Thursday’s on this blog is Liturgy Day. I
am going through the Mass, bit by bit, to see how each small part of the Mass
shows forth the pattern of Christian discipleship in the world.
We are at the very end of the offertory
rite, with the prayer over the offerings. This is one of the changeable texts
of the Mass, varying according to the season or feast or saint of the day. The
liturgy always does this, referring back to where we are in time while pulling
us into the contemplation of eternity. I will talk more about this next week
when we discuss the preface.
This Prayer Over the Offerings sums up
everything we just did, and so it is a good place to review what I’ve been
talking about the previous weeks. We bring bread and wine to the priest, and he
brings it to the altar. He gives thanks to God for these natural gifts ‘fruit
of the earth and work of human hands’, and in various ways prays for God to
mercifully accept this offering and make it His own.
The concluding prayer encapsulates all
these themes in various ways. The prayer for today, for example is this:
“Accept, O Lord, the sacred offerings which at your bidding we dedicate to your
name and, in order that through these gifts we may become worthy of your love,
grant us unfailing obedience to your commands.”
As I have discussed in past weeks, there
is a certain path of Christian discipleship laid out in this simple and fairly
short rite of the Mass. Going on from here, we will see what Christ does with
the offering, and the emphasis surely and deeply shifts to His action, and
rightly so. But at this juncture, we see our own part in it, what we are to do.
We are to bring whatever we have—the
bread and wine that is the whole substance of our person, our lives and
everything in them—and give it to Christ (symbolized by the priest) who brings
it to the altar (to His own place of love and gift, the Cross). We are to give
thanks to God for everything we are and have, that which delights us and brings
us pleasure, that which is heavy and burdensome.
We are to be utterly mindful of our
complete unworthiness, that the gifts we bring God—our whole life—is marred and
marked by sin and selfishness. His acceptance of the gift and His choice to
unite Himself to us and transform our lives into His life is a gift of mercy on
His part, not anything we deserve.
We see in the prayer I quote above that
He does graciously make us worthy of His love, and that He does this by giving
us the grace to obey His commands. Boy, do we ever have to take this prayer to
heart! I am always a little perplexed these days at some of the conversations
around ‘communion and who may receive it’, when churchmen who are older than I
by far do not seem to acknowledge in their positions that… well, that God’s
grace is real, you know?
That we are not left orphans. That we are
not left without help from on high, and that this help is specifically given to
us that we may obey His commands. There seems to be some disconnect
somewhere—that somehow God’s moral law is over here, but the messy reality of people’s
lives is way over there… and that’s all there is to it. A gulf separating the
moral law, the Divine Law which springs from the eternal Wisdom of God, and the
‘real world’ of human stumbling and striving and mess. And since it is an
unbridgeable gap, let’s just ignore it and pretend it doesn’t exist. Everyone
come to communion, yay! Really?
Do we not believe that Jesus really has
come to us to bridge that gap? That we can bring Him our messed up lives, our
moldy bread and cheap vinegary wine, and He will help us to make it into pure
fine wheat and choicest vintage? And that it is worth it? And that we need to
have come to some basic point of obedience before we can enter the fullest
depths of communion? But that even while we’re on the way, there is mercy and
grace surrounding us in the process?
We have to bring our bread and wine to
the Priest and lay it on the Altar—basic surrender, basic discipleship.
Everyone has to do that—people whose lives are in some kind of sort of basic
order… well, sort of (we’re all sinners, after all), and people who may have
some terrible disorder to some degree baked into the structure of their
lives—irregular marriages, homosexual orientation, cohabitation, work
situations that are unethical.
We all bring whatever we have to Christ,
but the bringing it to Him is the surrender of it to Him so He can purify us,
not so that we can arrogantly demand He take us as we are so that we can take
Him as we like. All are welcome, all are called, but the welcome and the call
is to the obedience of faith, which takes the incarnate form of obedience to
the moral law and to the Gospel.
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