LENT I, Year C: February 25 2007

What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God? (Micah 6.8): the voice of St Paul
Preacher: Fr Andrew Greany

The text from Micah chapter 6 which we've chosen as the basis of our 5 Lent Sunday morning sermons this year has been described as the 'finest guide to practical religion to be found in the Old Testament.' The straightforwardness of it might seem far removed from those inner struggles described in today's gospel ... that confrontation with personal demons signified by the temptations of Jesus: temptations to find short cuts to glory ... by wealth (winning the lottery, perhaps?), or by the use of magic powers. But the simplicity of the question 'What does the Lord require?' and the straight answer conceal the complexity of the situations faced by those who see themselves as the People of God. The religious people of Micah's time had formulated a sacrificial code; surely, they thought, to extend this further and further would be the way to satisfy their God: and so they ask: 'with what shall I come before the Lord ... shall I come before him with burnt offerings ... shall I even give my first-born for my transgression?' These are the questions which lead into our Lenten text: 'what does the Lord require of you but to do justice...?' Micah invites, or, more strongly, challenges the people to cut through the outward observance of their religion to the heart of commitment to a God of justice and kindness, within which they might be the companions of that God, rooted in the earth which He had created.

The aim of our 5 Sunday morning sermons this Lent is to look through the eyes of different scriptural writers at this same challenge to commitment to a God of justice and kindness. There's no need, I believe, to apologise for beginning with St Paul, or at least with one particular context in which St Paul presents this challenge, because that context is the Eucharist. We celebrate the Eucharist here every Sunday and indeed every day, and hold it to be what defines and demonstrates our membership of the Body of Christ. Like the Israelites of Micah's time, perhaps, with their sacrificial system, we want to get it right…and this is true however convinced we may be that it has superseded the old system. So we have to face this kind of question: does our gathering for the Eucharist enable or block our commitment to a God of justice and kindness? In the 'Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics', Robert Song writes in the chapter 'Hunger and Food:' the possibility of 'correctly' performing the Liturgy of the Eucharist but failing to embody the righteousness of God remains a constant threat to the Church. Elsewhere in the same collection, another contributor, Paul Waddell, takes up the phrase 'table manners': at the Eucharist, Christians are educated in the 'table manners' of the kingdom of God. Jesus, he writes, embodied the unsettling table manners of God's reign in the table fellowship he practised in his life.

Remember how he sat down with those who were normally excluded from acceptable society. This is why I invite you this morning to explore something of what St Paul says to the Christian community at Corinth about their gathering together to eat the bread and to drink the cup of the Lord in 1 Corinthians 11 vv 11-34, and about the 'breaking of the bread' in 1 Corinthians 10. What St Paul says in chapter 11 is a real-life illustration of the failure of a Christian community to live out the ideal described in chapter 10, where he says: because there is one loaf, we though many are one body.

So, what is the situation he describes in chapter 11? An 'unworthy' eating and drinking ... but how was it unworthy? Well, it seems that everyone arrives for the gathering at a different time; but it's to be a communal feast, everyone to come, everyone to bring something to share, though the rich would bring more and the poor would bring less. The idea was that everyone should wait until the blessing is said over the food, and a piece of bread is distributed to all before the rest of the provisions are shared. The same later on with the wine. But what was happening in Corinth was that the early arrivals weren't waiting for the others, and they were gobbling up their goodies before the blessing and the sharing. And this, goes Paul's argument, is not just discourteous, it is sacrilege. It is to defile the Body, the Body of Christ: it is to say, those people don't matter…we don't wait for them, we don't share with them. And then the Body and the Blood of Christ become dangerous food and dangerous drink, when we set aside the 'table manners' of God's kingdom. These 'table manners' hold us to 3 truths: (1) we can never be isolated individual Christians; we journey together; insensitivity to my fellow Christian is a denial and defilement of the Body: but (2) given that there is brokenness and division, in the Church, but not only in the Church, but in society and family and in the affairs of this and other nations, we cannot shrug our shoulders, wash our hands, deny the possibility of healing and reconciliation: that too would be to deny and to defile the Body of Christ (3) we are called to recognize and to proclaim the Eucharist for what it is, a place, a context for the gathering of people who would NOT otherwise gather! Paul Waddell again: at the Eucharist one's table companions may be strangers, misfits, malcontents, or even an assortment of enemies. There is no guarantee that in celebrating the Lord's Supper Christians will be surrounded by like-minded friends; indeed, they may pass the cup to someone whose presence makes them deeply uncomfortable.

The 'table manners' of God's kingdom are about recognizing these truths and these challenges; they are about 'discerning the Body'. But the insights of St Paul about the Eucharist shed light not only on the nature of our internal relationships; the Eucharist is to be a sign to the world. By being the context in which insensitivity to neighbour denies the Body: by signifying that to deny the possibility of healing denies the Body: by being a gathering of those who otherwise would not encounter or hear one another: in all these ways the Church's Eucharist is to be an effective sign of God's love, God's peace and God's justice to a world of insensitivity, of despair, of exclusiveness.

What does the Lord require of us but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly, in a down-to-earth way that is, with our God? When we discern the Body of Christ in the Eucharist, we discern that Body in its offer of love, hope and peace.