Heavenly heartbeat

Day after day, week by week, year after year, life is largely the same. 

Monday, wash day; Tuesday, ironing day; Wednesday, half day; Thursday, slow day; Friday, fish day; Saturday, wedding day; Sunday, Church day.

And… year after year, week by week, Sunday after Sunday, church is largely the same.  Same words, same vestments, same pews, same people, same Bible, same hymns, same organ voluntaries, often the same sermon though you have to have been coming a few years before you catch on to the cycle. But even if the preacher has bothered to sit down and write something new it isn’t. A painter has eleven colours; a musician has twelve tones; a preacher has an even more limited palette. I do sometiems feel I should apologise for  standing in this pulpit banging away at the same few notesm, like a Beethoven symphony but slightly less tedious. For the less cultured, I’m always picking away at the same scab, but you know that joke about preachers only having one sermon in them that they repeat endlessly is true and today I’m fessing up. Here is the formula. Anecdote. Joke. Dog. Jesus loves you. In six words, every sermon I’ve ever preached.In my defence, if it’s worth saying, it’s worth saying every week, or at least every few years.  As Andre Gide quipped:

Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since nobody was listening, everything must be said again.

A complaint sometimes levelled at Anglican worship– not just the preaching– is that it’s the same thing every service. My reflex response is: ‘are you a six year old?’ and the considered response, ‘Well yes, but you like it that way: I can tell. When any of the prayers change for the season,  I can feel the disaffection and confusion radiating from the pews.

If you were bored with your church– obviously that’s not going to happen here, but it’s theoretically possible– if church was starting to make you yawn you could go to one s down the road. You won’t have to walk far. Our ancestors built churches far more enthusiastically than people ever wanted to go to them. Anyway, you’ve upped and gone elsewhere. And at first you might think ‘Oooh, this is different. They sing those hymns and they wave their hands in the air while doing it. I’ve not heard that sermon before. Look at all these people.’ And then after a while you’ll notice, that not only is it the same words, the same check shirts on the backs of the same people, the same worship band playing the same tune over and over, the preaching preaching the same sermon; not just that but, also, just below the surface sheen, it’s actually the same service it was at St Mary’s. Remember St Mary’s? Those were the days.

Week in, week out, the world over, church is the same, like an vast orchestra tuning to one note

Repetition is comforting but familiarity sometimes breeds contempt (don’t I just know it); worst of all the sheer fixedness of it all can lead to  indifference.

I can attest that though it’s a cliché it is true that those who live by the sea side rarely visit the beach; likewise those who live in London are unlikely to be found milling around outside Buckingham Palace or Harrods unless the in laws are visiting (arrived a fortnight ago, 2 months to go). Seaside or capital or just dull suburbs,  you just don’t know what incredible things are there everyday, until something makes you stop and think, or worse, somebody takes it away.

Listen to your heartbeat, feel your pulse. All being well it is regular, repetitive, always the same: padam, padam, sometimes faster, sometimes slower, sometimes racing when  ‘it’s Sunday morning, time for church!’, the slowest  it will ever be five minutes into the sermon; day in day out 24 /7, 60-100 times a minute. Every  minute of every day of your life it’s there, padam, padam,  always the same. You rarely notice it.  Always there, never noticed. 

And when it stops. So do you.

Just like you, the church has a pulse, the body of Christ has a heartbeat: the eucharist. The regular padam padam of prayer and communion is the heartbeat of the church.  Sunday by Sunday, week in week out year after year, there is the eucharist, always the same. Same words, same prayers, same actions, same bread, same wine. Sunday by Sunday, week in week out, year after year, always the same. And I’m not sure any of us realise quite what an incredible thing that is. It’s always there: turn up to church on Sunday there’s sure to be a eucharist pulsing away, padam, padam; the one tune those Christians know and they’re playing it again. Easy to be indifferent, easy not to notice what an incredible thing you have stepped into. It’s like living by the sea, but infinitely more so; not noticing living in London, but exponentially more.

I don’t mean the Mass words, prayers, music, and so on are so fantastic you should be struck silent by the greatness. What is so astonishing is what is actually going on here. Shall I tell you what that is?

You are feeding your soul.

How?

You are feeding on God himself. 

Question is, then, why don’t you feel it? 

When you take communion why isn’t there a sudden fanfare  of shimmering trumpets and the sound of a myriad of angels singing and gold on your tongue coursing through your veins till the whole of your body is flooded with the lux eterna? Why is it not something like that?

Because we’re talking God, not Liberace; church not Las Vegas. 

Let’s think for a moment in a  Beddington Park kind of way. A dog’s sense of smell is a hundred thousand times more powerful than that of humans. A hundred thousand. How they can bear to live with us is beyond me. But they do. It no doubt helps that they really relish gross, horrible things. Anyway. A sense of smell a hundred thousand times more powerful than ours: dogs live in a very different world to humans, theirs is a reality rich beyond our comprehension, theirs a way of perceiving the world we will never  be able to experience. Lucky us. Their world is utterly beyond our senses. We will never inhabit that world, but it is, very much, still there.

Just because we can’t see it, doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

At the eucharist, receiving communion, something profound, profoundly real is happening; but… we cannot perceive it because we have only the most tentative of toeholds in that eucharistic reality, the true reality. We are, at most, paddling our toes on the shore of the great waters of eternity. We are living in the world of shadows; chained in the cave of Plato’s allegory, we are only ever able to grasp with our senses pencil outlines cast in two dimensions. You can probably tell we’ve left Beddington Park now. 

The eucharist is soul food; food from heaven; real food. We cannot see or taste that, but our soul knows what the senses cannot grasp. 

We cannot comprehend, and yet, most incredible of all,  a time will yet come when we will understand; when the veil will be lifted, when the insubstantial mists of our senses drift away and sacraments cease. Perhaps then we will look back and understand; look back and see that each time we took the bread and wine we were partaking in the very life of God;  look back and realise that each time we came to Mass we were taking one step further into the Kingdom of God. 

And when you come to communion, you are in that place, participating in that reality. Now. 

And  

Sunday after Sunday; week in, week out;  year after year, almost without knowing it, gathered round the table where earth and heaven intersect, eating the food of eternity. Our souls know it, our hearts feel it, our senses cannot apprehend it.

It’s amazing, astonishing, incredible. Here we are. Feeding our souls. What a place to be. 

Padam. Padam.