The eucharistic hinge

All my comments on 'how to lead worship' are based on real experiences!
Following these directions WILL improve your worship leading ... unless it is already perfect!!

A tip or two on leading a communion or eucharistic service.

Think of this as the service with two parts, 'word' and 'sacrament'.
The think about how you and the congregation are going to move from one part to the other. What is the hinge on which the service will turn from 'word' to 'sacrament'?

If we follow the prayer book (in Aotearoa NZ Anglican churches, the 'Red book' or NZPB) we find The Peace is the hinge, including the practical actions of pausing to greet one another, and the taking up of the offertory. Normally in a service with hymns/songs, one will be sung at this point.

In a communion service loosely based on the prayer book ... in my experience this often means 'the peace-greetings' are at the beginning of the service and the offertory may be taken up at the conclusion of the service ... I suggest the bare minimum hinge between the two parts of the service is a song prior to the Great Thanksgiving.

Practically this serves two purposes. One it allows the presider at communion to discreetly set up the communion vessels. Two it gets the congregation on their feet and into a mode of praising God - remaining on their feet to praise God through the Great Thanksgiving is then just a matter of continuity. (The converse, people sit quietly in their seats watching vessels being sorted out on the table, involves a forced and instant change of mood at the beginning of the Great Thanksgiving).

While I am about it, a couple of further ideas.

Evaluate very carefully the possibility of having the responses to the Great Thanksgiving on a screen set to the side of the table. I had an experience recently where this was the case - as presider it was quite disconcerting to be in the centre of things but to see almost all the congregational eyes looking to the side of me. Its hard to feel the unity between congregation and presider during the prayer of "communion" ...

St Matthew's Gospel on the Resurrection

One of the puzzles about the gospels is why they differ on parts of the history of Jesus. One of the most famous, and controversial puzzles concerns the four accounts of the resurrection. Only Matthew's Gospel, for example, tells us there was an earthquake-come-angelic intervention which rolled the stone away (28:2).

Some sceptics argue from these differences to the conclusion 'there was no resurrection in the physical sense that the body of Jesus left the tomb supernaturally ... there may have been a spiritual resurrection in the sense that Jesus' followers became convinced that death was not the end of Jesus so they composed stories about an empty tomb and appearances of Jesus after his death to support that conviction'.

But the Gospels seem to be doing something quite different to the process of invention which the sceptics imagine took place. What they are doing is answering different sets of questions about the resurrection, some of which seem to have arisen from ancient sceptics!

Thus John's Gospel (if we presume, as I would argue we may, that readers of John's Gospel already knew at least Mark's Gospel, if not the other two gospels) answers a question such as this in John 21, 'what happened in Galilee, where the angel in Mark 16 promised the risen Jesus would meet the disciples?'

Luke's Gospel answers some questions, possibly posed simply by believers with doubts, but may be also have been posed by sceptics. Thus 24:11 speaks of those to whom 'these words seemed to them an idle tale and they did not believe them', and goes on to outline (again) the evidence for the resurrection: Peter finds the tomb empty (v. 12), two disciples on the way to Emmaus encounter the risen Jesus (vv. 13-35), Jesus himself appears and invites those present to 'touch' him and to eat food with him (vv. 36-42).

That is, from the treasure trove of stories of encounters with the risen Jesus the Gospel writers recount those which respond to issues relevant to the Christian community in which they were present as they wrote the gospels. But they did not invent stories wholesale in order to bolster flagging belief.

With this in mind we can turn to Matthew 28 and recognise that Matthew had been made aware of this line of scepticism, 'Jesus did not rise from the dead; his disciples stole his body and hid it somewhere else.' Matthew 28:11-15 is Matthew's counter-punch to this false assertion. The disciples did not steal the body; the Jewish authorities invented the lie that they did.

But also in the story we might wonder if (say) Matthew was answering a child's question, 'Daddy, how did the stone get rolled away from the tomb?' His answer is in 28:2.

Of course Matthew is not only an apologist or defender of the fledgling Christian faith. He is also a teacher of the faith. What is the appropriate response to the presence of the risen Jesus in the life of the church? 'Worship,' is Matthew's answer, given in 28:9 and 28:17. Yet Matthew is also a pastor of the church, noting and understanding the frailty of people's faith in the risen Jesus, 'but some doubted' (28:17).

John Donne, Priest, Poet, 1631

31 March is the day to remember the extraordinary John Donne. This year 31 March is also the Feast of the Annunciation to the Blessed Virgin Mary (transferred from its normal celebration on 25 March ... oh, no, just nine months to Christmas!).

Here's one of the reasons why John Donne is worth celebrating. Talent and theology bound together in timeless verse. Hat-tip to Kendall Harmon on Titus One Nine.

Batter my heart, three-person’d God ; for you
As yet but knock ; breathe, shine, and seek to mend ;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp’d town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but O, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy ;
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

–Holy Sonnet XIV

Actually, if you think about it, its an apt poem for the Annunciation.

The Great Feast of Easter

A correspondent has reminded me that Easter does not finish with the evening service on Easter Day or the return to school a couple of days later. The Great Feast/Festival of Easter runs from Easter Day to Pentecost. (Keep eating those eggs!). Liturgically we acknowledge this fact by extending our greetings and salutations.

Thus in A New Zealand Prayer Book we find the following:

at the beginning of a daily service (e.g. p. 58)

Open our lips, O Lord
and our mouth shall proclaim your praise.
(In Eastertide: Alleluia.)

at the end of a daily service (e.g. p. 60)

the concluding Amen to the last prayer in Eastertide should be:
Alleluia, Amen.

A final observation about the Great Feast of Easter ... the 'Alleluia' of Eastertide is not merely a liturgical addition, its a, or should be a heartfelt expression of the joy of the risen Lord alive in ourselves and alive in our church.

Alleluia!

Holy Week and Easter Services

I love the progression of services beginning with Palm Sunday through Holy Week, Maundy or Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday.

But I have noticed one or two things about possibilities with these services such that the reality of how things are done undermines aspects of the progression.

Let me give two examples. First is Maundy Thursday evening. There are a range of possibilities here from a 'Commemoration of the Last Supper' through a 'Service of Shadows' to a 'Celebration of a Passover Meal' to a mixture of two or more of such possibilities. My suggestion, to avoid undermining the focus on the suffering on the cross on Good Friday, is to make Commemoration of the Last Supper the primary service for the evening (an alternative is to have a Passover Meal). If this is conjoined with a Service of Shadows then let that take place after the Last Supper and let it be more attentive to the events of the night of betrayal than to the suffering on the cross.

A second example is Holy Saturday when most Catholic but only a few Anglican churches hold an Easter Vigil, a service with fire and water, readings and eucharist, and baptism/renewal of baptismal vows. Technically this service should be held around the hour of Midnight so the first eucharist of Easter is participated in during the morning rather than evening. But it makes sense for various reasons to hold the Vigil earlier in the evening. Naturally this service does celebrate Easter, the rising of our Lord Jesus Christ from the dead (not least because in times very long past, this was the only service the church held at Easter). But the trick is to mute the celebration just a little so as to reserve the full celebration for Sunday morning after dawn. One way to do this is to avoid having a supper after the service!

Of course its possible that I am being a little fussy here. And I recognise that in Kiwiland we can be keen on a holiday at Easter time so a 'one stop liturgical shop' on (say) Maundy Thursday or Holy Saturday can help us have our holiday and fulfil worship commitments for these great days of commemoration and celebration. But I am always keen that we should THINK about what we are doing and why we are doing it and what are the intended and unintended consequences of what we do liturgically! Hence penning a few thoughts!

Preaching Precisely

Here's two quick points about sermons, based on some recent observations. I'll probably develop them more soon.

(1) Preach from the passage about what the passage says (and - the point needs reinforcing negatively - do not preach about what the passage does not say)!

The problem here is this: to preach on a topic not found in the passage undermines the notion of 'biblical preaching' which is that preaching connects the Bible to the congregation. Preaching on a topic or issue disconnected from the text is a legitimate form of preaching but it is not biblical preaching. And it should come with an honest statement, 'What I am about to preach on is important but it has no relationship to the passage(s) from the Bible which you have just heard!'

(2) By all means retell what the passage says, but go beyond retelling the passage (and any associated restating Christian doctrine) to apply the passage to the daily reality of the lives of your hearers. The problem here is that the Bible is connected with the Bible, with theology, with Christian knowledge, but it is not connected with the congregation.

Some things speak for themselves!

OK I know this is a site for Lay Preachers (principally) but this post is about a lovely, arguably very great poem which captures the flavours of rural ministry.

The Country Clergy
by R. S. Thomas;
introduced by Mick Imlah
Fifty years ago, in March, 1958, The TLS published "The Country Clergy" by R. S. Thomas. Thomas, who died in 2000 at the age of eighty-seven, identified himself closely with the Welsh land and language, though he was not a native speaker of the latter. When he wrote "The Country Clergy", he himself had already been an Anglican minister in rural Wales for more than twenty years: at Chirk in Denbighshire, Tallam Green in Flintshire and Manafon, Montgomeryshire. Severe, stony, sometimes ill-humoured, scathing alike of Welsh peasant and English influence, his poems are widely taught in schools.
(From The Times Literary Supplement - Poem of the Week)


The Country Clergy

I see them working in old rectories
By the sun's light, by candle-light,
Venerable men, their black cloth
A little dusty, a little green
With holy mildew. And yet their skulls,
Ripening over so many prayers,
Toppled into the same grave
With oafs and yokels. They left no books,
Memorial to their lonely thought
In grey parishes: rather they wrote
On men's hearts and in the minds
Of young children sublime words
Too soon forgotten. God in his time
Or out of time will correct this.

R. S. THOMAS (1958)