Still pondering these things after my experience in Yorkshire. (Did I say I had some really wonderful fish’n’chips up there?). I haven’t reached anything settled yet (except that I have been convicted of the importance of liturgy) but here are a couple of things I’m pondering:
Tim’s put up a testimony here.
Peter’s written some sensible stuff here.
More on this anon.
Things that you need to understand if you want to know what’s going on in the world: the ‘Export Land Model’
I may have put this up before, but the problem with business as usual is that it assumes too many static variables. Imagine you have a milk bottle which you are filling with water – all goes nice and steadily until you hit the bottle neck – if you don’t slow down the rate of water going into the bottle then you get sprayed! We are now moving into the bottle neck and we are going to be forced to change our behaviours – the ELM is just one reason why things will get much worse, much more quickly than any of the powers that be expect.
Intensely good; I cried my eyes out. At least four out of five.
PS I’m sure there’s a technical term to describe the medical equipment he lugs around through most of the film, as a metaphor/symbol for the problems that he is labouring with. Objective correlative?
I’m going to start transcribing, in edited form, my learning church talks on communion into the blog, but in small chunks, which may make them easier to digest!! Click ‘full post’ for text.
What is the Eucharist? The word refers to the giving thanks of the community. ‘Eucharist’ is simply a Greek word meaning thanksgiving and it’s the ecumenical word, in other words when the different churches come together to talk about it, that’s the word they use to describe it and it doesn’t necessarily have any other great theological import other than this. Of course what name you give to the meal is freighted with all sorts of politics – I tend to try and ignore the politics so far as I can! – whether you call it the Lord’s Supper, or the Mass or the Eastern Orthodox call it the Synaxis, there are all sorts of names, but breaking bread and wine and sharing it as the community of the faithful telling the story of Jesus, that’s what we are talking about.
This is Tom Wright, Bishop of Durham:
“I firmly believe that when Jesus himself wanted to explain to his disciples what his forthcoming death was all about he didn’t give them a theory, he gave them a meal.”
In other words, it’s when we actually share this meal and take part in this process that we start to understand what our faith is all about. The earliest description we have, as I am sure you are all aware, comes in 1 Corinthians 11 and Paul says,
For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you: The Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way, after supper he took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.” For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.
I’m sure you’re familiar with the passage, it is pretty much the heart of what the priest says every time there is communion. In some churches it is exactly St Paul’s passage which is used, in some churches it is slightly repackaged, rephrased, but that is the earliest text we have got referring to it. And it is within about twenty years after the event.
We don’t know exactly which year it was when Jesus died, but it’s not unreasonable to think it being from early to mid-thirties AD and that Paul’s letter is early to mid-fifties AD, so you are talking about twenty years after the event, in other words it is within living memory. Just to emphasise that, it is not really very long at all after the event, and it is in a context where there is an existing practice, the people he is writing it to are aware of this, the story has gone before them, and they are acting on it. So Paul is referring to something which is already going on, which means that the Eucharist, as an ongoing practice within the church community, was established long before Paul is writing his letters.
Therefore: we can be pretty confident that the heart of the Eucharist goes back to Christ himself, and that it is not something invented out of whole cloth by the later church (compare a couple of references in Acts to the Apostles coming together to break bread on the first day of the week and so on).
But what did Jesus mean by it?
One new service that is now embedded in the benefice is ‘The Learning Supper’, from 6.30 to 9pm on the fourth Sunday of the month, and including a shared meal. We’ve just done one on the theme of ‘Anger, Forgiveness and Reconciliation’, but these are the ones in the pipeline and they form a four-part sequence:
May 25th: Law, grace and righteousness
June 29th: Obedience and the apple
July 27th: Prayer
A blog recommendation for those who like Wendell Berry and similarly ecologically sound writing.
… and tell people to wake up!
TVFTB = “The view from the boat”
Because we’ve bought one – one of these – and I spent a few happy hours this afternoon learning how to put the sails on.
I forgot to put this up earlier (for the benefit of Mersea Benefice people):
Learning Church summer 2008
Essential and Credible: Understanding Christianity Today
Saturdays at 9.30am in the Church Hall
May 3rd: Love God… Love neighbour – the essence of Christian faith
May 10th: “But I can’t believe that!”: what is so Holy about Scripture?
May 17th: You must be holy: the identity of Israel
May 24th: Bloody awful: sacrifice, atonement and the Temple
May 31st: “You’re all doomed!” – prophets and prophecy
June 7th: Jesus’ message: Change your life! God is here!
June 14th: If Christ was not raised then we are the most to be pitied
June 21st: “Unless you are born again…”: right and wrong ways to understand that phrase
June 28th: “Eat my flesh” – why Christians aren’t cannibals
July 5th: Prayer, liturgy and worship
July 12th: Why Richard Dawkins is an idiot
July 19th: Where do we go from here?
Not Ollie.