Sunday, October 5, 2014

Sunday, October 5, 2014

Psalm 118

Here we have a Psalm that spoke to the early Church’s experience of the Christ event, perhaps most famously verse 22: “The stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone.” Indeed, these words are quoted by Jesus himself in Matthew 21, and later by Peter in Acts 4. This ‘great reversal’ is fundamental to the Christian message, and our reading of our scriptures should, I think, be guided by this hermeneutic (interpretive lens). 

The Christian message, as I understand it, is one in which people are called to look at their world from the perspective of the oppressed. And not in a patronizing way. I think at its most authentic, Christian faith becomes incarnate from the ground up. 

Whenever the Church speaks or acts from a position of privilege we need to look at things critically. The Church has lost its way countless times throughout history when it has forgotten to stand in solidarity with the rejected stones of society. I think as Anglicans in Canada, with our historic ties to England through both Church and Commonwealth, we need to be particularly careful. At the same time, sometimes the grumbling that we hear from our pews about dwindling numbers can come from that position of cultural entitlement.

When we’re tempted to approach a problem or situation from a privileged, power-grasping mindset, remind yourself that the Lord whom we follow is the One who... 

humbled himself to become a human being; 

came into the world through a woman who would have faced  judgement from the ‘proper’ people of the day; 

  instead of presenting difficult philosophical concepts, taught  using agricultural imagery;

What other examples from our scriptures and history can you think of that reflect this call to solidarity and humility? How can and do these examples extend into our day-to-day experience? It is in realizing how our spiritual lives and so-called secular or ordinary lives are intertwined that we will come to a greater appreciation for the profundity of what we do when we gather as Church. 

By Baptism we are all equally members of the Body. Where else in the world but in the Eucharist are king and beggar given the same gifts? Where else in the world but in the Eucharist are food and drink blessed in a common prayer of thanksgiving and given equally to all?

[...]

We died with Christ in Baptism so that we might live in him, and in each Eucharist we celebrate the mystery of life through death. Does this enable us to see the radical social consequences of the liturgy as an expression of God's perpetual work of transformation, breaking down only so that he may build anew? Such ideas require an expansion of our inherited sense of the meaning of the sacraments in liturgical worship. In these acts the members of the Church are offered a means of contact with the whole range of God's activity in the world. Through a common language of word and gesture, and utilizing the basic natural elements of human washing and nourishment, we share in acts of the most profound significance, affirming the presence of a loving God who calls us into an all-encompassing unity of love and service as his own people.* 

- Matthew Kieswetter

* Louis Weil, Sacraments and Liturgy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), 99-100.