CLent4

Third of series on the Holy Eucharist – the return of gifts

3/14/10

Three weeks ago I began a short series of sermons on the Holy Eucharist.

The first sermon reflected simply on what it means

to walk in the door and enter into worship with other people.

Two weeks ago, we focused on the Word with a capital W –the Word of God -

that there is a rhythm and intentionality

that our corporate worship needs to be alive and relevant.

This rhythm is that we come together and say the words of the church

– the collects, readings, creed, prayers.

And, we bring to this place our hunger and thirst for God.

And, from the Word of God we expect instruction and guidance, comfort, and strength.

We have faith that before God all hearts are open, all desires known,

as we say in the opening collect on most Sundays,

and God is receptive to what we bring of ourselves and our world.

As we go through worship together, we take in the words of the Church;

we join to them our selves, our own stories, our hearts, minds to these words.

We are reminded to do this by the brief silences throughout the worship service.

And then, we respond together with hymns and songs.

When we bring our own individual lives and contexts to our time together here,

our worship is alive with the holy exchange that we call the Word of God.

Today we’ll spend a little time with the offertory.

You’ll notice when we get to the ‘offertory’ that in the prayer book

there are no words associated with this part of worship.

Now it’s time for action.

At this point in the service we have had the Word together:

the scriptures and homily and our responses to them.

We have prayed the prayers of the church

mingled with our own personal prayers.

We have confessed how we have separated ourselves from God

and the ways in which the world we are part of has fallen short.

We don’t shut out all that’s going wrong, but like Christ, we embrace it.

We join ourselves with Christ to do the work of redeeming it.

We are told that we are forgiven and filled with goodness,

and are part of the larger life and reality of God, which we call eternal life.

And in that moment, something has happened to all of us.

We all have, what you might say, had our slates wiped completely clean.

And it is right then that we turn toward one another and we offer each other the peace of Christ.

We proclaim shalom – peace - in which there are no divisions,

nothing any longer that separates us from God,

nothing that holds us back from really having peace among us.

We talked about thin places a few weeks ago.

Talk about thin places!

That moment of peace exchanged,

where we can be in a world together ‘forgiven, loved, and free.’ [Hymnal 304]

If we are intentional about that, how might we live our lives differently

and see others differently in the coming week?

Some Anglican prayer books have moved away from the word ‘offertory.’

Why? Because God has been clear through the ages

that what God wants from us – as the book of Micah says,

is to love mercy, do justice and walk humbly with our God.

God does not require offerings of any kind at this altar…

God hopes for us simply to bring ourselves with grateful hearts

acknowledging that all we have received,

everything created, comes to us from the Creator.

When we talk about “the Fall” of humankind

when Adam and Eve had to leave the garden of Eden,

we think of temptation, disobedience,

of them wanting to know as much as God, to be equal to God;

to be gods themselves.

But, this caught me in my reading:

We fall when we fail to be Eucharistic persons.

Meaning, we become less of who we are created to be when we forget how to give thanks.

Thanksgiving is elemental to our human nature.

We need to be thankful if we are to be fully human.

And so we bring all that we have received, not so much as an offering to God,

but to acknowledge that it comes from God.

We are returning it to God and placing it back in its true belonging.

-        the bread and wine we have made from the good earth;

-        the symbol of our gifts, talents, labors that we call money.

-        and we bring ourselves back to our true belonging.

In the moments each week of the exchange of peace

and the placing of ourselves and all that we have received

back into our true belonging with God,

we are given a small taste of the world God created and Christ came to restore.

Forgiven, loved and free.

This is where we’ll pick up next week –

when we turn together toward the table

where all that has been returned is taken, blessed, broken, and given

in our prayer of Great Thanksgiving, our communion prayer.