+This past week I was on a reading retreat-- an intentional time of rest, prayer and reflection fueled by my reading of two books—one by contemporary religious commentator Becky Garrison on mission-shaped ministries for the 21st century ( Garrison, Becky Ancient-Future Disciples: Meeting Jesus in Mission Shaped Ministries Seabury Books, 2011) and another, The Bible that basically talked about the same thing. Through my reading I was challenged to look at everything we do as The Church, questioning whether what we’re doing is life-giving or institutional-giving. Both books pushed my boundaries of the familiar and the regular because both books clearly state that to be Christ’s body in the world, as is our Christian challenge, we must be a living breathing, adapting organism of faith and hope and love.
How many of you are familiar with the Prayer of Humble Access? We recite it just before communion at the 8 am service. Those of you who grew up with the 1928 prayer book or in a Rite One parish, or in the RC church, know this prayer:
We do not presume to come to this thy Table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table. But thou art the same Lord whose property is always to have mercy. Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood, that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us. Amen.
This is one of those prayers, one of those icons of our institutional faith that people either love or loathe. I, myself, have spent little time with this prayer. When I first encountered it, I decided I didn’t like it and just moved on, never challenging my verdict and usually reciting it with a bit of disdain in my heart. That is, until I heard the foreshadowing of it in today’s Gospel, when the centurion says:
“Lord, do not trouble yourself, for I am not worthy to have you come under my roof; therefore I did not presume to come to you. But only speak the word, and let my servant be healed.”
These words are the words of an outsider—a Roman soldier praying for another outsider—a slave—an amazing act of Love.
The boundary breaking in today’s readings is stunning!
In our reading from the Book of King’s Solomon stands on the steps of his newly completed temple, praying that all those drawn to this amazing edifice, familiar and stranger alike, will come to understand that the God this building is dedicated to is a God for all people. No exceptions. Read through a 21st century lens, these words drip with irony as, for most of its history, the temple in Jerusalem has been fought over by people trying to maintain their version of the institutional status quo, avoiding, at great cost, a move into the unfamiliar and the new.
In both our reading from King’s and our reading from Luke we are reminded that the growth of the church-- that the spread of the Body of Christ in this world--is a journey into the unfamiliar and a trip down the road of unknowing.
Our Christian faith, if it’s going well, should be, at times, uncomfortable. Because our faith, if it is to grow and to flourish, must accept the new, embrace the different and welcome the unfamiliar. If we stay in what’s familiar, if we go through the motions of our worship just as we always have, if we listen to the same old people saying the same old things and refuse to listen to the new, the different and the uncomfortable, then instead of being Christ’s body in this world we are just a lifeless corpse hanging on a cross.
So what does any of this have to do with the Prayer of Humble Access and my opinion of it? Lots.
Both of the books I read this week—Becky Garrison’s and God’s---are full of stories about what happens when we open ourselves up to the unfamiliar and the new.
So as I read today’s Gospel and heard the familiar prose of the Prayer of Humble Access I began to wrestle with my assumptions and my opinions. I looked for something new wrapped up in the old, I looked for something fresh out of the familiar. Through reading, thinking, praying and talking I realized that what I didn’t like about the prayer was the exact thing I needed to embrace about the prayer!
I always heard this prayer as a hymn of self-loathing-- that we couldn’t receive communion until we were convinced that we were worthless worms and that it’s only through the mercy of God that we aren’t thrown into eternal damnation and hellfire.
Well guess what? While God never wants us to loathe ourselves—and of this I am absolutely positively sure--- we aren’t—and never can be—worthy of God’s grace and mercy. Although we can never earn it, we also can never ever lose it. We have two choices: forget and reject it or remember and embrace it. God isn’t the fickle one, we are.
We get so caught up in the institutional part of church we forget the Body of Christ part of the church---our readings this morning remind us that ours is an ever-changing faith: the way we worship God, the way we strive to be God in the Flesh on earth, is always evolving, changing and becoming something all together new. As Solomon prayed for on the temple steps, as Jesus recognized in the faith of the Centurion, as I discovered when I read the prayer of humble access with fresh eyes, being the body of Christ in the world requires that we embrace the different, accept the new and reach out to the stranger; because when we do our faith is enriched, our worship takes on new meaning and our God, the God who loves everyone always no exceptions? Well when we look at the familiar from a new perspective and when we welcome change instead of fearing it, that God shouts Alleluia and Amen!+
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