A House of Meanings

Christian Worship in Plain Language

Juan M. C. Oliver, Juan Oliver

• Publisher: Church Publishing
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781640651401
• eBook ISBN: 9781640651418
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

A plain language exploration of the theology of worship. Professional theological terminology is often inaccessible to the average Christian. A House of Meanings presents liturgical theology in accessible ways, free of technical language. The book is designed for individual reading and structured to be a resource for a series of parish workshops, especially during the Easter season. Chapters conclude with a discussion guide intended to assist parishioners in developing their own sense of the value of worship and its relationship to our daily lives. Dedicated to deepening parishioners' understandings of the Church and how it has both gathered and sent into service to the world, A House of Meanings will be useful not only to congregations, but to seminarians and anyone planning or evaluating worship.

Chapter IV

Talking and
Eating with God

The Eucharist

Immediately after their baptisms, the new members joined the Christian community in the celebration of the eucharist, or thanksgiving. We will explore it in its two parts: the Word of God and the Holy Communion, reviewing first what we do and its history, and then the meanings we have found in them, action by action.

Your experience. What has been your experience of participating in the eucharist? Life-giving? Restoring? Forgiving? Enraging? Frustrating? Incomprehensible? Boring? What has been wonderful, and what has been a challenge? What is it like for you to gather with other Christians every Sunday—or most Sundays? If your congregation at eucharist were to magically disappear, what would be lost to you?

The first part of our gathering was, and still is, the Word of God. At eucharists, we gather together—and with God. In fact, the Greek word ekklesia, translated in English as “church,” actually means “assembly.” It originally referred to an assembly of elected Greek officials called together to deliberate, like our legislatures. The Church was understood to be an assembly elected (literally, “called out”) and convened by God. Your local church is an assembly of people, regardless of where you gather, whether at the church’s building or at a picnic eucharist in the woods. There are four significant actions that the assembly always carries out in this part of the eucharist: gathering, listening, sharing, and praying. Before we examine each in its own right, it will be helpful to review the earliest eucharists and what they looked like.

The earliest eucharists. Meals feature often in the New Testament, indicating that even before we developed rich theological understandings of the event, we simply got together to share a meal. Even then, though, Jesus’s practice of eating with the wrong people had a specific meaning as a sign, as we shall see below.

Imagine yourself a follower of the Way (the first name we gave ourselves, before “Christian”), in the bustling city of Corinth, around the year 53 ce. You and members of your household gather with others in the large home of a well-to-do member. There are perhaps between thirty and fifty people there. Normally you would bring something for the potluck, but today all the food is provided by the host. You are not surprised by the presence of homeless people, slaves and free people, men and women, Roman citizens and foreigners, together. The meal is a radically egalitarian event in a culture in which it was extremely important to eat with the right people and avoid the wrong ones. The menu is probably mostly bread and vegetables, though perhaps it also included fish. Meat was probably avoided since it was associated with sacrifices to the gods in pagan temples.

Shared meals like these gradually began to take place either Saturday after sundown or early on Sunday morning, before work, and were associated with “the Day of the Lord,” that is, the day of Christ’s resurrection but also the day of the fulfillment of the reign (kingdom) of God, here on earth.

These gatherings did not take place in churches initially but in homes, whether the home of members wealthy enough to accommodate a large group, or modest homes and apartments—even shops—where a smaller group might meet. As the assemblies grew in size, homes were remodeled and enlarged to suit those purposes.

By 150 CE, in a Syrian community in Rome, the event had developed its basic structure, which we observe to this day: we gathered, heard God’s Word, shared its meaning, prayed for Church and world, gave thanks to God, ate together, and were sent out. Let’s look at the first four actions: gathering, listening, sharing, and praying.

We gather. Justin the Martyr, a layman writing to the emperor Antoninus Pius around 150 CE, described what we did on Sundays in that Syrian community in Rome:

And on the day called Sunday, all who live in cities or in the country gather together to one place, and the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read, as long as time permits; then, when the reader has ceased, the president verbally instructs, and exhorts to the imitation of these good things. Then we all rise together and pray. . . ¹

Our first significant action in the eucharist, then, is gathering. This begins the minute you leave home, but it comes to its climax as the Church comes together, singing a song of praise, and ending with our prayers “collected” in a collect said by the one who presides. This gathering rite may be extended by adding an optional entrance hymn and prayer for purification, but nevertheless the core of the action is an acclamation, a hymn, and prayer.

In this sense at least, simply gathering in the name of Christ already is a sign, as found in that earliest Church order, the Didache, or Teaching, whose Eucharistic Prayer asks God, “. . . may your Church be gathered together from the ends of the earth unto your kingdom.”²

From the very beginning of the eucharistic gathering, we are reminded that we are, already, in God’s reign (kingdom). What does gathering mean? And to whom? Here is what it meant to the great Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann:

The liturgy of the Eucharist is best understood as a journey or procession. It is the journey of the Church into the dimension of the Kingdom. We use the word “dimension” because it seems the best way to indicate the manner of our sacramental entrance into the risen life of Christ. Color transparencies “come alive” when viewed in three dimensions instead of two. The presence of the added dimension allows us to see much better the actual reality of what has been photographed. In very much the same way, though of course any analogy is condemned to fail, our entrance into the presence of Christ is an entrance into a fourth dimension which allows us to see the ultimate reality of life. It is not an escape from the world, rather it is the arrival at a vantage point from which we can see more deeply into the reality of the world.³

We listen to God’s Word. Once we are gathered, we hear God’s Word. Two biblical readings are proclaimed: one from the Old Testament or Acts, a second reading from the New Testament. The first and second readings may be followed by a psalm or a hymn. Finally, we hear a reading from the gospels. This reading may be honored in special ways: the book may be carried in procession accompanied by imperial Roman signs of honor like lights and incense, or simply proclaimed from the same pulpit or lectern as the other readings.

Throughout, we are listening to God’s Word, that is, God’s message to us here, today. We do this through texts originally written in foreign languages thousands of years ago, and addressed to a very different people. It is important to understand their historical, cultural, linguistic, and even socioeconomic context, or we may seriously distort the texts, projecting meanings that were not there originally. Understanding the texts in their context, we can then find parallel meanings in our own context. Since biblical texts were originally written in Hebrew and Greek, this is a good place to say a word about translation.

Translation is an art. It is carried out by professionals, who, at least bilingual, always translate into their first language, whose rhythms and nuances they carry, as it were, in their blood. It cannot be done well by a machine, for, more often than not, there are no exact correspondences from language to language, but what is said in one language finds similar or analogous expressions in another, not literally the same. For this reason alone it is wise for proclaimers of the Word at worship to consult more than one translation as they prepare. Throughout this book I am using David Bentley Hart’s new translation of the New Testament for it is as literal as possible—and therefore at times ungrammatical, inelegant, and inappropriate for liturgical use; it offers, however, the meaning of a text in its original context, so the reader may find the analogous meanings in theirs. It is also very helpful to the average congregant to hear rather than read the Word proclaimed, for in hearing it, the text takes on a life and surprising relevance all its own, opening new avenues of interpretation every single time, allowing us to encounter it afresh.

What does listening to God together as a community mean? We gather to listen, so it is immediately evident that the Speaker has something to say that we value. It may be shocking, surprising, consoling, revolutionary, life-changing, or predictable, but the very act of proclamation assumes that it is something worth listening to—something for which we are grateful—so we respond, “thanks be to God.” This means perhaps that the meaning of being here, alive, comes from a Source beyond ourselves, just as we do not create ourselves either.

Sharing the meanings of the texts. Listening to God’s Word would be a lot easier if God spoke univocally, every sentence crystal clear, with scientific exactness, leaving no room for interpretation. But God respects us too much for that, and knowing that the Word must be meaningful to each of us in our particularity, the Speaker speaks in parables, metaphors, stories, and other poetic ways, which we must interpret for ourselves here and now. To be able to engage in this, the operative question is, What does this message mean to me/us in my/our life today?

Even with the best translations, the task of applying the Word to our local, immediate situation requires work. This usually takes place in the form of a sermon or homily, in which the preacher “opens up” the Word proclaimed, exploring its meanings for us today. It can also take place when a group of Christians simply share what the Word means to them in their context, as we do in such exercises as lectio divina and African Bible Reflection sessions during preparation for baptism, confirmation, and so forth, where the participants share what the passage means to them. Sometimes in small congregations, the Lectio Divina method or African Bible Reflection may be used in place of a sermon, or in response to it.

Too often we can hear and interpret the Word only as it affects each of us in our individual lives, and the meaning of the Word to the congregation or parish community remains unexplored. Preachers can, and should, seek to articulate what God is telling not only individuals but the community as a whole.

The Creed. For almost a thousand years, most of Western Christianity managed to celebrate the eucharist without the Nicene Creed. Promulgated by the bishops gathered by Constantine at Nicea in 325, and expanded in Constantinople in 381 CE, this Creed was developed to expel the Arians from the assembly, for they believed that the second person of the Trinity is a creature of God, unequal to the Father. In the East the Creed was added to the eucharist as early as 511 CE, but in the West it was included only in Spain in 589; there, the invasion of the Arian Visigoths made them particular targets of the accusation of heresy. It was only in the early eleventh century that the Western Church included it in the eucharist everywhere.

An entire book could be written on the issue of whether the Nicene Creed belongs in the eucharist at all. Here I would only point out several details: First, the original context and purpose of the Nicene Creed was to exclude the Arians. Additionally, its philosophical language, to be crystal clear, is different from the usual metaphorical, poetic style employed in worship. Moreover, for a thousand years the Great Thanksgiving was, and continues to be, our main creedal statement in the eucharist, to which we assent with our final Amen, required for it to be valid. Finally, it seems that our Eucharistic Prayer B’s progression of ideas may have been influenced by the Apostle’s (or baptismal) Creed, which forms the core of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed as well. The baptismal or Apostle’s Creed, which preceded it, was essential in baptism. Such baptismal creeds are much older than the Nicene. So we cannot say that reciting the Creed is essential to the eucharist—in the Holy Eucharist Rite II it must only be recited on Sundays and major feasts.⁴

We pray for the Church and the world. Now that we have heard of God’s love and intention for of all creation, we dare speak up and say “help!” As Justin the Martyr described it,

“[we] offer hearty prayers in common for ourselves and for the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• I Signs of Grace: How Worship Works
• II The Hinge of the Year: The Liturgies of Holy Week
• III Your Own Death and Resurrection: Baptism and Confirmation
• IV Talking and Eating with God: The Eucharist
• V Getting Organized: Holy Order
• VI Sign of God’s Love: Marriage
• VIII n a New Place: Anointing of the Sick
• VIII The Uprising of Jesus Christ: The Church, its Mission, and Cultures
• A Postscript on Liturgical Design
• Glossary