I want this morning to go off piste in my sermon. I’m not going to address any of the three readings which we have just heard, important though they are. I want instead to share with you a passage of theological writing which I first read many years ago and which has deeply influenced my thinking and praying since then.

It comes from a book entitled The Shape of the Liturgy, which was written by an Anglican Benedictine monk, Dom Gregory Dix of Nashdom Abbey It was published in 1945. It is a monumental work and, frankly, a very hard read! It traces the development of what we call the Communion Service, otherwise known as the Lord’s Supper, or the Mass, or the Eucharist, from its institution by Jesus to the time when Dom Gregory was writing. Eucharist simply means thanksgiving. I was delighted to find when first I went to Greece that the modern phrase for “thank you” is still “ev charisto”. It took me right back to Dom Gregory and our services of worship.

There are two reasons why I want to share this passage with you. First, because at the beginning of my ministry among you, it will tell you something about me and my beliefs. But second, and much  more important, because Dom Gregory reminds us of some things central, vital to our Christian religion, of which we can all too easily lose sight.

Hear now the profound spiritual wisdom of that amazing monk: 

“At the heart of all liturgy is the eucharistic action, a thing of absolute simplicity – the taking, blessing, breaking and giving of bread and the taking, blessing and giving of a cup of wine and water, as these were first done with their new meaning by a young Jew before and after supper with His friends on the night before He died.... He told His friends to do this henceforward with the new meaning ‘for the anamnesis’ [that is, the recollection] of Him’, and they have done it always since.

Was ever another command so obeyed? For century after century, spreading slowly to every continent and country and among every race on earth, this action has been done, in every conceivable human circumstance, for every conceivable human need from infancy and before it, to extreme old age and after it, from the pinnacles of earthly greatness, to the refuge of fugitives in the caves and dens of the earth. Men have found no better thing than this to do for kings at their crowning and for criminals going to the scaffold; for armies in triumph or for a bride and bridegroom in a little country church; for the proclamation of a dogma or for a good crop of wheat; for the wisdom of the Parliament of a mighty nation or for a sick old woman afraid to die; for a schoolboy sitting an examination or for Columbus setting out to discover America; for the famine of whole provinces or for the soul of a dead lover; in thankfulness because my father did not die of pneumonia; for a village headman much tempted to return to fetich [worship] because the yams had failed; … for the repentance of Margaret; for the settlement of a strike; for a son for a barren woman; for Captain so-and-so, wounded and prisoner of war; while the lions roared in the nearby amphitheatre; on the beach at Dunkirk; while the hiss of scythes in the thick June grass came faintly through the windows of the church; tremulously, by an old monk on the fiftieth anniversary of his vows; furtively, by an exiled bishop, who had hewn timber all day in a prison camp near Murmansk; gorgeously, for the canonisation of S. Joan of Arc – one could fill many pages with the reasons why people have done this, and not tell a hundredth part of them. And best of all, week by week and month by month, on a hundred thousand successive Sundays, faithfully, unfailingly, across all the parishes of Christendom, the pastors have done this just to make the plebs sancta Dei – the holy common people of God.

To those who know a little of Christian history probably the most moving of all the reflections it brings is not the thought of the great events and the well-remembered saints, but of those innumerable millions of entirely obscure faithful men and women, every one with his or her own individual hopes and fears and joys and sorrows and loves – and sins and temptations and prayers – once every whit as vivid and alive as mine are now. They have left no slightest trace in this world, not even a name, but have passed to God utterly forgotten by men. Yet each one of them once believed and prayed as I believe and pray, and found it hard and grew slack and sinned and repented and fell again. Each of them worshipped at the eucharist, and found their thoughts wandering and tried again, and felt heavy and unresponsive and yet knew – just as really and pathetically as I do, these things.... The sheer stupendous quantity of the love of God which this ever repeated action has drawn from the obscure Christian multitudes through the centuries is in itself an overwhelming thought.”

(Dix, Dom Gregory,  The Shape of the Liturgy  1945; 

Dacre Press, pp. 743 – 5)

That’s the end of the quotation. I know it’s a lot to take in at one go. But I hope that maybe you will remember three things:

First, the historicity and universality of the church. This rite, this Eucharist, has been performed over centuries, around the world, in all possible circumstances, in response to our Lord’s command.

Second, we who participate in it, we – you me, all of us - are members of “the holy common people of God”.  “The holy common people of God”. What a powerful description, and what a privilege.

And finally, we are all too aware that none of us is perfect. That we try and try again to do better, and fail. Let us remember that millions before us have tried and failed and millions after us will try and fail, and yet all are held within the love of God as shown in the Eucharist.