Sermons from St Faith's
The Great Sacrament
Revd Sue Lucas, Maundy
Thursday, April 2nd, 2015
Today is the day Jesus gives his Church the
great feast of thanksgiving, the Eucharist
that perpetual memorial of his death until he
comes in glory, in which we become what we eat,
Gods friends, Gods adopted sons and daughters,
Christs Body, the Church.
Great feasts of thanksgiving can, however, be
deeply problematic, fraught and difficult for
all the joy of family meals when people gather
for a feast, there is always the feast so
eagerly awaited, so carefully prepared, when
tensions boiled over, tempers frayed, someone
stormed out, or said too much, or ended up
weeping over the washing up.
This should not surprise us for this is what
it is to be human; and the Eucharist is the
sacrament of the in-between times when we, as
an all too human church, live in the tension
between being, and not yet being, Gods new
creation.
And if the Eucharist is the great sacrament of
unity, it is also the sacrament in which we are
visibly the body of Christ broken, rent and
divided; between Eastern and Western
Churches, in the West, between Roman and other
Churches; and in our own Anglo-Catholic
tradition, between those who find the priestly,
and now episcopal, ministry of women a source of
rejoicing, and those who cannot, in all good
conscience, accept these developments, and for
whom they are a source of pain.
In the matters and the matter that matter
there, we most forcibly confront our humanity
all that is best in it, and also our brokenness,
our hurt and our anger, our violence and
destructiveness.
We are about to enact this liturgically; for the
washing of feet is not simply an act of service
and humility; in this moment of acute
vulnerability and intimacy, we prepare one
another for death; Jesus washes his disciples
feet, as an unknown woman washed his to
prepare them for their deaths.
Are we willing to do this? Do we
dare? Are we prepared, with our Lord,
fully to embrace our humanity and mortality, to
see the great sacrament he gives us this night
as assisting us in being mortal, in dying to
self, and living to God and to others?
At Mirfield, before Compline, there is a reading
from one of the monastic rules. When I was
there last week, it was from the Augustinian
rule of Sister Agatha Mary, who wrote of the
colossal difficulty of the vocation of really
living in community, among those God has given
us, rather than those we would choose; it is,
she says, a vocation that can be properly formed
only in failure because it is only in failure
that we are able to go to that place in us that
dares to face the truth about ourselves.
Do we dare? For this colossally difficult
calling that we manage not in our own
strength, but by constant reliance on grace is
our baptismal calling, to be one with Jesus in
his death and resurrection to live in the
broken middle between the now and the not yet;
and in this difficult, dangerous dark place; in
this place of loss and letting go; in this place
of failure in which we face the truth about
ourselves; this is the place of broken bread and
wine outpoured the space, if you like, of the
sacrament and so this place in which we stand
is a place of the profoundest hope the very
place in which, for our feet to washed, we take
off our shoes for it is holy ground, the place
where, in the greatest possible intimacy, God is
with us. Amen.
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