Audio File of Matins & Ante-Communion for Trinity 2
Blessed is he that shall eat bread in the kingdom of God
You’re invited! To what? To the banquet of love. “Love bade me welcome,” as the poet, George Herbert, wonderfully says. “Come unto me, all that labour and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you,” Jesus says. “Come and see,” he says to the disciples of John. “Come, for all things are now ready,” Jesus tells us in today’s Gospel parable. The whole of the Christian life is about the invitation to love. The kingdom of God is not about power and prestige; not some sort of patriarchy, even on ‘Father’s Day’. It is about the divine love which perfects and renews, refreshes and restores the broken loves of our broken lives. “Herein is love.”
And that love is powerfully made known to us. “Hereby we know love.” How? “Because he laid down his life for us.” And because he laid down his life for us, “we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.” Thus we see the ever-present aspect of reciprocity and mutuality that belongs to the Christian Faith. Thus we see the paradoxical nature of sacrifice without which love is nothing. We are to act out of what has been shown to us and known by us in the story of Christ crucified, the book of love opened for us to read. Even more, as John again in his First Epistle tells us, we are to love not just “in word, neither in tongue; but in deed and in truth.” Something is required of us if love is to be real for us and in us.
Yet “my soul drew back” from Love’s invitation, as the narrative voice in Herbert’s poem says. Why? Why do we not respond to God’s invitation? Is it a failure to pay attention? To God? To the meaning of God in our lives? Such are our modern concerns. God, it seems, is irrelevant to us. Or is it the church which has become irrelevant both to God and to us?
In the current situation of Covid-19, the churches have been caught in a paradoxical situation. On the one hand, it belongs to the Christian Faith to invite people to come and see, to come and be fed, to come and be refreshed by God’s Word and Sacrament; to be companions with God and with one another – companion literally means with bread, com panis. We are companions in the breaking of the bread; that is our blessedness. On the other hand, that has been refused by the civil and medical community as being dangerous because of the pandemic. And understandably so. How do we respond to the demands of the invitation which belongs to the Church’s essential proclamation? The last several months have been revealing on that score.
The churches have been effectively shut down both by the state and by the acquiescence of ecclesiastical authorities. It is not the first time that countries, communities, and churches have faced plagues and threats to human life. It may be the first time that the Church in the form of the churches has effectively been denied any real voice and any way of responding to such things pastorally and theologically. Never has the sacramental and pastoral ministry been so completely proscribed except in times of outright persecution. The ministry, being what it is, has, at times and in some places, endeavoured to find ways to honour the dictates of the state while also ministering to souls. Gone are the times when the clergy were often on the front-lines of care and in jeopardy of their own lives. Mercifully, there have been few fatalities of Covid-19 among the front-line health-care workers.
Some churches have opted for the idea of spiritual communion largely through digital formats in video-taped services, particularly the Christian Mass. That provision, whether with or without music (and that of varying quality), is like Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, on the one hand, and a Priest’s Mass, on the other hand. In the few places within the Anglican world where there is Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, the theological understanding is that this means meditating upon what one has already received or is about to receive sacramentally, since Mass is meant to be communion and not a spectator event. And certainly for churches of a reformed catholic understanding, it is not about only the Priest receiving, even if one thinks of that as being somehow on behalf of the people.
The idea of spiritual communion is indicated in the Prayer Book Service for the Ministry to the Sick (BCP, p. 584), which recognizes the situation of an individual who “either by reason of the extremity of sickness or the want of warning” to prepare “receive[s] not the Sacrament with his mouth” but in faith; in short, spiritual communion. A rather different context than our current one. Yet the directive clearly assumes the principle of the sacraments as the ordained means of our incorporation into the life of God. You are invited even in the extremities of sickness into the blessedness of the kingdom of God sacramentally.
Other churches, such as here at Christ Church, have opted for the idea of the eucharistic fast, recognizing the restrictions placed upon us that prohibited the opening of the church. We have endeavoured to maintain the patterns of prayer and teaching by way of email communications, the Parish website, audio files, and even the old fashioned telephone. The Exhortations to Communion offer a way to reflect on the sacramental aspect of our Faith. Mercifully, we were able to break the eucharistic fast on Trinity Sunday. “Behold a door was opened in heaven.” The response has been revealing and has shown a deep appreciation for the sacraments. That is itself, perhaps, one of the great take-aways from all of this. It has taught us not to take things for granted.
Other churches, such as those that have daily services, have undertaken to carry on, within the initial restrictions of no more than five people, with a rota of masses, essentially, Confraternities of the blessed Sacrament, it seems to me, where it was possible to know who could come and when. For most of our churches, largely rural in character, this was not a realistic possibility.
I mention all of these approaches because they signal a profound sense of the importance of the life of the Church and a charitable but firm way of attempting to respond to the current limitations. They reveal the creative ways in which the mandate of the Gospel has been upheld even if the institutions of all Faiths have been dismissed as non-essential from the perspective of the secular state. More disturbing is the way in which the institutional churches have simply acquiesced without argument for the creative and compassionate ways in which the invitation of the Gospel might continue to be proclaimed. How is it that our buildings, often large and commodious, were not allowed to be open as sanctuaries for quiet moments of prayer? How would that not be ‘therapeutic’, if one needed to provide a secular argument?
One of the things which has come out of this is, perhaps, a renewed appreciation for the sacred spaces. They matter because we are embodied beings. The sacred spaces remind us that we are essentially spiritual creatures. That is itself a great strength and blessing.
In times past, church buildings were often used as refuges and even as hospitals. Now the churches have relegated themselves to irrelevance. We are post-marginal, not just to the society around us but to ourselves. This is the greater problem, the greater refusal of the invitation.
Today’s Gospel highlights the blessedness of the invitation and then confronts us with the excuses that keep us from the banquet of love. Is Covid-19 simply another excuse, all precautions notwithstanding? Or does it reveal something about the deeper malaise of our church and culture where, simply put, God does not matter?
We are, I think, greatly and rightly concerned about a number of social justice matters but can those be resolved through the mechanisms of the advocacy culture which endlessly pit one against another? We cannot help but be moved and outraged by scenes of injustice and abuse but need to be careful to note that things are neither exactly the same in every country nor in exactly the same way. Without being smug and self-righteous (a brief look at the story of Black Loyalists in Nova Scotia should cure that, (http://blackloyalist.com/cdc/), or being anti-American, it is enough to say that the story of injustice towards blacks and native peoples is a different story in Canada as The Walrus pointed out years ago (https://thewalrus.ca/the-lynching-of-louie-sam/). But beyond that historical and social observation, there is the deeper theological concern. How can there be any semblance of social justice without recourse to the divine justice which is essentially love? I sense in some of our indigenous leaders such a longing for a sense of the dignity of our common humanity.
Jesus’ response to the statement that it is blessed to eat bread in the kingdom of God is the parable of the excuses. He is not denying the statement but highlighting its truth by our denial of its truth. In other words, Jesus is emphasizing very strongly the divine desire for our blessedness. The parable shows the divine will for human redemption, for our good as found not simply in our worldly pursuits but in our being with God. “Go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in, that my house may be filled.” Our good, the good of our humanity, cannot be fulfilled in the world in such things as property, possessions, not even marriage. “We have here no continuing city,” as Hebrews puts it (Heb. 13.14). We are more though not less than our daily lives and experiences. Such is the burden of the Church’s proclamation. Our excuses are our refusals of divine grace. We draw back, “guiltie of dust and sinne,” as Herbert’s poem, Love III, states.
Yet, that would be itself a mercy. For in the Gospel parable, our excuses are offered as justifications. There is no sense or awareness of guilt, the idea of knowing that something is not quite right, no awareness of sin; in short, no contrition or confession that would mean the acknowledgment of a greater Good upon which all goods depend. The Gospel seeks to awaken that in us; to show us what the Epistle says. “For, if our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things.” The Gospel is told to remind us of the blessedness of our being with God in his love for us even in spite of ourselves. There is, after all, nothing new about our excuses. Excuses ‘R us.
This is all part and parcel of the necessary and essential invitation of the Christian Faith. It cannot not be proclaimed. It cannot not be provided regardless of the indifference and hostility of our world and day. Somehow the Church has to be true to God and to herself in charity and in truth. The challenge of our day is not about the forces outside us; it is about the forces within us. The challenge is to be the Church, the place of the invitation to God’s love, the place where we are companions with God and with one another.
Blessed is he that shall eat bread in the kingdom of God.
Fr. David Curry
Trinity 2, 2020