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?
