Maundy Thursday Chrism Eucharist
St Albans Abbey, 1st April 2010
John 13. 1-17; 31-37

In churches and cathedrals around the world today millions of clergy and lay people are gathering to mark the beginning of the three most sacred days in the Christian calendar - the triduum. Those of us who are readers or clergy come to reaffirm the vows and promises we made when we were first commissioned or ordained. We will then be sent out to invite others to journey with us from the Upper Room and the desolation of Gethsemane tonight, to the empty tomb and the joy of the resurrection on Easter Day. And as we do so, we find ourselves caught up into Christ’s self-offering and meet the God who pours out his life for us and for the world.

One of the huge privileges entrusted to us is leading worship and preaching. By our words and our lives we are challenged to bring people into the presence of the living Word and be transformed by grace. The drama of these three days is great, but so is the challenge.

John Holmes tells the story of an American woman coming into a cathedral and saying to one of the vergers, ‘I just love your Anglican lethargy’. I wonder what people will be experiencing as they worship in our churches or chaplaincies this Easter? Will it be lethargy or will it be a transformative experience? Richard Giles says this:

If we can imagine a whole liturgy – not just a homily – that disrupts as much as it consoles, that offers us alternative images, that reshapes the way we imagine, that enables us to react violently against the forces, internal and external, that enslave us, then we shall be on the way to a new state of seeing and being.

It is the quality of our worship that is of supreme importance. Which is why we can never put enough care and effort into its preparation.

So as we prepare to enter again into the events of these sacred days, let me spell out this morning four theme which I believe we all need to address.

First of all, will our commemoration of the cross enable us to face the reality of our brokenness and sinfulness, but in such a way that we also find forgiveness and amendment of life? As a generation we are ambivalent about sin, unless of course it is someone else’s failings. Do you know Anna Russell’s doggerel?

At three I had a feeling of ambivalence towards my brothers,
And so it follows naturally I poisoned all my lovers.
But now, I’m happy. I’ve learnt the lesson this has taught:
That everything I do that’s wrong is someone else’s fault

We prefer to blame our genes or our upbringing or someone who didn’t fulfil their statutory duties. Underneath our defensive posturing, however, we know that we are morally responsible creatures, which is why we feel uncomfortable when we hear of Judas’ kiss or Peter’s denial. The passion of Christ confronts us with our fickleness. Let’s face it: most of us would have been shouting with the rest of the crowd, demanding Jesus’ execution.

There is a huge freedom in owning our brokenness, especially when we know that the grace of God is reworking and remaking us in the likeness of his Son. When I was prepared for confirmation I was taught that it is good to make one’s confession. I suspect I was the only ordinand at my theological college who went off regularly to make confession, despite the fact that many of the great reformers such as Luther taught just how valuable it was. Perhaps the other ordinands weren’t so sinful as I was or perhaps they hadn’t discovered the extraordinary power of acknowledging out loud one’s broken humanity and hearing the words of absolution.

Perhaps you know those words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in his book, Life Together ?
Why should we not find it easier to go to a brother than to the holy God? But if we do, we must ask ourselves whether we have not often been deceiving ourselves with our confession of sin to God, whether we have not rather been confessing our sins to ourselves and also granting ourselves absolution. And is not the reason perhaps for our countless relapses and the feebleness of our Christian obedience to be found precisely in the fact that we are living on self-forgiveness and not a real forgiveness? Self-forgiveness can never lead to a breach with sin; this can be accomplishes only by the judging and the pardoning Word of God itself

The second challenge we face in leading worship is whether we can create space in which people can deal with suffering?

The increase in the numbers of young people attending Remembrance Sunday services and the growth in the number of impromptu wayside shrines at accident scenes are indicators of the instinctive need that ordinary men and women have to deal with pain and suffering. If we only have happy services we may not allow people space to grieve or bring their pain before God. There is a place for stillness and silent waiting in our worship. Do we give time for lament in our liturgy? Sometimes when there has been a tragedy or a disaster we need to cry out, ‘My God, My God, where are you?’ As with our Saviour on the cross, this is not a denial of God’s love but a profound expression of faith, bringing our desolation to the One who alone can speak a word of healing.

Thirdly, does our worship allow us to face our mortality? On Holy Saturday we commemorate Christ’s descent into hell, to the land of the dead. In recent years our cinemas and television screens have been sated with apocalyptic images and disaster movies, but in our daily existence we try to avoid at all costs our mortality. Each of us has to come to terms with our finitude. Our worship needs to take us into the dark places, allowing God to speak to our subconscious fears. We need the confidence to peer into the abyss, trusting that God will address our deepest fears.

Finally, will our worship this Easter draw us afresh into the reality of Christ’s resurrection? This alone can transform us and empower us to transform the world. The reason why the events of that first Easter were so powerful was because they did not pretend that Jesus’ suffering and death weren’t real, terrible and awful – it was actually obscene. The awesome wonder of resurrection was that it spoke to our deepest fears and destroyed the ultimate victory of death. Those first disciples were set free from fear because they knew that if death had been defeated then nothing could separate them from the love of God.

Let me close with a true story of the late Mervyn Stockwood, former bishop of Southwark. He had gone to Russia with a parliamentary delegation. It was still an atheistic state. He had forgotten to pack his electric razor and so went to the salon in the hotel to be shaved. He wrote in his diary
‘There were two dressers, one of either sex. The man already had a client. Here was a dilemma. I am enthusiastic for sex equality, even when it comes to the ordination of women; but to be helpless in a chair with a woman wielding a cut-throat razor is another matter. However I had no alternative and I know now what real commitment means. As the soap-coupled beard mounted on the blade, the woman looked intently at me, especially at my pectoral cross and episcopal ring. She consulted her partner at the neighbouring chair, and hurrying back, asked me, through an interpreter, whether I was a bishop. It was the Easter season and the Orthodox Church, perhaps more than the others, celebrates the Resurrection with intensity. Taking my cross in her hand, she kissed it, next my ring, and then raising the razor blade aloft, with the soap and my beard still on it, called out, ‘Christ is Risen.’ Whereupon the other customers joyfully responded, ‘He is risen indeed’. I thought ‘Poor old Brezhnev, sixty years of atheism and still the Galilean conquers!’

As ministers of the Gospel, we cannot lead people in worship where we have not been ourselves. So we come here today to ask God to forgive our failures and to allow the great truths of Holy Week and Easter to take hold of our hearts and minds. And as we return to our parishes and chaplaincies, we pray for God’s grace, as well as skill, empathy and imagination, to draw others into the worship which takes us through death to life and transform us and them into an Easter people.