Walking Through Communion - The Word

In the third of our series of articles on the service of Holy Communion, the Reverend Derek Hinge walks us through the Ministry of the Word: 

 

We now come to the second main part of the structure of the Service, namely the Ministry of the Word.  In other words, through pre-preparation, confession, hearing God’s forgiveness, rejoicing in that through the words of the Gloria and ‘Collecting’ our thoughts in the seasonal Collect Prayer, we lay ourselves open to hearing God speaking to us, and responding to what we hear in a formal Credal statement and more informally in our prayers.  Let us look at all this is a little more detail.

 

Scripture

First a lay member of our church reads a small part of the Bible, either from the Old or New Testaments, or both.  The lay person represents all of us reading the Bible.  He or she gathers together all those other times during the week when we read the Bible on our own, but now the whole church is gathered to read the Scriptures.  The Church’s claim is that this book, the Bible, is ‘God’s Word written’.  What we listen to is a very small part of the life experience of real people, who lived at a real time in the world’s history, and interpreted their experience as a revelation of the nature and the activity of God.  Put another way, the Bible is God speaking – through story, history, poetry, prophecy, letter writing and visions – about himself and about us.  The Bible is thus a very human, very earthy book.  It pulls no punches, and deals with all the great questions of human experience like where we come from, why we are here, and what the purpose of life is.  

Then we sing a hymn or a Psalm.  The Psalms are a particularly rich part of the Bible because they express the spiritual response of different people to their experience of life.  They were chanted by the Jewish people as they worshipped in Temple and synagogue and they were adopted by the early church as a first hymn book.  So, as we sing the Psalm and respond to it, we are entering into a very ancient tradition, uniting ourselves with the experience of millions of godly people down the centuries to the present day.

Gospel

A very special part of the Bible we have not yet mentioned is the four gospels.  The word ‘gospel’ means ‘good news’.  The Gospels, written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, give us four portraits of Jesus.  Here we meet God who is more than the unseen heart of human history but a real live human being who meets you face to face.  Here we make the claim that the Bible is more than the ‘written’ word of God – now we see it as the ‘living’ word of God.  Out of respect we stand as the Gospel is brought in procession amongst us with the cross, almost shouting the message that God meets us in His Son Jesus with the good news of his way of salvation; and we shout back, ‘Glory to you, O Lord’ and ‘Praise to you, O Christ’.  

The purpose of the Sermon that follows is to help you to listen to God more intently.  The preacher will have spent a considerable time (maybe an hour or more for every five minutes he or she speaks) thinking and praying about one or more of the scriptures you have heard, and trying to make connections with our daily experience of life.  In other words, the preacher’s intention is to help you to listen to the God who is alive and active, and to help us to make some sense of our daily lives.  

Creed

In response to our listening to God through Bible reading and preaching, we stand to affirm the faith of the church – ‘we’ believe.  Remember that Creeds were not formulated by committees, but arose out of scholarly, prayerful and deeply committed people who found themselves being opposed by heresies that cut across the very earliest beliefs and traditions.  They are therefore carefully worded statements, particularly in areas like the equality of Father, Son and Spirit in the nature of God.  At any particular moment in our Christian journey, we may have doubts as to our ability to assent to every credal phrase; but, in solidarity with all the baptised, we stand with the rest of the church to affirm what the church’s life is based on.

Prayers

Then, we turn from listening to God and affirming our faith to our Prayers, the practical outworking of that faith in daily life as we bring the needs of our world, our neighbours and ourselves to God.  We ‘intercede’ for others.  One of the challenges of this part of our worship is to try to put yourself in the shoes of those being prayed for and to think what your response to God’s good news might mean in practical action for those in need.

Peace

And, finally in this part of our worship, we acknowledge our need for and dependence on one another for all of us need to know God’s peace and healing touch.  And that is expressed in the ancient action of ‘giving the Peace’ with the words, ‘the peace of the Lord be always with you’.   This action is in response to Jesus’ command first to be reconciled with one another before coming to offer our gift at the altar.  We need to be at peace in our horizontal relationships as well as in the vertical, and we cannot break bread together if relationships are fractured.

 

Click here to read the previous article: The Gathering

Click here to read the previous article: The Ministry of the Sacrament

 

© All material copyright Revd Derek Hinge.  No part of this article may be reproduced in any format without the author’s express permission.