Homily preached at Christ Church
Greenwich, Connecticut
May 8, 2019 / Commemoration of Dame Julian of Norwich
Altar Guild Rededication Service
Hebrews 10:19-24
John 4:23-26
A couple of years ago, the Bishop of Texas came to visit Yale Divinity School. In a talk he gave to the Episcopal students there, he remarked – with all the fervor of a prophet – that the future of the church was one that would reach beyond the four walls of the church building on Sunday mornings. It wouldn’t be enough, he said, to evangelize the neighborhood with our zeal for Christ and to be known by our works of mercy and charity; to survive, the church of the future would need to sever its crippling and sentimental attachment to the Sunday morning regime of liturgy and coffee hour, a regime most evident, said the bishop, in the ministrations of the altar guild.
I think the good bishop was surprised by the strength and vehemence with which altar guilds were defended by members of the student body, including those whom this preacher found the most unlikable, and under heavy assault, the bishop relented and was forced to admit that he himself likes churches and altar guilds.
But there is a tendency in contemporary church life to poo-poo the buildings, vestments, and vessels of the church, to imagine that chalices and linens are outmoded and antiquated, and that the contents of the sacristy somehow stand between the church and its own future. Our neighbors who worship down at the Hyatt cheerfully sneer at Christ Church’s maintenance of its historic campus, but without a lot of understanding of why it is that church buildings are actually important, and why worshipping in a temple devoted to bland, mass-produced, pseudo-luxury represents no more than a tinhorn faith for a tinhorn culture.
Jeremy Taylor, one of the 17th-century Anglican divines, gives a good summation of why it is that we set apart church buildings for their particular purpose. He says something about why those buildings have altars as their focal points, as indeed churches have had for most of Christian history. He writes:
The Altar or Holy Table is sedes Corporis et Sanguinis Christi. S. Chrysost: hom: 21. in 2 Cor: et alibi. And if the Altars, and the Arke and the Temple in the Law of Nature and Moses were Holy, because they were God’s Memorialls, as I shewed above, then by the same reason shall the Altar be uper agion, highly Holy, because it is Christ’s Memoriall. ….. Wee doe believe that Christ is there really present in the Sacrament, there is the body and bloud of Christ, which are, ‘verely, and indeed’ taken and received by the faithfull, saith our Church in her Catechisme. Now if places became holy at the presence of an Angel, as it did it with Joshua’s case to whom the captain of the Lords Host appeared, and in Jacobs case at Bethel, and in all the old Law, for God always appeared by Angels, shall not the Christian Altar be most holy where is present the blessed Body and blood of the Son of God?[1]
We hear Taylor’s use of the phrase “really present in the Sacrament,” which is the classic Anglican response to the question of what is going on at the Altar when the Eucharist is celebrated. Christ is present in the bread and the wine, for those who worthily receive the sacrament. The work of the Altar Guild is to care for the altar itself – for the sedes Corporis et Sanguinis Christi – as well as for its dressings and accoutrements. It is a sacred work.
As Bishop Henry Codman Potter of New York once remarked, “The best deserves the best,” and that is why we use sterling, and linen, and silk. We might recall that in the Gospel of John, Christ’s passion is preceded by Mary’s anointing him lavishly, with pure nard; and it ends with Joseph and Nicodemus, laying his body in the tomb, having wrapped it in linen and anointed it with “about a hundred pounds” of myrrh and aloes.[2]
It is perhaps not incidental that we should gather here to rededicate ourselves to the ministry of the Altar Guild on the day on which the church commemorates Dame Julian of Norwich. Lady Julian was an anchoress, which means a religious recluse (from a Greek root meaning “to retire” to “a place”). She died in the first quarter of the 15th century, and was for decades sought out by Christians from across England and continental Europe.
She became a recluse at Norwich soon after her recovery from a nearly fatal illness, living in a small dwelling attached to the Church of St Julian. Even in her lifetime, she was famed as a mystic and spiritual counselor and was frequently visited by clergymen and lay persons, including the famous mystic Margery Kempe. Kempe writes of Lady Julian: “This anchoress was expert in knowledge of our Lord and could give good counsel. I spent much time with her talking of the love of our Lord Jesus Christ.”[3]
The life of the church, which is anchored for us in the church’s liturgy with the altar at its center, is not an incidental construction. Lady Julian did not live in a cabin in the woods; she lived in a dwelling attached to a parish church, the place where the people of Norwich came to “worship the Father in spirit and truth,” as we hear Jesus say in this morning’s Gospel lesson. Lady Julian met them there, at the door of the Lord’s house, as a guide for those who would grow in the “knowledge and love of God and of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.”
Other than moments of revelation – which are few and far between – God makes himself known to us in the word of Scripture (and hopefully in its homiletical exposition), and in the Word made flesh, Jesus his Son, whom we know through Scripture and through our encounter with him, week in and week out, at the altar. The work to which we rededicate ourselves today, the care of that altar, is a holy work, and it is meet and right and a good and joyful thing that there should be in this place a guild set apart to perform it.
May God speed you in that work, this day and always.
AMEN.