Relocating To Elfland

“From the night season our soul awaketh early unto thee, O our God; for thy precepts are a light upon the earth. Teach us to perfect righteousness and holiness in thy fear; for we glorify thee, our God, who existest in verity. Incline thine ear and hear us; and call to remembrance by their names, O Lord, all those who are with us and pray with us; and save them by thy might. Bless thy people and sanctify thy inheritance. Grant peace to thy world, to thy Churches, to the priests*, to the Authorities, and to all thy people.

“For blessed and glorified is thine all-honourable and majestic name, of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, now, and ever, and unto ages of ages. Amen.”

(Service Book of the Holy Orthodox-Catholic Apostolic Church, ed. Isabel Florence Hapgood)

[*In the Presbyterian tradition, the reference here would be to ministers and elders.]

“We give thanks unto thee, O Lord our God, who hast raised us up from our beds, and hast put into our mouths the word of praise, that we may adore and call upon thy holy Name. And we entreat thee, by thy mercies which thou hast exercised always in our life, send down now also thine aid upon those who stand before the presence of thy holy glory, and await the rich mercy which is from thee. And grant that they may always with fear and love worship thee, praise thee, hymn thee, and adore thine inexpressible goodness.

“For unto thee is due all honour, glory and worship, to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, now, and ever, and unto ages of ages. Amen.”

(Service Book of the Holy Orthodox-Catholic Apostolic Church, ed. Isabel Florence Hapgood)

“Plainly this custom which enjoins us to take communion once a year is a veritable invention of the devil, whoever was instrumental in introducing it. . . . It should have been done far differently: the Lord’s Table should have been spread at least once a week for the assembly of Christians, and the promises declared in it should feed us spiritually. None is indeed to be forcibly compelled, but all are to be urged and aroused; also the inertia of indolent people is to be rebuked. All, like hungry men, should flock to such a bounteous repast.” (John Calvin, Institutes, 4.17.46)

Not long ago I was conversing with a fellow minister about weekly celebration of the Lord’s Supper. He made a comment that set my mental wheels spinning: there is, he said, a particular piety that flows out of (or accompanies) weekly celebration of the Supper, and it sits rather awkwardly with certain versions of piety in our Puritan-Presbyterian heritage.

Hmmm. . . . So much to think about here. I would have to say, from my own experience as a pastor, that implementing weekly communion in our congregation has transformed our worship and, in more subtle and gradual ways, our piety. I believe the reason for this lies in the nature of the Supper, and what it forces us to confront about the character of our God.

For one thing – and it is no small thing – the Supper hammers away at the spirit-matter dualism that continues to shackle so much Christian piety. God could have given us only His Word, and if we were honest, I think a lot of us in Reformed churches would have been satisfied with that. We love preaching, we love words, we love grand ideas, we love the Logos. And we should. But God didn’t stop there. He also gave us sacraments. The God who determined to walk among us as the Logos-made-flesh also determined to pour water over our bodies and to feed us bread and wine. And He is quite insistent that this shall continue until He returns, in the body, to resurrect our bodies and usher us into the new heavens and the new earth. If we take this seriously – if it isn’t just a footnote to our hearing sermons but a profound and necessary unfolding, to all of our senses, of what we hear in sermons – then we are forced to a confront a God who is “with us” in the fullness of our lives, not just in the cerebral sanctum of our minds. He isn’t some Idea far off in the ether, accessible only through gnosis. He is the Maker, Lord, and Redeemer of all things in heaven and on earth, of our souls and our bodies. He is transcendent, speaking to us from above and beyond; but He is also immanent, speaking to us – quite literally – at hand, as the God who fills all things. “The Word is near you.”

But there is something else, and this brings us closer to the question of weekly communion. One of the main arguments I have heard against weekly communion is the idea that people will start “taking it for granted.” After awhile, it will become ordinary to them, and they won’t take it with sufficient seriousness.

Curiously enough, I have never heard the same argument marshaled against weekly preaching of the Word, and so I wonder: what kind of “sufficient seriousness” do we think God expects of us at the Supper? It must be a seriousness unique to the Supper, because it isn’t imperiled by weekly practice of any other element in worship.

I must be careful in what I am about to say. Sweeping generalizations are unfair, and I want to be clear that I am not accusing anyone in particular. That said, I believe there is a seriousness about the Supper in some Reformed circles that miserably distorts our Lord’s intentions for the Supper. The Supper is, indubitably, “serious” in that it sets before us the death of our Lord Christ. One can, I should think, never take that with too much seriousness. But our problem in some circles is not that we are taking the death of Christ too seriously; it is, rather, that we are taking ourselves far, far too seriously at the Supper. On the basis of a really confused idea of “self-examination,” we miss the whole point of the Supper – which is that God in Christ is for us. The Supper is not a judgment seat; it is not a place of thunder and lightning (except insofar as it shows how thunder and lightning were visited on our Surety); it is the table of our Father, where He brings forth the Bread of Life and the good wine of the gospel, and joyfully feeds His children.

May I say it respectfully: I simply can’t see why children need six months of preparation before they approach their father’s table; and if we, being evil, can figure that out, how much more our Father who is in heaven? The Table of the Lord is a friendly place, a joyful place, yea, even for sinners (no one else, incidentally, is invited); and weekly communion implicitly bears witness to this by not permitting weeks and months of anguished “preparation.” Rightly conceived, weekly communion reflects a certain view of God and of our approach to Him: it takes “seriously” the work of the Spirit by which Christ is really present at the Supper, whose work it is to cry out in our hearts, “Abba, Father.” And yes, this does bring forth a certain version of piety. It’s called the Spirit of adoption, rather than the spirit of bondage to fear. God give us more of it.

“When God’s goodness conveys not only benefits but God himself, it appears as love.” (Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, p. 2.180)

“Mine, mine was the transgression,” goes the English rendering of Bernard’s hymn, “but Thine the deadly pain.” As our ancient fathers laid their hands on the heads of sacrifice animals and confessed over them their sins, we think today of the Lamb of God and confess, “He bore our sins in His body on the tree.”

“He bore our sins.” Does this really strike home as it should? God knows how sentimentalized and sanitized the cross has become in popular representations; but among us who call upon His name, does it really register that the Son of God hung dying in agony because of us?

I know this already sounds like angst mongering. We have all heard preachers try to whip up mass feelings of guilt before the specter of the cross. The modicum of truth in such otherwise manipulative harangues is that we surely should feel something before the cross. It ought, just perhaps, to move us a little that “herein is love,” and an astonishing love, extended to enemies.

But let us descend to concrete matters. When we confess our sins before the cross today, how do we do it? Do we take a list of precepts, say the Ten Commandments, and think of ways we have transgressed? I wonder if this really gets to the heart of things. Seeing ourselves as rule-breakers has its place, but I doubt it will evoke a sense of the badness of our sins unless we see the glory of the goodness and righteousness God intended for us and see, in light of that glory, the depths of wretchedness to which we have fallen.

May I suggest today some extended reflection on God’s original calling to man to be fruitful and multiply, to subdue the earth (Gen 1:28), to cultivate the sanctuary of God, and to keep it against all that defiles (Gen 2:15)? Here in the fourfold calling of humankind we might begin to see what we were made for, and how pervasive are our sins of commission and omission. We might also think of the threefold offices of our original estate: the prophetic office characterized by wisdom and knowledge, the priestly office characterized by holiness, and the kingly office characterized by righteousness. Or, we might consider the three relational theaters in which we were created: the cultic theater of worshipful communion with God, the communal theater of fellowship with our human neighbors, and the cultural theater of labor among the non-human creatures.

We might, in considering these things, feel just how badly things have gone awry. We might feel our real helplessness before the dominion of sin, and might awaken thankfulness for the work of the Last Adam, apart from whose death we would never have known relief from the curse, apart from whose resurrection our inheritance could never have been returned to us and secured, apart from whose Spirit the degenerations of sin would never have been reversed and healed. We may even, in contemplating how different is our estate now in the Last Adam, feel the stirrings of true hatred of sin, and fresh resolves after repentance and new obedience. “What Thou, my Lord, hast suffered was all for sinners’ gain.”

If grace restores nature, then life under the dominion of grace does not become unnatural. One “under” grace does not breathe different air, walk on different concrete, wear different clothing, or ride a camel (unless, of course, that is the thing to do where he lives). He doesn’t need to buy a “Christian” iPod, a “Christian” house, a “Christian” lawnmower, or “Christian” beer. What makes him different is not that he sits in a closet and sings hymns for a living, but rather that his entire life is pervaded by the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. All created things are, for him, gifts from above. All his work and play aim at showing off his God. The law of love binds his heart and conscience; the seed of his faith bears the fair fruit of holiness. He is at war with all that displeases and dishonors God, and rejoices in all truth, goodness, and beauty because he delights in God. To meet him is to meet a true human, not an alien. What is different about him is that sin is no longer natural.

“It is important to realise that there is some really fatal flaw in you: something which gives the others just that same feeling of despair which their flaws give you. And it is almost certainly something you don’t know about – like what the advertisements call ‘halitosis’, which everyone notices except the person who has it. But why, you ask, don’t the others tell me? Believe me, they have tried to tell you over and over again, and you just couldn’t ‘take it’. Perhaps a good deal of what you call their ‘nagging’ or ‘bad temper’ or ‘queerness’ are just their attempts to make you see the truth. And even the faults you do know you don’t know fully. You say, ‘I admit I lost my temper last night’; but the others know that you’re always doing it, that you are a bad-tempered person. You say, ‘I admit I drank too much last Saturday’; but every one else knows that you are an habitual drunkard.” (C. S. Lewis, “The Trouble with ‘X’ . . .” in God in the Dock: Essays in Theology and Ethics)

G. K. Chesterton once said of W. B. Yeats, “He is not stupid enough to understand fairyland. Fairies prefer people of the yokel type like myself; people who gape and grin and do as they are told.” I have begun to wonder if the God of the Bible does not share this preference with the fairies. I have begun to wonder if many fail to enter His kingdom precisely because they are not stupid enough to inhabit, with childlike imagination, the story of His kingdom on earth. And I am increasingly certain that the reason so few of us live well as His citizens is because we have lost touch with the enchantment of that story – we are simply too grown up to believe it is real, too grown up to find our deepest identity in it and uncritically to submit to its laws.

When Saint Peter says to us, “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for His own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light,” are we stupid enough to see that this is not a string of quaint metaphors? Or do we smile sophisticatedly, then return to the “real world” where grownups live? After all, it is a bit awkward behaving like royalty in the “real world”; people start to regard you as odd, and who can long endure that? Who wants to be thought of as putting on airs; or worse, to be thought of as doing so because one lives in delusions of an unseen world?

But is it not precisely this to which the gospel summons us? Is it not to worship the unseen God, and to live as His offspring in the world? Is it not to entrust ourselves entirely to an unseen Messiah and, not having seen Him, to love Him and long for His appearing? Is it not to enact in the present world the life that belongs properly to the world to come? This is, undeniably, the stuff of madness; yet it is the madness without which Christianity ceases to be itself.