I think this has been my favorite sermon I've preached at St Simon's so far. Since it was the fifth Sunday in the month, the service was morning prayer, so the sermon was extra lengthy.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.
This is our final Sunday in Lent, as next week, we will be celebrating the Lord’s entry into Jerusalem, welcoming him with palms and our loud hosannas, and next Sunday we will read the Passion Gospel, telling of the Christ’s suffering and death. Next week is a week for paradox: triumphant and welcoming entry followed by betrayal and crushing death.
But this Sunday is paradoxical for a different reason: here at St Simon’s we are celebrating together today using Morning Prayer as our primary Sunday service, instead of the Eucharist, as we usually do. This is the fifth week in March, and so, as is customary in some parishes, we are gathered this Sunday to worship using the liturgy of Morning Prayer. As happens rarely, every single Sunday in Lent this year fell in March. It will not happen again until the year 2020.
So, a few words about the use of Morning Prayer as the principal service on a Sunday. This will be my actual first time even attending Morning Prayer when it’s used as the primary Sunday service, and at the 10o’clock service, I’m the officiant! The Episcopal church I grew up in always had the Eucharist on Sunday, but that is due to the liturgical changes which occurred in the Episcopal Church during the 1960s and 1970s. I’m sure many of you who are cradle Episcopalians remember Morning Prayer on Sundays.
It is an ancient tradition of the Church to break the day into parts, called hours, and assign specific prayers, known as offices, to each part of the day. Traditionally, the hours begin with Matins, in the night, Lauds at dawn, Prime at 6am, Terce at 9am, Sext at noon, Vespers at dusk, and Compline at night before bed. This was the pattern in most of Western Europe, and before the English Reformation, the primary service on Sunday in England began at dawn with Lauds, and then the celebration of the Holy Eucharist. It was uncommon before the Reformation for laity to receive communion more than once yearly, so after liturgical reforms were made in England, the importance of reception of the Eucharist was underscored, and the frequency with which the Eucharist was received increased. But the principal service of many Sundays switched over to Lauds, which we call Morning Prayer in our Book of Common Prayer. The tradition of celebrating Holy Eucharist monthly and receiving Hoy communion monthly was a drastic change from pre-Reformation practice, and was intended to make the Eucharist more accessible and more frequently received by the laity.
Over the centuries since the English Reformation, as the Anglican church spread across the globe and to our country, this tradition remained fairly common, until only a few decades ago. There was a major liturgical movement in the 19th century, known by various names: the Tractarian Movement, the Oxford Movement, the Catholic Movement, which sought to reintroduce Catholic traditions back into Anglican worship. And we shouldn’t think of necessarily Roman Catholic traditions, but Catholic traditions: those aspects of worship which belonged to the ancient Church. But that movement stayed pretty small, in terms of relative numbers of parishes. Those parishes are commonly now known Anglo Catholic or High Church. The leading High Church in our diocese is St Andrew’s, in University Heights. In those parishes, Eucharist began to be celebrated weekly as the principal Sunday service. That change wouldn’t happen to most parishes, however, until our own lifetimes, and primarily happened because of the publishing of the new 1979 Prayer Book which encouraged weekly celebration of the Eucharist.
So, if our current Prayer Book encourages weekly celebration of the Holy Eucharist, why are we celebrating Morning Prayer today? The wealth of our Anglican tradition is most deeply expressed when we display the aspects of our tradition which unify and unite us: we illustrate our continuity and we embrace our heritage when we celebrate Morning Prayer as the principal Sunday service. We are united to those who went before us and who passed on to us the tradition which shapes and informs us. Continuity with the past is the primary reason why almost all parishes continue to use Elizabethan language when reciting the Lord’s prayer, whether it’s Rite I, Rite II, 1928, or any other prayer book. By using the same words our ancestors used, we remind ourselves of the very real connections we maintain with them. The Lord they worshiped at Morning Prayer is the same Lord we worship in Holy Communion.
In the Gospel today, we hear that same Lord speaking to Philip and Andrew, two of the apostles, using a pastoral theme to relate the message of his upcoming death: "The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. 24I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.
The people hearing Christ would have immediately understood the imagery he used, and though most of us here are not farmers, there’s likely to be a few gardeners among us.
My first experience of gardening happened when I was 5, at Winfield St Elementary School in Corning, NY, when I was in kindergarten. I’m not sure what the practice has been here in Buffalo, but in Corning, we attended kindergarten for a half day for the first half of the year, then a full day beginning in the spring. I had difficulties adjusting to the change of a full day of kindergarten, and remember feeling very homesick. However, it got much better for me when we started a new unit in which we learned about plants and seeds. Our teacher read to us about acorns and oak trees, and fuzzy gray dandelion heads. The most exciting day, though, was when we each received a white Styrofoam cup with dirt in it. I was something of a dirt eater, or at least, a dirt sampler, so I was very excited, but remembered that I shouldn’t eat this dirt, since my teacher told me we’d be putting a seed in it, and that the seed needed the dirt and water and the sun to grow.
Along with the cup, each of us received a few cucumber seeds: they were small, flat, pointy at one end, and smooth to touch. We stuck our little fingers into the dirt and pushed the cucumber seeds down, poured a little water onto them, placed them on the ledge by the window, and left them there to grow.
Each day, the first thing any of us did when coming into class was run over to the ledge to check our dirt cups with our sleeping seeds. And cups of dirt they remained. Each day: nothing. The next morning, new bright expectation, a dash to the ledge: nothing.
Then one day, there was a tiny green bump in a cup in the first row, and 20 proud 5-year old parents peered into the Styrofoam cup, overjoyed at the tiny bump. Each morning, more and more and more bumps in the Styrofoam cups, then stems, then leaves. In my cup, one of my little plants came up and still had the husk of its seed wrapped around its leaf. I recognized the smooth white skin of the seed, opened like a butterfly in flight, and the point pulled apart and separated.
Not since kindergarten has my gardening joy been so bright and buoyant, but each spring still finds me out there, with seeds or tiny sapling plants, still pushing them into the soil to grow. My kindergarten plants actually produced cucumber fruit, and I was amazed when we first cut open the fruit and inside: dozens of smooth, white seeds! The tiny little white seed I had planted had exploded out of my Styrofoam cup and blossomed into bright yellow flowers which became huge cucumbers replete with identical white seeds. Miraculous.
Soon forgotten were the days of expectation and wonder: would the plant ever grow? Would the seeds wake up? Though I was a very precocious 5-year old, the results were far beyond even my imagination. Gone was the anxiety of let down expectations. Gone was the worry about if there was something wrong. It was replaced wholly with joy in the form of a huge cucumber. I was overjoyed because of the surprise: my teacher had told us the little seeds would grow into plants then into cucumbers, but she had not impressed on me how radical the change would be. Then in such a short time, the Styrofoam cup was tipping over because of the weight of that radical change. I knew something impressive was going to happen, but I was not prepared for how amazingly different, how overflowing that change would be. From one tiny seed to a huge cucumber bursting with dozens of little seeds. Miraculous.
My experience of the little white Styrofoam cup prepared me for my later encounters with the Lord as an adolescent, teenager and adult. In the little Styrofoam cup, I lived what has been called “the wastefulness of creation”: God responds to the smallest effort, the tiniest seed with an abundance larger than the imagination could have formed. My wonder at how impressive and unexpected the results of that little smooth seed would be mirrors my later wonder at God’s response to and action in the world.
As mentioned in the Epistle to the Hebrews read today, though God could have sent an angel, could have sent another prophet, could have appeared again as a burning bush, instead, he chose to clothe himself in human flesh and live upon the earth as Christ. The response of God to the needs of the world was beyond anyone’s imagination.
Christ refers to himself as wheat that is planted in order to produce an abundant harvest. It is as God the Creator that he refers to himself here. Christ takes the smallest seeds, and creates from it more than any mind could have guessed, more than any heart could have hoped for. But neither the cucumber seed in my Styrofoam cup nor Christ could bring out more than could be imagined unless they accepted change. For the cucumber seed, it meant opening, breaking, and shedding its smooth outside, to let the plant inside shoot out. I saw what remained of the seed on my tiny little shoot: opened, and empty. For Christ it was the same. He was wheat planted, and in order to become a field of grain, Christ needed to be opened, broken, and had to shed his appearance. He achieved in the crucifixion the change in his body which would allow new life to spring forth, and to spring forth in abundance.
Next Friday, as we pass from Maundy Thursday to Good Friday and on to Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday, we witness the great change of Christ as he is buried in the earth, and as his death changes him and when he rises out of the earth, like my little cucumber plant, he will be other than we first saw him, bursting with life, and spreading, growing, and creating abundant life.
My favorite Easter hymn, which truly is a Holy Week hymn more than just Easter, is entitle Now the Green Blade Riseth. It’s hymn 204, if you’d like to follow along with me:
Now the green blade riseth from the buried grain,
Wheat that in the dark earth many days has lain;
Love lives again, that with the dead has been:
Love is come again, like wheat that springeth green.
In the grave they laid him, love whom men had slain,
Thinking that never he would wake again.
Laid in the earth like grain that sleeps unseen:
Love is come again, like wheat that springeth green,
Forth he came at Easter, like the risen grain,
He that for three days in the grave had lain.
Quick from the dead my risen Lord is seen:
Love is come again, like wheat that springeth green.
When our hearts are wintry, grieving, or in pain,
Thy touch can call us back to life again;
Fields of our hearts that dead and bare have been:
Love is come again, like wheat that springeth green.
Laid in the earth, like grain that sleeps unseen. I was fooled by my little white seed, and worried that I had stuck it in the dirt and nothing would come of it. Frequently, we wonder if the things we’ve begun, if the plans we’ve laid, the hope we’ve tried to give a grieving friend, or the love we’ve shown our children is going to be enough. But the seeds we plant do not bloom overnight, and we may need to wait quite a while before the results show. The hope and love we give others is like my sleeping seed, is like the buried Christ: a promise of change, of grace, and of abundance.
Christ uses the imagery of wheat because it was well known to those listening to him. The image would have sticking power. But he is also alluding to something else when he describes himself as a grain of wheat: he’s pointing to himself as present in the Eucharist. In the Eucharist, Christ is a single seed who is multiplied over and over in order to give life to many, like in the parable in today’s Gospel. It’s a bit ironic that today’s Gospel falls on a fifth Sunday, when we are celebrating Morning Prayer and not Holy Eucharist. But maybe it gives us the opportunity to reflect on Christ in the Eucharist, since we will not be receiving communion today. Will we feel different this week, since we did not have communion? Is anything different?
The Eucharist is not solely for us, but for those who are not here with us on Sunday. The closing dismissal given by Fr Ralph commands us to go into the world, to love and serve the Lord. We are to receive the Eucharist here at the rail, then become the Eucharist to those in the world. In that way, we become the tiny seed which is planted, but which springs back up as a field of grain.
Our God comes to us every on Sunday in the form of bread and wine, as a tiny seed which has fallen to the earth and now is sprung up in multitude to feed many. Let s take the opportunity this week, to thank Christ for his life shared with us in the Eucharist. The small lamp burning above the aumbry reminds us that the Eucharist is here present, and that the Lord dwells here. On Good Friday, though, the aumbry door will be open, the lamp will be out, and the Eucharist will be absent. The church will be uninhabited by Christ in the Eucharist. How much more complete our joy will be on Easter, when once again, we celebrate the Eucharist, joining with Christ in his resurrection, like wheat that springeth green.
1 comment:
Moving, personal, instructive,
inspirational. Very nicely done!
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