I did that…

An architect can stand back, look at a building she has designed and say ‘I did that’. A carpenter can look at his work and say ‘I did that’: if I was that carpenter I could say ‘I did that, you can tell, it wobbles’. A Prime Minister can look at a country cascading into chaos and say ‘I did that!’ A piano tuner can listen to the silvery tempered tones of the keyboard he has calibrated and say, quietly to himself so as not to disturb other listeners, ‘I did that’. Even a chef has a brief window of opportunity in which to say ‘I did that’ before someone comes along and says ‘I ate that’.  But a priest? When can we say that? The work of the clergy is transient, ephemeral, insubstantial, hard to measure. I prayed. I visited. I sat with someone. I listened. Perhaps that is why vicars can leap so enthusiastically at building projects: something that is solid, substantial, with a definite end point when they can say ‘I did that’. Sometimes, they really shouldn’t.

But forget building follies, there is a certain point in any priest’s ministry,  early usually, and especially for those up the catholic end of the candle, when genuflecting to the sacrament suddenly seems absurd, because you look at that wafer of consecrated bread and the thought flashes across your mind ‘I did that…’. But then every priest should know that regardless of their waving their hands over the bread and saying the magic words, they didn’t do that. That is an important  thing for all of us to remember.

There is a streak of ambiguity in Jesus’ teaching that has bequeathed Christians an immense missionary advantage — we’ve proved nothing if not adaptable— and also two thousand years of arguing and counting. If two millennia have taught us anything, it’s that Christians just love a good ding-dong. And yet those disputes, disagreements and debates… Just as the Pyramids and the Colosseum seem, well more substantial, somehow grander, that say the Gherkin or the Shard, so the ancient arguments of the church seem just that little bit more monumental, more epic than they are now.  Christians are still arguing, of course, but by this point in time we are squabbling over the crumbs, a crowd of bickering seagulls, rather than noble warriors of the faith on a quest for the truth.

Back in the fourth century, for example, what became known as the Donatist controversy raged across Christendom for more than 100 years, the last embers of its furious fire not blinking out till some 200 years later. I know you had a whole sermon on the Donatists a couple of years ago: you haven’t got all of it this time, and anyway you’ve forgotten it all by now, those of you who were here.  In brief, what it was about was this. During the last major persecution of the church in the Roman Empire, under the Emperor Diocletian, many Christians, laity as well as priests and bishops apostatised- denied their faith- in order to save their lives. This might have involved handing over the Christian scriptures to the magistrates or sacrificing in one of the official cults. Most Christians were not brought to that time of trial; most of those who were caved in to save their lives. It’s understandable. There but for the grace of God and so on. When the persecution was over, the apostates re-emerging as Christians once again were greeted by the church with forgiveness and understanding.  Except in North Africa where, grouped around the Bishop Donatus Magnus,  a substantial number of churches refused to accept the sacraments and spiritual authority of the priests and bishops who had publicly fallen away from the faith during the persecution. Their argument was that such was the magnitude of the sin of apostasy that clerics who had saved themselves during the persecution had rendered themselves incapable of effectively celebrating the sacraments. As is so often the case with extreme views- Nigel Farage anyone?-, the Donatist position quickly became more extreme andhardened to refuse to accept any sinfulness in a priest. You may detect here a spiritualised echo of the Old Testament, where the book of Leviticus decrees that:

No one who has a blemish shall draw near [to offer the Lord’s offerings], [not]one who is blind or lame, or one who has a mutilated face or a limb too long,  or one who has a broken foot or a broken hand,  or a hunchback, or a dwarf, or a man with a blemish in his eyes or an itching disease or scabs. 

Which pretty much rules out the entire current hierarchy of the churches of the Anglican Communion. Or it would if they paid attention to that part of Leviticus.

You may also recognise rumblings of the Donatist views in some of our contemporary Christian spats. 

It took Saint Augustine of Hippo, the heaviest-weight thinker of Catholic Christianity to comprehensively trash this argument and show it up for what it is. The saint’s response to the Donatist pre-puritans was, to put is simply, ‘It’s not the priest who’s doing the work with the sacraments, it’s God’. The validity of a sacrament depends on the holiness of God, not the worthiness or holiness of the minister. That has been the position of all Catholic (inc Anglican) churches ever since. 

Which is just as well, because every single one of us who stands up at one of the hundreds of thousands of altars around the world, whether it be here in St Mary, Beddington, in Canterbury Cathedral or the barley-sugar confection in St Peter’s, Rome; every single one of us is a sinner. And as far as the sacraments are  concerned, being a sinner is like being pregnant or dead, you either are or you aren’t, you can’t be a little bit pregnant or partially dead or half a sinner.

The work is intangible. But the work is not mine, it is God’s. Pick your metaphor, the priest is a window, a pipe, a bottle, a means of delivery like  the brown paper on a parcel, the messenger not the message: and the holiness of God cannot be changed in any way by what it flows through.  

Some of you like me, some of you don’t, some don’t really care either way: if you rummaged around in my dirty laundry I’m sure you could find something to shock you, but that isn’t the point. What happens here, happens because of God not because of the priest, change the priest, pick any priest and it still happens, and the priest is an expression of the priesthood of all believers. It’s important for the church to have someone set aside to make sure that what is done is done (hopefully some of the time), but the individual attributes of that priest, good, bad or indifferent are not a factor. One ideal would be for the priest to be transparent, invisible and inaudible: as you may have noticed, we’re just not created like that, so we have to accept that God doesn’t want his priests like that either.

God can, and very often does, make the most implausible and improbable things the channels and instruments of his grace. Bread for example. If you were going to invent a religion from scratch, you wouldn’t in a million years choose bread as the bearer of one of the central mysteries of that faith, unless perhaps you were an especially obsessive baker named something like Elijah Hovis or Willie Warburton. Yet today we will take a piece of slightly odd but apparently straightforward bread and treat it in a most peculiar way. We will put it on a silver plate, hold it up to be venerated, ring bells when it’s consecrated, sing songs about it, genuflect at it. Most peculiar, downright bizarre. From one perspective it is just a piece of bread, rather as the Bible is just a book and Jesus was just a man. But do any of us truly believe that the world is no deeper that what is in front of our eyes, that there is nothing but surface, that everything is 2D, like the houses on Hollywood film set, all front and no behind? Surely not. We feel without quite knowing how to explain it the sense of latency in the world, that much of what is there is hidden from our grasp; we know almost instinctively that life has depth and some things have more gravity, more solidity  than others even though they may look, superficially, the same. And for Christians that wafer thin, almost translucent, flimsy piece of bread reveals to us the depth of holiness of God, it becomes, par excellence the  conduitof his grace, the meeting place of heaven and earth, and the revelation of his love. Today we celebrate the feast of Corpus Christi: we celebrate not bread, not wine,  but God’s holiness, Christ’s body and blood.

In church we try to make that bread as bland and unnoticeable as possible: thin, tasteless and with a minimum of crunch. That’s possible with bread in a way it’s not with humans. But it really doesn’t matter. God’s holiness still comes through. Ordinary bread, consecrated by an imperfect priest, on behalf of an impaired church:  made holy by God.

God did that.