Then this afternoon we welcomed friends from the parish, and from a neighbouring Anglican parish, to Evensong and Benediction. "I can't think how long it is since I attended evensong and benediction" was once comment. So good that this part of the Anglican Patrimony has been accepted into the Catholic Church, by way of the Ordinariate. We concluded with tea and cakes - and there were scones with jam and cream - or rather, cream and jam. Irresistible to a Devonian.
Usually my sermons go by without comment; today, though, two people said how much they appreciated it. So, forgive me, I shall attach it here - and then go to bed. You might want to do the same before reading it.
Do this in remembrance of
me
These few words caused so
much blood to be spilled in England less than five centuries ago. Men and women were killed for insisting on one
interpretation or another of what St Paul is reporting. The Greek word he used
is ana mnesis … literally, ‘again minding’. So did he just mean “calling to
mind” as you might call to mind something for your shopping list? Or is it more
like thinking about an old friend and the good times you had together? More
likely this second sort of remembering, surely? But is it more than that?
If you walk down Whitehall
from Trafalgar Square towards Parliament you pass a tall block of marble – the
Cenotaph. Its name means “empty tomb” and that is what it is; unlike the grave
of the unknown warrior in Westminster Abbey, there is no body inside it. Yet
every November it is the setting for a great National act of remembrance; as
young soldiers, sailors and airmen march past it, you can’t help recalling
their prede-cessors, so many of whom died in their youth. Then there are the
veterans, very few now from the last war, but many from conflicts not dignified
with the name of war; the Falklands, Iraq, Afghanistan. With them there is the
doubly sad sight of young men in wheelchairs, their lives altered for ever by
fighting for Queen and country.
Coming as many of us have
done from modern Anglicanism the arguments can seem strange. In the Council of
Trent the Catholic Church used particular philosophical language to try to
describe just how bread becomes body – language which in essence goes back to
the Greek philosophers, and especially to Plato. Many of us might still
sympathise with Queen Elizabeth I who did not want to open a window into men’s
souls – yet her tolerance only went so far, and belief in transubstantiation,
the Catholic doctrine, was made illegal, just as the reciting of the Rosary and
so much else was proscribed.
In the end, there are two
opposed attitudes, not just to the Mass, but to the whole Sacramental system.
For Protestants, sacraments are nothing but empty symbols, cenotaphs if you
like, tombs with nothing in them. Baptism changes nothing. The eucharist is just
a meal. The journey many of us have made from Anglicanism into the Catholic
Church shows that for us this is not enough. Baptism creates a reality; it
overcomes the effects of original sin, it puts us on the path to redemption.
Communion too; it really changes us. St Paul warns of the dangers of eating and
drinking it without discerning, as he says, the Body. To eat and rink
unworthily, unprepared, is a great danger - for the Mass actually joins us to
the sacrifice of Christ, makes us participate in his death, gives us a
foretaste of the heavenly banquet.
This sacramental system
finds a response far beyond the confines of Catholicism. It is this need for
reality in worship which strikes a chord for many outside the Church. They may
not understand why, yet when they attend a Catholic funeral they can see that
we are doing something for the person who has died. A Catholic funeral is not
just a romantic recalling of a life, seen through rose-tinted glasses. It says
that this person, like us all, was a sinner; and that God, who is merciful to
us sinners, will hear our prayers for him. Above all, if we offer God’s dear
Son in a celebration of a requiem Mass, he will respond to our heartfelt
pleading.
There is a
solidity and a certainly about the Catholic Sacraments which too many who have
grown up as Catholics simply take for granted. For those who have come into the
Church from outside, it is quite different. When you have been in a church
where every clergyman’s opinion is as good as any other’s, where one cleric might
believe in the sacrifice of the mass and another consider it is no more than an
empty symbol, it is a huge relief to come into a communion where private
opinions cannot outbalance the belief of the church down the ages – a communion
where one bishop is not going to sound off in the Press, as one Anglican bishop
has this week, in order to disagree with his fellow bishops. But not only with
them, but with the whole Church down the ages. Is this why the latest bishop of
Salisbury was ordained, to deny what every former bishop of Salisbury, and
every other present Anglican bishop, believes about Christian marriage?
So today we
celebrate Corpus & Sanguis Christi – the Body and Blood of Christ. We
reverence the sacred elements because they are the same body and blood which
hung on Calvary for us. They create a permanent link between the Jesus of
History, walking and talking in first century Palestine, and the Jesus of
today, who sits in majesty at the right hand of the Father, ever pleading on
our behalf his Sacrifice on the Cross.
The Cenotaph
comes into its own, comes to life you could say, every November when church and
state gather round it to remember. They are joined in memory by the armies of
the past, the countless numbers who laid down their lives in war. For us, the
Mass does this and so much more every time it is celebrated; as often as you do
this, you show forth the Lord’s death, until he comes. Show him forth, and lift
Him up – as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so the Son of Man is
lifted up, to draw all men to himself as he promised. May we ever venerate
these sacred mysteries of his Body and Blood, and in our lives show him to the
world.
