Christ Church

Link to audio file of the service of Matins & Ante-Communion for All Saints’/Trinity 21

“And he opened his mouth, and taught them, saying, Blessed…”

There is a nugget of truth in every form of nonsense, even a nugget in the nonsense of Halloween in our contemporary culture however far removed from its pagan and Christian origins. The nugget lies in the very idea of dressing up in masks and costumes which are about a kind of playful imagination about the self, about who you are. At the very least, it presupposes that you are a self, a person, a ‘you’ that is more than the forms of appearance that you might present. And as we saw last week, in considering the ways in which God calls us to account both in terms of the marriage-feast of the only-begotten and the story of Cain and Abel, we are taught the great lessons of an ethical understanding at the heart of which lies the insight that self-knowledge and the knowledge of God are inseparable and belong to the nature of our fraternity and life together in the body of Christ.

In that time of year when leaves lie scattered on the ground in heaps of burnished gold, and in the culture of scattered souls and minds, we are recalled to the wonderful vision of the unity of the spiritual community of our humanity. Who we are is seen in what we are called to be. We are called to the Communion of Saints, to who we are in the will of God. Here is the great redemptive vision of our humanity, the counter and the corrective to all of the fearful divisions and uncertainties of our confused world endlessly caught in division and animosity precisely through the assertions of diversity at the expense of unity.

Halloween means the Eve of All Hallows’, all the Saints, “a great multitude which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues,” as John the Divine tells us in his marvellous vision. We are part of that great company in and through our liturgy and life in Christ. This feast provides the true spiritual ground for our human freedoms and rights, our freedoms and rights as persons irrespective of the assertions of identities and particularities of race, religion, gender, whatever. Ultimately, there is a greater truth and unity to our humanity expressed in and through the diversities of personality but not because of the competing identity claims of contemporary culture. The true sense of self is found in our life in God and with one another in the communion of saints which includes those who have gone before us with the mind of Christ. In some places we have a visual reminder of this in churches situated in a churchyard. The original Christ Church, for instance, was placed within what is now known as the Old Parish Burying Ground. The churchyard reminds us of the greater community of spirit to which we belong.

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Link to audio file of the service of Matins & Ante-Communion for Trinity 20

“Wherefore be ye not unwise, but understanding what the will of the Lord is.”

The days are evil, Paul tells us in Ephesians. It is a sombre sounding note in what otherwise seems to be a rather encouraging exhortation about being “filled with the Spirit”, about “speaking…in psalms, and hymns, and spiritual songs”, about “singing and making melody in your hearts to the Lord”; referencing directly the cultic practices of our liturgy in the Holy Eucharist, “giving thanks always for all things unto God and the Father, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ”. The ethical imperative of this is clearly signalled. It is about “submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of God”.

This requires constant vigilance and instruction. “Be ye not unwise but understanding what the will of the Lord is”. We are at once fearful and anxious about our world and day and yet complacent and indifferent to the things which matter most. As such we acquiesce and contribute to the evil of our days. This is perhaps the tragedy of the Church in the failure to attend to the principles that belong to its truth and witness.

Something of what that means is seen in the rather disturbing scene presented to us in the Gospel story of the marriage-feast of the only-begotten. This Gospel reminds us in no uncertain terms about the seriousness of the invitation to the banquet of divine love and the consequences of our casual indifference; about our being “cast into outer darkness” with “weeping and gnashing of teeth”. Cast out even when you think you are in. Why? Because of our unreadiness which is nothing less than our indifference and complacency about spiritual things especially with respect to our corporate life in Christ, to what belongs to our fraternal and social friendships in their deepest meaning, as Pope Francis suggests in his latest encyclical, Fratelli Tutti. Simply put and I think obviously so, we don’t take church seriously because we don’t take God seriously. Ours is the culture of the shrug ‘whatever’. Where God does not matter nothing matters including ourselves. We neglect the idea of human agency and responsibility which is grounded in our life with God.

Something is required of us. What is required is our active attention to God in Word and Sacrament. Being serious about God is about being serious about ourselves as moral and intellectual agents; in short, an ethical understanding which shapes our thinking and doing. We are being called to account. This is something profoundly positive which is why this Gospel story figures so prominently in the second exhortation to Communion (BCP, pp. 90-92). We are “to consider the dignity of that holy mystery, and the need of devout preparation for the receiving thereof, so that ye may come holy and clean to such a heavenly Feast, in the marriage-garment required by God in holy Scripture, and be received as worthy partakers of that holy Table.”

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