Fall Formation Preview: One Bread, One Body
The Rev. Robert Fruehwirth, Rector
As we round the bend of mid-summer, I am eager for you to know of plans for the fall. The parish formation for the coming year is going to center on the Eucharist, our Sunday Worship. The title is One Bread, One Body.
This might seem random, like I have plucked one possible topic out of the ether. It is however strategic and follows on the formation we have done in the past three years, particularly our exploration of the Anglican Way of being Christian, and the You, Redeemed and We, Redeemed Lent programs of 2022 and ’23.
Last fall I led the parish on an exploration of our Anglican Way. The basic idea had three steps
1) First, there is a God. Big breath!
2) Second, the God of Jesus Christ is involved in history, in your story, my story, our parish story. God is the main protagonist in the story and wants us to cooperate with Him/Her because God desires our joy and healing. This is huge stuff!
3) Third: we learn how how cooperate with God (rather than oppose God's movement) by situating ourselves in an ongoing conversation, the devoted play, between Scripture, Church Tradition, and reflection on experience — that is, we reflect on what is happening now in our stories and how things actually work. And all this occurs not in isolation but in community, facing one another in humility and with different gifts of the Spirit. In the Anglican tradition we don't attempt to absolutize Scripture or Church authority or human experience but discern how we are to cooperate with God in the play between all these authorities.
The Holy Eucharist, our Sunday Worship, is where all this comes together: the self-revelation of God in Scripture, Church tradition and teaching, and reflection on our lives. The Eucharist a highly structured presentation of the core practices of Christian life as a whole. It is as if our divine dance teacher takes us by the hand and shows us, week in and week out, the movements and practices which we are then intended — yikes! — to improvise through the rest of our daily lives.
First, we gather at a time and in a space where we expect to encounter God in Word, Sacrament, and Community. This expectation of God’s arrival is the key operation of faith (and hope! and love!). We listen to scripture, and commentary, expecting to encounter something of God. Then, we pray, bringing to God our joys and all that is wrong in our world, all that troubles us. We ask for God's mercy, healing, and power.
And then…something else entirely happens, what we call the liturgy of the Altar. In the offertory we offer our lives and souls and bodies to God. We then remember the story of Jesus' death and resurrection as the BIG STORY in which all our other stories, joyous and painful, past and present, are woven into God. We expect Jesus to be there with us, and having offered our lives up to cooperate with God’s work, we then eat the bread that is his body and we drink from the chalice that Jesus says is his blood. Communion.
Finally, we are dismissed.We are sent into the world to improvise these basic dance steps of listening to the Word, praying our needs and our joys, receiving the life of Jesus’ Spirit, and cooperating with God movement through our stories and histories right now. Eucharist!
We will be exploring each aspect of this dance, this liturgical play, in two Sunday Forums in September, laying the foundation for renewed parish life, as well as for our New and Renewed Members Class following on this
And there is one more (super important) thing.
Reflecting on Eucharist, and how God works within our stories, will provide a chance to clarify how our faith supports us in remembering and telling the story of our parish more fully -- not only the good parts, but allowing the difficult parts to expand and deepen us. This is work we we have been doing for many years and will reach a peak in our Bicentennial years (2024-26). The focus now, even as we unearth more stories — more poignant, inspiring, funny, and difficult stories from our past — is how our faith, our Eucharist, gives us a way of taking all this material to God in prayer and allowing ourselves to be changed by it, to become more and more the Body of Christ.
It is my joy every Sunday to do Eucharist with you all. Even more, it is God's joy to do it with us. We are a source of delight in God as we learn to dance our lives with the movements we pick up in the great liturgy of Eucharist. God loves this sharing of life with us, in sickness and in health, unbroken by our sin and glorious in virtue. This is God’s joy.
God bless,
Robert