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Recently I was reminded again why renewal in theological education is so important for Germany. I attended a conference on “Text, History, and the Gospels” sponsored by the theology department at one of Germany’s major universities. The conclusions of the conference speakers were 1) there is no correspondence between what is written in the gospels and what actually happened, and therefore 2) the gospels do not give us any reliable information about Jesus, but only about the churches they were written for decades later. This is the opinion of most professors who are training future pastors for ministry in the state church (and has been for almost 100 years). No wonder hardly anyone goes to church anymore.

— Dr. Joel White (my brother-in-law), professor of New Testament at the German Theological Seminary in Giessen, Germany

“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” It was this verse (John 12:24) that Dostoevsky put as the frontispiece to the greatest novel ever written, The Brothers Karamazov. The story goes that one publisher forgot to print the verse before page one and Dostoevsky wrote an angry letter to the publisher saying, “Better it would have been to have forgotten to print my 969 page commentary on that verse and printed the verse instead!”

In our culture, we have all accepted the notion that the right to know is absolute and unlimited. The gossip column is one side of the medal; the cobalt bomb is the other. We are quite prepared to admit that, while food and sex are good in themselves, an uncontrolled pursuit of either is not, but it is difficult for us to believe that intellectual curiosity is a desire like any other, and to recognize that correct knowledge and truth are not identical. To apply a categorical imperative to knowing, so that, instead of asking, “What can I know?” we ask, “What, at this moment, am I meant to know?” — to entertain the possibility that the only knowledge which can be true for us is the knowledge that we can live up to — that seems to all of us crazy and almost immoral.

W. H. Auden, “The Joker in the Pack” (in The Dyer’s Hand) [via Alan Jacobs]

Today is the feast day of St. Anselm (died 21 April 1109). The theory of the atonement he articulated so beautifully that it still bears his name is in our day thought passé by Anglican divines and others who, being poorly trained, can’t read their Bibles and their Anselm closely enough. Here’s an excerpt from the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams’ 21 April 2009 sermon celebrating his predecessor Cantaur. Please read it entirely here.

‘No-one comprehends what is truly God’s except the Spirit of God’

What is our task at this Eucharist? What are we actually here for? First and foremost to give thanks to God for his great glory. We are here because we have learned from God in Jesus Christ that our peace and healing is to be found simply and definitively when we pray to the Father in the words of Jesus and so acknowledge the Father’s glory as it deserves to be acknowledged. There is, you could almost say, an ‘aesthetic’ of salvation: we are whole, we are at one, when we offer a truthful response to the truth given to us, when we respond in complete harmony with what has been spoken to us. Christ eternally responds in such a way to the Father, the truth echoing the truth. For us, the task is to let that truthfulness of answer to the Father’s self-giving come alive in us. And the action of the Eucharist is no more and no less than this: as Christ’s Body, we both claim our identity and renew it in sharing it through the elements of bread and wine, so that Jesus the Word Incarnate lives in us and we in him, and God is fittingly thanked for who and what he is.
     Perhaps that is as good a place as any to start in understanding St Anselm. When he writes in perhaps his most influential book that the atoning work of Christ on the cross is an offering made to repair the insulted honour of God, we may recoil in alarm: doesn’t this suggest a God who is obsessed with what is due to him, in a way that we should rightly condemn in a human being? What on earth does it mean to say that he cannot simply write off the offence to his honour which sin implies? Isn’t all this not only a scheme that privileges justice over mercy but treats justice itself as a narrow matter of satisfying inflexible and impersonal requirements? …
     Thus it is that sin can be seen as a deadly deficit of truthfulness: there is no health in us because we cannot do what we are created to do – and it doesn’t make a difference if God says ‘never mind’. The problem is not that God is clinging to his offended dignity but that we are being prevented – through our own grievous fault – from reflecting back to him his glory as we ought. We cannot live in a way that has true and objective worth. And that is why our salvation depends on an action that is not just apt or fitting or morally correct but precious – an act of immeasurable worth. Christ’s self-giving to the Father through his death on the cross is a perfect divine response to the self-giving of the Father – an infinitely precious and beautiful response to an infinitely precious and beautiful gift, a perfect echo of the eternal outpouring of God the Father in his generating of the Word. But it is also a human act: Jesus’ human freedom has chosen to act out the eternal love without reserve, accepting death as the cost of this acting-out. Humanity has at last done what it is created to do, and so a relation of truthfulness is at last restored. Our nature has been made capable of echoing God’s. We can give God back the gift he has given us, life, freedom and love. Honour is satisfied – not in the sense that some impersonal and inflexible requirement has been met, some divine box ticked, but because justice has been done to God himself by creation and so justice has been done to creation, and especially to the human creation.
     Here is Anselm himself theologising as he loves to do, on his knees and in the context of the Spirit-filled sacramental life of the Body of Christ: ‘Let your heart feed on these thoughts, chewing on them continually, sucking and swallowing them when your mouth receives the body and blood of your Saviour. Throughout your life, make these thoughts your daily bread, your diet, your rations…Good Lord Jesus…like the sun you shone forth upon me, and showed me my condition. You threw off the lead weight that was dragging me downwards…Bent over as I was, you straightened me up to look you in the face, saying, “Be confident, I have redeemed you and given my life for you”…I owe my whole self to your love because you created me; I owe my whole self to your love because you redeemed me; I owe my whole self to your love because of the greatness of your promises. Indeed, I owe your love much more than my whole self – as much more as you are greater than I am…Let me experience by feeling what I experience by understanding. I owe you more than my whole self, but I have no more to give. And in my own strength I can’t even give you my self. So draw all of me, Lord, into your love. All that I am belongs to you as my maker; now make it yours through devoted love.’
     This is the honour and the justice that Anselm seeks to set before us as the foundation of our faith. It is the honour and justice that sets the Church free to witness to the dignity of human beings over against tyranny and violence. And it is the honour and justice that we do here at the altar, praying in the Spirit with the word and power of Christ to the Father, acknowledging dignum et justum est, aequum et salutare, ‘it is indeed right, our duty and our joy.’

                    O proud left foot, that ventures quick within
                    Then soon upon a backward journey lithe.
                    Anon, once more the gesture, then begin:
                    Command sinistral pedestal to writhe.
                    Commence though then the fervid Hokey-Poke.
                    A mad gyration, hips in wanton swirl.
                    To spin! A wilde release from heaven’s yoke.
                    Blessed dervish! Surely canst go, girl.
                    The Hoke, the poke — banish now they doubt
                    Verily, I say, ’tis what it’s all about.

                    — Jeff Brechlin, Hat tip to Kathryn Greene-McCreight

In Memorium

With all the sadness and trauma going on in the world at the moment,
it is worth reflecting on the death of a very important person,
which almost went unnoticed last week. Larry LaPrise, the man who wrote
“The Hokey Pokey”, died peacefully at age 93.
The most traumatic part for his family was getting him into the coffin.
They put his left leg in. And then the trouble started.

— Stuart Shelton, Hat tip to Kathryn Greene-McCreight

At the end of a Good Friday service, we get to the point where nothing we do will be or feel adequate to what’s being remembered. And that’s completely right, because what matters on this day is what’s done elsewhere, done by God, somehow using the stark injustice and horror of the execution of Jesus to turn around the way the world works. Intense activity elsewhere; as if you could hear faintly a workman hammering steadily away at the blank surface of human self-satisfaction and self-deception, and an irregular sound of plaster dropping to a distant floor.

And it’s not an intimidating feeling. It’s not that we’ve got an appointment we mustn’t miss and we don’t know which door to walk through or which staircase to go up. In this empty hallway, there’s nothing expected of us at this moment. The work is out of our hands, and all we can do is wait, breathe, look around. People sometimes feel like this when they’ve been up all night with someone who’s seriously ill or dying, or when they’ve been through a non-stop series of enormously demanding tasks. A sort of peace, but more a sort of ‘limbo’, an in-between moment. For now, nothing more to do; tired, empty, slightly numbed, we rest for a bit, knowing that what matters is now happening somewhere else.

Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury

Two years ago I drove through Foggy Bottom with two of my children to enjoy a delicious lunch with a good friend. The next day it struck me how foggy are the bottoms of selected email messages in my inbox. At the bottom of a March 10, 2010 message from a school teacher: “Please help reduce our impact. Do not print this email unless absolutely necessary.” And recently from someone else’s bottom: “No trees were harmed in the transmission of this email, although a few electrons were mildly inconvenienced. Please consider the environment before printing this email.”

Apart from my Uncle Rod and my father, nobody I know actually has put their arms around — hugged — more trees than I have. By the time I was twenty I’d cut down at least four hundred trees. That number would be pushing a thousand but for a tree — not one I was cutting but one ‘hung up’ on the one I was cutting — that fell on my head knocking me out and breaking my collarbone. If my experience with trees scandalizes you all I can say is try it sometime in thick woods. The bugs are so bad you might give up before you’ve done anything to shake a stick at but the work invigorates, and certainly if you are privileged to do it with your father. You will learn by the sweat of your brow what a tree is or a forest and how it can be made strong in the broken places to borrow a phrase of Hemingway. The Ottawa National Forest where I did the clear cutting became as a direct result of it thicker with trees every one of which was stronger and taller than what stood there before. That was the point of the husbandry. It goes as tall trees do over the heads of the naïve.

I shan’t put it at the bottom of my email messages but I’ll lay the axe to the wood here. Every one of us Gentiles would be without God and without hope in the world save for a man put to death on a tree ‘harmed’ in the transmission of our redemption. Consider that every time you think about the environment.

The sacramental meal we commemorate and eat on Maundy Thursday has four common designations: The Lord’s Supper, Communion, Eucharist, and the Mass. Tonight I want you to meditate with me on the sacrament as the Mass.

I recognize that that’s a designation not used in some Protestant circles. Still, twenty years ago in Providence on Saturday mornings I would go to Low Mass at St Stephen’s, one of the signal Oxford Movement Anglo-Catholic parishes on the east coast. My son Gabriel is singing in the choir tonight at High Mass at Ascension & St. Agnes. At St. Francis we designate this liturgy the Holy Eucharist, but the service is the same even if we refer to it by different names.

Christians call it the Mass because in the ancient church the traditional liturgy in Latin concluded with the dismissal ite missa est. The Latin word for ‘sending forth’ is missa, or the verb is missio, and it’s from missa that we get mass. The Mass sends you forth as Christ’s missionaries. “Go in peace to love and serve the Lord,” we say after the retiring procession, or “Let us go forth in the Name of Christ” or “Let us bless the Lord,” which is to say “Go out to serve the Lord.” The earliest documentary evidence we have for the use of missa to refer to the eucharistic liturgy comes from Ambrose, the venerable 4th-century Bishop of Milan. Ambrose wasn’t being idiosyncratic. By the fourth century and probably by the second, one of the ordinary designations for this liturgy was the Mass. 

Go serve the Lord! — the emphasis of the Mass language is that we’re sent forth by this sacrament that energizes and fortifies us to go out and live for Christ. And so even as the designation ‘Eucharist’ points backward as a service of thanksgiving for what God in Jesus Christ accomplished for us, the Mass points forward. It gets us thinking about what comes next; the privilege and the challenge to live not for ourselves but for him who died for us. 

Maundy Thursday is a good time to be reminded that the sacrament should not be thought of as a kind of escape, a time when Christians circle the wagons and sequester themselves. If it’s a huddle we’re huddling as they do in American football in order to move down the field and score! That’s what this meal does. It points us forward.

That Jesus intended it to do that he allows us to see by the timing of his institution of this ritual meal. He instituted it before his death on the cross. “I have eagerly desired to eat this passover with you before I suffer,” he said to his disciples. Consider it. Why did Jesus do things this way? Why didn’t he wait? After all he would die the next day and then after his resurrection there would be a period of forty days during which he at many times ate with his disciples. At one of those meals he could have said, “You know how I laid down my life for you a couple Fridays ago, well this meal is intended to remind you of that.” He could have used it to point backward. But he instituted it before his death so right from the beginning it points forward!

It points forward for Jesus himself. Jesus shortly after this meal was arrested, was put on trial and was sent to the cross. What fortified him to go to Gethsemane and to Golgotha in part was this meal. It was the last physical nourishment he took before he would suffer on the cross. The wine was the last drink to slake his thirst before he would be on the cross saying, “I thirst.” So in physical terms it nourished him for the battle ahead.

And also in spiritual terms it fortified him for Jesus intended this meal to be a whetting of the appetite for the heavenly banquet that awaits. While he celebrated the Lord’s Supper he reminded the disciples of the time that is soon to come when we will be gathered together and seated at the table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and Jesus at the head. There’s a coming great banquet, a wedding feast of the lamb, and this meal is intended to be a foretaste of it, a whetting of the appetite to encourage you, to fortify you to remember that if you will die with him you will live with him, if you will suffer with him you’ll share in his glory. 

The Bible tells us to “fix our eyes on Jesus the author and finisher of our faith who for the joy set before him endured the cross.” This meal is part of how the Father set the joy before the Son so that Jesus would have on his mind and coursing through his very body that which is to come. 

Listen to what Jesus says in Luke’s account of his institution of the Lord’s Supper. “‘I have eagerly desired to eat this passover with you before I suffer. For I tell you, I will not eat it again until it finds fulfillment in the kingdom of God.’” Do you hear it? It’s pointing forward, isn’t it? After taking the cup he gave thanks and said, “Take this all of you for I tell you I will not drink again of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes.” So it points us forward. It’s a whetting of the appetite.

I know some Protestants who have a kind of take it or leave it attitude toward the Lord’s Supper. They can go months, even years, without receiving it and thus they impoverish themselves. For Jesus instituted this meal because we desperately need to be fortified and encouraged by the goal of our salvation so as to live the kind of faithful lives he’s calling us to. 

St. Francis has lay eucharistic visitors, people commissioned to bring the sacrament to those who for various reasons can’t get to this altar to partake of it. Like the clergy they are privileged to bring the sacrament to people at home or in hospital. Eating this meal reminds those lying in mortal weakness, it feeds them and their imagination all over again with what suffering as a member of the Body of Christ is all about, what will happen as they pass from this life to the next. It steels and fortifies them for what may well be their last battle and what lies ahead. 

In Steven Spielberg’s movie War Horse an old French farmer describes the work of the Great War’s carrier pigeons to his granddaughter. “Can you imagine,” he says to her, “flying over a war and you know you can never look down? You have to look forward or you’ll never get home. I ask you, What could be braver than that?”

Jesus went like a lamb to the slaughter, innocent as the horses in the cavalry charge at the Battle of the Somme, innocent as the pigeons sacrificed on the old altars of Yahweh. As you partake of this meal he eagerly desired to eat with his disciples before he suffered, may your mouth feed from his hands of the joy the Father set before him. May you take into your throat that love which is stronger than death and fiercer than the grave. And may you go from this Mass missionaries of the one who loves his own who are in the world, and loves them to the end. Amen.