Easter Day Sermon 2015
May the words spoken be to the greater glory of God and advance of the Gospel. In the Name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.
Some here will remember the halcyon days of the 1980’s when wine drinking in New Zealand rapidly increased in popularity and our Sauvignon Blanc became world famous. But some, notably Kathy among them, never left their preference for Chardonnay. Now, as we hear that Chardonnay is having a come back in preferences, she and others like her are proud to say she kept that Chardonnay preference tradition going, against the tide of opinion.
There are of course, many of examples of how we stick to our guns on matters of preference or more deeply held allegiances or opinions…sometimes allowing ourselves to be swayed when obvious needs for change are presented to us. Religion is one of those personal preferences and within the spectrum of worship style in our Anglican Church there are many options to choose from.
As is fairly obvious I guess, I’ve never been persuaded away from the faith expression I’ve grown up with in the Anglican Church. I try to live in my faith through the image of Christ in the context of the way I feel compelled to worship God…in what we know as the Anglo-Catholic style of worship. Andy mentioned in his Good Friday sermon how from year-to-year we pass through this Holy Week and Easter Season with familiarity and similarity such that the individual experiences become blended into a single experience of God in Christ crucified and risen…and yet every year is special as this one has been. Listening to him speak, I realized that I couldn’t remember a year since I was a very young child where I have not participated in these services…and in a worship style very similar to what we have experienced here this year. There has been for me and for many of you too I think, a practically unbroken tradition of sacramental focus in worship within what some call ‘the old way of doing church’.
As it happens, one of my own most wonderful moments this year was on Good Friday when in the early morning I checked into my Facebook account and found a posting from Bishop Jim. His posting had the headline, “Why young people are seeking old ways of doing church?” This had me intrigued because as we know, the cry for decades has been about doing church differently and in ‘new’ ways. I read the article and immediately sent my own post, inviting all people to come to St Alban’s to experience rich sacramentally focused liturgy, where we haven’t tossed out the so-called trappings that were associated with doing church the ‘old way’. The article was from a person who had lived through the era of removing icons and furniture, vestments and even much of the foundation spirituality that has marked out the Anglican Church, in order to adopt ‘new’ ways of ‘doing church.’ It’s time to stop, says the article and proposes that many young people are finding meaning and nourishment from the ‘old ways of doing church’. Let’s hope that this is so!
What we do here at St Alban’s is deeply prayerful and sacramental, reflecting the revival of early 1st Century church traditions with a focus on the sacred, espoused first by post-reformation expressions of a need to wind back to earlier liturgical practices as eventually adopted by the Tractarian Movement of the 19th century, and then later through the Catholic Renewal Movement in our church during the 1960’s and 70’s. St Alban’s is marked out as being the bells and smells parish in this Diocese and is accepted as authentically maintaining Anglo-Catholic sacramental worship and liturgical style. In other words I suppose, ‘doing church the old way’, although I would actually dispute that because some of what we do and most certainly what we say in support of the Gospel message of inclusiveness of all people, is not necessarily shared by those who label themselves catholic…Roman or Anglo-Catholic.
Knowing what I wanted to say here this morning, I was delighted to read this article because it fits well with my sense of how important it is that we maintain the tradition of liturgical style we have at St Alban’s. In saying this though, I want to speak about what that tradition really is, whether we ‘do church’ in the old way or in some new way. In my delight at reading the Facebook posting by Bishop Jim, I hope that many are encouraged to come here and experience the way we ‘do church’ for themselves. Our liturgy is rich in sacramental focus and prayerful sincerity…those qualities transcend any preferences we may have for bells and smells or alternatively priests in jeans and sandals…but personally I prefer the former.
So let’s start at the beginning. What we are doing today in this mass, marks out how our church began. We could say that The Annunciation has a claim on that and in a way that is true. Just as well, we could say that The Nativity and all the events in the life and ministry of Jesus have a claim on those early beginnings…but really, it was when the cry went up “Christ is risen; he is risen indeed” that our church was launched into being…the church Jesus left for his disciples to build and evangelise in his name.
The events of the next few days would form the basis for the church going forward as Jesus had urged them to prepare for after his death. The Risen Christ appears to Mary Magdalene in the garden and then later to the disciples as they were hiding away for fear of their lives and wondering what would happen now that their Master had been killed.
Even then, this was the time when our worship traditions commenced. The followers of Jesus had to find ways to express their prayerful thanks to God for the Risen Christ who had led them in the person of Jesus. Their new words of prayer mingled meaningfully with the words of Jewish Scripture they knew well…but something new was happening.
The reading of the Hebrew Scriptures and Psalms remained of course, until the Christian Scriptures were written and incorporated into services of praise and thanksgiving. Liturgies using phrases of Scripture in the context of expressions of belief emerged…we use them today. Over time the wearing of ancient vestments…a mix of some Hebrew, some Roman, some Egyptian and later some more modern garments became symbolic as sacred elements of prayerful ceremonies as the Early Church developed with its Presbyter-Bishops and with a tug-of-war between Pentecostal and institutional church models, both arguing that they were truly being guided by the Holy Spirit. Nothing much has changed in that discussion after more than 2000 years of assertion of right…although at present, I note that the congregations in the former appear larger than those in the latter group.
The use of candles to represent the light of Christ and hope for the world became more meaningful than simply providing illumination. The same is true for incense, carrying the Cross of Christ in Procession and honouring Our Lady his Mother Mary and All the Saints.
‘Doing church the old way’ is for us a rich mixture of history and tradition…but it doesn’t end there. Our worship and its focus on the sacred is not only based on the life and ministry of Jesus but also, it is in the context of the promises he made, reflecting God’s will for the world and his legacy for it. Old or New, our way is the Way of the Cross, with Christ crucified and risen.
Regardless of liturgical style or otherwise, this truth is immutable if we are to consider ourselves to be Christian. This is what doesn’t change, no matter how we ‘do church’.
This year during Lent, I was part of a group who each week progressively constructed a set of Prayer Beads, while praying the Ancient Order of Service known as Compline…what we call Night Prayer in the contemporary New Zealand Prayer Book. We’ve heard about these beads a few times during our services and on Palm Sunday they were blessed for their sacredness as instruments of prayer by the individuals who had made them. Each set of beads has a small Cross in their sequence.
This was for me, the first of six Crosses that I have used for prayer during Lent, Holy Week and now today…Easter Day. This year, I have personally focused especially on the Cross, even more than I usually do in my daily devotions. Beginning with the Cross for the Prayer Beads, I decided that I would use a different Cross for each section of Lent, Holy Week and Easter. I’m particularly pleased I did now, given the content of the Facebook article I’ve mentioned because as I say, the Cross and its meaning for our faith transcends all expressions of worship and liturgy style. It is what it is and while I want to declare my Anglo-Catholic preferences, I do so in the context of what is beyond the Stations of the Via Dolorosa, which we may regard as the Way of the Cross in our daily lives.
The Cross dominates our penitential time in Lent as we look to it in forgiveness and for reconciliation with God through Christ and with each other in our lives. The Prayer Beads Cross has that purpose for me and it became the first of the sequence of six crosses I’m going to talk about now.
The second Cross is the one I always wear as a Benedictine Oblate in the Order of the Holy Cross. It’s a so-called plain cross…proclaiming the Triumph of the Cross…it’s one with no figure of Christ upon it, either Christ Crucified or Christ in Glory such as the one above me here or our Altar Cross. I wore this cross for our service of Devotions at the Stations, when as a plain cross, Our Lord carried it to his crucifixion.
The third Cross is one I wore on a medal…the medal of the oldest ever Anglican Religious Society…the Confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament, which I happen to represent as Priest Guardian in New Zealand. This medal has a crucifix on one side and a chalice and paten on the other, signifying the Blessed Sacrament. I wore this for the Mass of the Last Supper on Maundy Thursday, as we commemorated that signal event of Jesus with his disciples, leaving for all time forward, a memorial of his Blessed Body and Blood…his Real Presence made Holy when we accept it to be the sacred memorial it is.
The fourth Cross is one I was given by a priest friend as he was dying. His death was tortuous and he felt at the time that his life was ending badly…painfully in death and with a sense that he had been shunned by society for what and who he was in life. I always wear that Cross on Good Friday for its reminder that as Jesus felt forsaken as he hung painfully on the Cross, we all experience our own human pain and at times have a sense of abandonment. I am also reminded however, that in the end, Jesus rallied in his faith with his last breath by saying, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” In this way, he gives us hope and the comfort of knowing that when we hand ourselves over to God through Christ, we are not alone and are never abandoned by him, no matter who or what we are.
Yesterday, for the Holy Saturday Vigil Mass, I wore the Benedictine Cross given me some years ago when appointed as the Minister Provincial for the Order of Holy Cross in NZ. This is my fifth Cross for the week. It’s a crucifix but has the symbols of Saint Benedict behind it. As the church grew and successors of the disciples evangelized, mystics and religious people like Benedict developed means for people to pray and in his case, to live in communities of prayer, doing the work of God. To me, his work in the glorious shadow of the Cross, provides a spirituality that continues to bring the light of Christ into the world as we symbolized last night at our mass and do time and again through our worship during the year.
Today I am wearing a new Cross, my sixth for the week. I bought it last week in Melbourne while there in St Paul’s Cathedral. I went in to pray for my just departed brother-in-law, whom I had known since childhood and loved very much. After lighting a candle for him, I passed by a stall with various items for sale and saw this Cross. It is a plain Cross by definition but a rather nice one as it happens. You may wish to look at it after mass. It is made up of two crosses…one on top of the other. The outside most Cross is superimposed on the Cross of Bethlehem…the four equilateral crosses surrounding a larger cruciform shape. It is made of olive wood and comes from the Holy Land. It struck me when I bought it that my focus on the Cross for this season was unintentionally and yet suddenly and splendidly supplemented by this lovely object. It was appropriate to my mood of grief at the time, which was yet joyful too in that I am convinced by the promise of Christ that my friend who had just died would be received into God’s love and care. How appropriate I thought, to wear this Cross for the mass on the Day of Resurrection.
So there are my six Crosses of Lent, Holy Week and Easter. The Cross, which stands for us as a symbol of our faith and the fulfillment of the promises of Christ.
Today we give glory to God for his gifts of mercy and grace…and for his incarnate Son Our Lord Jesus Christ. We each of us has our own personal stories to tell, joys to extoll and fears to express when we consider the crosses of our own lives. But I truly believe that we can lay all these at the Altar of God and be assured that in the Resurrected Christ, he is with us now and through the presence of the Holy Spirit, we are made whole and reborn in his image. What better way than to gaze upon the Cross and all it means for our faith.
Every time we put Christ at our centre and especially when we receive him into our lives through song and sacrament, fellowship and prayer, worship and thanksgiving, we have the Cross as our unifying symbol of hope. We can do that (‘do church’ as it were) in anyway we choose…but for us here in our way at St Alban’s…perhaps the ‘old way of doing church’…we do so with what is new every day in our faith. And t hat new thing is the new life we are given by God through Christ…Christ, who is risen today. Alleluia!
In the Name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen