Our Parish Church

Let us start by saying what you see first.

This church is long and thin, with a path up the middle. The church is a model of the Christian life, and the Christian life is a long journey. This central aisle is our route. As we walk up this way we learn that we are travelling along behind many other people, and that they are following the Lord Jesus Christ. He is taking them and us with him.  Many other people keep us company on this pilgrimage, and the Lord leads us from the front and keeps us together.

Many of the psalms we sing tell us that the Christian life is like walking along a path. It is not easy to see the way, but if you follow the Lord, you can keep going the right way, one step at a time. God’s word always lights up the next step. ‘Your word is a lantern to my feet and a light to my path’, says Psalm 119. Without it, it is easy to turn off the path by mistake and lose your way.

The main part of this long church building is called the ‘nave’. ‘Nave’ comes from ‘navis’, the Latin word for ‘boat’. You can see that the roof looks like the inside of a boat. Imagine you see an old fishing boat hauled up on a beach and turned over. If you crawled in under the boat, it would look like this roof.

The church is like a boat. An old word for boat is ‘ark’. It is taking us across the seas, through the storms. The people of Israel knew that seas can rage out of control, so they used the word ‘sea’ as another way of saying ‘rage’ or ‘violent’.  This church is the ark that will get us through that storm.

In some churches you see the altar right in front of you, but in our long church you have to look through a great wooden screen and the chancel to see it.

You go up the middle aisle of the nave and you get to this large wooden lattice with an entrance in the middle. This is the rood screen. ‘Rood’ sounds like ‘root’ but it means the whole trunk of a tree. The wood of this cross is a vast living tree, with growing branches that stretch across our way. This tree is the cross on which Jesus was crucified, and you are standing at the foot of this cross. You can see a cross up above you and under it the words ‘By thy cross and passion deliver us’. The whole wooden structure is a tree that is budding and bursting into life. This is the tree of life. All humanity are branches that grow out of the one central trunk, and Jesus is that trunk.

So you step through the tree that is also the cross, and inside is the sanctuary. ‘Sanctuary’ means ‘holy’. It is a garden. It is the Garden of Eden, but now Eden is being redeemed, so it is decorated like paradise. The walls and floor and ceiling have a flower-and-tendril pattern that has been copied all over every wall and wood surface in the Church. Everything is budding and growing. The new growth has started up here but it is spreading out from here all around the Church, and from the Church it will spread back out into the world.

This place is also known as the choir. On each side there are benches, which tells us that the people of God are a choir, or two choirs, one on each side. One choir sings, and then the other choir sings in reply and so there is a kind of conversation, just as there in heaven. When you look up you can see that angels, carved and painted on the rafters, are holding up the roof. Each angel holds a scroll with words of the hymn ‘Glory to God in the highest…’, so you can read, or sing ‘… and peace to his people on earth’, as you walk round, following the song from one angel to the next.

When you look back into the nave, the main bit of the church, you see that the big stone pillars are also like trees, like the olive trees under which the Lord gave the gospel to the disciples on the Mount of Olives, where the Garden of Gethsemane is. So the whole church is a model of the redeemed creation. And it is a message to us from all the Christians of this place over many centuries. ‘It is good’, they say, ‘good news of great joy.’ ‘Pass it on’, they say, ‘pass it on’.

At the top of the sanctuary is the altar and a step where we kneel to receive communion. Communion is what happens when the whole congregation of people comes together in the morning on Sunday. Of course some people come in here every day in the morning and again in the evening. They continue the worship of the Church, which never stops, even though we may not hear it. But ‘communion’, also known as ‘fellowship’, is the ‘togetherness’ of the Church that meets once a week at the Eucharist. When the Lord Jesus is present, so is the whole Church. ‘Church’ means ‘gathering’. The Church itself is standing in for the whole creation, so each gathering of Christians is the first instalment of all creation. One day all the fragments will be gathered up and fitted together, and will find their true place in the whole unbroken creation of God. When all the broken pieces fit each other everything will be mended. God now calls all the piece together, and the first pieces that arrive are the people who meet here, and in every other church. Together they are the sign that God is at work bringing things together and reconciling them so that they not at war with each other any longer. But meanwhile, there is a difficult process of getting used to being with these people. Why are they all so different from me, you may ask? The answer is, that they are so because they are God’s challenge to you. He gives them to you as a present, and you have to learn how to value them. Can you do it? Yes, within this holy communion, you can.

But why is it so complicated, you ask? Why isn’t it simpler? Well, many churches are quite simple, with plain white walls. But Christians are always trying to tell you the gospel as simply as they can. And so they tend to draw you a picture that puts the gospel plainly and simply. Once all churches were decorated with painted scenes from the bible on the walls. Each picture was simple enough. Many of them show you Jesus healing or helping someone, or show you a parable. Here you can see a picture of King David and another of the Good Samaritan. Then, five hundred years ago many Christians decided that there were so many images in each church that they could no longer be understood. The simple message of the gospel was being lost in the clutter. So they whitewashed over the images, took out all the reminders of the saints, and churches became quite simple again. Christians believed that this would make it easier to hear the news of the gospel when the bible was read out loud. That would also make it easier for us to read the bible for ourselves.

But Christians always create pictures because people always ask for something simple. Though we left the walls plain, we continued making pictures on the glass of the windows. Hundreds of little pieces of coloured glass are put together to create pictures of the Lord and the apostles and scenes from the bible. That way we can also see what we are listening to.

At the back of the Church on the right the window has a picture that shows you the Eucharist. What you see in this picture, you also see on Sunday morning when the priest holds up the bread and cup. There is Jesus in the middle, holding the round loaf and a cup, about to share them with us. He is going to let us into this loaf. He has gathered us and all the other broken pieces of creation to make this one, perfect loaf. Now he calls this loaf his body. He shows it to us and then he shares it with us. He breaks it open so that we can come in, and become part of this body of his.

On one side is his mother Mary, on the left as you look up, and Mary Magdalene who is holding the ointment with which she anointed the Lord.  Both Marys are looking at the Lord and then at us. It is the same with all the apostles: We just follow their eyes and see the love in the expression on their faces. The same with all the apostles; they look at the Lord and we follow their eyes. And the Lord? He looks at us, and then he looks up to his Father and hold us up. If he didn’t hold us we might run away. You see it is simple, in a way.

So this is some background about what you can see in this church building when it is quiet.  Now we need to say what is going on when the church is gathered on Sunday morning and it is not quiet at all.

The Church Service

On Sunday morning everybody comes to worship the Lord together here. We call this into ‘holy communion’ or ‘the Eucharist’.

The service begins ‘In the name of the Father Son and Holy Spirit’. This ‘Father’ is Our Father, because his Son, Jesus has become our Lord. We say publicly that we are the Lord’s people, Jesus’s people. We tell the world that we are the people who belong to this Lord, the true master, who is our Father. We don’t give our time to any of the many little ‘masters’ who bother everyone else in the world so much.

In Church as we pray to him, we come close to the Lord. We ask the Lord if we may enter his presence. We are only able to ask because we know that we may enter, and we have entered and we stand before him. He has come to us, and by his Holy Spirit we can stand here, right in front of him.  A similar prayer later is called the ‘prayer of humble access’, which describes the situation.

The Ministry of the Word

We come because the Lord called us. Now we hear his call to us in the scripture. In the next stage four passages from the bible are read out, or sung out loud.   Everybody in the bible is telling us to get ready for the arrival of the Lord, and so they are saying that we should shoo off all the other little lords who try to get in the way.

The first passage comes from the Old Testament, which means from the patriarchs and prophets of the people of Israel. They explain and encourage and warn us, in order to prepare us for what is coming up. Even when things were going wrong for them, the people of Israel were passing on their experience to us and so acting as God’s witnesses to us.

Then we read a psalm, which responds to what the Old Testament reading has told us. Someone sings the psalm and we all sing one line of it as our response. Then we read from the New Testament, starting with an epistle, a letter written by one of the apostles, very often Saint Paul, to one of the churches. Then we all sing a hymn which is some version of the psalm or repeats the message of the psalm, or is our own glad response to that message.

Then the priest reads from the Gospel. We get to our feet because we treat the Gospel as the arrival of the Lord himself. The priest should read that Gospel so slowly and clearly that everyone in the building should not only be able to hear it, but to learn it, as he delivers it phrase by phrase. Imagine that no one had a bible of their own, and the only way to receive the bible, is by learning it off by heart as you hear it, week by week. That is how we should hear the Gospel. We have to chew on that lesson from the Gospel all week, because we have nothing else to live on, nothing nourishing anyway.

So one witness responds to another, and one part of the bible replies to another.  The Old Testament prophets speak and the New Testament apostles reply. And we reply too, at the very least with our ‘Thanks be to God’ and our ‘Amen’. And so week by week the Lord gives us this great chorus of witnesses and they give us the Lord’s message to us.

The Lord always introduces us to new people. Some of them, like the apostles and other Christians, are clearly on our side. But some of whom seem to be against us. We have to learn from the Christians how to cope with those who are unhappy and at war with themselves, are also at war with us, and with everyone else around them. Our Christian life comes as a series of friends and companions. And it comes as a series of bruising meetings with unhappy people. Some of them try to push you around, or frighten you or lash out at you in some way. It is a struggle with people who don’t want us and don’t want anything we can give them. It is a long trek through unpopularity and other people’s grief. It is a way of glory and at the same time it is the way of the cross.

The bible prepares us for this by introducing us both to Jesus’ disciples, and to those who hate him. It gives us both, at the same time. So our life following Jesus is described to us by the gospel and the other passages we read each Sunday of the year. You don’t just get one picture of the Lord. You get a new picture of him each Sunday. As these images flip past us we get a sort of old-fashioned jerky movie of the Lord moving along in front of us. We see the disciples and all the Christians in front of us hurrying to keep up with him. And we get better at keeping up, and we get better at telling who is following Jesus and who is just trying to get between us and him, and so getting in the way.

The bible is read, and then the priest gets up to open the passage for us. His job is just to say what is there, so we can see our own next step. That means he should repeat each sentence in it and say the same thing again in different words. Then he can connect it to the other readings and to last week’s gospel, so we can see how we have moved on since last week. As I say, the best thing is simply to learn the passage off by heart.

Your priest is to administer the Word and Sacrament. In other words, his job is to stand there behind the great pot of lamb stew, and to push his ladle down to the bottom and give you everything that comes up. Your job is to say ‘Give us more meat, Father’, or ‘Give us more gravy, Father. Leave nothing out’. The Gospel is the meat and the fat and the onion and all the herbs – rosemary, bay, sage, each week a slightly different taste.  ‘Herb’ means ‘bitter’. The gospel tastes bitter, fiery, sweet too sometimes, but it always is full of the goodness that goes down deep and makes you strong from the inside out. Tell the priest that you are going to need that nourishment to toughen you ready for what is coming. Tell him that is job is not to entertain you and not even to please you. His job is just to look into the bible and then look into your face and see what you need, and without being afraid of your reaction, to give it to you, holding nothing back.

Christ gives us his message. He tells us who we are and who he is. And all these people we meet in the scripture are part of the message to us. Of course we don’t understand them or like them all straight off. The Lord shows us what is true, and what is not, and we receive this as knowledge. So that is the ministry of the Word.

 

 

Confession

Next come prayers and intercessions, and then confession.

We make our confession, that is, we say what we need but do not have, or what we cannot do or have not done. We put together is all those things that have gone missing, or somehow got broken, dropped and left behind. These includes all those times when you said or did too much, for instance, shouting, when it would have been enough to tell them, or even better, not to have told them. You went too far? That’s a ‘trespass’. You didn’t go far enough? We call that a sin. It’s whatever was left out but shouldn’t have been.

During the week we can get bruised, and then we sometimes lash out and give each other bruises. Not real ones, but the hurt is inside. But in the mass we exchange the kiss of peace. That is, we ask one another for forgiveness and we do forgive one another. We give one another the hug that came from God, and which brought us together in the first place. We share the handshake of forgiveness around the church. Everyone there recognises that everyone else has received forgiveness from the Lord, so we must add our forgiveness too. With this handshake we publicly make peace with those around us in the Church and this tells the rest of world that the same truth-telling and the same forgiveness are available for everyone. We Christians take the accusations, true and false, that the world throws at us, and we swallow them down, along with all the hurt that caused them. There is no place to hide from the hard words of God. They are true, and they will find us, and it is a relief when they do.

We are sorry. Well, sometimes we are not sorry, but, if we carry all this unfinished business around it gets heavier and we will be sorry about that at least. You shouldn’t try to get used to the weight of it, though you see so many people trying to. So many people try to make out their sins are just normal and they don’t ever want to be parted from them. But these sins are crumpling them up like a slow illness, and the effort of not saying so is making everyone around them ill too. No. You want to get rid of it. You want to dump it somewhere. But where? I know. The best place is at the altar when you go up at the Eucharist.

Go up to the altar and the moment you reach the altar rail flip the whole lot off your shoulder with a kind of shrug and let it all shoot out. It will disappear deep down under the altar into God’s forgiveness and it won’t come back up.  Then you can skip back the way you came.  This may not mean very much to you at the moment, because your sins are so small they wouldn’t wet a paper bag. But as you get older, everything gets heavier.

But we can simply dump all these sins.  They stop being ours. They are Jesus’s problem, and that means they are no problem at all. So sin removed, and it is replaced with holiness. In fact it is holiness that is very gently nudging sin out all the time.

Ministry of the Sacrament

Now we get to the Ministry of the Sacrament, the Eucharist itself. It starts something like this:

Blessed are you, Lord of creation. Of your goodness we have this bread to offer, which earth has given and human hands have made.

God is holy. And God makes us holy. Being with God, which is what the mass is, makes us holy. And so the elements at the centre of the mass, known as sacraments, make us holy. God himself does the work here, and he uses whatever is to hand to make us holy. Eventually all creation will be caught up into this work, and all creation will become holy. But here and now, in the mass, the first instalments of this holy creation are bread and wine. Jesus told us to break bread and drink this wine, and so we do.

The Holy Spirit is making us his holy people.  He set to work on us at our baptism (or perhaps long before, but we didn’t know about it) and he been at work on us ever since. As you look back you can sometimes see how this happened in different stages, and confirmation is one of these. We could call the Spirit’s work ‘sanctification’ – ‘holy-making’.  In old English we used to say that the Spirit is hallowing us. ‘Hallow’ is the same word as ‘halo’ and ‘holy’.

All this means that Jesus stands before the Father, speaking with him on our behalf, saying the things, like ‘Thank You’, that we would say if we could. And he asks the Father to overlook and forgive what is missing, and then he just supplies whatever that is. Jesus puts himself between us and our sins, and puts his own body between us and those who are trying to harm us, to shield us by taking their blows himself.  He lifts us up and holds us up, just as parents do, just as he is carrying that lamb on his shoulders in that window over the altar. Your parents raise you over many years, and sometimes they just pick you up and put you on their shoulders like that. They can do this, because in the background Jesus raises us all up, and keeps us there between him and the Father.

Jesus shares his life with us. This is the life he shares with the Father. Together they break off little pieces of that life and pass them to us. They give us their life in instalments. But they don’t just put each piece into our hands and leave us there holding it. How would we know what to do next? They put it into us, just as you put milk into a baby, or just as you would blow air into someone who couldn’t breathe for themselves. That milk and that air do what is necessary; our bodies know what to do with them, or that milk and that air know what to do to get our bodies going again. Jesus has breathed his Spirit into us and that Spirit puts in us some of what he shares with his Father. Their relationship, or their holy communion, is what they are putting into us, and what they are raising us up into. It revives us. We are able to live within this communion of theirs, and can’t live without it. For now, each little piece of that communion – each sacrament – prepares us to receive the next piece, so we are slowly brought up into the whole communion. They are bringing us into their company just as you could (and one day, will) bring someone into your home and life.

The Lord does not just put holy things into our hands. He also puts us into situations in which you find that you know what to do with these holy gifts, even though you have never done it before. With them you learn new skills. All the skills used well together add up to what we call Christian service or Christian love. Sacraments give us the gifts and skills of the Spirit. So now, looking back at the ministry of the word, we can say that God’s word and scripture are not just knowledge about God and about us. It is also fuel that powers us along, further and further into God’s great assembly.

The Father and the Son between them know we are not ready – not holy yet – and they work to make us ready. When they have finished, and each of us is ready, they will declare that we are holy. So meantime Jesus works on us, to make-us-holy. His holy-making is his sacrifice. This is his work. He dedicates himself entirely to it, and we can say that it costs him everything, and he pays whatever it costs. It is all at his expense, and if it leaves him with nothing, still he will go through with it until it is all done. But at the end, we will be holy, and the Father and Son will decide that we are worth their effort, and we will be quite amazed.

Communion

We go up to the altar to receive communion. When you go up to the altar with everyone else you all form a line, moving slowly forward up the aisle. At that moment you can see that we have all set out on a long walk that continues as long as our lifetime, and which takes us on a trek through the world. We are going through the desert with the people of God, led by the Lord who we can only see as a distant column of fire and smoke ahead of us. Mostly what we see is the long column of people in front of us.

You are following the Lord, just as the children of Israel did. You can practise that long walk – in glory but through shame – every Eucharist. The line of pilgrims only appears for a minute, and no one points it out. But you can know that you are always safe in the middle of that line, because Jesus has pioneered the route, lots of Christians – ‘saints’– have followed and they now show you the route. And lots of Christians will follow you, and they will be thankful because you keep the Lord Jesus in your viewfinder and so you show them the way too.

Standing before the Lord

In every church we look for the Lord Jesus where the altar is. He is our king and he is enthroned here. Sometimes the bible tells us that the earth is his footstool, and the altar is a little version of that footstool. All around the altar is white and gold, reflecting back to us the rather dazzling future glory of heaven.  But when all this light doesn’t blaze out at us too much, we can make out the Lord and Mary and the disciples, and behind them, all the Lord’s people. All of them are pointing out the Lord for us.  In this church, above the altar, in the window, we see the Lord, with the lamb across his shoulders, St Peter on the left, St Paul on the right. Above them there is the Holy Spirit, portrayed as a dove. He hovers over creation, keeping the covenant of God which protects us all, and he comes down to us to bring us into his holy communion.  And that is a pelican, who feeds his children from the blood she takes from her own breast.

When we see the priest in the mass we see where Jesus is. Jesus puts our priest and servers there, so we look in the right direction, even though we can’t make Jesus out. On either side of the priest are two servers who help us to focus on the right place. They are doing the job of the angels, framing the view of Christ in the middle, like a range-finder. When it is talking about the angels in the most holy place in the temple, the Old Testament calls them the Cherubim. All angels sing, Holy, holy, holy… and we join in with them.

So we see Jesus twice at least. Once in the image of Jesus portrayed above the altar (or maybe on the cross on the altar), and once in the priest who stands at the altar.  But without these images, we don’t see Jesus yet. We are not ready. But he is making us ready.

Remember the blind man in the Gospel of Mark (8.24) who said he could only see stick-men, ‘like trees walking around’? Remember how difficult it was for the disciples on the way to Emmaus to realise who they were looking at? Jesus and everyone around him are still completely blurry to us. It is as if we can sometimes make out their outline, but mostly only see the brilliance without being able to see who it is who shines that brightly.

The priest looks like any other Christian. He wears the dull-coloured clothes of poverty (because in theory, only rich people wear bright colours). But in the Eucharist, he puts on the bright white garment of the holiness that God is spreading over all of us. God lends us his holiness, and since he doesn’t ask for it back, it stays with us, and the Holy Spirit always tops it up for us.  So the priest becomes one of the holy things, just like the bread and wine. As this bread and wine become holy, and we receive them, we become holy. Of course this takes our whole lifetime and more. But in the Eucharist the priest, along with all the other elements and the prayers, is a true-to-life portrait of our own future holiness. Sometimes the priest is dressed in the green of creation, with gold, reminding us that man is placed in creation in order to look after it, and that creation will be redeemed and glorious, just as we will. So even the vestments of altar and priest tell us about our own future.

We will see Jesus as he really is, and we will be like him, and we will shine like that too. And sometimes, when others see us, they may get a glimpse of that future glory. Sometimes they like the look of that glory, and sometimes they turn away from it. We can’t see it when we look at each other, and yet, in the Eucharist, we can learn to see each other as we will be, when we are all made holy and this glory shines through each of us too.

Holy, holy, holy

We are at the doorway into heaven. We can hear the singing and make out some of the words. We stand before the Lord and he speaks to us, and he does so through these many voices. And we hear what they are singing and saying in heaven, and we are able to join in. Everybody is there. There are out there, in a place that is wide open. We are still stuck here in a smaller space, but this is good because we are not yet ready for life out there in that much bigger place. It is too much for us, and there is no point in sending us out there before we are strong enough for it. Our confinement here is preparing us for the time when we are ready, just as splashing around in the shallow end means you the getting ready for the deep end, and that one day you will be ready for the sea.

What do you see in the service when church is full of people? You see people. You see them from behind, and some of them see you from behind. We see people who are ahead of us; they started out before us, and now they are older, they have got a bit further. We look to them for their experience. So in the service the Lord surrounds us with people and always presents us with new ones.

At the exchange of peace they will come and shake your hand and at the end they will introduce themselves to you. Then you can ask them what they are doing here. Ask them why they come. Ask them something about the service. Ask them what their favourite bit is and why they like it. Ask them which their favourite hymn is. You are too shy? You are afraid that you don’t know anything and will sound silly? Don’t be. They will probably be glad you asked your question. They may be as shy as you are, but they will glad if you ask them a question.

So what do you think of our parish church now?