Author: Douglas Knight

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.

The Word of God and the Eucharist are not two things, but one. Five years at St Mary’s now, and this is as far as my thinking has got. For the eucharist to be the eucharist, Scripture has to be heard and explained. Where the Scripture is not read and opened the cup of eucharist is empty, and this wine brings us no Christ. Scripture has to be opened, and that means read and expounded. First it must be read, well, slowly and loud, not gabbled or murmured, by someone who understands what they are reading. And then it must be explained. The lessons – all three of them – must be so explained, week after week so that we begin to realise who we are and what it means for us to be Christ’s people, and to be Christ’s people here, in our case in Hackney, London. If the Scripture is opened in the course of the service, then as the years go by people will be converted and become disciples, and the whole business of our sancification will begin. If Scripture is not heard and opened, this bread and cup will be precisely as eucharistic as our coffee and biscuits. Scripture is not opened by preaching alone, nor by the eucharist alone, but both together, understood as one.

It seems to me that the Christ served up in the cup is the Christ served up in the sermon. The one Lord is served up in what to us are two forms, preaching and sacrament, but of course just the one indivisible Christ. So the preaching is sacramental and eucharistic, and the eucharist is edifying because it reaches our heads as much as our heart, it feeds, teaches and unifies each of us, head and body.

The Word of God means not just the Scripture read but the Scripture preached on – explained – in the sermon. Actually we could widen that to include the congregational responses, which are also sentences from Scripture, and even further to include the hymns, for they are also our responses to the Scripture-and-bread received. In fact I think that in St Mary’s, insofar as Scripture is opened, it is by the hymns and intercessions, rather than by anything that comes from the pulpit. Well, I’ll try to make the case – you see what you think. In St Mary’s the teaching happens principally through the antiphonally sung psalm that follows the Old Testament and then through the choice of hymns. Clearly our selection of hymns follows some well-thought out schema associated with Common Worship. I approve of it. It seems to me that the great teacher in my church is the organist. By his playing he teaches that congregation to sing and so in some measure to worship. He plays with a crispness and a dedication to supporting and driving the singing of the congregation that I have never seen anywhere else. The congregation sing so confidently that some of the theological sense of what we are singing is surely absorbed.

The hymns we sing, particularly in the season of Easter, contain lines of lurid (Protestant) penal substitution and macabre (Catholic) accounts of Christ’s wounds bleeding for us. Whoever picks the hymns either cannot tell the difference or is isn’t concerned by it, and that is fine by me. But I don’t think I have ever heard the judgment and the anger of God tackled in sermons, let alone any talk of Christ’s blood. The atonement is considered too difficult or divisive to preach on, even in the run up to Easter. Though our hymns are full of it, penal substitution and almost any account of the atonement are avoided by our clergy, and when you can get the conversation onto the topic the subject is quickly changed. They avoid the atonement in sermons, except occasionally when say Genesis 22, Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, comes up, and then the idea of sacrifice to God is ruled out, hard to say on what grounds – taste, maybe? Still, the atonement is there in the Scripture read, in the sentences, responses and above all in the hymns, so we are always receiving a good part of the evangelical narrative in the Sunday morning eucharist. Much of it is said or sung by the congregation, and this is crucial it seems to me. But the sermon never explains the lessons we have heard, or the responses we have made to those lessons and so never points out to us the unity of the whole, given by the evangelical narrative. None of this unity of Scripture-and-response is explained, so my question is – how eucharistic is this?