At the Sunday eucharist at St Mary’s, our discipleship sometimes appears in the intercessions. These tend to be led by a small number of lay members of the congregation who learned their faith in Sunday school in the West Indies forty years ago. Their intercessions are the Word of God and the gift of God to us still. They know how to pray, and their prayers teach how to pray, and in the course of these prayers we learn a little about our Master, and as a result we learn something about who we are. Because the organist has taught the congregation to come in on time, each ‘Lord, hear us’ receives a proper crisp ‘Lord, Graciously hear us’. You can’t drift too far off in intercessions because your response is continually required. Every part of the service is antiphonal, so the whole congregation is at work, and all this repetition brings slow comprehension, very slow in my case.
St Mary’s follows Common Worship and the Revised Common Lectionary. This means that the Word of God we hear week by week provides some of the narrative logic of the gospel. This week’s readings follow on in some respect from last week’s. The great advantage of this is that we are not dependent on choices made by our own clergy. Of course we get their platitudes from the pulpit. Typically sermons begin with a rambling anecdote, come back to one aspect of one of the New Testament readings (ignoring the other NT reading, the Old Testament and psalm – see, four pieces of Scripture altogether), and then wobble towards some trite apercu about the way ‘we’ are today. But I really don’t mind sitting through the sermon, with its embarrassed English inconsequential and often contradictory moralizing. I willing sit through twenty minutes of nonsense in order to have the forty-five minutes of liturgy, with the huge amount of the Word of God that Common Worship contains, with all its sentences, licks and riffs – so I can hear it, say it and sing it in full congregation.
Sermons that follow a theme or expound a book of the bible are fine in an evening worship-and-teaching service. If I was vicar I would move Sunday evensong back to Saturday evening. Then we could say that Saturday evensong was the prelude to the through-the-night prayer meeting or liturgy that culminates with full church sung eucharist on Sunday morning. In non-feast (‘ordinary’) times of year I would have the whole preaching-teaching-worship service followed by pizzas, dance, more guitars-and-drums modern worship racket until the young people wore themselves out.
After five years with this basically very middle-class congregation, I know that it is Christ who serves himself up in the sermon and in the cup. He serves us in the strange form of these embarrassing performances. It is not that Christ hides himself in the gabbled and uncomprehending reading of Scripture and embarrassed serving of the cup, but that he makes himself plain in there in these cringe-inducing performances. He makes himself present and available here for us all, not only in the obvious disciples, whom even I can identify, like those who lead intercessions well. He makes present in the – to me – hidden way represented by those who despise an evangelical faith, though they are our leaders, and who prefer to dive down every culture-de-sac of middle-class imported spirituality and activism. Not only are these the ones I have to break bread with, but they are the cup I have to drink in order to drink with him, and share in him.
