part and parcel

 

SERMON PREACHED AT ST PAUL’S, ARROWTOWN

AND ST PETER’S, QUEENSTOWN

SUNDAY, AUGUST 11^th, 2024

 

John 6: 35, 41-51

 

As most of you, or at least most of you who live and worship here permanently, will know I'm a product or survivor of what I've often intended to call “one of those schools.” By “those” I mean private schools in the Anglican tradition, indeed one of the schools that Anne had under her watchful eye as director of the Anglican Schools Office.

As part of the special character of such schools it is expected that they will have a chaplain and a notable and distinctive Anglican Christian input. I was privileged to be at the school at the time of an outstanding chaplain, and there was an additional interlude during which he was replaced, perhaps he was on leave or something, by a wonderfully creative but even more out of the ordinary or eccentric chaplain. As it happens they were both called John.

The more outlandish of the two was on the school staff as an art teacher, and again I had the privilege of sitting at his feet for a year in his what was then seventh form history of art classes, which for some reason I was taking as a scholarship subject. Never mind that I in fact never turned up for the exam at the end of the year.

John II as I shall call him was as you would imagine creative, with a deep sense of God in all the arts, a deep sense of the power of the visual, and as it happens and rightly that extended to the power of other forms of the arts including liturgy. One night for reasons I can’t remember, he was in the one of seven boarding houses to which I belonged, and was celebrating communion for the senior boys. Despite being an avowed atheist, my respect for John II, and my dislike of the normal evening routine meant that I sat in on the communion-slash-discussion group. John II was engaging and compassionate and seemed to enjoy having a sceptic present.

But that wasn’t what I was going to tell you. What I’ve remembered ever since was that night he celebrated communion using not bread and wine but beer – only I might add a communion sized sip per boy – and potato crisps, or as we called them in those days, potato chips. His point was that communion was an everyday act, involving everyday aspects of, in this case, New Zealand life.  To some extent as I reflected on it years later it was a point well made.

In some denominations in the Pacific islands a form of sacramental theology known as “coconut theology” evolved, because the coconut itself was a perfect expression of the stuff of life that communion should be. The flesh of the coconut to a native Fijian far more closely resembled the bread of life to which Jesus likened his own body, and the milk of the coconut in a largely teetotal (at least in theory) society, far more adequately or less ambivalently expressed the wine made blood, the life force that the blood of Christ is traditionally in Christian speech.

As I thought over these things for many decades, and even discussed them vigorously at theological college, it seemed to me that John II was onto something but not quite the right thing. Certainly beer in the 1970s in New Zealand society was very much akin to wine and in first century Middle Eastern societies, or indeed across countries in Western Europe today, a part and parcel of life.

I hasten to add I don't mean the 6:00 swill kind of beer drinking which was an earlier phenomenon in New Zealand, or the drunken summer private school party beer drinking, but the part of life that I still enjoy, a pleasant beer with or before a good meal.

The crisps however had me worried, and still do. These days I largely avoid them, though I must say I find salt and vinegar all but irresistible. but the saturated fats disturbed me. And that’s almost the point. The bread of life of which Jesus spoke was the very Stuff of Life, the very substance of life. Emma Wilson was indeed right to point out in our gospel conversation this past week that the sanitised wafer of Anglican liturgy is not what Jesus was referring to.

As an aside you may have noticed that I am trying increasingly to use the single wafer rather than the somewhat insulting notion of separate priest’s and people’s wafers which have been for so long our tradition, despite announcing at the fraction that we all share in the one bread. And yes I get that the bread is, in recipe terms, “one,” but not in visual terms or even symbolic terms.

So what I think of the wonderful and honourable John II got delightfully wrong, and Emma Wilson got delightfully right, was the very thingyness, the substantive nature of the bread-made-body and body-made-bread to which Jesus was drawing attention. And despite the everyday place of beer, at least in 1970s New Zealand culture, wine too was effectively an essential part of Middle Eastern life. This of course being long before the prohibitions that are part and parcel of much later Islamic cultures.

So I suppose what I take away from this and what I hope you might at least consider is what I would call the normality of communion. Despite my being from the more Catholic end of Anglicanism in most circumstances I prefer to downplay some of the fussiness and detail of liturgy. Bread and wine are essential symbols. My theology is high enough that I believe they are absolutely impregnated with the meaning of the life and death and resurrection of Jesus. But they are also the stuff of life, and I believe they should be both intellectually and physically accessible to all of us as a normal and beautiful encounter with our incomprehensible God, God drawn close to, and dwelling amongst us.

So despite the formality of the way in which we distribute communion and receive communion I hope we can also hold onto an understanding that it is of the very essence or being alive, of encountering God, and to draw on a very Fourth Gospel idea, to consume and imbibe the very essence of all that God is for us.