St. Paul’s On-the-Hill Episcopal Church

The Rev. Stephen C. Holton, Rector

Ash Wednesday; February 25, 2009

Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

GOD IN CHURCH & ALTAR & PEOPLE

For the World

Last Sunday we got back here after a long trip to Montreal, and north in Quebec, and then back here. It was a good trip, but it was good to be home.

As I stood behind the altar and celebrated the Eucharist with you I felt a deep feeling of contentment come over me, a deep sense of being grounded in ways I could not understand; and the knowledge that there is a rootedness in God that happens in Eucharist, in Community, that is hard to find in many places; a rootedness that withstands the slings and arrows of this world, economic downturns and personal downturns. God lasts and so we last. God loves and so we can love, no matter what is going on around us. Our source of strength is in Him and not in those things outside ourselves. So with His strength we can affect all that is outside ourselves. We can affect it with His strength, His love and have an impact on it. It does not destroy us. We heal it.

It is because of God whom we find in church – though others may find him in other places. It is because of God by whom we are nourished in communion – though others may be nourished by Him in other ways. It is because of God whom we encounter in each other. And it is because of each other, and with each other, that we can bring God into the world, and show His love there.

As I thought of God’s courage and strength that sustained me in that Eucharistic experience, I thought of the courage and strength that has sustained many Christians down through the years, in little churches like this one and big churches in big cities, in cosmopolitan centers like Paris and Rome, and rural communities in places like Kenya and Mississippi.

I thought of those famous words that I have quoted before and which I quote now, from the great liturgical scholar, Dom Gregory Dix, in speaking of the Eucharist which sustains us all, and has always sustained us, and has always welcomed us home to God.

He writes: “At the heart of it all is the Eucharistic action, a thing of absolute simplicity – the taking, blessing, breaking and giving of bread and the taking, blessing and giving of a cup of wine and water, as these were first done in their new meaning by a young Jew before and after supper with his friends on the night before he died. Soon it was simplified still further, by leaving out the supper and combining the double grouping before and after it into a single rite. So the four action Shape of the Liturgy was found by the end of the first century. He had told his friends to do this henceforward with the new meaning for the ‘anamnesis’ (the remembrance) of Him, and they have done it ever since.

Was ever another command so obeyed? For century after century, spreading slowly to every continent and country and among every race on earth, this action has been done, in every conceivable human circumstance, for every conceivable human need from infancy and before it to extreme old age and after it, from the pinnacles of earthly greatness to the refuge of fugitives in the caves and dens of the earth. Men have found no better thing than this to do for kings at their crowning and for criminals going to the scaffold; for armies in triumph or for a bride and bridegroom in a little country church; for the proclamation of a dogma or for a good crop of wheat; for the wisdom of a Parliament of a mighty nation or for a sick old woman afraid to die; for a school boy sitting an examination or for Columbus setting out to discover America; for the famine of whole provinces or for the soul of a dead lover; in thankfulness because my father did not die of pneumonia; for a village headman much tempted to return to fetich because the yams had failed; because the Turk was at the gates of Vienna; for the repentance of Margaret; for the settlement of a strike; for a son for a barren woman; for Captain so-and-so, wounded and prisoner of war; while the lions roared in the nearby amphitheatre; on the beach at Dunkirk; while the hiss of scythes in the thick June grass came faintly through the windows of the church; tremulously, by an old monk on the fiftieth anniversary of his vows; furtively, by an exiled bishop who had hewn timber all day in a prison camp near Murmansk; gorgeously, for the canonization of S. Joan of Arc – one could fill many pages with the reasons why men have done this, and not tell a hundredth part of them. And best of all, week by week and month by month, on a hundred thousand successive Sundays, faithfully, unfailingly, across all the parishes of Christendom, the pastors have done this just to make the plebs sancta Dei – the holy common people of God.”

And so you see my extreme contentment as I stood behind the altar over there and faced you over there, all around the Eucharist right there for God all around us. A complete grouping in community, living and dead, human and divine; one with each other and in God.

Then there was another vision, another moment of real life that meant so much more. It was in the narthex after the early service, as I was coming through to take my place at the back and shake hands as people passed through on their way to coffee hour. Someone’s mother had died and all were gathered around her, offering their condolences, their kindness, their best wishes, their help. Years of relationship yielded acres of love encompassing, enfolding, holding this person in her grief.

This too is a sacrament. This too is love, this time mediated through the people of God, for other people of God, by God himself.

Was ever this other commandment so obeyed, this one to love? And perhaps this is the other reason these little country churches last, and these great cathedrals last, and these rural communities in the middle of nature, and those people in great persecution or economic danger.

On the night he was betrayed Jesus took bread and blessed and broke it and said, whenever you do this, do this in remembrance of me. He also got up, took a towel and bound it around his waist and knelt at the feet of his disciples and asked them to do this, too, in remembrance of him, and wash one another’s feet. And it has never been clear to me how the history of the church might have been affected if we did both on a Sunday morning.

Yet, perhaps, we do; taking bread, blessing and breaking and eating it here, at the altar, in his presence; and then going forth and blessing and loving one another, also in his presence. Then we go forth from this place with the same love placed by the same Lord in the same hearts to bless and love all these strangers, the heartbroken and the careworn whom we meet on our path.

The same Lord sends us to all, the same Lord who meets us here, the same Lord we come away to, to meet here, week by week.

This Lent we come away to a season of penitence and fasting, to get reacquainted with that Lord whom we might have left along the way, whom we might have forgotten along the way, from whom we might have been distracted by economic danger, personal hardship or just fast paced living.

We turn back toward him. We get the ashes; ‘remember you are but dust and to dust you shall return.’ We receive the Eucharist; ‘Do this in remembrance of me.’ We recite the Litany of Penitence – all that we have done and left undone. We hear the words of absolution; “Almighty God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who desires not the death of sinners, but that they may turn from their wickedness and live.”

We are accepted again into his eternal kingdom, now, in this present life. We go forth again, “to love and serve the Lord” in every stranger and neighbor and enemy – heartbroken, careworn, with no strength left in their soul.

Here is a place for such strength. Here is a place for such kindness. We are its bearers. We bring it to others. With words or actions, we do it in the name of God.