3 Many different churches

In this chapter we are going to see how churches worship, and that the one
Church is made up of many churches.

1 Gathering – Baptised into One Body

The Church is the love of God, opened to man. This gathering, procession
and worship make us visible and available to us. In the Church all people are
being called together and reconciled in this love. We are called out to be this
distinct gathered people, and we are sent to our society to be witnesses of
this reconciliation. The Church is distinct from the society around it for the
sake of that society. We are brought into the Church not only for our own
sake, but the sake of those who are not yet members of the Church. We enter
the Church in baptism, sometimes also referred as conversion. Since there is
one baptism, Christians must regard all other Christians as members of the
Church. as the baptism service puts it: ‘In joyful obedience to your Son we
baptise into his fellowship those who come to him in faith.’ Through all the
great variety of church and discipleship, there is one Church, and the great
variety of the churches is for the sake of the world.

1. We may enter the presence of the Lord

When we enter Church, the building and the worshipping community, we enter
the presence of God. The Lord is enthroned before us. He is high and lifted
up, his glory fills the temple. The whole company of heaven stand around him.
He holds audience with all creation, and each Church service is our peek into
this audience.

We recognise and acknowledge the presence of the Lord and of all his
company. Some bow or genuflect as they come into the building, some kneel
and pray in silence until the service begins, while others greet their friends.

All people that on earth do dwell,

come ye before him and rejoice.
O enter then his gates with praise,
approach with joy his courts unto (William Kethe)

Welcomed in to the courts of the king

I’ve been ushered into your presence.
Lord I stand on your merciful ground
Yet with every step tread with reverence (Matt Redman)

2. Baptism
The Lord calls, and so we come. In the place where there was no evidence of
God for man, there is now the community that is gathered to be this evidence.
The Church exists because God has called into existence. The Lord says

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‘Come’. So at once they got up at once, and left their nets and followed him
(Matthew 4.19-20, Luke 5.29) So it must be with us. We may say ‘Lord where
are you going?’, but the answer is ‘Come and see’. To be a Christian is to
follow where Christ leads. We do not know everything about our way, but we
are on the way with him and with all his people. He is at our head. We do not
trail along behind him, as though we have been left to make our own way, for
Christ not only leads us but carries us.

Baptism is the start of life with Christ. It is the event of our conversion to Christ
made public. It is our passageway from one life to another, so that in baptism
we are dying to one form of life and being born to another. There are two sorts
of life: there is the simple creaturely form of life, which always comes to an
end, and there is the unbroken life of God, held out to us in Christ, which
never comes to an end. In our creaturely life, death and life are two processes
that go on side by side: we are running down and wearing out, and we will do
so until we run out of life altogether. Life is pitted with death; when the holes in
the fabric of life start to join up, our creaturely life is over. But in Christian
baptism one life is being replaced by the other. The new life, that is unbroken,
is replacing the old life that is stained and pitted with death, so that though we
wear out, we are always renewed and regenerated. As the baptism service
puts it: ‘We thank you, Father, for the water of baptism. In it we are buried with
Christ in his death. By it we share in his resurrection.

2. The Church on the way

Through water you led the children of Israel from slavery in Egypt to freedom
in the Promised Land.
Our immersion in the water of baptism is our dying to death and rising to
eternal life. We say: ‘To follow Christ mean dying to sin and rising to new life
with him.’ We go down into that water, and travel through it until we emerge
from it on the other side. Our course is set for this long transition from life
marked by death to that unbroken life. The whole Christian life is this baptism.
We are going through this water with Christ.

We are making a crossing and will go through a storm. But we are going to
make this crossing together with the whole convoy lead by Christ. With him,
the rage of the sea will not overcome us. In his ark we travel ‘in sure and
certain hope of the resurrection.’ As one canticle from Isaiah puts it:
The Lord makes a way in the sea, a path in the mighty waters, ‘I will make a
way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert, to give drink to my chosen
people.’

The whole Christian Church is on the way. We travel together through the
world, regarding it as our training and preparation. Every Sunday we stop and
we celebrate publicly this anticipation of the Promised Land. Perhaps it looks
as though we go to Church, sit still together for an hour or two and then rush
off again to our separate lives. But this is not how it is. In the service, we are
on the move, visibly and publicly travelling together through the world. We are
travelling behind Christ: he leads, we follow. We are on the move through our
city and society, passing through every community, members of it yet distinct
from it. Christ leads his people through the world, as though he were showing

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us off to it: Christ always leads us in triumphal procession (2 Corinthians
2.14). An event has started, it is ongoing and points to what we cannot yet
see. So we sing:
Lift High the Cross the love of Christ proclaim
Come, let us follow where our captain trod
Our king victorious Christ the Son of God (499)
We are being formed and transformed, so we cannot yet claim to be human in
the full sense, but we and when we have been, we will be human at last. We
are changed by our encounter with other Christians and our shaping in the
Church, transformed, individually, and corporately, as we are gathered,
reconciled with one another and brought into one body. Though the cavalcade
pauses, it does not stop. We are in procession because we are not yet what
we will be. In this way Christian hope is built in.
We are on the move right through this service. Perhaps this would be easier
to visualise if we worshipped standing up, and so if we took chairs or pews out
of Church. At one point in the service, as we go up to the altar to receive the
eucharist the whole congregation is standing. This is how to see the service
as a whole. It is the event in which line of God's people stretches from our
places of work and our homes, all the way to Church and in church up to the
altar. Christians are the people raised and made to stand upright by the
resurrection.

3. The Church goes from church to church

Each church gathers with other churches. We do not remain sitting in our
separate churches but go out together to find other Christians in other
congregations. We worship with them and ask them to share with us whatever
insight their experience has given them, and we offer them whatever
encouragement we can. The promise that Where two or three are gathered
together, there am I in the midst of them (Matthew) refers to congregations as
much as it does to individual Christians. No individual group or congregation
of Christians is sufficient. It must seek its own, and it must seek those
Christians that it sees as unlike itself, and for this reason we are on the move.

The Church gathers out on the street. It does so at particular seasons like
Christmas and Easter when every part of the Church, evangelical and
catholic, gathers and processes through the streets. In the season of Advent
we all go carol-singing to tell the city that Christmas is the advent of God to
man.

The Church is on the street at Easter. In my part of the city, East London,
Catholic and Anglo-Catholic processions on Palm Sunday, Good Friday and
Corpus Christi processions have always been a big part of church life. You
can see churches processing along our streets on Palm Sunday, when we
celebrate the Lord’s entry into Jerusalem, and on Good Friday to celebrate
the passion. We gather and walk again in the West End at Pentecost. At
Corpus Christi, Catholic Churches take to the streets again. All Saints Church
St Margaret Street meets with other churches and processes in a circuit
around Oxford Street.

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You can see this at other times too. In the run up to the millennium, when the
Churches were working towards the cancellation of third world debt, some in
London started to March for Jesus. The March became a annual event
through the 1990’s to draw our attention to the Jubilee. The evangelical
churches call this ‘prayer walking’ and these processions ‘prayer marches’.
This year, as parliament was considering legislation which we walked from
Westminster Cathedral to Westminster Abbey on the ‘Thousand Crosses for
life’ as legislation that did not seem to safeguard life was being considered by
parliament.

My part of London is also where the Salvation Army started. These Christians
adopted a particularly disciplined life because they saw how strongly despair
and with it alcohol, drugs, gambling and prostitution gripped this part of the
city. They knew that only the disciplined and communal Christian life will
withstand those pressures. The Salvation Army has stood on pavements, its
bands played and sung hymns, prayed and celebrated the victory of Christ
here for more than a century. The forces of self-destruction still make
themselves visible, and is always obvious in this part of London that some are
losing the struggle, becoming victims of the cravings and dependencies that
turn us in on ourselves. But by gathering to celebrate Christ’s victory over all
the addictions, all hurts and rancour, and by singing and praying as we walk
on these streets we demonstrate that God has not abandoned anyone of us to
hopelessness. As the Church does so, it raises the hopes of the whole city
and society. As the Apostle Paul says ‘We are the aroma of Christ to God
among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing; to
the one a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance from life to
life. (2 Corinthians 2.15). We are the Church on the way, so we meet and
process through the streets of our city. We confess ourselves to be pilgrims,
so we sing:
He who would valiant be
‘gainst all disaster
let him in constancy
follow the master (Bunyan To be a Pilgrim)

4. The Church gathered

In every church service we see how the Christian people are underway. Their
pilgrimage is a public procession in which the more experienced lead and the
new comers follow them. As we sit in church there are people in the rows in
front of us and behind us, just as there were Christians before us and will be
Christians after us. As we look towards the altar we are looking forward
towards the future. But we can only see this future by looking backwards, as it
were, through all the generations of Christian history, to Jesus and the first
disciples. By looking at the incarnation we can see glimpse the shape of the
future, when all Jesus’ people are finally united with him. As we down the
Church we may glimpse in the crowd some of the Christians whose lives have
impressed us. Who shall we look for – Saint Francis of Assisi, St Columba
and the saints of the Celtic Church? Or Martin Luther, John Calvin, John
Bunyan, John Wesley? Or the Christians of the twentieth century, like Karl
Barth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King, Oscar Romero, Mother
Theresa or Lesslie Newbigin? They set out before us, and they have travelled

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further and waited longer than us. We can say that: These fought valiantly as
a disciple of Christ against sin, the world and the devil and remained faithful
to Christ to the end of their lives.

These more experienced Christians ahead of us in this procession are also

here to serve us. This long line of Christians is also a supply chain by which
good things are passed to us by those ahead of us. What they receive, they
pass on to us. They are waiting for us and are not going to finish without us.
Whatever they receive, it makes them a distinct people, different from the
wider world. This communion of persons made holy very slowly mediates this
holiness to us, so we can share in their fellowship and become holy too. They
pass back to me the instalments of holiness that we call ‘sacraments’, each of
which is an intangible piece of the indivisible union of Christ with his people,
and of the holy and indivisible union of God with man. This imperceptible
stream of holiness is the resurrection, seeping into us. The community that is
slowly gathering around Christ, and which we know as the Church, is the first
glimmerings of the resurrection. This is why at your baptism we pray: May
God who has received you by Baptism into his Church, pour upon you the
riches of his grace, that within the company of Christ’s pilgrim people you may
daily be renewed by his anointing Spirit and come into the inheritance of the
saints in glory.

5. Rival gatherings
The Church is these people whom Christ gathers and sends to us so that we
can also gather around him. But there are many other assemblies and
gatherings, of course, focused on other individuals or other movements. The
world is made up of people swirling around, gathering around one event, and
then moving on to gather around the next.

The worship the Christian community proclaims that the God of Jesus Christ
is the only God. But it does not say this in a vacuum, but in a world of voices
all saying something about what we want or need, and therefore about who
we should be gathering around. All human beings give themselves away: we
cannot help ourselves. We worship and adore, and we give ourselves away.
We leak or bleed: adoration seeps out of us, and this makes us utterly needy.
We need recognition and we throw ourselves as anyone and anything to get
it. If we do not give ourselves to Christ we give ourselves away to some other
power. Either we love and adore God and give ourselves to him, which is of
course to give ourselves back to him. Or we direct all that love and adoration
to other individuals, and the movements that gather around them. If we do
this, we give these individuals more adoration than they can manage, and so
we inadvertently make idols of them. Our whole consumer culture is a vast
adoration service which interposes itself here, opening up a gap in order to fill
it with whatever love service it is able to concoct. The love industries percolate
between each man and woman, always setting before each the image – the
idol – of a more perfect woman or man. As such it is a vast displacement
activity that keeps us from receiving, sharing and returning the true love that
comes from God.

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All the voices that make up our consumer culture tell us who we are, and what
we should demand from one another. They are making claims to power too,
since they suggest that we commit ourselves to them. The Church must be
able to put names to these. It calls them ‘gods’ or idols: they are images of
what is good, which have somehow become distorted. Whenever it is in
session its worship brings the Christian community into confrontation with all
other gods. The Christian community speaks out to the world, warning both
how powerful these delusions are, but also how demeaning its gods are, and
how powerless and illusory. Every Sunday morning the Christians meet
together to tell the gods of their defeat. The gods are being taken out of us,
and growing less with our every act of confession of Christ.

6. The service of Christ

The worship service is Christ’s service and worship of God. But also Christ
makes himself our servant and serves us. So the service is two things: it is
the Son’s eternal conversation with the Father, and it is his service to us. This
means that the Church is the labour and ministry of Jesus Christ for us. He
works for us and provides for us. This second meaning is the basis of the first.
God creates Christian worship for us. It starts before we arrive and continues
after we have left. This service and song of the whole company around God
goes on over our heads, and it spills over from heaven in the form of the
events of worship that we know, so what we experience in Church is a relay
from heaven.

The Church service generates the Christian ministry to the world. The Church
service powers the Christian mission. By publicly withholding all worship from
everyone who is not God, and doing this so all the rest of the world can see,
the Christian community provides a service to the world because it de-bunks
all our excessive claims and demythologise all who seek power without
acknowledging its source. It withholds excessive acknowledgement or
adoration from every other authority. The possibility of this true worship, and
thus the possibility of truth, and the consequent denial of false worship, is
itself witness to God and so service to the world.

The Church service is the event of God’s work for us. God not only works for
us, but he is at work on us. He is opening us up to one another. He prevents
us from finally writing one another off and closing down on one another. All of
us who do come to church, come for others. We are here for those who are
not here. Our identity and the truth of human society can be found in that
worship service, so that when we are with God we discover how to be
become human together.

The Church is public and visible and therefore institutional. It is a generous

thing to be available so that anyone and everyone knows how to find us. Our
buildings are visible and opening hours are just as long as they can be. You
don't have to make an appointment or join a queue. The Church is for the
sake of the world, indeed it is dedicated to the world. But the Church is only
good for the world because it is different from the world. Christian life is
communal life and it is discipleship.

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The Church has long term positive impact on society. In order that the Church
cannot be concerned about the form of that impact. The Church is not good
for society because it sets out to be so. The more it is aware, and nervous of
how this will play with ‘society’, the less good for society the Church will be.
Only by being true to the gospel can the church be good for society.

We meet together with other churches

The Church gathers in a particular place. We meet here on behalf of the
whole people of London. London is my place, yours is somewhere else
perhaps. When it gathers, the church intercedes for its own locality, speaking
on its behalf to God.

But we in London are under a common discipline, and it is this that keeps us
one people gathered from many. We are the Church in London only as long
as we are under the discipline of the whole worldwide Church, and indeed the
whole historic Church. They hold us to account and keep us honest. They
insist so that we do not withhold any part of the gospel from London. Without
this discipline would we become a clique of the like-minded and in the long-
term we would be in danger of becoming a sect. As long as we are connected
to the other churches in London we remain under the discipline of the whole
Church. We are able to say that:
We are members together of the Body of Christ
We are children of the same heavenly Father
We are inheritors together of the kingdom of God

2 Hearing – Truth and Judgment

The Church that hears the Word of God also passes it on to the world. It tells
the world that there is there is an authoritative judge who can tell what is true
and what is not. That God and no one else is this judge is good news. The
Church says: Look, the Judge is at the door!

1. The Word, the Spirit and the Church

The Church hears Scripture read in public. Scripture is read, morning and
evening, in every act of Christian worship. His mercies are new every
morning. When we are ready to admit that our predecessors in the Christian
faith have been faithful, and have handed on to us the truth of Jesus Christ
and his apostles, an extraordinary adventure opens up to us. As the hymn
goes: Our fathers owned thy goodness and we their deeds record (NEH 479).

The Word of God is heard in Scripture. For this reason the Christian church
reads all Scripture and thus that it reads the Old Testament. We may not
divide the Old Testament from the New, for so we will divide the indivisible
testimony of God. If we were to demote or discard the Old Testament it would
be because we did not understand that we are the gentiles, the latecomers
introduced into the long-existing community of God. This community may only
be known to us as the people of the Old Testament, the people of Israel who
looked forward to Christ and finally bore him for us. The work of God began

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before us, and has created a community that precedes us. We may read the
Scriptures because of the many prophets and people of the people of Israel
have transmitted them to us. If we do not see the Old Testament as the
testament and testimony of God we cannot hope to join the people of God
revealed to us there.

The sermon connects all the readings, the Old Testament and New Testament
together, so that each part of the bible is the view-finder through which we
read every other part. As a whole, Scripture is the viewfinder through which
we can see our own world. The sermon shows us how to see all that happens
to us, together and individually, in the light of the progress of the whole people
of God. The narrative of the way that the Christian people has to go unfolds
through all the readings of the year. It is marked by the liturgical calendar.
Each sermon helps us follow our own progress around the year, and so
shows us that the whole Church is together on pilgrimage. The people of
Israel and every generation of the Church are our guides and marshals on the
path that we are taking together.

The sermon unpacks the word and action

What is the purpose of the sermon? Imagine you are in a place that you have
never been in before, packed with people, watching a ceremony that is taking
place in a language you do not speak. You are baffled by everything you see.
Then, because he realises how lost you feel, someone next to you in the
crowd tells you what you are witnessing. He points out the action going on
above the assembled worshippers and he gives you just enough whispered
commentary to pick up what is going on. This is what the sermon is. It is a
murmured commentary on the action going on all around us, in this worship,
in the Scripture of the people of God, which is the plot of this worship, and in
the world around us. This action is the entire action of Jesus Christ and his
company in the creation and redemption of the world. The action of God that
is recorded for us by the people of Israel in the two books of the old and new
testaments, is going on live above and around us. It is reports of this action
that we hear when the bible is read to us. The sermon is to help us see what
is going on above us and before us.

Psalms and morning and evening worship

The Christian faith requires us to learn vast swathes of text by heart so that
the words found good by many generations bubble up from within us. We
read the bible on the train, as we come back in the morning from our night
work in the city. We say our prayers as we walk work and we sing inwardly.
As we read the history of God's dealings with his people Israel, we learn their
prayers and so learn what to say when things go wrong. From them we have
the psalms and prayers to use for every eventuality of life with God. as the
hymn puts it:
Our fathers held the faith received
By saints declared, by saints believed
By saints in death defended (NEH 479)

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3. Judgment
When we are gathered together we are in the presence of God. We say: The
Lord is here. His Spirit is with us. God sees us and knows us. He is the one
whose good opinion we value, whose judgment we trust. His Word comes to
us as judgment. If he did not give us his judgment he would be no help to us,
and thus not be our friend.

The Lord is not merely present in our worship, but present in judgment. He is
the judge who now holds session for us. All the world is present in this
assembly and can see how it is. Every secret is made known, nothing is
hidden; no one is left with only half the picture. The whole truth is revealed
here, and everyone can see it for what it is.

When we say that this is the judgment of God, we do not mean that it is not
ours. The truth is there to see. We can agree with the Lord and assent that
things are indeed as he describes them. This judgment will be entirely ours
too, for it will be clear that the judgment the Lord gives is the right and the only
judgment, and the judgment that everybody concurs in and is pleased with. All
who are present will declare themselves satisfied and glad. In Christian
worship the ultimate judgment, the last word, is being given. This judgment is
not fate, it is not cruel or arbitrary or unwished for: we look for it, we demand it
and protest when it is withheld, and it is a relief when it arrives.

Judgment is a good thing. Judgment is decision-making, and through

decision-making we gain the experience that can help us become makers of
good decisions. Good judgment is good: only bad judgment is bad. Being able
to tell the difference between a good decision and a bad one, is good. If you
see someone heading into danger, you shout a warning. You make a
judgment, a decision, based on instinct and if your judgment is right, perhaps
you have saved a life. We act for one another, and judge and make decisions
on one another behalf.

Let us take a homely example. I present myself poorly. When you see how I
hunch my shoulders, you demonstrably relax your shoulders, to show me that
I am holding myself too tight. Each time you do this, you are enabling me to
see how I look, and how way-off my self-image is. Imagine that you see how
badly dressed I am, and decide to take me shopping for some new clothes.
Each time I emerge from the changing room wearing some new item, you
indicate with a slight nod or wince how suitable it is. Each of these is a little
judgment. Because you do this gently and subtly, I welcome this rather than
resent it. I rely on your judgment, and learn how to judge myself, and so I
grow into greater self-control and self-possession.

We are able to judge positively for one another. Then we can tell each other
not to be afraid, not to harm ourselves, and we can trust one another to seek
the best for us, and so seek one another’s opinion. We all seek judgment. The
point is only to find the judge who is not needy and so has no designs of his
own on you.

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The news of our redeemer
God is judge, and he presents himself before us in Church to give us his
judgment. It is because he is indeed our friend that God comes to us as our
judge. There is someone who can really tells us who we are. When we hear
Scripture, we receive that scrutiny and that examination, and we see how
things lie with us in how he speaks to us.

To conceal this news from one another is an unkind thing to do. When this
news is not clearly expressed and welcomed, but ridiculed and belittled, the
Church suffers. But when we ourselves are complicit in covering up the news
of this true judge, that is a disaster. Getting the information about any public
service is a fundamental to the success of that service itself. The news of
God, the access to God and the name of the true God is essential to the
service. The name of God is the means by which the service of God can be
accessed. Knowledge of this access is access this service. And the reach of
the name of God's name and the extent to which he is known is the extent of
the cover he offers. God is known not for his sake, but yours. The glory of
God, the extent of public knowledge of him, is not for him, but for us. To
proclaim the name of God is to proclaim salvation. As we say in the eucharist:
He opened wide his arms for us upon the cross; he put an end to death by
dying for us

4. The Word of God

The Word God comes to the words of man
The Word of God comes to the word of man. The world is made up of the
many words of God and of man, and all the words of man are the words he is
given by God, which he must some day return to God so that they be
renewed. Whenever this contrast between the word of God and the word of
man is not made, the Christian faith is seen in abstraction from the world to
which it speaks comes in service, pointing to this salvation.

Our confidence in our accounts of the work of Christ, and of the atonement
and sacrifice is low when we do not understand that the Gospel comes into a
world made up of many ‘gospels’. The whole truth, of the Word of God,
confronts the many half-truths, of the many words of man. The gospel enables
to identify and diagnose all half-truths as no-gospel. The worshipping
community of the Church therefore has to contrast the Christian message to
all the other messages; it says that there are two liturgies. There is the
Christian liturgy, which is true worship. And there are the many pagan
liturgies, in which man’s worship is turned in the wrong direction. The first
liturgy is directed by love of God to the perfecting of all God's creatures, while
the others take us in all sorts of other directions, dissipating us until the truth
of our identity is broken and lost.

The task of expounding Scripture to proclaim the work of Christ. In its worship
the Church says and sings many things about the work of Christ and cross. In
the songs we sing in our worship one Scriptural statement is piled on another.
But when we explain what we mean, we have to unpick things a little and
show how they cohere in a single narrative, the narrative of Christ and his

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people. We have to preach and expound the atonement. We have sermons
for this purpose, and we have an educated clergy to give these sermons.

5. The cross of Christ

Sin and death
In our worship we link the act of confession and judgment, forgiveness and
absolution. We understand what these are by the cross. And we understand
what the cross is because the Old Testament is read and preached on. The
Church that reads the Old Testament is able to see Easter as Passover, and
see that this Passover lies ahead of us. the baptism service tells us:
Through water you led the children of Israel from slavery in Egypt to freedom
in the Promised Land. In water your Son Jesus was anointed by the Holy
Spirit as the Messiah, the Christ, to lead us from the death of sin to newness
of life.

The Old Testament is given to the Church so that this holy community may
find in it the means to read the New Testament, and so understand that these
two testaments are not just about Christ, or about a timeless moral truth, but
about what lies ahead of us. The Church that receives the Old and New
testaments together can see the promise of its rescue from darkness, the
forgiveness of sins and so it is enabled to marvel at its salvation and sing the
praises of God. The Church that does not read the Old Testament will
understand the New Testament only as an expression of timeless moral truth
without any hope of forgiveness and transformation. That Church will then be
withholding that forgiveness, and leave its people in their sins. Then the
witness and priestly office of the Church to the world will be left unperformed,
the world will remain its sins, and the Church will be responsible to God for
the misery of the world.

If we do not feed from Christ, the Word who is the living bread, we feed
instead on food from other sources. When that eternal bread is withheld, the
Church feeds on what it gets from other masters, and the news of true
judgment and salvation does not reach those most in need of it. Their lives will
be held to our account. Just as there are always two cities and two liturgies,
that of Christ and that of all masters, so there are always more than one cup
set before us, the cup of Lord and the cup offered by other masters. If we do
not see ourselves as Israel ready to undergo this Passover, we will have
turned ourselves into Pharaoh, who attempted to put himself between God
and his people.

6. Hearing worship
The Word of God is heard in the entire prayer and worship of the
congregation. Scripture forms all the acclamations, songs and hymns that
make up the service. All hymn books and song sheets are there to teach us
the words to sing. The aim of these books is that the congregation come to
know its hymns and songs off by heart. The Christian faith requires us to learn
vast swathes of text, so we can reproduce them from memory: we want the
words of Scripture to bubble up from within us. These are the words found
good by previous generations. We should learn the hymns and know them off
by heart, along with the bible and the rest of the service. The words of our

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hymns and songs should respond to the preceding Scripture. That is why we
say: Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening. You have the words of eternal life

The Church must pass on the Word that it receives. The prayers and
responses collected in ‘Common Worship’, the worship book of the Church of
England, represents the repository entrusted to this generation for the sake of
a new generation for the Church in our society. We have to pass this worship
on to them.

The narrative of the Church service is given by the narrative of Scripture, and
the narrative of Scripture is the narrative of the events in the life of Jesus of
Nazareth. This narrative of those events are told us by Jesus Christ himself.
Jesus Christ spells himself out to us through these readings. In short, what is
going on in the Church service is Christ coming to us and taking us with him
to God. As the witness and servant of God, the Church is constantly watched
and judged. For the Lord intends that we pass on the Word that we have
received. When the Church does not do so, it sins. It sins against those for
whom this word was entrusted to it, and since God has taken the side of
these, it sins against God . The Church is most under the scrutiny and
judgment of God. Liberation comes from naming the creatures of God
truthfully. In the worship of the gathered Christian community we participate in
the Son’s worship of the Father. His worship calls into being a company that
worships with him and so participates in the conversation in which the Son
hears and receives and replies to the Father.

The Christians must also listen to the world, compassionately but critically.
They do not have to accept its own account of its predicament. They are
summoned and gathered to judge, and so the judge the liturgy of the world.
Only the Church says that that man is a mystery and a wonder, knowable yet
never utterly known, who will always surprise us and about whom there is
always more to learn. He cannot be truly known through the reductive
concepts of power which the liturgy of the world deals in. Only the discourse
of the Church of love and service can point to the whole depth of God’s
relationship to man and of man’s dignity as God's beloved creature. It is this
insistence on the depth of man and the world that makes the Church essential
to the functioning of civil society. In this liturgy we can speak directly to one
another. We can charge one another with failing to live in peace and truth.
And we can forgive one another. So in the power and fellowship of Christ we
are reconciled, our state of war brought to an end and we are brought to
peace.

The Christian life and teaching is the grace of God mediated through the
experience of previous generations of Christians. It allows to us grow and
become this distinctive and holy people, able to hold out to our society what it
cannot receive from any other source.

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3 Singing – Joyful People
We are sent to the world to celebrate the goodness of God and of the creation
that that he has given us. We are planted and established here, so we rejoice
and are glad before the world.

1. We enter the presence of the Lord

As its enters the presence of God the Christian community sings its thanks,
with psalms and hymns. The psalms are the basis of Christian worship and
praise. We praise daily. In our psalm and hymns we encourage one another to
come into this praise.
O Come let us sing unto the Lord
Let us heartily rejoice in the strength of our salvation (Psalm 95)

So we sing…
Be still, for the presence of the Lord
The Holy One is here
Come bow before him now
With reverence and fear.. (47)

And we sing:
Welcomed in to the courts of the king
I’ve been ushered into your presence.
Lord I stand on your merciful ground
Yet with every step tread with reverence
And I’ll fall face down
as your glory shines around (Matt Redman)

Every Christian congregation sings and proclaims this glory:

Salvation belongs to our God
Who sits on the throne
And to the Lamb
Praise and glory,
wisdom and thanks,
honour, and power and strength
Be to our God for ever and ever (Source 443)

2. Celebration and the young church

The Christian life witnesses to the coming together of age-groups. The
Christian life of young Christians operates on cycles that are longer and
shorter than that of the Church as a whole. Whilst we are in our teens, or
students or young adults, we do not always keep the same time as the rest of
the Church. On the shorter cycle is the worship music of the young church.
The young church meets on Saturday or Sunday night for worship and
teaching, but also to eat out together, to go to concerts or to see a film. On the
longer cycle are the annual festivals. The Summer festivals, such as Soul
Survivor, Spring Harvest, New Wine and Home Focus, are the distinct way in
which young Christians come together in worship. There are similar youth
movements, large-scale Youth Days, renewal and charismatic movements

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and open-air masses in the Roman Catholic church. These festivals are
regarded as new, but they are not. In the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, the Presbyterian churches held vast church camps, called
‘conferences’ or ‘conventions’, perhaps four times a year, with days of
confession and preparation leading up to a communal celebration of the
Lord’s Supper. The antecedents of these could be traced back into medieval
history. The Church has always met and worshipped out of doors in large
summer events related to the Church calendar or harvest, with fairs and
festivals.

The worship of the young Church expresses yearning and desire. They
express what all humankind feels, but most humankind suppresses and is in
denial about. Our hearts are restless, says Augustine, until they find their rest
in God. There is a dignity in admitting that we are restless because we are not
complete in ourselves. As long as we say that we yearn for what we do not yet
have, we keep one step ahead of the love industries, that intend to trade on
that desire, claiming to fill it while making it less and less tempered and under
our control. The Church yearns for its Lord, the bridegroom who is on his way.
Who is this that rises like the dawn
fair as the moon, bright as the sun, My Lord
Many waters cannot quench your love,
stronger than death, sweeter than wine
Always your light shines in all of the earth
Always I love you (Source 1627)

3. Old songs and new

The Church has many musical cultures, but most obviously there is traditional
worship and new styles of worship. The Church must always have both. Let
us look at the new worship songs. We sing sets of songs, one after another,
uninterruptedly in a ‘time of worship’. Song by song we progress from through
rooms of the palace and into ever-closer presence of the Lord into intimacy
with him.
Be still, for the presence of the Lord
The Holy One is here
Come bow before him now
With reverence and fear..
We stand on holy ground.. (Source 47)

God loves man. Between them there is a love affair.

To be in your presence
To sit at your feet,
Where your love surrounds me
And makes me complete
This is my desire
O Lord this is my desire… (Source 524)

We might say that these songs are too repetitive, or too focused on the
experience of the individual Christian. But there are psalms that are equally
heavy on repetition, and focused on the fear and hope, and joy and love of the

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individual. We might say that not very much goes on in these songs, but
perhaps that is how love affairs appear to those outside them.
Isn't he beautiful, beautiful, isn't he?
Prince of Peace, Son of God, isn't he?...
Yes, you are beautiful, beautiful, yes, you are (Wimber 242)

We are promised and engaged to Christ. Christ loves us and gives us his
praise. In much of our worship though we put this the other way around.
Lord, you have my heart (Source 341)

It is complete intimacy, even ecstasy.

In your arms of love
Holding me still
Holding me near
In your arms of love (Source 239)

Christ is wooer. We are wooed. So we are sometimes passionate.

I am my beloved and he is mine, I am my beloved and he is mine, … and his
banner over me is love (Source 152)
No one but you Lord
can satisfy the longing in my heart
nothing I do Lord
can take the place of drawing near to you
Only you can fill my deepest longing
Only you can breathe in me new life (373)

But our passion for Christ is also intermittent. Sometimes we are faithless, a
run-away bride. For this reason, these songs must be accompanied by our act
of confession and repentance. We cannot sing alone, but must also hear
Scripture, pray and confess our unworthiness, and celebrate the steadiness of
Christ’s love for us.
Set me as a seal upon your heart,
as a seal upon your arm;
For love is strong as death
passion fierce as the grave;
its flashes are flashes of fire,
a raging flame.
Many waters cannot quench love,
neither can the floods drown it (Canticle – The Song of Solomon)

4. Marriage
Jerusalem the bride
Love is fundamental to human life. We give love and seek love, with the same
seriousness as we exist. There are many forms of love and friendship, and
they can all be gifts of God when they are received and exercised within
Christian discipleship. But the chief mode of love, created for us, is the love of
man and woman. The love of the two sexes is the basic gift of God to all
mankind, whether or not we experience it at first hand. The distinction of the
sexes is the basis of all human relationship and society. As the Prayer Book
says:

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When you made us in your image,
creating us male and female,
you gave us the gift of marriage.

In marriage two people are brought together publicly in a relationship of love

without limit or end. They give themselves away, to each other, with no
intention of withdrawing that love again. This exclusive relationship is ‘a holy
mystery in which man and woman become one flesh.’ Their marriage is a little
society which is good for society as a whole. As the prelude to the service
puts it: ‘The hospitality of their home may bring refreshment and joy to all
around them; overflowing to neighbours and embrace those in distress or
need’. They are receptive to the possibility of children first of all. Marriage is
‘given as the foundation of family life in which children may be born and
nurtured.’ Children can only be brought into the world in the security of the
relationship of one father and mother. All children have the right to a
permanent relationship with the two people responsible for their existence.
Their relationship is the covenant which gives a child the unchanging
foundation on which all his or her other relationships can develop. Marriages
are the basis on which a new generation can grow to emotional maturity and
discover the permanence of love in their turn. Marriage is the basis on which
our society can receive a new generation and look forward in confidence
about its renewal and continuation. It is the source of the continuity, hope and
confidence of society as a whole.

All marriage is based in the covenant of God with man which is the ‘mystical
union’ or marriage of Christ and his Church. ‘Marriage is a gift through which
husband and wife shall be united with one another as Christ is united with his
bride, the Church. Chastity or celibacy is fundamental to Christian discipleship
and of the spiritual gifts it is the most central gift. All the gifts relate to love,
and support and define love, making it deliberate and intentional, so that it
ceases to be frantic or indiscriminate love, by which we rebound from one
infatuation to the next. Love becomes free when it is self-controlled. For
Christians, marriage is a particular form of chastity: these two Christians give
themselves to support one another in this discipled life. The woman you marry
is the exclusive channel through whom you may love all other women: she is
all womankind, for you, so you can explore her forever without ever reaching
the end. If you imagine that you are subsequently driven to love some other
woman, you are getting less woman, not more. Along with an individual loss of
self-control and personal integrity, all society is weakened when the unity
created by love is broken. This is why the Church prays:
Bless all whom you make one flesh in marriage.
May their life together be a sign of your love to this broken world,
so that unity may overcome estrangement

5. Hymns
The worship of the Church is always both old and new. Through its
relationship with all previous generations of Christians, the contemporary
Church can nurture the future generations that are given to it. For this reason
we must look at the issue of old and new in our worship. If ‘worship songs’ are
new, hymns are old, so why do we continue to sing them?

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Hymns have narrative. They give us the story of the gospel and teach us to
place ourselves within its this narrative so that we understand ourselves as
the people of Christ. These hymn-writers and all those who have passed them
on to us, teach us who we are. Many hymns and songs are interpretations of
the psalms, or of those other songs in the bible, known as canticles. The
‘Magnificat’, song that Mary sings when the birth of Jesus is foretold, is an
example of a canticle. Every part of the bible can be plundered for song
material.

We have to learn our hymns and songs. If we know them by heart we will be
able to remember them when we are in trouble and hymnbooks are out of
reach. As long as we sing the praises of God through it, no trouble will be
fatal. These hymn-writers give us the words to sing when we are in trouble,
and that makes them our friends. Their rhymes help us remember, and that is
why hymns come in verses with lines that rhyme.

All spoken languages are always changing, so any version of a song is

always slowly becoming archaic. If we left our hymns unchanged, changes in
the language will eventually make them difficult to understand. Many of our
hymns have an air of Victorian sentimentality. That is not their fault of their
writers. It simply means that we have to re-touch them and untangle their
tangled syntax to show the sense of what we are singing. One reason why we
have sermons is to point out what we are singing and to make all our worship
plain. And we can also write contemporary versions of them, which is what the
Victorians did: they took the songs they inherited and brought them up to
date.

We can translate them closely or we can paraphrase them loosely. The point
is not simply to carry repeat these hymns, but to re-write them in our own
language so that what they said to earlier generations they now said to us.
This does not mean that we should only sing the contemporary versions, but
we should keep singing both the old hymn and the contemporary version.
They often diverge enough to become separate songs, and often enough is
the earlier version that preserves the richest theology. This brings us back to
the problem of versification.

Rhythm, rhyme and versification

Why did the earlier generations use rhyme and so write songs in rigorous
verse form? Why did they cramp the natural sense of the sentences by
cramming them into verse? They did this because we also sing God's praises
when we are not in Church, but in the week when we are doing something
else. At all earlier periods Christians did much more manual work than we do,
and they travelled on foot. We may sing when we are washing up, cleaning
the house and particularly, walking. Walking is rhythmic. The first and most
natural rhythm is the unhurried rhythm of walking along. So songs are for
singing as you work and as you walk, and particularly as you do so with lots of
other people. A good song helps a company to travel a long way. Every earlier
generation knows this and this is why the songs with the strongest narrative,
images and rhythm are best for singing on the road and survive the longest.

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We can try to re-interpret songs keeping the rhythm and versification, or even
putting new songs into better versification. We need to do this so we can sing
it with all our minds as well as all our hearts. It is possible to sing these hymns
without noticing what we are singing, or even being able to make much sense
of it when we do notice. But let us at least begin to notice. Our Victorian hymn
writers rediscovered some of the of treasures of the early Church. Here is a
hymn by Fulbert of Chartres (960-1028), in the version by John Mason Neale:

Ye choirs of new Jerusalem,

to sweet new strains attune your theme;
the while we keep, from care released,
with sober joy our Paschal feast:

When Christ, unconquer'd lion, first

the dragon's chains by rising burst:
and while with living voice he cries,
the dead of other ages rise.

Engorged in former years, their prey

must death and hell restore to-day:
and many a captive soul, set free,
with Jesus leaves captivity.

Fulbert tells the saints in heaven to keep singing, because we are celebrate
the triumph of the resurrection on this Easter day. As he starts to give reasons
for his joy he sets out into his narrative: Christ has broken the bonds of death,
and is leading all his people out of death’s captivity. If we sing these songs,
making new sense of them, we will have joined Fulbert and those choirs of
new Jerusalem.

The Church will rediscover versification when it starts to sing and walk,
worshipping while travelling. The Christian pilgrimage can be a long trudge.
We will persevere if we sing the songs that keep us going us, in step, and
which give us the narrative that tells us where, why and to whom we are
walking, why we are doing so together, and why we are journeying through a
world that does not like to see us do so. But we can sing:
O Jesus I have promised to serve thee to the end
Be thou ever near me, my master and my friend
I shall not fear the battle if thou art by my side
Nor wander from the pathway if thou wilt be my guide (538)

6. Blessing and honour

God gives his Spirit to all creation and to all creatures. Words not only name
things, but they also bring things into being. Words create life and take it away
again. People receive new strength from the words of recognition we give
them. When the right words are withheld from us our confidence and strength
run out. Praise is the fundamental currency of human being. We talk some
people up, and we talk others down, promoting some, but ignoring or
denigrating others. The world is a blizzard of praise, glory and honour,
recognition, esteem and respect, and it is also the place where praise and
esteem is withheld, misdirected and perverted. As long as we honour people,
giving them praise and gentle judgment in proportion, they flourish and their

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lives take their proper healthy course. When we withhold recognition from
them they decline, first in morale, and then socially and economically. When,
as a result of being made socially and politically invisible, they run out of the
material means of life, they die. God sends his praise to man: When you
send your Spirit, they are created and you renew the face of the earth. When
you take away their breath, they die and return to the dust (Psalm 104.29-30).
Christians acknowledge that man receives his true praise and affirmation from
God, and say so, sending their praise back to God. Prayer is ‘God's breath
returning to him’, as George Herbert put it.

We may not take the recognition or glory that comes our way and assume that
we deserve it and that it is ours in an absolute sense. That ‘honour and glory’
must be returned to its source. If we have done well, it is because we have
been done well by. It is good for us to point out where all our happiness
comes from. The origin of our worship is that God speaks in our praise. He
gives us words of love and acknowledgement. It considers us worth it, he
attributes us with ‘worth’, which is the original derivation of the word ‘worship’
after all. So in our worship, we re-direct this the traffic of praise back to God.
We say that it is God who loves man, and our love of God is recognition of the
source of all human love. So we sing:
Jesus we adore you,
lay our lives before you,
how I love you

We may adore God. Adoration sent in other direction will corrupt its object.
But we may adore God with complete safety. We may and must, adore him
only. All human loves, even of parent and child, even of husband and wife,
need to be defined by this love first, or they may cease to be true. God loves
and adores us, and we receive this love and so we have to give it. The more
we give ourselves to him the more secure we become. If we do not give our
love to God, we give it to someone who is not able to deal with it, who is not
able to return our identity to us. The way to love someone truly is to recognise
that that they are creatures of God: that recognition keeps them and us safe.

Our love can be corrupting and destructive if it turns to adulation. As creatures

we are so needy that our love tends to make them more than creatures, it
cannot recognise the proper limits. Our adoration is too strong a force for any
creature to deal with. Our adulation will press them out of shape and tempt
them to think of themselves both as more, and as less, than they are. Our
whole existence in the marketplace is searching for, and inventing,
compensations for true love. That true love and perfect recognition God gives.
It enables us to withdraw our worship from all other objects, and denounce
our misdirected loves, mediated through the market and the various
ideologies in the public square. This true love comes to us from God, and is
mediated by God through the Church, the community he has made for the
purpose. Then we can sing:
Overwhelmed by love
deeper than oceans
high as the heavens.
Ever-living God

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Your love has rescued me… (422)

7. The Spirit of freedom and discipleship

The Spirit brings freedom. But for us freedom has to be learned, which means
that we need guidance, direction and control. Freedom does not mean that we
are abandoned to our own devices. This freedom comes together with
fellowship. The Lord provides for his Church, giving it the practices of
discipleship by which we can learn our freedom. So the Spirit does not leave
us on our own, but puts us in good company, giving us other Christians to look
after us. The Spirit gives us apostles who are the gentleness of Christ for us,
who will sustain us with the guidelines, teachers, practices and exercise that
comes from service.

Singleness, celibacy and self-control

We want to be disciples. This means that we see the point of discipline, and
are ready for instruction and correction. Only the Christian who has accepted
and been chastened by correction is able to offer correction. A true friend
does not just tell us we want to hear, but is able to bring us some gentle word
of correction. Not to give people the discipleship they need and want is as
irresponsible as not sending children to school, or teaching them good
manners and how to manage their emotions. They need guidance and
discipleship in order to find out how things work, and to do so by both telling
them and by letting them experiment and find out for themselves. These laws,
guidelines, teachers, practices, exercises, books are the gifts of the Spirit.
These are what the Spirit gives us, and there is no way to the Spirit except via
the gifts by which we introduces us to himself and prepares us for increasing
proximity to him.

Christians are taught a self-controlled lifestyle, which involves turning away

many apparently more compelling choices. As soon as we are able to turn
some of these options away we get better at deciding between them. When
we can say ‘no’ so some choices, we start to develop some character of our
own and cease to be so easily moulded. When we do not acquire this self-
control or self-possession we are shaped by whatever the market is selling.

Worship in Spirit and truth

God has married man to himself. Christ is the groom and the Church is his
bride. In the words of one canticle: I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming
down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.
The marriage of the Lamb has come and his bride has made herself ready.
The resurrection is the demonstration that the Spirit has united us to Christ
and, in him, to one another. Though we break the marriage-vow, we may
renew it and be restored to him. What the Spirit binds nothing can unbind: the
Spirit has bound Christ to himself, and he has bound Christ’s people to Christ,
without limit, forever. No created power, not even death, can tear Christ away
from God: as a result, no created power, not even death, can tear us away
from Christ, or oblige Christ to let go of us. The Spirit has broken the bonds
that held us and brought us into this communion and now we can open our
mouths to speak, to judge and to praise.

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The Lord is the Spirit. His people can worship him only in Spirit, for only the
can bring us into communion with the Son within which we may see the truth.
The Spirit who raised Christ from us will also raise us to him. Christ’s
resurrection is promise and warning of our own future resurrection. Our new
freedom is the demonstration of the resurrection, which has put its indelible
mark on us, sealing us for a future with him. We are that community that
knows itself to have been brought together by the resurrection and overcome
the power that set each things against all others. The Spirit makes a great
company, the train that follows the Son, and which is his glory. Jesus is no
longer alone, but with all the prophets and servants of Israel behind him. This
whole company of heaven is a totality cannot be broken or divided for the
Holy Spirit makes us members of an impregnable – a ‘spiritual body’ which is
to say, one which is no longer subject to decay.

The Church is drawn into ecstatic praise of Christ in which all sing in chorus
and unison. But this impulse that brings them to into one voice, or harmony of
voices, intends to make them reasoning and speaking people. This singing is
not beyond our control, but strengthens our own self-control and enables us to
subordinate ourselves to one another. The whole congregation is at work in
this worship, so every part of the service is antiphonal. We confess that it is
Christ is who is doing all the work in this worship by his Spirit and that we are
simply his passengers. We do not know or comprehend or control Christ or
his worship.

Singing is ‘with your heart’, that is, with the whole person, body and mind.
Speaking is reasoning, ‘with your mind’. The whole body alternates between
singing, acting as whole (spiritual) persons and speaking-and-listening, which
is to act as minds that reason with other created minds. Reasoning, mind to
mind, enables us to participate in the singing, in which we communicate as
whole person to another. Everything that the Church does ‘must be done for
the strengthening of the Church’, says the Apostle Paul (1 Corinthians 14.26).

This participate in the service of the Spirit makes us free. He brings us to

Christ and so releases us from every other master, and enables us to confess
no lord but this one. Now we have identified the Lord, the right Lord, we are
not taken in by any other and can be fearless in the face of them. Whenever it
is in session the Christian community speaks out to the world, telling it how
demeaning, and how powerless and illusory, its gods are.

4 Praying – Confession and Release

The community that has received the promise of the resurrection is able to
confess their sins and receive forgiveness and new life.

1. The cross
When we come in to Church we gather around Christ. We identify him by the
cross. There is a cross on the altar and in the window above it, and the cross
is at the head of the procession that leads us in and out of our assembly. We
sign ourselves with the sign of the cross or wear a crucifix around our neck.

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We live under this cross. He opened wide his arms for us. Arms outstretched,
Christ covers and shelters us. He is the canopy of the covenant under which
our redemption is possible.

The cross stands for Christ, even when no crucified Christ is explicitly
portrayed there. It looks as though Christ is alone on the cross and therefore
as though we are not that cross. But Christ is only there as us. Man is on that
cross: the cross is an image of us. Man is the figure distorted by pain and
anguish. It is not just Jesus on that cross we see before us. That is also us
there. We are man, and this pain is ours.

The cross shows us that Christ sees us, and knows that this is what we are.
He is fully aware of who and what we are, for ‘no secrets are hidden’. We are
the ones squirming in the grip of our passions and being slowly consumed by
them. We inflict this conflict on ourselves and on each other. We are on this
cross, and in this misery, and heading for this death and hell.

But we are not alone there. Christ does not leave us alone there. He remains
among us and stands with us. The figure on the cross is a composite figure, of
Christ and us together, represented as a single figure.

We shut ourselves in a small and vicious place where we were sure that God
could not reach us. But Christ has entered that place, and become one of us,
man in agony. Christ has come to the man who is pulling himself apart, and
even taken on the body of this man, entered this process of mental and
spiritual disintegration. He knows the place we are in, from inside. He has no
reason to be here, with us; he could leave at any moment, but he remains
here. It is we inflicting this pain, on ourselves and also on him. We do not stop
inflicting it, and seem ready to destroy ourselves and him. But Christ remains
here: he abides and withstands what we inflict. Finally our ability to sustain
this agony it is broken. Man is exhausted by his own conflict and agony and
his power to inflict it is broken. Christ has withstood the power of man to inflict
this passion. The ability of man to destroy himself is overcome by the ability of
Christ to withstand man, and end his career towards destruction. On this
cross Christ has triumphed over everything that bound us. This is why we
sing:
I bind this day to me for ever,
by power of faith, Christ's Incarnation;
his baptism in Jordan river;
his death on cross for my salvation;
his bursting from the spicèd tomb;
his riding up the heavenly way;
his coming at the day of doom (St Patrick – Alexander)

2. Repentance and Forgiveness

In the eucharistic prayers we hear that: God so loved the world that he gave
his only Son Jesus Christ to save us from our sins

Christ saves us from our sins. We may therefore confess our sins, be
released from them and be free of them. Sin is made of all our unfinished

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business, all that we cannot cope with. It is not initially serious. But if this non-
serious sin is left unidentified and untreated it becomes serious. The only
treatment for sin is confession and repentance, that is, we may name it, drop
it and walk away from it.

We can repent. This is where the Christian faith is on its own. No other world-
religion offers forgiveness. They can offer bravery in the face of fate, and they
can offer oblivion, and the destruction of your personality. But the gospel
brings the forgiveness of sins. We can let go of the past so we are not trapped
in a cycle of revenge and retaliation. Forgiveness lifts us out a closed system
and gives us a future. The prayer of forgiveness is spoken over us:
Almighty God,
who forgives all who truly repent,
have mercy upon you,
pardon and deliver you from all your sins,
confirm and strengthen you in all goodness,
and keep you in life eternal;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.

We are the people who can let go off our mistakes, and let them be taken
away from us. Without that release, we are like an old computer with so much
on its hard-drive, that its has slowed to a crawl. Its memory is taken up with
the all junk it has processed. So put down your burdens, for they do not
belong to you anymore. We sing:
I heard the voice of Jesus say
Come unto me and rest
Lay down thou weary one, lay down

Each of us is curved in on ourselves. Sealed in our separate bubbles we float

by one another. I am in flight from you and you from me. Each of us stands on
our own planet, defending ourselves from the incursions from others, but is
utterly lonely, and ridiculously repeating that this is not loneliness but
independence. Christ prickles the bubble in which each of us is trapped,
releases us and puts us in one another’s embrace. Christ unrolls us, and
stands us upright before one another. He gives you to me and me to you, and
so puts us together.

By this absolution the Church publicly authorises and empowers me to go

free. The exchange of the peace is my release from the relationships I have
not be able to sustain and my reconciliation with all those who have rightly laid
their charge against me. The Church prays:
May almighty God deliver you from the powers of darkness, restore in you the
image of his glory and lead you in the light and obedience of Christ

3. Confession
We can confess our sins. We confess our sins in the course of our worship
service. We may also confess them before the service, and we will be taught
the prayers that will carry us through such trials in the future. We can go to the
priest and tell them whatever we like and so unload everything that we
ourselves cannot deal with. Let us lay aside every weight and the sin that
clings so closely, looking to Jesus in penitence and faith.

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Confession is shared. We carry one another’s burdens. The real threat
represented by any sin or any difficulty is that it isolates us from all others.
The first step is to share it with other Christians to ensure that it does not have
this effect. Let go of it: whatever it is, go and tell them. We may sing:
Burden down, Lord, burden down, Lord, since I lay my burden down, …
wonder will my sister know me.. wonder will my brother know me, since I lay
my burden down.

In Orthodox churches you can see people making their confession as the
service is getting underway, whilst the psalms of morning prayer are being
sung. They kneel before the priest, who sits on a bench at the side of the
church, and make their confession at his feet, with the priest’s long stole
drawn over their heads, concealing them from the congregation. The long
stole of the priest represents the covenant of God, the covering by which we
are all protected. As a result of this confession their sins are no longer their
own, and they are ready to receive communion.
We encourage one another and talk one another up. We ask one another to
give us their judgment, that is to give us some constructive criticism. We all
need an external eye to see what we cannot see for ourselves, and to suggest
ways to achieve a better, less laboured way of doing things. Of course this is
painful business, that results in hurt feelings. But we should tell them when we
see someone still doing something that they don't need to do, speaking the
truth in love, and examining and testing what we hear from people.

You are free to bear the sins of others, free to put up with the bafflement and
misrepresentations. By sins, we do not of course mean simply fault and guilt,
but the whole weight of promises not kept, expectations unmet, projections
imposed, and all the unfinished business which we have created for ourselves
or which other people have left us with, and which we have wrongly or rightly
taken as our own load.

4. Healing and release

I give myself away. We beg others to take notice of us. We are so needy for
praise. We spend our careers looking for the one thing that will make us stand
out, that will finally turn heads, and bring eyes on us so we hear. We pray
constantly, soundlessly to one another, and our prayer is a single plea, Look
at me!. We are needy and we send out a stream of demands and desires that
reflect this neediness. Our entire career is premised on keep this plea
disguised, and not letting this neediness become public. All the entertainment
industry hears us and comes to our aid, translate our longings into demands
that they can meet and, if we let them, they intercept the desires that should
only be heard by God and interpose themselves between us and God.

The Church service identifies where we have been cheated of recognition and
love. When such wounds remain unhealed, the original injury must be named
Maybe the Church can help us reconstruct whether it was some particular
member of the family or group who undermined our confidence or gave us
some pervasive sense of hopelessness. They committed the sin perhaps
without any awareness at the time that this is what they were doing. But over

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the years we may have nurtured this offence too, turning the original act
against us into a charge that we hold against everyone else. We may forgive
those who have sinned against us, and we must do so. We may sing:
Right now the presence of the Lord is in this place
he will heal the broken hearted
he will bind up their wounds
the healing cleansing fire of the Lord
is in this place (Source 949)

When we come into the assembly of the Church we are called back into our
right mind. The worship of God punctures my excessive claims, and releases
me from the misery of my desperate self-promotion. The Church service,
which is the service of Christ to us, takes away from us all the substitutes that
we have interposed between one another, and between ourselves and our
Lord. As we gather to sing, pray, listen and eat we let go of all that diverts us
into inconsequential forms of life. The Church service is a form of letting go of
all that has enthralled and consumed us in the course of the week. We sing:
Reclothe us in our rightful mind,
in purer lives thy service find,
in deeper reverence praise

As we gather to sing, pray, listen and eat we let go of all that makes life easy
and that diverts us into inconsequential forms of life. The Church service is a
form of letting go of all that enthrals us and consumes us in the course of the
week. It is therefore a form of fasting, which is what we call the period of
preparation before any feast. We receive again the ability to decide what is
important and let go of the rest. We are released. We can sing:
As through man death comes to all,
So has man unlocked death’s prison.
As in Adam all are dead,
So in Christ shall all be risen (155 Le Grice)

5. Prayer is learned
Only the people of the resurrection can suffer and experience the passion,
and become intercessors for the world, and experience and acknowledge its
redemption with worship and thanksgiving. Prayer also has to be taught and
learned. The whole service teaches us, how to speak and pray. But prayer
and worship as a whole requires catechism. We have to be taught to pray,
and we have to be led in prayer and worship, by good example. For this
reason we should not prefer spontaneous prayer over learned and practised
prayer, but equally we should make room for spontaneous prayer. We follow
the forms given to us. So we follow the form that we received from the Lord
himself:
Our Father
Who art in heaven
Hallowed be thy name…

Our worship sets out patterns which set out an alternation between prayer
leader and people. He gives pauses in which we put our own prayers for the
particular people and situations that concern us. They introduce their prayers,

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and then gathering them in a prayer (the ‘collect’) that collects and
summarises all our prayers. This prayer must refer to the Scripture we have
heard and all the other people we have prayed for. Once again we have a
conversation. The congregations learn this pattern and so they know when it
is their turn. For this reason it is not a good thing that all prayer be made up
on the spot, ex tempore. It is no kinder to suggest that this is possible, any
more than it is kind to insist that a beginner get up and give a concert without
rehearsal.

We make public confession of our sin. We do not attempt to portray ourselves

as either better or worse than we are. The jury is out on us, but we point out
that there is a just and merciful judge and we entrust ourselves to him.
We pray
Forgive us our trespasses
And we pray
forgive us all that is past
and grant that we may serve you in newness of life

5 Eucharist – New Life

God draws us into communion with himself. God himself prepares us for life in
his presence. In his communion we brought into lasting encounter with one
another. In the Church we learn how to be with the other people of his
communion. They are given to us in instalments and represent a long
passage for us. At the end of that passage we will have learned how to love
and be present to them in the fellowship of God. We receive the presence of
Christ as we wait with his body, and from him we gain presence and through
him become more truly present to one another.

1. Passover
Christ is our way into life. He has breached the prison wall which enclosed all
humanity and broken out, so he is our escape from death. He put an end to
death by dying for us. He now takes us with him. The Christian life is the long
passage that we will follow through the whole course of lives. We are passing
over from mortality to eternal mortal life. When we gather around him in the
eucharist, Christ takes us through the opening he has made, and which we
identify with the altar and the broken bread on it. On this side is the narrow
confinement, and on the other side is the whole infinite space of the
communion of saints who enjoy all time and are of all places. But between this
gateway and that eventual kingdom there is a long passage and a rough
crossing. We pray:
You delivered Noah from the waters of destruction
You divided the waters of the sea
And by the hand of Moses
You led your people from slavery
Into the Promised Land (All Saints, Common Worship 368).

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The Lord has come to us, and is now bringing with him the whole life and
communion of God. This gathering of people in the eucharist around this altar
locate this coming and enable us to recognise this holy life and communion of
God that comes to us from Christ. Led by him we begin to march through into
the unlimited territory of the communion of God in which all creatures can
meet. Christ has opened up this passage and he keeps it open for us by his
body. Christ opens the Church to let us and all humanity enter through it into
his kingdom. The Church lines this route and accompanies us along it, so that
we travel along it together. Those with the most experience of captivity sing
the best songs about waiting for this redemption:
Deep River, my home is over Jordan. Deep River, Lord I want to cross over,
into camp ground
Jordan stream is wide and deep, Alleluia, Jordan stream is wide and deep,
Alleluia
Wade in the water, wade in the water children, wade in the water…
Run river and darkness come, Alleluia, Run river and darkness come, Alleluia
Jesus stand in the other side, Alleluia, Jesus stand in the other side, Alleluia

2. Release
In baptism we are stripped and washed. Baptism commences the permanent
purificatory service of the eucharist. Christ removes our sin from us, giving us
what we do not have and taking away what we cannot cope with. We receive
this stripping and cleansing. In the eucharist we receive the strong medicine
that drives out all other toxins out of us, and divested of all that does not fit us.
As canticle from Ezekiel tells us:
I will sprinkle clean water upon you,
and purify you from all defilement
A new heart I will give you,
and put a new spirit within you

This stripping, washing and purification continues all our lives. The Christian
life is the public continuation of our baptism. The whole Christian life is
preparation for the resurrection to eternal life. It is preparing us for the
celebration that will follow. We prepare by concentrating on what is ahead,
and this concentration effects our whole routine and the place of food in it.
‘Fasting’ is what we call the preparation before the eucharist. We tend not to
eat before the eucharist. We fast together: if you fast on your own your fasting
may separate you from your community, which is the opposite of what our
preparations are for. The whole Christian life is a preparation, punctuated by
regular anticipations of arrival. Each Sunday and festival of the Church year is
an anticipation of that celebration. We are waiting for our Passover and we
are already undergoing it.

3. Living sacrifice, permanent service

Christ gives presence to his body
Christ carries us, serves us and cares for us as anyone one of us cares for his
own body. He serves and renews us with his life. He is the source of the life of
each one of us and of the whole body together. We sing:
O Risen Christ today alive
Amid your church abiding

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Who now your risen body give
New life and strength providing (NEH 487 Morgan)

God dispenses himself to us gently. He is always able to give himself to us,

yet slowly and always waiting until we are ready to receive more from him.
The whole created world represents the provision Christ has made for us and
is the tangible aspect of the service that he makes to us. He refreshes the
world, so that it remains good for us, and he brings us into closer and more
lasting relationship with it.

We are being made members of that communion of God. We are members of

this communion in the material world that God has created for us. We are
receiving the spiritual and permanent life, which will preserve us as biological
creatures no longer constrained by the limit represented by mortality. We are
thus being made real and present to one another with a presence that will no
longer be constrained by sin or death. So we shall be biological and spiritual
creatures. As the Liturgy of St James proclaims:
Lord of lords, in human vesture
In the body and the blood;
He will give to all the faithful
His own self for heavenly food

Sacraments are instalments of the presence of God. They come to us in the

form of creation redeemed and made holy. These instalments are sanctified,
that is to say, dedicated to us by the Holy Spirit to do us good.

4. Presence
We go up to the altar to receive the body and cup. They are given with the
words: The Body of Christ, The Blood of Christ. We reply with our: Amen

In this service and in this cup, we receive the presence of Christ. By the
power of the Holy Spirit he took flesh. He makes himself present to us and he
gives us presence, so that we may become truly present to one another. For
we are not yet truly present to one another, not yet real as Christ is real, not
solid as he is solid. We have a sketchy being, which requires to be constantly
renewed, added to and filled out. But supplied by him with his abundant life,
we gain greater reality and become more truly and constantly present to one
another. Then, formed and transformed by the presence of Christ, we may
appear before one another truly as representatives of Christ and so as
servants of one another. According to the canticle from Ezekiel:
A new heart I will give you,
and put a new spirit within you
And I will remove from your body the heart of stone
and give you a heart of flesh

The sacraments are instalments of reality. In that cup is the presence of

Christ, gently portioned out so that, given time, we gain more presence from
him and so we become truly established. The eucharist provides us with
instalments of reality which will make us more real and more permanent.
Christ is present with his body in the eucharist, and within that body each

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other us is being made more truly present. How is Christ present, and we are
becoming present?

Christ is present here by the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit brings us here before
all these other people and holds this disparate community together, making it
one increasingly holy body. The Holy Spirit holds Christ distinct from us, out of
our grasp and beyond the powers of our perception, so that he is hidden from
us. And the Holy Spirit, and reveals him to us infinitely slowly in the persons of
whom this community it made up. So we sing:
Pray we then O Lord the Spirit
On our lives descend in might
Let thy flame break out within us
Fire our hearts and clear our sight (NEH 142 Hewlett)

Christ has come within the bounds which we inhabit. He has broken these
bounds and leads us out of them. But he also waits until each of us decides
that we will follow. We have to want to be free of death and so it is for us to
pray that he will lead us. The Holy Spirit allows us to call Christ, and willingly
to receive him and be transformed by him as he comes. This takes time, and
all the time in the world is given for this purpose. Because Christ holds out this
life and gives each of us all the time we need to take it from him, it is not an
unilateral imposition. We do not lose our identity it in accepting it, but rather
we gain our identity, for in time his act for us becomes our act too.

So the Holy Spirit humbles himself before each one of us. He never makes
himself available as a single person visibly before us. He leaves no trace of
himself. He is here to give us what we need and take away whatever we
cannot cope with. Having prepared the place for us, he withdraws just we
enter, like a good servant, so that it may be entirely ours. For our sake the
Spirit subordinates himself to every other person, making possible for us to
receive them without coercion and so in complete freedom. He is able to
outlast the resistance each of us puts up to one another and to Christ. He
waits for us to consent to receive Christ, freely. For this reason he does not
yet allow Christ to become visibly present to us. So we sing:
Holy Spirit come renew us
Come yourself to make us live
Holy through your loving presence
Holy through the gifts you give (NEH 140 Foley)

Christ makes himself present to his gathered people, and extends his
presence to them so that they may gain from him a lasting presence. The
people gathered at the eucharist are with Christ, and are on the way to Christ.
The body is becoming present, so it is not yet present in the way that it will be.
There is a presence and an absence, so we have to look forward to, and
yearn for, he who is not yet here.

5. Waiting for the body

We who are many, are one body, because we all share the one bread
Christ is not yet all in all. The body is not complete, so it waits, for the last and
least to come in. Our account of his presence with us must include an account

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of his continuing absence. The continued waiting and suffering of the body of
Christ and our imperfect communion is acknowledged in the eucharist. ‘He is
not here – he is risen!’ We look for his coming again in glory. In our
intercessions and anaphora we have to name those for whom we are waiting,
or from whom we are divided: by naming them, our intercessions make them
present to us. We discern the body of Christ correcting when every member of
the body is present. Anyone who eats or drinks without recognising the body
of the Lord eats and drinks judgment on himself (1 Corinthians 11.29). In our
own church this means waiting for those who are not present, and not
beginning to celebrate until they arrive. When they do not arrive, the Church
must go to find this particular Christian and bring him back. We name those
who are not present because they are still separated from the Church. The
community may not start celebrating the feast without last member brought to
safely within the body. To start before the last arrives would indicate that this
member is not a vital part of the body, and that he does not matter to the body.
But we cannot be the Body without him; every last member must be brought
in before the body is whole and present. The body that eats before this
moment, swallows division and weakness and condemnation. To remind
ourselves of this, we sing:
One body we, one body who partake
One Church united in communion blest;
One name we bear, one bread of life we break
With all thy saints on earth and saints at rest (Briggs)

All created things are good for us when they bring us into proper relationships.
The things we use and consume have to be released by those who were
responsible for their production. We may not eat alone, our group without all
other groups. Only when they are given their proper position in this worship do
created things become blessings and so good for us. We have to eat with the
‘least of these’ before our food will do us any good. In the prayers of the
eucharist we ask God to give us all those whom we are waiting for, and so
make this body complete. We mourn for those who are not yet present, for
their absence means that we ourselves are not yet present as we want to be.
In our intercessions and offertory prayers we raise them. We are not all
present, but we are here for those who are not.

6. Embodied persons
We are persons, made up of soul and body. Because we are bodies we are
present to each other. It is our bodies that make us present to one another, so
without them we would not communicate or be with one another in any sense.
Because we are more than bodies, we are not entirely controllable and
definable by each other.

Each body, in all its particularity, is a gift from God. it is the gift that God has
made to the rest of us, and it is a good gift. It is only our bodies that make it
possible for other people to find us, access us and address us. Our bodies
make us available to one another; they are the medium of all our communion.
Our bodies are made up of material elements taken from the creation which is
given to us for the purpose. They are made up of all thing things that we have
eaten, crops and vegetables and the meat of the animals which have

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themselves been nourished by vegetation. This animal and vegetable matter,
taken from the soil and transformed by the inputs of sunlight and water,
makes up the tissue of our own bodies. All creation is summed up in man,
who is witness to, and his own body is evidence of, this marvellous complex
of relationships. Each human body is a miniature version of the world. As we
stand before one another, and in particular as we are gathered to do so in the
eucharist, we are each of us a microcosm of creation.

This theme becomes explicit at harvest festival. But imagine we brought to

the eucharist some tokens of whatever we are engaged in during the week.
Orthodox Christians bring to the eucharist some bread along with the names
of those they want included in the intercessions: some of this is blessed and
sanctified, while the rest is distributed to the hungry congregation as the
eucharist ends.

The sanctified food we brought with us is taken home again to be shared with
whoever did not come to the service, the old, sick, and otherwise absent, and
eaten during the week. But the harvest is only secondarily the crops brought
in at the autumn harvest. It is the whole of mankind that is the harvest of God,
and that means clearly those who have not yet received any of the good
things of creation.
All who are thirsty
All who are weak
Come to fountain
Dip your heart in the stream of life (Source 627)

We bring bread and other gifts of food that will be given to the poorest
members of the congregation. The church looks after its own first, those better
off providing for the poorest. And then the church looks after other people’s
poor, those not claimed by any other section of society. The church looks after
other poor, sick and children. It starts hospices and hospitals and nurses and
binds up other people’s bodies. It sets up schools and gives other people’s
children an education. All this is an extension of the service of Christ, and an
articulation of what is going on the service for those who have not come into
it. So we sing:
Grant, O harvest Lord that we
Wholesome grain and pure may be (Alford)

7. Persons embody creation

Every human being, being a creature with a body, embodies creation. Each of
the bodies which make us visible and present to one another, constituted of all
the vegetable and animal bodies we consume, is itself a gathering of the
material elements of creation. Since Christ clothes himself with his people, in
him all persons and all material creation are forever present with God. In his
liturgy to God and service to man, Christ unites all creation with God. So:
We hail thy glorious presence
O Christ our great high priest
Over sin and death victorious
At thy thanksgiving feast (NEH 310 Parsons)

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It is the proper purpose of creation and of every material thing in it to be the
medium of man-with-man and man-with-God. The materiality of creation is not
recalcitrant stuff that represents an obstacle to redemption. It hears its
master’s voice and obeys, leaving exposed whatever forces that resist the
Spirit.

Christ’s people embody creation. Each of the bodies which make us visible
and present to one another, constituted of all the vegetable and animal bodies
we consume, is itself a gathering of the material elements of creation. Each of
us embodies a particular part of the earth, so creation exists within the body,
or as the body, of each member of Christ’s assembly. Creation lives in and
through us, just as much as we live in it. In Christ we are the ‘person’ of
creation, the indivisible unity that preserves creation immune from time and
death. In the eucharist, material creation is able to sing the praises of God
and so participate through us in the freedom of God. so we sing:
O Living bread from heaven
Jesus our saviour good
Who they own self hast given
To be our souls true food (NEH 310 Parsons)

Since Christ clothes himself with his people, in him all persons and all material
creation are forever present with God. In his liturgy to God and service to
man, Christ unites all creation with God. This work of bringing these many into
one, is what is going on in the great eucharistic prayer of offering, the
anaphora. For the benefit of world, the saints who are assembled behind
Christ participate publicly in his office of raising and embodying the world to
God. As Christ and his body speak for it and present it to God, creation’s
divisions disappear, there is reconciliation between the social and the natural
worlds, and so we are able to live with, rather than against, the order of
creation. As the eucharist is the reconciliation of mind and body, intellect and
materiality, so the Church is the union of nature in humanity and nature, and
freedom come to creation.

People and bread

The bread is the life of the people of God that are given to us through the
Scriptures. Since wheat is harvested and milled, bread represents something
that is broken. ‘Bread’ includes the sowing, cultivating, harvesting, threshing,
milling, baking and serving that nourishes our bodies and makes glad the
heart of man (psalm 104) a combination of natural process and human input,
that ‘earth has given and human hands have made’. This bread is distributed,
as Christ has handed himself over to us.

But bread also represents what is unbreakable, an indissoluble unity that will
remain for us forever. This bread is the body of Christ, that is to say, Christ
with all his people, glorified together in this holy communion. So we sing:
Life-imparting heavenly manna,
stricken rock with streaming side
heaven and earth with loud hosanna
Worship thee, the Lamb who died
Alleluya

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Risen, ascended, glorified! (Bourne NEH 296).

The kingdom of God makes itself present to us now, in a hidden way, in the
eucharist. His kingdom is many people and it is they who in the Spirit make
themselves present to us now in this eucharist and worship. The eucharist
gives us this thumbprint view of Christ, of Man-who-is-with-God. And the
composite figure of the priest, the altar and eucharistic bread and cup are the
view-finder through which we can glimpse this view. The altar is the throne,
where God is always available for us. The priest, surrounded by the deacons
and server, is the future of man glorified, man-with-God. The bread and wine
are the redeemed and consummated presence of Christ, his body and all
creation. We see God with man, and so we can see one another, and see
ourselves, with God. We can see the future, and we can decide that we do
indeed want this to be our future. So:
Sing, my tongue, the Saviour's glory,
of His flesh the mystery sing;
of the Blood, all price exceeding,
shed by our immortal King,
destined, for the world's redemption,
from a noble womb to spring (St Thomas Aquinas)

And we pray: O Lord of Heaven in this sacrament you hast brought us near to
an innumberable company of angels and to the spirits of the saints made
perfect As in this food of our earthly pilgrimage we have shared their
fellowship so may we come to share their joy in heaven. (CW p. 514)

6 Whole People – The People of the

Resurrection
The Church is the demonstration that the power of death has been overcome.
Christ holds his community together so that it will endure forever.

1. The Church as promise of the resurrection

The Church is the promise of the resurrection. The Holy Spirit now brings the
foretaste of the resurrection to us so we can participate in this future kingdom
in the Church. Jerusalem is built as a city that is at unity within itself (psalm
122)
In the Church we experience that glorious city and become that settled and
established people.
A city radiant as a bride
and bright with gold and gem,
a crystal river clear and wide,
the new Jerusalem;
a city wrought of wealth untold,
her jewelled walls aflame
By ‘new Jerusalem’ we mean that Jerusalem that is always being renewed,
and which is therefore never grows old.
Glorious things of thee are spoken,

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Sion, city of our God;
he whose word cannot be spoken
formed thee for his own abode:
On the rock ages founded,
what can shake thy sure repose? (NEH 362 Newton)
Jerusalem is founded on the rock of ages, so it is eternal. Time does not make
it old or worn. Many other things seem urgent and overwhelming now, but
these will all disappear. The City of God will remain standing there, and it will
be clear that it was here all the time. God formed this city, that is, this society
of our, for his own abode, in other words to dwell here with us. This is his
place for us and for him together. It stands forever.

The Church as the love of God

God loves us. The point is not that we love God, but that God loves us with a
love that is all from him to us. The love that we express in our songs, is just
the shimmer of a reflection of this true love, of God, for us. So we sing:
Create in me a pure heart that’s yours for ever
Yielded and steadfast, secure in your love.
Restore to me joy in belonging to you.
Make me yours, Lord, make me yours,
I long to be devoted to you (Source 670)

We are created for life with each other, with God. God's love calls us into
being. It is not that we adore Jesus: this is not the significant thing. Rather
Jesus is wooing us and singing to us. This is the direction that all the singing
is going in. His love for us is not just some venture of his own; it is the same
love that he shares with the Father, so that this love that inexplicably comes
our way, is the love of God, the same God who made all that exists. So,
however puzzling this may appear, whatever exists, is desired and is good.
We can spend our lives discovering how creation is to be valued and other
people are to be cherished, and despite all horrors, we should not try to flee
from them or discard any part of it. The Lord intends that we love, and love
each other, and that means that we do so freely. Our love and freedom are
just as fundamental as our existence.

The little gatherings of the Church is our evidence that Christ is drawing all
humanity to himself. As the baptism service says: Faith is gift of God to his
people. In baptism the Lord is adding to our number those whom he is calling.
The resurrection is the demonstration that the Spirit has united us to Christ
and, in him, to one another. No created power, not even death, can tear Christ
away from God, tear us away from Christ, or oblige Christ to let go of us. So
the resurrection of Christ is promise and warning of our own future
resurrection: the Spirit who raised him from us will also raise us to him. This
resurrection is hidden within the present world, and the worship of the Church
is the place where we tumble upon this secret. But the Church is all the
evidence of this being drawn together we get. The Church is made holy,
distinct from the world. It is the promise of the resurrection, in fact it is the sign
that the resurrection is underway.

The Church is the anticipation of the resurrection

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The Church is the big fact with which God confronts the world, and that the
distinctiveness of the Church is the single contribution to the world that the
Church can make. Just by being different from the world, the Church
demonstrates that the world is not yet everything it claims to be. The Church
does not yet look settled; its glory can only be recognised by those who are
being sanctified within it. Whether the Church looks dull and grey, or sinful
and appalling, its shortcomings do not ultimately prevent the Church really
being God's message to the world. The sinfulness of the Church does not
prevent the world getting the witness and message of God.

The church is the promise of the resurrection. Although we now only see the
people immediately around us in Church. But in this worship we are brought
together with all those who worshipped in this building before us, and in the
first Christian church in this place. So we worship with all those who came
before us will come after us, and all those in other communities in other parts
of this city and country. We do not see these previous generations, but that is
not to say that they don’t see us.

Christ is hidden here, before our very eyes. Who Christ is, dawns on us only
as we realise the people standing around at the gathering of the church as
increasingly disparate people are gathered around him. We learn who he is as
it becomes clear that all these different people are part of his entourage; they
are his because they know that they have all been served by him. They are
his train and his glory. As more of them come into the gathering, we may
realise that he brings together and reconciles people who are so different,
who come from all opposite corners of the world, and that thus all the people
of the world are his, and that his rule extends worldwide. A very unassuming
man, nothing in him that you would recognise him by, other than this
entourage. We get the first inkling of his worldwide reach because the people
brought into the eucharistic gathering are so entirely different from one
another that they represent the whole variety of humanity, from every
imaginable class and condition of man. Even those who take their identity
from their hared of one another and were enemies, now sit next to each other.
They speak in all their various dialectics and in the assembly they listen to
each other, and search to find someone to translate what each, no matter how
humble, or from no matter how remote a part of the world, in the belief that
Christ has spoken to that part of the world too and that they are also his
ambassadors. This is ‘orderly worship’ (1 Corinthians 14).

2. Christian service is living sacrifice

Christ is our head and we are his body for the world. Christ regards us as part
of himself, as his own body. He is our captain and leader, and he lends his
identity and very being to the Church. He considers the Church his own, and
considers its sins and deficiencies his own. He calls all humanity into
reconciliation in this body so that no part is any longer at war with any other,
and he steadily and with inexhaustible patience he keeps up this call. Christ
sustains his body so that it resists all contrary voices, and remains unified, so
that together with him these many people make this one indivisible unity.
When we see the Church, we see him. We have the paradox that Christ is
sin-loaded and sin-covered, and we are justified and sin-free.

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So though we are two distinct entities, we are also one, and we may not think
of ourselves without him.

The unity and order of this body can be seen in the way that its members
order themselves to one another in love. Everyone is ordained to a place
within this people, and so to a particular station and office in it. Each of us is
served by those more experiences than ourselves and is given (ordained) to
serve those who are less experienced than we are. So united to its head the
whole Church is priestly. There is one priest, Christ. But Christ joins us to
himself to make us his body, and so the whole people together make one
single priest for the world who makes one single offering and service to the
world. So we can pray:
Through him we offer you our souls and bodies
to be a living sacrifice.

The Christians are the service of God to the world. They take the worship of
God with them wherever they go. Each Christian is the whole eucharistic
service, and each takes that service with him through the world through the
week. When the Church meets together on Sunday we are brought back into
the indivisible time of God. We are brought together to participate in the
celebration that takes place uninterruptedly before the throne of God. This
week’s service is not really separated from next week’s service by six
weekdays. The weekdays do not break up the worship that goes in heaven,
for secular time does not divide what the Spirit holds together. The worship of
God constitutes a single, unbroken Sabbath day.

But we have this by faith. This little gathering, the Church, is all the evidence
we get that Christ is drawing all humanity to himself. It is not thrust on us. The
unity of Son and Spirit, evident in the resurrection, holds all these otherwise
incompatible persons together in the love and communion that is the Church.
In this communion we learn to see all humankind patiently, not only as we
presently are, but also as we may be. We learn to see people together with
their future. We are in the world and so surrounded by it, but in the Church we
are in particular surrounded by those who are being sanctified. And we hold
on to all others in this company. We must hold on to one another and not let
the buffeting forces loosen our grasp on one another. These people are being
prepared so that they can accompany us, and help us to recognise all
persons as Christ’s. So these people of the gathered Church are being made
our friends. According to Richard Baxter:
He wants not friends that hath thy love
and converse and walk with thee
and with thy saints, here and above
with whom for ever I must be

The Lord presents these people to me. Christ sends these friends ahead of
himself, so I have to meet them first, until through them we have become
ready to meet all men. Throughout our life in the Church, the saints come to
us and help us to receive all mankind, and so finally to receive Christ.
Within the fellowship of saints
is wisdom, safety and delight

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and when my heart declines and faints
it is raised by their heat and light
This hymn by Baxter, who was a seventeenth century Puritan theologian,
shows that the Protestant Church has always celebrated the communion of
saints.

Everything going on in Church is this movement in which Christ gathers us

into relationship with these many other members of his communion.
Christians are not merely saying and singing this as though it is so much
disembodied information, but they are also moving towards it, and this is the
movement we see in the church service. Everything that we sing is
commentary on this movement, so the worship service is our communal body
language seen over the long term. It is not only addressed by us to God, but it
is the address of God to us. It is not only directed to those of us presently in
the building, or presently looking on, but to all generations of the Church,
those who for us and in the past and those who are still on their way.
The earthly eucharistic liturgy is a relay station for the heaven liturgy. We
listen for the singing of the heavenly crowd, pick it up and stay in synch with it.
They look forward to our arrival. Heaven reaches down to earth, holding earth
and bringing into union with heaven and made it one communion and reality
with it. The Church is not assimilated or absorbed into the world, but remains
forever.

4. Receiving the body in faith

Jesus Christ is calling, gathering, ushering all humanity along towards the
Father. He overcomes all rival masters to bring the whole human body
together. Christ comes to us first in the form of these other Christians we
encounter here in the Church service. They are all that Christ yet is giving us
of himself. He does not come to us as the single figure of Jesus, for Jesus has
been glorified and we are not yet prepared to encounter that glory. He comes
inasmuch as we take him from the least of these, for ‘whatever you did for the
least of one of these brothers of mine, you did for me’ (Matthew 26.40). He is
really giving us himself, but these people are the form in which, for now, he
does so. They are the non-negotiable form in which he comes to us. We have
to receive them from him.

There is no way to Jesus except through the people he gives us and whom he
calls his own body. If they are exasperatingly different from ourselves, this is
because Christ is utterly different from ourselves. We have to master our own
exasperation in order to receive them, for these people are our preparation for
receiving him, and indeed they are hard-to-decipher form in which we are
already receiving him. We may exhaust ourselves trying to control these
people or avoid them. But in this very trying character, they are the hardness
and difficulty of Jesus to us and the way in which he assesses our readiness.
We have to learn to take these people as the very gift of Christ, indeed as the
very appearance of Christ. It is in this form that Christ has emptied himself,
and in this form that we may and must receive him.

The good order of the Church

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With each other Church in the world we say the creed together. We say: We
believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church. The Church has these four
distinguishing features: it is one, holy, catholic and apostolic. ‘One’ means that
Christ is indivisible and he makes us indivisibly part of him and of each other.
Since Christ is its head, the Church is the body of Christ for the world, and
Christ and Church are one entity, the Whole Christ. ‘Holy’ means that Christ is
utterly distinct from all others, and he makes us distinct from each other. By
‘catholic’ we mean that Christ is the universal who includes all creation. By
‘apostolic’ we mean that the Church has received the whole tradition of the
apostles and witnesses of Christ and that it passes that on intact, leaving
nothing out. These four features ensure that the Church is the communion of
love.

The distinctions incorporated and affirmed within the body of Christ are
protected by offices within the Church. The Lord sanctifies specific office-
holders in the body in order to serve us and do us good: they ensure that we
do not form into narrower, less tolerant groups; their discipline enables us to
accept the ordering of the whole catholic body within which all differences
may flourish. Just as the whole Church is under the discipline given by Christ,
each congregation is under the discipline of the whole Church, worldwide and
of all generations.

Each church sends apostles to other churches and receives them from other
churches. Every church is part of the whole Church as it receives the teaching
and discipline of these apostles from the rest of the Church. The apostle
therefore represents the whole Church, and thus not only the church or the
denominations we are comfortable with. We cannot turn away from other
churches without shutting ourselves off from Christ and from our own future in
his body. Every eucharist and every event of ecumenism is an event of
judgment and repentance, and of forgiveness and reconciliation, in which we
look forward to being reconciled with those from whom we are still separated.
Every church must humbly offer its faith to every other, submit itself to the
questioning of every other church, and attempt to learn from them all. The one
Church exists as each church gives and receives the instruction and oversight
of every other.

A church without leaders and disciplinarians is not a well-ordered church.

Christians who do not receive this discipline and oversight do not flourish, just
as children become unsettled when they do not know where the boundaries
are. The Christians who do not receive their shaping from the whole Church
always push a little further; the Church has to understand that each episode of
transgression is motivated by the desire to be more closely loved and more
firmly guided. Each congregation pushes its leaders. If they do not push back,
and reprimand us, it is because they fear us too much and love us too little.
Let us pray for them. Whenever you see your minister, remind him of who he
is and what he has been given to say to the Church and do not let him go until
he gives you his blessing.

5. The Spirit and the resurrection

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The Holy Spirit who always accompanies Christ can make him visible or
invisible to us. The Holy Spirit holds Christ distinct above us, out of our grasp.
And the Holy Spirit brings us here before all these other people and holds this
disparate and implausible community together, making it one body. The Holy
Spirit hides Christ from us, and reveals him to us, bit by slow bit, in the
persons of whom this community it made up. So we sing:
Each new born soldier
of the crucified
bears on his brow
the seal of him who died

The resurrection is the demonstration that the Spirit has united us to Christ
and, in him, to one another. No created power can tear Christ away from God,
not even death. The result is that no created power, not even death, can tear
us away from Christ. Not even death can oblige Christ to let go of us. So the
resurrection of Christ is the promise of our own future resurrection. The Spirit
who raised him from us will also raise us to him. This resurrection is hidden
within the present world, and the worship of the Church is the place where we
tumble upon this secret.

The resurrection will bring us face to face with all men. The resurrection that
raises us to God will also raise to them, and them to us, so that we will receive
Christ together with all whom he brings with him. He now sends us all these
people ahead of him to us, so we may receive him by learning to receive
them. Our resurrection, imperceptibly underway since our baptism, consists in
meeting these saints who already make up the glorified body of Christ, until
we finally meet the Lord himself. The unity of Son and Spirit, evident in the
resurrection, holds all these otherwise incompatible persons together in this
love and communion that is the Church. In the Church we learn to see one
another patiently, not just as we presently are, but also as we will be. So we
pray:
Rejoicing in his mighty resurrection and glorious ascension and looking for his
coming in glory

6. The mystery of the Church

There Church is the big fact with which God confronts the world, and that the
distinctiveness of the Church is the single contribution to the world that the
Church can make. Just by being different from the world, the Church
demonstrates that the world is not yet everything it claims to be. This must
mean that God is also competent to make the Church mean what God says it
means. And whether the Church looks dull and grey, or sinful and appalling,
its shortcomings do not ultimately prevent the Church really being God's
message to the world. The sinfulness of the Church does not prevent the
world getting the witness and message of God.

The church is the promise of the resurrection. I just see the people
immediately before me, which is to say, that I see only the people in the
building with me. But in every eucharist we are brought together with all those
who worshipped in this building before us, and in the first Christian church in
this place. We do not see these previous generations, but that is not to say

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that they do not see us. So we worship with all those who came before us will
come after us, and all those in other communities in other parts of this city and
country.

Christ is hidden here before our very eyes. Who Christ is, dawns on us only
as we realise the people standing around at the gathering of the church as
increasingly disparate people are gathered around him. We learn who he is as
it becomes clear that all these different people are part of his entourage; they
are his because they know that they have all been served by him. They are
his train and his glory. As more of them come into the gathering, we may
realise that he brings together and reconciles people who are so different,
who come from all opposite corners of the world, and that thus all the people
of the world are his, and that his rule extends worldwide. We get the first
inkling of his worldwide reach because the people brought into the eucharistic
gathering are so entirely different from one another that they represent the
whole variety of humanity, from every imaginable class and condition of man.
Even those who take their identity from their hatred of one another and were
enemies, now sit next to each other. They speak in all their various dialectics
and in the assembly they listen to each other, and search to find someone to
translate what each, no matter how humble, or from no matter how remote a
part of the world, in the belief that Christ has spoken to that part of the world
too and that they are also his ambassadors. This is ‘orderly worship’ that the
Apostle Paul sets out in 1 Corinthians 14.

The Spirit makes the Church holy. In all our worship we make a distinction
between the Church and the world. It is the Church that makes itself distinct
from the world, and it is for the sake of the world that it does so. The Church
exists for the sake of the world and is dedicated to it. But the Church cannot
be assimilated to the world. It is only because it participates in the worship of
God that Church holy has something that it can offer to the world.

The Spirit glorifies Christ for us by drawing all people and all creation around
him. Who Christ is, dawns on us only as we realise the people standing
around at the gathering of the church as increasingly disparate people are
gathered around him. We learn who he is as it becomes clear that they are all
part of the entourage and glory of Christ. The whole diversity of humanity,
from every imaginable class and condition of human being are brought into
this gathering. We see Christ bring together and reconciles people from all
corners of the world. Thus we discover that all the people of the world are his
and that his rule extends worldwide. As the Canticle from Ezekiel (36. 24-28)
puts it: I will take you from the nations, and gather you from all the countries.
You shall be my people, and I will be your God. Even those who were
enemies, and identified themselves through their hatred of one another, now
sit next to each other. In this assembly they speak in all their various
dialectics, they listen to each other, and search to find someone to translate
what each has said, no matter how humble, or from no matter how remote a
part of the world. They understand that Christ has spoken to every part of the
world and even those from the remotest corners of the world are the
ambassadors of Christ for us, and bear gifts from Christ to us. This is the
‘orderly worship’ that the Apostle Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 14.

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The strangeness of Church
Church is also an unfamiliar and even strange place. This great crowd of
people is even easier to see if you go into an Orthodox Church. Directly
before you is the ‘iconostasis’, the large partition that stands before the altar
which is entirely covered with images of Christians of previous generations.
They look at us and we look at them and even go up and greet them with a
kiss. Going to Church is simply going to meet the saints and be with them.
They are all clustered around Christ or beneath him if his image is high up
above us all, in the apse or dome where is portrayed in glory, with all the
members of his kingdom about him.

You see the priests and servers bowing to one another. Why do they do that?
Each bows towards the other because he recognises that person as Christ.
Each member of the congregation is becoming translucent to Christ, and we
could bow before every member. ‘Greet one another with a holy embrace’
(cite), as Paul says, for in doing so you are greeting Christ (cite). But for now,
we let bowing to some serve for bowing before the whole body. We do not
want this strangeness to get in your way. Many assemblies of Christians do
not make use of these images or these vestments and do everything with as
little ceremony as possible because they are determined that none of the
ceremony should become a obstacle to you. But these images and
movements are not intended to make you feel awkward. They simply mean
that we understand that we are all becoming images of Christ, and that we will
also radiate his glory. With them we pray:
May God in his infinite love and mercy
bring the whole Church,
living and departed in the Lord Jesus,
to a joyful resurrection
and the fulfilment of his eternal kingdom

7. Well-ordered people
The kingdom of Jesus Christ is made up of a vast assembly of people. It is
this assembly that in the Spirit makes itself present to us in worship. We
receive them in the persons of the people of this congregation. We receive
one another from Christ and so our resurrection comes to us in this secret
way one person at a time. Our refusal of one another is stripped off us. The
purification that we call the passion is the way we presently participate in this
slow resurrection of the body. When we are happy to receive from Christ
everyone whom he sends to us. Then we will experience them as our joy and
our reward.

We regard all Christians, no matter different from ourselves, as those who

have called by Christ into his body through baptism. There are many churches
and many of ways of expressing their particularities. Their differences tend to
be expressed first in terms of their denomination, then perhaps of their
churchmanship, which is how they speak about the holiness of the bible or
sacraments, and then in terms of their ethnicity or mix of ethnicities. But none
of these differences is ultimately significant. What is ultimately significant is
locality. What part of the city have they been sent to? To which specific set of

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people have they been made the witnesses of God ? Locality is the identifier.
Each church must hope to be the witness of God to people who inhabit these
few streets, or speak this particular language. The unity between us is
absolute, while the diversity of the churches that might seem to divide us is for
the sake of the world.

The Church is that vast assembly made up of all the members of Christ, both
those who for us are in the past and the future. They want us to take up our
place with them. This assembly, that is future to us, will make itself present to
the present world in Christ and in the Spirit, all at once, at the judgment. In the
incarnation we have a preview of this coming together of all things. And this
future assembly makes itself present to us now, little by little, as his
incarnation is continually set before us in every eucharist. The resurrection
that raises us to Christ, will also raise us and bring us face to face with all
men. He now sends us all these people ahead of him to us, so our
resurrection, imperceptibly underway since our baptism, consists in meeting
these saints who already make up his glorious body. So we pray:
In sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life
through our Lord Jesus Christ,
who will transform our frail bodies
that they may be conformed to his glorious body

Though for us they are dead, vanished and forgotten, no human being is so to
Christ. He holds them in life, for nothing can remain dead or unhearing when
he calls. In the body of Christ we stop running away from all previous
generations, turn ourselves around and go back to meet and be reconciled to
them. Our future consists in being joined to them, the present to the past. In
the Church the saints are not behind us, in our past, but ahead of us, in our
future. All the saints have to be poured into us, for only when we contain them
all, do we become holy, sanctified, catholic. So we are able to pray:
With angels and archangels,
and with all the company of heaven,
we proclaim your great and glorious name,
for ever praising you and saying:
Holy, holy, holy Lord,
God of power and might,
heaven and earth are full of your glory
Hosanna in the highest

And we sing:
Lord thy glory fills the heaven
Earth is with its fullness stored; unto thee be glory given
Holy, holy, holy Lord (NEH 343 Mant).

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