ABSTRACT

The church where I serve as pastor has recently started a midweek Eucharistic service. This is nothing earth-shattering, it is the sort of thing churches do all the time – gather for prayer, mutual support, and praise. What is of interest is its very ordinariness. This gathering is as spare as we Methodists get. No music, no offering, not much

in the way of trappings at all. Just twenty or so people at the end of their work day, in the middle of their week, gathering in twilight to praise. We gather in the loveliest room here at our church – a high ceilinged, airy space where we can see our town’s greatest mountain through the stately windows, and we bathe in the numinous light of that hour of the day. I have occasionally used the second-century prayer, ‘Oh Gladsome Light, pure brightness of the ever-living Father in heaven, oh Jesus Christ, holy and blessed. Now as we come to the setting of the sun, and our eyes behold the vesper light, we praise thy name oh Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.’ But more often I have prayed extemporaneously. The form of the Eucharist is based on our Methodist Church’s roots in the

Church of England, which are in turn based on some of the most ancient liturgies of the church universal. The opening prayer glances at God’s omniscience (‘Almighty God, to you all hearts are open, all desires known, and from you no secrets are hid’) and our calling to perfect love (‘cleanse the thoughts of our hearts … that we may perfectly love you’). Then we pray a blessing over the reading and preaching of the word (‘Open our hearts and minds … that we may receive with joy what you say to us today’). I read scripture and preach a (mercifully) short homily, often with responses of objection or agreement from the small congregation. Then we pray for our needs and the needs of others. These prayers are often why they have come. Their hearts are heavy, and they need help lifting them up to God. Next, the Eucharist offers that help: ‘Lift up your hearts!’ I command with the ancient words, and they all throw their hearts up in the air (‘We lift them up to the Lord’). Then with the ancient liturgy I recount God’s saving work in the Old and New Testaments. We pray with the seraphim in Isaiah and the elders in Revelation, ‘Holy Holy Holy Lord, God of power and might’ – sometimes I even sing that and they sing back. I ask that the bread and wine be transformed for us into the body and blood of Christ. They process up and I tell them, ‘The body of Christ, broken for you. This is the body of Christ, the bread of heaven.’ Another worshipper holds the cup, ‘The blood of Christ, the cup of salvation.’ They eat and drink, we pray, sometimes I make an

announcement or two with service opportunities later in the week, and we all return to our lives. It’s all strikingly ordinary. Or if it strikes you at all, it’s because your senses have

been trained to notice the radical nature of the everyday. Christianity is always a matter of ‘traditioned innovation’, with an emphasis on both words.1 It’s never simply traditional – keeping the way we’ve always done things frozen in amber, as if for viewers in a museum. Nor is it simply innovative, making things up as we go along. It’s always a matter of reaching back into our tradition to pull out what’s old for a new day. Arguably there is no innovation anywhere, inside or outside the Church, without rich tradition; and likewise no tradition kept alive without some form of innovation. Jaroslav Pelikan, the great Orthodox scholar, liked to contrast tradition, which he called the ‘living faith of the dead’, with traditionalism, the ‘dead faith of the living’. Creativity always depends on memory.2