Sermon by Canon Angela Tilby

Sunday after Ascension 2020

Acts 1.6-14, John 17.1-11

At the end of the Order for Holy Communion in the Book of Common Prayer there is a lengthy rubric giving instructions on how the service should be conducted. It concludes with a stern warning not to worship or idolise the sacramental bread and wine, for, and I quote, ‘the natural body and blood of our Saviour Christ are in heaven, and not here; it being against the truth of Christ’s natural body to be at one time in more places than one’. That rubric reflects the fierce theological debates of its era. It’s a polemical swipe against the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, but it’s also a swipe against Lutherans who had come to claim that after the resurrection Christ’s human nature was everywhere present. No, said the English reformers. Christ’s natural body and blood are in heaven.

I haven’t thought about that rubric for years, but it came back to me on Ascension Day as I reflected on the fact that most of us have not actually received Holy Communion since the middle of March. I have twice – each time when Jo was presiding at home. The rules of the Church generally require another person to communicate along with the priest and so I did. But most of the time, for most of us, Holy Communion has been something we have watched from a distance, without receiving. There’s a strange parallel here with the Ascension story. The risen Jesus, who has appeared to his disciples over forty days, is taken from them into heaven. This is Jesus in the reality of his human nature, with his ‘natural Body and Blood’ as the Prayer Book might have put it, now taken into heaven. I’ve been wondering what this might tell us about the sacrament of Holy Communion. Before lockdown we took it for granted that we could, if we so wished, receive communion every Sunday. I must have received communion at least once a week for over fifty years, more often since I was priested. And yes, I have missed receiving these physical tokens of salvation, and I know many others have too. But I have to say, it has also felt quite fitting at a time when I can’t shake hands or kiss or hug my friends and neighbours. We’ve all had to stand back from some of our social instincts, and from some of the physical ways in which we express ourselves to one another. It’s a mark of the weirdness of this virus that it can manifest as a loss of taste and smell and that it makes touch dangerous. So perhaps it is not so odd that at present we cannot receive Christ through sacramental touch and smell and taste. I have found it really hard to hear of people seriously ill and even dying without the comfort of the touch of their loved ones.

I can only think that when the appearances of the risen Christ ended and the disciples sensed he was now in heaven, they must have felt some anxiety and loss, which is surely why they retreated to their upper room to pray for God’s guidance. Perhaps we can gain something from their example to help us in this strange time. First, I think we need to recognise once again the huge gulf between earth and heaven, our world and God. Christ genuinely left us at the Ascension; he is now with God in his human nature. I sometimes wonder whether frequent communion, such as we have become used to in the Church of England, has made us a bit over-familiar, as though reception were an entitlement and not a gift.

I remember meeting a group of Anglicans about twenty years ago who were urging all sorts of experiments in worship on the grounds that they were simply bored with the Eucharist. That saddened me, but even I sometimes feel I have lost some of the reverence I once had, my sense of the majesty and otherness of God, of Christ whose stilling of the storm led his disciples to say: ‘Who then is this, that even the winds and the sea obey him’. I had a student once training for the church’s ministry who had been in the army and he used to get furious when people seemed over familiar with Jesus. Jesus is not my mate, he would roar, he is the Lord! A sense of God’s distance and mystery, of Christ being at one with that sheer otherness, that his presence is in some sense hidden from us, could bring us back to something important.

Second, we should remember that if the Ascension of Jesus takes away his physical presence, it is also a promise. However literally or not we understand the Ascension story it surely tells us that Christ in heaven is there for us. He prepares our place. Our human nature, with its roots in the animal world, and our sense that we are also souls, is now with God.  I love those words from the letter to the Colossians: ‘Your life is hid with Christ in God’. That remains true, however afraid we are of our current circumstances, of our unknown future, of how long we will have to put up with a degree of risk and uncertainty in our daily lives.

Third, I think we should remember that frequent communion is probably the exception rather than the norm. Our Prayer Book forbears were only required to communicate three times a year. Eastern Orthodox Christians go regularly to the Liturgy but only communicate on special days. Catholics go to mass but they have not always expected to receive communion. The point has been to participate by listening, by seeing, by contemplation, above all by an openness to the Holy Spirit who is present and is to come.

I think we’ve even realised through our online worship that God remains present to us, that we are close to him, and to one another, perhaps in new ways. At Holy Communion we know Christ principally in the breaking of the bread. Which is not to say that receiving the bread and wine is an afterthought, but perhaps it does not add as much to genuine worship as we have come to think. As the Prayer Book tells us when there is a ‘just impediment’ to receiving, we are not in fact excluded from Gods presence or his grace. If we genuinely repent of our sins and believe that Christ suffered for us and redeems us, if we remember the benefits he has won for us ‘giving him hearty thanks therefore’, then the Prayer Book reassures us: ‘we do indeed eat and drink the Body and Blood of our Saviour…  although we do not receive the sacrament with our mouths’.   

This is what is called ‘spiritual communion’ and it used to be widely commended and practiced especially during broadcast worship or in times of sickness or absence. There is an intimacy which does not require physicality, an intimacy which may even be enhanced when touch and taste are impossible. So let us pray this week for the Holy Spirit to come and bring us consolation, at this still difficult time, helping us to set our minds on the things that are above, not on things that are on earth, for our life really is hidden with Christ in God.