly present, under the veil of the Tabernacle or Aumbry where a light burns perpetually before the safe where the Sacrament is reserved, for Communion of the housebound or for our corporate devotion as in Benediction. To honour that perpetual presence, by bowing or bending the knee when coming and going, doesn’t deny that presence elsewhere through prayer, the reading of Scripture, in Christian Fellowship, in the beauty of nature, in holy people and so on.

We receive a pledge of the glory that is to be ours… The Eucharist is a great Promise, the pledge of glory, like the cinema advertisement, a preview of forthcoming attractions. Last month I was privileged as Priest Associate of the Holy House at Walsingham to be present with up to a thousand at a day when Mary’s effigy was brought to stand on the coronation pavement before the high altar of Westminster Abbey in a great day of devotion. You could see these words behind the statue, inscribed over the high altar, from Revelation Chapter 11 verse 15: ‘the kingdoms of this world are become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ’. I found this deeply moving. It made for a day not just aspirational but touching on the reality of the Eucharist there and then as hundreds did business with God bringing the nation on their hearts. The coronation eucharist sets earthly kings and queens to be servants of the advance of Christ’s kingdom which is both present and to come. The use of material objects at the eucharist reminds us that God is transforming the whole universe building up the new creation in which indeed the kingdom of this world becomes the kingdom of our God and of his Christ. At Mass the priest invites us to Communion with the words ‘blessed are those called to the supper of the Lamb’ and this phrase has a double resonance - the Supper is here and it's to come, a preview of the forthcoming attraction of the banquet of heaven. As today’s postcommunion prayer expresses it: may we delight for all eternity in that share in your divine life, which is foreshadowed in the present age by our reception of your precious body and blood.

To summarise this is the hour of Jesus, the communion of the church, Christ’s sacrifice, presence and promise.

O Sacred feast in which we partake of Christ, his sufferings are remembered, our minds are filled with his grace, and we receive a pledge of the glory that is to be ours.

St Bartholomew, Brighton Maundy Thursday 18 April 2019

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".

"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;

“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 a command so obeyed?

In these striking words Anglican monk, Gregory Dix celebrates the awe and wonder of the Holy Eucharist instituted on this most sacred night. In his book The Shape of the Liturgy still used in Anglican Theological Colleges Fr Dix writes "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".

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 sealed in his blood 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.

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 tend to make our default the second purpose of the Eucharist? Do we come to Church like we go to Sainsbury’s to get supplied for ourselves 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 Gregory Dix reminds me how all through my life the Eucharist has been means of sanctifying the lives I minister to, of taking, blessing, breaking sometimes a situation brought on my heart to the Altar for Christ to carry in Sacrifice to his Father.

Each Eucharist, majestic or simple, pleads Calvary.  Pleads, note, not repeats. Christ died once for all. His death can’t be repeated but his Sacrifice abides for ever. It is that sacrifice being solemnly renewed before us this evening as he blesses bread and wine through his priest."This is my Body...this is my Blood" offered for you to the Father, given to you in Communion. It's a good Anglican practice to bow or bend the knee as we come into Church or leave Church, or as we approach or leave the Altar, a practice saluting the Real Presence of Christ. Outside the eucharist, Christ is present, truly present, under the veil of the Tabernacle. To honour that perpetual presence by bowing or bending the knee does not deny that presence elsewhere through the reading of Scripture, in Christian Fellowship, in 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, announced by Our Lord on this Eve of his passion, which is action, sacrificial action. 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 most holy night, 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.