pre-membering, 1986, 2025

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St ALBAN’S, NORTH MELBOURNE

SUNDAY, 28^th SEPTEMBER, 1986

 

 

Last week Alan[1] began a series of sermons exploring the meaning of the Eucharist, the Communion, the Mass, in which we participate here every Sunday. He reminded us that the Eucharist is something we are all called to do, that it is an action in which we all take part.

Now it’s my turn, and I have asked Alan if I could speak on the meaning of memorial, or remembrance, as we find it both in our liturgy and in the biblical passages about the Last Supper on which our liturgy is based.

Which leaves me with one small problem. In a very few minutes I’ve got to grapple with one of the most crucial issues that divides the church today. It’s a contentious issue, and although it wasn’t the cause of the Reformation it has remained close to being the single most divisive issue in dialogue between Catholics and Protestants, between various Protestant denominations, between Anglicans and Catholics, even, dare I say it, between Anglo Catholics and Evangelicals.

So, given that that kind of significance, the best I can now do is to offer you a few thoughts on my own understanding of the way we remember as we celebrate the Eucharist, ideas that have been helpful for my own spirituality. This is not something about which I would want to be dogmatic.

I guess there are various ways of remembering, and philosophers in particular have played with them throughout history. Plato, for example, believed we were born with some kind of a blueprint, a memory of an ideal world of which our world is only a shadow. That sort of memory is similar to what we might call instinct – the force, for example, that leads birds to migrate or humans to care for their young.

Another form of memory is our own memory of past events. Many of us for example remember clearly what we were doing the day John F. Kennedy was shot, or the day Armstrong landed on the moon. We remember our parents and our grandparents, and places we have lived.

The problem is that I believe these kinds of memory are precisely what Jesus was not talking about when, on the night he was betrayed, when he took bread and wine and commanded his followers to do in the same way, “in remembrance of me.”

Jesus, we must constantly recall, was a Jew, and the culture in which he spoke was that of Judaism. The night of the Last Supper was the night on which he and all Jews celebrated the events of the Passover – the escape of the Jews from Egypt in the Exodus.

Every year since the time of the Exodus the Jews remembered those events of the Passover by celebrating with a special meal. That is what Jesus and his followers were doing on the night when he was betrayed, in the upper room.

But the Jews didn’t believe they were merely remembering a past event and giving thanks for it. Instead they believed themselves to be recreating that event in their own homes as they celebrated the Passover. Not just a past event that they remembered, like some of us recall the glorious days when Essendon won grand finals, but actually recreating Essendon’s glorious events here and now.

It is in the context of that kind of memory event that Jesus commands his followers to remember him and the events of that night when he ate with his disciples.

But, and this is where it becomes complicated, it seems that he wanted them to remember not only the events of that supper, but also the events that were about to happen. The events of the Crucifixion, and, as we now know, the Resurrection. That is why he speaks of the bread as his “body” and the wine as his “blood.”

So he is asking the disciples not only to remember the events of that night, but also events that were yet to happen – to remember in anticipation.

Now for us both the events of the upper room and the events of the Cross have already happened. But I believe we are not only asked to remember, to make real in the present those past events, but also are called to “remember” another event that has not yet taken place. That event is the Banquet that is to take place in the Kingdom of Heaven at the end of time.

So we remember not only past events, but remember also a future event. We make both real, real happenings, in the present.

So what happens here each Sunday? It seems to me that, because Jesus had this very concrete understanding of memory, he was talking about making something really present. As he celebrated the events of the Exodus in the upper room those events became really present.

In the same way, I believe that he asks us, in remembering the events of the Last Supper, the Cross, and the Resurrection, and in remembering with anticipation the events of the great banquet of heaven, to permit those events to become truly present around this table as they were in the upper room, and as they will be at the end of time.

This I believe is what we mean when we talk about Real Presence. The Catholics have often been criticized for attempting to claim, with various philosophical words like transubstantiation and transignification, that the bread and wine really do become body and blood.

I would say that it is unhelpful to believe anything less than that. Not that these elements are mechanically changed, but that because the memory of the past and future events is so powerful, these events reoccur, are recreated and precreated in our midst as we remember them.

So it is an awe-inspiring task in which we are involved. It is an event of great beauty, and time for great thanksgiving – which is what “eucharist” means – because in these events we are reminded that we are reunited with Jesus and made at one with the Father through Jesus by the power of the Spirit, who binds us together and transforms both us and these elements into something new.

So what do I believe? I believe that as we share together in the Eucharist we really are experiencing Christ present in these elements as we receive them in obedience to his command. That, I believe, is what it means to “do this in remembrance” of him.

---

[1] The late Fr Alan Foster was Priest in Charge of North Melbourne in the mid 1980s. He was later the Rector of Coffs Harbour, where, sadly, he died in office after a battle with cancer. He was a significant influence in my own formation both as vicar of St Alban's and, earlier when he supervised my summer work placement in the parish of Pascoe Vale with Oak Park. 

early blurts of a theolog

 

 

 my first public sermon

SERMON PREACHED AT CHRIST CHURCH, HEATHMONT

St MARY MAGDALENE (July 22^nd) 1984

 

 John 20: 1-18

 

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord our strength and our redeemer.

 

Today is set aside in our church calendar for reflection on the life and witness of Saint Mary Magdalene.

As is so often the case of those early followers of Jesus, we know next to nothing about Mary Magdalene. We know, from this account in the fourth gospel, and from parallel accounts in Mark and Luke, that she, together perhaps with Mary the Mother of Jesus, perhaps with some other women, was the first to see the Risen Lord. And we know from Saint Luke’s account that she was a woman who had formerly harboured seven demons. The number “seven,” incidentally, at that time meant not necessarily one more than six, but “the ultimate,” “infinite,” or “innumerable.” Mary, then, was a lady who had a lot of problems.

Somehow in Christian tradition it has become assumed that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute. There is no sound scriptural evidence to support this tradition. And it seems to me that in the “folklore” presentation of Mary as a prostitute we have clouded two more essential aspects of her circumstances. By placing her in a box marked “prostitute” we have limited the scope of the “seven demons,” the “ultimate badness” that once inhabited her, and we have glossed over the primary problem that a woman in her position had to face, the problem of her woman-ness. Women, though respected to a limited degree for the functions they could perform, had, in first century Palestine, few more rights than the rights of our car today.

So, as we focus our attention today on Saint Mary Magdalene, what have we to learn?

If our Lord was prepared to entrust a woman, one formerly seen as ultimately bad, with the single most important message in human history, “I have seen the Lord,” then we as beneficiaries of that message should look very closely at the way in which we communicate the news of the Risen Christ.

In a day in which we claim, rightly or wrongly, relative equality of sexes, we should be seen to be working together to proclaim the gospel. Women and men with equal status, entrusted by our Lord to use different but equal gifts for our urgent work.

Too often though it seems we radiate only an impression of complacency and conservatism.

I guess for Mary herself the immediate result of Jesus’ entrusting of the glorious message to her was one of an inner feeling of self-worth. “I am okay. My master and my friend has given me a job to do.” Do we instil this kind of self-respect in our neighbour?

I sometimes wonder if our apparent failure to communicate the gospel to our neighbours isn’t directly the result of our failure to entrust the good news of our new life to the countless outcasts that are around us. Well I wouldn’t devalue the kind of training I am receiving as a future minister of word and sacrament, at the same time I have to stress that at the end of my training I am no better qualified to communicate the love of Jesus to my neighbour than is any other person.

I sometimes wonder if we aren’t gagging Jesus because of our inbuilt ideas of professionalism in the church. We leave the task of evangelism to the Billy Grahams, the task of pastoral care to the priest or pastoral worker, we leave the task of intercession to the intercessor, the task of reading the word to the reader.

Yet it seems to me that the only qualification Mary Magdalene had in order to set in motion the wheels of Christianity was a sheer, burning, naïve enthusiasm: “I have seen the Lord.”

To communicate that message we need to learn to work together. We need to learn to trust one another, as our Lord trusted Mary. We need to learn to encourage one another, to recognise and to emphasise one another’s gifts, as our Lord recognised in Mary a readiness to communicate, to bubble over with the news. Mary expressed the news with no great and articulate sermon but with that magnificent blurt, “I have seen the Lord.”

Mary blurted out those words, never stopping to consider the possible response of the shattered and frightened disciples. The disciples gathered there must have thought this woman crazy, reverted perhaps to her former demon possessed state. Later it was to become a frequent accusation levelled at the early Christians that they were drunk or crazy. Perhaps we too – and I definitely include myself – should learn to be drunk, crazed by the overwhelming news of the Risen Lord burning within us.

 

god on our side?

 

SERMON PREACHED IN THE TRINITY CHAPEL, PARKVILLE, VICTORIA

9^th JULY, 1984

 

[possibly the first sermon I ever preached, part of the homiletics formation programme at Trinity theological school]

 

Romans 8:31-end

It is not my intention here to launch into a learned exegesis of Pauline thought, or to present a well-researched paper on the soteriology of the Tentmaker of Tarsus. For what it’s worth, Bishop John Robinson describes this as the culmination of “perhaps the greatest chapter in the New Testament,” on which “all commentary is bathos.” Far be it from me to disagree.

In 1963, an angry and confused young man in New York wrote a poem that was to become one of the anthems of the folk protest movement in the United States throughout the 1960s. In it he attacks not the God of the Christians, but the mockery we have made of that God, the effigy we have raised up in Yahweh’s place as a screen to mask our seemingly insatiable search for power. 

Incisively that angry young man alluded to those words of Saint Paul that are our reading tonight:

FOR COPYRIGHT REASONS I HAVE NOT REPRODUCED THE LYRICS.

THEY ARE TO BE FOUND HERE 

Blasphemy? Or is the God we advertise by our words and actions – or lack of them – the type of God who applauds the double standards and hunger for power of a Judas Iscariot? Judas Iscariot betrayed our Lord with a symbol of peace and love, whilst in fact seeking power and – perhaps – wealth.

Perhaps we too betray Christ with a kiss? we don’t need. to be church historians to recognise the duplicity of our representations of Christ. We greet our Lord in love, yet have used him throughout history as a battering ram by which to inflict our will and our culture on unfortunate and unwilling peoples.

What, then, are we affirming when, with the apostle, we claim God is “for us,” all that we have “God on our side”? If God was not on the side of Judas Iscariot, then we must assume that he was on the side of the Victim of the betrayer’s actions. The Oppressed One, our Lord. And we don’t need to be liberation theologians to recognise the recurrent biblical motif of God’s love and concern for victims of injustice.

God does not change his mind – that reminder too is a recurrent biblical motif – so today we can assume that God still loves the poor and oppressed, whether they be heroes of our faith (or of other faiths) behind the Iron Curtain, or the ghetto dwellers neglected by the Reagan administration, the Bantustan dwellers oppressed by the South African regime, the Aboriginal People  divorced from their homelands in Australia, womankind alienated by patriarchal language and power structures, homosexuals condemned to misunderstanding and victimisation by the enforcement of macho norms … the list goes on. These are those whose side God is on.

The Labor government in various states in Australia is withdrawing privileged status from religious institutions … should we moan and fight to maintain our luxuries, or should we instead thank God that we are at last to come face to face with the implications of a post-Christian era? That our idiosyncratic structures are to tumble about our ears in the same way that “cultural Christianity” has tumbled in the face of two world wars? The decline of cultural Christianity has gone a long way towards shattering the myth that God is “for” or “on the side of” cultural, and predominantly bourgeois, patriarchal, and Caucasian Christianity, and for that we should give thanks.

Saint Paul talks about God being “for us.” But do we allow him to be for us, when we defend our obscure and elitist institutions? Can we be allies of God when we too often reduce our ministry to a numbers game, as parish level of “bums on seats,” ostensibly in the interests of extending the Kingdom, but more realistically in the interests of maintaining the vicar’s stipend, keeping leaks from the roof, or restoring a parish organ? Perhaps, in a post-Christian era, we have to look more closely at the possibilities of worker priests (of more than one sex}, self-sufficient parish communities, and home churches, before, with Saint Paul, we can truly claim that God is for us.

If we can overcome our crippling disabilities, disabilities of wealth, power, and patriarchalism, then we will once more be able to “thank God in all circumstances.” Particularly we might do so in the second chance he has allowed us in the secularisation of society, and in the resultant loss of ecclesiastical privilege. Then, once more, we will, as humble men and women reliant solely on the grace of our God, rejoice in the knowledge that if God is for us, “neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the president nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Jesus Christ our Lord.”

YOU MAY LIKE TO REVISIT THE FINAL VERSE IN DYLAN'S ANTHEM ... I DID