Lent 5 2019 (Lent Series on the Liturgy – 4. The Sacrament of Offering)

Sermon preached by the Revd. Canon Leonard Doolan

 

Over these weeks in Lent I will be offering 5 sermons based on the Liturgy – the weekly offering of the church in which God’s glory in Christ, and in us, is celebrated. This is the third in the series.

Each week the subject will be preceded by the word ‘sacrament’. I am using this word in its loosest sense because I do not want to confuse what we are doing with the 7 formally recognized Sacraments of the church. This ‘looseness’ of the word ‘sacrament’ I discovered recently when reading a book on the Eucharist by the great Orthodox theologian, Father Alexander Schmemann.

I am working with the basic meaning of ‘sacrament’, namely ‘the outward visible sign of a hidden invisible grace’. In other words, a mystery revealed.

To recap – in the first week we thought about the nature of the church focusing on the image of the ‘household’ and then we moved to thinking about the Sacrament of the Gathering of the household of faith, and the immediate need for repentance, Kyrie Eleison, followed by the outburst of Gloria (except in Lent and Advent). In week 2 we reflected on the Sacrament of the Word, balancing the word of God in scripture, and God in Christ as the Word made flesh. Last week we considered the Sacrament of Prayer, looking at 5 points in the Liturgy when prayer is the task of the household of God.

 

As we think of the Sacrament of Offering, of course no greater offering could be made that the offering of Christ on the Cross. It is this self -offering that characterizes Christianity. It is an offering that in the Reformed language of the 1662 Prayer Book refers to Christ’s offering as an ‘oblation’  which makes a ‘full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world’.

This language is intended in the Anglican tradition to guard against the Roman Catholic dogma of the ‘Sacrifice of the Mass’ in which there were tendencies to think of Christ being repeatedly sacrificed each time the Mass was celebratd. Anglicans have none of this, and with sound scriptural understanding accept that what Christ did on the Cross, he did once and for all. There is a Greek word hapax, which means ‘only once’, and it occurs only once in NT Greek vocabulary in the Letter to the Hebrews, and in fact has been absorbed into English grammatical language. If a word occurs only once it is referred to as a hapax legomenon.

So Christ’s offering is a one off, unique, occurrence, yet it is constantly happening – unconstrained by time, place, history. In this way it differs enormously from the well known ‘offering story’  in the OT where Abraham is about to sacrifice his son Isaac, until very much the last moment before Abraham sees a ram caught up in the bushes, which he sacrifices in place of his son.  Christ’s sacrifice, by comparison is complete, once and for all, yet paradoxically never ending.

As he offers himself, so we are called to be people of offering, and this is expressed in our Liturgy in several places. Last week we thought about prayer, and of course this is a form of offering – the offering of our deep needs and concerns offered up in prayerful reliance on God’s constant willingness to turn his attention to us, and to be alongside us. We have thought about our offering of repentance – when we bring in openness the things of our hearts, deep and powerful forces within us which we know restrict and control us, and distort the beautiful image of God within us.

In our Liturgy there are other ‘offering points’ and perhaps the most apparent is that part to which we give the word ‘offertory’

 

Before we proceed, perhaps a little corrective note is required. In the language of the Reformed churches, and in particular the more Protestant parts of it, the word ‘offertory’ has rather lost its original meaning. Some of us are tempted to think that the offertory is the bringing up of the money collection. It is not. The origin of the offertorium in the Mass is the offering of the bread and wine. There are two very distinct things going on here, usually disguised nowadays by the singing of a hymn.

Let’s think about both aspects, taking the money collection first. For people of faith there is no part of life that is not affected by, and infected by, what we claim to believe. You cannot be ‘half Christian’ or  ‘Christian in the bits I like’. As Christ is totus tuus – totally for us – so we must be totally for him. This means that our worldly wealth, however poor we may believe ourselves to be, we must take account of how we steward our money in a ‘Christward’ direction.

Our ancient cousins, the Jews, had a clear scriptural command. They were to give a tenth of all that they earned, all that they had as income, to their religion. Some Christian denominations also demand this of their membership. It is a challenge, yes, but it is the only clear instruction in scripture about the response of our finances, our possessions, our time and energy.

The very presence of the Anglican Church here in Athens depends on generous giving. Giving money from our church  to social programmes is right and proper, but first and foremost we must fund the essentials of our own church life, or we put it all  in peril.

When we take a collection, it is only right that as it is collected for God’s work, that we should ask God to bless that money, and it is designated only for the essentials of church life. The household of God needs a budget, and economy. But this is not the Offertorium.

Properly speaking the Offertory is the offering of the bread and wine from the people to the holy table, and these are the very signs that we offer our whole work and human enterprise back to God. I cannot emphasize this enough. Sadly as we sing a hymn normally, we are unaware of just how significant this action of the people of God actually is.

These signs and a symbols  represent all of creation and of all human toil, the totality of human enterprise, and we offer it to God in praise and thanksgiving. ‘Blessed are you, Lord God of all creation! Through your goodness we have this bread to offer. Fruit of the field and work of human hands, it will become for us the bread of life.’ And again, ‘Blessed are you Lord God of all creation! Through your goodness we have this wine to offer, fruit of the field and work of human hands, it will become for us the cup of salvation.’ For bread and wine, think all my toil, all my effort, everything I am and do, my life’s work.

It is in our eucharist, our Liturgy, that mankind offers the praise to God that is indeed meet and right – and it is our duty and our joy to offer it.

Next, I would like to consider the Great Thanksgiving Prayer. In the old Prayer Book there used to be one of these, now we have a choice of 8, with 2 more being recently authorized for use when numbers of children are present.

The Great Thanksgiving Prayer is the prayer of offering par excellence.

In each case it begins with the customary greeting between priest and people. The Lord be with you. And also with you. This is a rather thin and unsatisfactory translation of the old Latin Et cum spiritu sancto – and with thy spirit.

Then we hear the words ‘Lift up your hearts’ – we lift them to the Lord. What could concentrate the language of offering more acutely than this. We refer to these words in Latin as the Sursum Corda – but the entirety of this great prayer is called the anaphora in Greek, the lifting up.

In this great prayer the whole church is reminded of the great deeds that God has done. It is Trinitarian, in that it speaks of God’s action, but focusses on what he has done in Christ, and how it is done in the Holy Spirit.

The spread of God’s action is expansive in this offering of prayer, but it is also very specific to time and place. It concentrates down to a meal, the last meal of Christ before he is crucified. So this prayer includes the scriptural words we are told that Christ used at the Last Supper. We refer to these words as the ‘Dominical words’, the words of our Lord. The bread and wine offered up by the people to the table, becomes the bread and wine offered up by Christ, which are to be his body and his blood.

We are charged by him ‘to do this in remembrance’. The Greek word used for this is anamnesis – remembering up. During this Great Prayer the Holy Spirit is prayed for. I referred to this before. In a sense the Holy Spirit is already present, always and everywhere, but this is a sacramental moment so we are praying the Holy Spirit to be present ‘somewhere’ as we offer to God the bread and wine for his doxology, his glorification. This prayer for the Holy Spirit we refer to as the epiclesis. The normal gesture for the priest at the epiklesis, at the font or at the altar, is to extend the hands forward.

So this great prayer of anaphora is essentially THE great prayer of offering of the church. It is the central action of the eucharist, the Liturgy, and it is pivotal – being preceded by gathering and repenting, reading scripture, praying the intercessions, and followed up by sharing the bread and wine and sending the people of God out into the world to be the light and salt in the community. The anaphora lies at the heart of the worshipping life of the church as she says with all her people, ‘Holy, holy, holy Lord, God of power and might. Heaven and earth are full of your glory. Hosanna in the highest.’ It is for this purpose that the Liturgy exists – for this reason we celebrate the eucharist, or the Mass. This great prayer of offering is the prayer that has shaped the church and Christianity itself. Everywhere the Mass is, this prayer of offering is present.

 

I end with a favourite quote of mine, which I was reminded of recently. It comes from a classic book written by an Anglican Benedictine Monk, Dom Gregory Dix. The book is called The Shape of the Liturgy and he reflects on those ‘Dominical words’ I referred to. ‘Do this in memory of me.’

Was ever another 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 pinnacle of earthly greatness to the refuge of fugitives in the caves and dens of the earth. Men have found no better thing than this 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; in thankfulness because my father did not die of pneumonia; for a village headman much tempted to return to fetish because the yams had failed; because the Turk was at the gates of Vienna; for the repentance of Margaret; for the settlement of a strike; for a son for a barren woman; for Captain so-and-so wounded and prisoner of war; while the lions roared in the nearby amphitheatre; on the beach at Dunkirk; while the hiss of scythes in the thick June grass came faintly through the windows of the church; tremulously, by an old monk on the fiftieth anniversary of his vows; furtively, by an exiled bishop who had hewn timber all day in a prison camp near Murmansk; gorgeously, for the canonisation of S. Joan of Arc—one could fill many pages with the reasons why men have done this, and not tell a hundredth part of them. And best of all, 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 plebs sancta Dei—the holy common people of God.