THE PRIEST AS GARDENER

‘Priests are to be servants and shepherds among the people to whom they are sent…They are to be messengers, watchmen and stewards of the Lord’.[1]

The language of the Ordinal gives familiar images of the priest, replete with Biblical allusions and imagery.[2] In his reappraisal of the work of Archbishop Michael Ramsey’s classic The Christian Priest Today (1972) in an anniversary lecture, Rowan Williams adds a new image, that of the priest as weaver, one who interprets and draws together the stories that form and shape the community that the priest serves. In this blog I want, humbly, to suggest and explore another image, that of priest as gardener. As it continues I have written on the basis that the word ‘gardener’ can be replaced by the word ‘priest’, and ‘garden’ be replaced by ‘human spirit’ or ‘church’, such are the parallels.

It reminds me of a story when I started my second curacy, before I was licensed and no one knew who I was. A woman came into our new garden as I was chopping some overgrown things down. She was clearly looking for someone and said to me, 'Are you the gardener? Can you tell me where the keys to the church hall are?' Nice to be mistaken for the gardener.

Of Gardens

Gardens feature in the Bible as locations that are, and represent, a place of proximity to God in God’s creative and redemptive purposes. In the Old Testament, the Garden of Eden is the place where Adam and Eve dwell, initially in harmony with God, before fracturing that relationship (Genesis 2.15 ff), and it is also a place where the man and woman hide from God (Genesis 3.8); the garden in the Song of Songs is a place where the loved purses the beloved (Song of Songs 6.2). In the gospels the Garden of Gethsemane is where Jesus bears the weight of the fallen creation to reverse ‘Adam’s fall’ in saying ‘yes’ to the Father (John 18.1); and in the Garden of Resurrection, which is in such close proximity to the place of crucifixion (John 19.41), Mary Magdalene’s tear-filled search for her Lord sees her find the beloved (John 20.15).

These gardens interconnect typologically: Adam and the New Adam; the lover’s pursuit in Song of Songs, Mary Magdalene’s in the garden of resurrection. In Eden and the Garden of Resurrection the true gardener is God.

Of Gardeners

The task of a gardener is to cultivate, tend and nurture a garden. The gardener does this to (co)create something beautiful and that grows, not to the gardener’s glory, but as something for everyone to behold and for God to delight in. The garden is an offering beyond itself and is subject to forces beyond the gardener’s control. So then, the garden, like the human spirit or church community is a microcosm of the world; or, is it the world, the Kingdom, in embryo? Like the trees of the field the plantings of the garden will ‘clap their hands’ (Isaiah 55.12), or in the words of the canticle Benedicite, omnia opera, ‘O all ye Green Things upon the Earth, bless ye the Lord: praise him and magnify him forever’.[3]

The gardener intercedes for the garden. The prayers of Rogationtide are perhaps more agricultural than horticultural, but the same principle applies: the gardener asks God’s blessing on the garden.[4] The gardener knows, like St Paul, that whilst planting and watering it is God who gives the growth (1 Corinthians 3.6). The tending of the garden is a work of trust on the part of the gardener and one in which grace is bestowed.

There is nothing the gardener enjoys more than to perambulate around the garden. The poet George Herbert interpreted the ‘beating the bounds’, the traditional Rogation procession, ‘as a means of asking God’s blessing on the land, of preserving boundaries, of encouraging fellowship between reconciling neighbours with the reconciling of differences, and of charitable giving to the poor’.[5] The gardener knows that whilst boundaries are in the mind of the gardener: bees, birds, butterflies and dandelion seeds do not observe boundaries. In gardens boundaries are trnagressed. There is cross fertilisation, literally. The gardener has to live with and accept this graciously.

Biodiversity is crucial to support the ecosystem of the garden. Plants that may not be desired by the gardener nourish and support the life of other deeply valuable aspects of garden life. The caterpillars that are a nuisance become the pollenating butterflies. Even 'weeds' (insert names as applicable) have a place in a healthy garden. That which is deemed a weed by the gardener can be a thing of beauty; it can be redeemed and seen as a blessing to the garden.

The gardener has to be endlessly patient. There are many pressures to short-circuit patience. Planting of rapid growing shrubs or ground covering plants and those that provide instant splashes of colour are easy to do. But they will need to be replaced season by season. We do not plant many oak trees any more. In the eighteenth century Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown changed landscapes with a patient vision knowing that neither he nor his aristocratic employer would see instant benefits. The landscape would look its best when trees had matured and lakes had reeds around them. And that would be long after his day.

The gardener has to take particular care in transplanting. Seedlings are delicate and do not always take root in new soil. Indeed the gardener has to attend to the whole garden but know that some plants are more self-sufficient than others. The gardener’s task is inter-generational. The youngest plant can bloom and be beautiful as can the mature plant; each will need different treatment.

The gardener can only work with the garden that has been entrusted. So it would be impossible to create the gardens of Sissinghurst into the Australian outback. The gardener has to pay heed to the soil conditions of the garden as well as the local climate and conditions, what the French viticulturists would call the terroir. A gardener is on a hiding to nothing in attempting to replicate the planting of a garden from elsewhere and to not pay attention to the realities of the terroir of their own garden.

Like the vine grower, the gardener has to prune (John 15.1-2). Pruning helps healthy growth, can increase fruiting and cuts away disease. On first sight pruning looks brutal or harsh yet it is profoundly necessary. Furthermore pruning can benefit other plants as well as the pruned one. Pruning enables light to get to dark places to allow those plants growing in the shade of others to flourish, although some plants are shade loving and the gardener needs to honour that. The full sun will impoverish those plants.

From time to time the gardener has also to tie up and support those plants that cannot stand by their own strength. The trellis is needed to ‘bind up and heal’. Gardeners also need to feed and nourish the soil. Feeding is a task of the gardener. The need for patient digging in of nourishment and nutrients, watering in drought but knowing some plants draw from deep down and not just at the surface (cf Jer 17.7,8).

‘You cannot bear the weight of this calling in your own strength, but only by the grace and power of God…Pray earnestly for the gift of the Holy Spirit.[6]

This is a profoundly Trinitarian vision into which the gardener is bound. In the gardener’s task we see the Triune God: the Father, the source of all being and life, the Creator, who spreads the garden before us; we see the Son, in the redemptive capacity with the Father, to recreate the garden as the New Adam; the Holy Spirit in the Spirit’s boundless creativity, sustenance, beauty and diversity of gifts, the Spirit which enables even ‘the desert [to] blossom and burst into song’ (Isaiah 35.1).

© Andrew Bishop, 2016

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[1] Common Worship: Ordination Services, Study Edition, p. 37.

[2] Common Worship: Ordination Services, Study Edition, p. 37. This edition gives biblical references for these images.

[3] Book of Common Prayer, p. 9.

[4] Common Worship: Times and Seasons, p. 610.

[5] Common Worship: Times and Seasons, p. 597.

[6] Common Worship: Ordination Services, Study Edition, p. 39.

Seeking Wisdom: St Benedict and Universities, Ancient and Modern

‘The path of the just is as the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day’ (Proverbs 4.18 AV)

‘But where shall wisdom be found? And where is the place of understanding? (Job 28.12 AV) Those are the questions that underlie the great Hebrew tradition of wisdom writing. The answer from the book of Proverbs is, in a nutshell, that, ‘The fear of the Lord is beginning of knowledge: but fools despise wisdom and understanding’ (Proverbs 1.7 AV). Proverbs is a book that restates that question and answer, and explores wisdom and her benefits and contexts. The question for the Christian is how far that wisdom tradition informs us today as those living in the hope of the gospel.

I want to use the Rule of St Benedict as a way into that and as a lens through which to see the pursuit of wisdom and the love of God, not least in the context of learning in Universities.

The Rule is laced with Biblical references, predominantly from the book of Psalms, with the next largest number of citations from the book of Proverbs. There is a clear relationship between the opening of Benedict’s Rule and Proverbs: from Proverbs: ‘Hear, ye children, the instruction of a father, and attend to know understanding’; and from the Rule: ‘Listen carefully, my son, to the master’s instructions, and attend to them with the ear of your heart’ (RB, Prologue, 1).

It’s not overstating it to say that St Benedict’s Rule is the conjunction and application of both the Hebrew wisdom tradition and the vision of Christian society. The pedagogy of both may seem remote from our times, laced with patriarchy, but The Rule is, at its heart, a practical and very pragmatic set of guidelines and instructions for living in Christian community, and some of the disciplines that go with that, centred on worship, hospitality and deep attention to God and neighbour. It is a powerful statement of finding wisdom in the heart and love of God.

Universities and collegiate foundations flow from and echo the monastic ideal: a resident, learning community that pursues wisdom (in the library or scriptorium); that eats together (in the refectory or hall); that ponders in company (in the cloister or quad); and that prays together (in the chapel or oratory). The survival and promulgation of learning and Christian teaching through the so-called Dark Ages has been attributed in large part to The Rule and those living it. They were faithful to the disciplines that go with the pursuit of wisdom, centred on worship, hospitality and deep attention to God and neighbour.

What Benedict advocates is a patient, unhurried pursuit of wisdom. For those pursuing wisdom, patient habit forming is at a premium. ‘Habit’ for a monk has a double meaning, the robe he wears and the formation in which he engages. So it is that Benedict states his aim of creating ‘a school for the Lord’s service’ (RB Prologue, 45) and this is about habit forming in the virtues and in wisdom. In emphasising, like Proverbs, the acts of hearing and attending as we pursue wisdom, Benedict’s Rule takes the wisdom tradition of the Hebrew scriptures and weaves it together with the New Testament and his deep conviction that the Christian should, ‘prefer nothing to Christ’ (RB 72.11).

In a hurrying world the ancient question uttered by Job still has a place: ‘where is wisdom to be found?’ Many things conspire against us: short terms for undergraduates, REF applications for academics, modern living and all hours’ social media. Whether we are monks or not, the disciplines that go with the pursuit of God’s wisdom, centred on worship, hospitality and deep attention to God and neighbour still matter but are still hard to pursue.

How we do that is in the forming of the habits of patience and attending to God are also shaped in those times and places where the hurry to a conclusion is not essential, and recognises that not everything concludes tidily anyway. Perhaps that’s why the Rule gives attention to the washing up in the monastery kitchen as much as to the cleaning of the vessels of the altar. Nevertheless, wisdom is rooted in God; a place like this is a witness to the divine patience where you are invited to stand on the threshold of God’s time: ‘the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’.

But we cannot do this alone. The pursuit of wisdom is relational and inter-generational, as Proverbs and Benedict know. Hence the reference to father and son, that extends out into understanding that the wise community is not simply a teaching community, but a learning one too, drawing on and interpreting that which is handed on to us.

This patient, relational wisdom comes out in Benedict’s use of verses from the First Letter of John. How should the monastery deal with the admission of those seeking to join them? Benedict answers quoting 1 John, saying, ‘Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God: because many false prophets have gone out into the world’ (1 John 4.1). This isn’t the desperate, grasping anxiety to recruit and boost numbers, characteristic of our contemporary church. This is a sense that ‘trying the spirits’, what we might call discernment, which is not to be hurried or rushed, but to be right both for the community and the individual: an act of wisdom.

So, then, there are connections between Proverbs and attending to wisdom and our second reading which is a meditation on love and listening to God. The Rule of St Benedict starts the process of incorporating wisdom and practical daily living in Christian community: as he says, it is a Rule ‘for beginners’ (RB 73.8). Such is the nature of wisdom that there is a practical and prosaic dimension to it. The wise ordering of the community is one aspect, but also wisdom as the basis for our ethical thinking and acting. The Christian Gospel roots that in love; not as a soppy sentiment but in the redeeming, sacrificial love of God revealed in the cross, which is, as St Paul puts it, scandal to Jews and the polar opposite of wisdom to the Greeks (cf 1 Corinthians 1.18-25).

So where is wisdom to be found for you and me? The culmination of Benedict’s pursuit of wisdom in relation to life in Christ comes as he connects it to the way of humility, the way of the cross, and how that shapes practical wisdom and the living of the virtues. So, he says, ‘after ascending all these steps of humility, the monk will quickly arrive at that perfect love of God which casts out fear (1 John 4.18)’ And he goes on to say that this can be exercised, ‘no longer out of fear of hell, but out of love for Christ, good habit and delight in virtue’ (RB 7.67, 69). Benedict is alluding to the verses from 1 John which capture John’s theology, ‘he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God…Herein is our love made perfect…There is no fear in love but perfect love casts out fear…We love him because he first loved us’ (1 John 4. 16-20 AV).

That’s the task for us as Christian disciples, within and outside Universities, to continue to pursue wisdom in all that we pray and think, speak and learn and do, so that it may be said of us, ‘The path of the just is as the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day’ (Proverbs 4.18). 

© Andrew Bishop, 2016

Imposters yet true - Seeking my true self in Lent

A sermon preached at Guildford Cathedral on Ash Wednesday. Readings 2 Corinthians 5.20b-6.10 and John 8.1-11.

‘We are treated as imposters, and yet are true’ (2 Corinthians 6.8)

+ In nomine Patris…

I have recently been reading a fascinating book about narcissism.[1] In it the psychologist authors describe the features of narcissism in individuals, including Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD), and narcissism in society.

The term ‘narcissism’ derives from the Greek mythical figure Narcissus who set out, a bit like us all, looking for someone to love. The beautiful nymph Echo fell in love with him and repeated his every word, but he rejected her and she faded away. Narcissus kept on looking for love and companionship, and one day, as he gazed into a pool, he saw the face that he would fall in love with: his own! He was so engrossed in his own beauty that he was stuck by the pool, lost the will to live and died.

In contemporary terms a narcissist is someone who thinks that they are superior to everyone else -  ability, status, good looks, intelligence and creativity - even if they’re actually not. Narcissism is corrosive for individuals.

It’s also bad for society. The book I’ve been reading says is that through narcissism we become phony:

We have phony rich people (with interest-only mortgages and piles of debt), phony beauty (with plastic surgery and cosmetic procedures), phony athletes (with performance-enhancing drugs), phony celebrities (via reality TV and YouTube), phony genius students (with grade inflation), a phony national economy ($11 trillion of government debt)… and phony friends (with the social networking explosion).[2]

Clearly not everyone is a narcissist and whilst there are damaging features of society it’s not thoroughly rotten. But to sketch out the extreme helps us to situate our own self-regard, or lack of, in the context of Ash Wednesday and this beautiful season of Lent.

Lent takes us back to a pool, but not one where we gaze longingly upon our own image but upon the face of Jesus Christ. In the baptismal pool Jesus calls to us lovingly: he is the one who loves us before we even seek the love that only he can give. His love draws us into the love of the eternal Trinity. Lent is a time when his call to us and claim upon our love is renewed and heard afresh, lest he becomes to us like Echo was to Narcissus.

That call to Christ’s love on Ash Wednesday, and in Lent, is back to that first love - in its joy-filled disciplines - where we attend to body, mind and spirit: for our body, in disciplines around self-denial and fasting; for our minds, being stretched through reading and pondering; for our spirits, through re-engaging in our life of prayer.

Lent, which begins today, is the time of the Church year that invites us away from our phony selves and takes us back to who we truly are. We construct much of our own identities and want others, and ourselves, to believe it. The greatest danger is when we ourselves believe the myths about ourselves.

It’s not just about being narcissists and believing ourselves to be all-important, invincible and at the centre. All too often we believe the negative narrative of ourselves, summed up in phrases like, ‘I’m not really very good at this’ or we feel ourselves to be a fraud, on the brink of being exposed as useless, inadequate or unlovable. As Bernard of Clairvaux warned, in the 12^th century, ‘Sorrow for sin is indeed necessary, but it should not involve endless self-preoccupation. You dwell also on the glad remembrance of the loving kindness of God’.

Ash Wednesday holds before us the phoniness of our lives – the over-exalted and over-negative bits -and places upon us, literally, and ‘in your face’ the reality of where we come from and who we are. It encourages us to dwell on the ‘glad remembrance of the loving kindness of God’

As the cross is marked in ash on your head you hear these words, ‘Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return. Turn away from sin and be faithful to Christ’. In the face of all we construct about ourselves and our identity - unrealistically good or unrealistically bad - we are reminded of our mortality, that we will die. We are not immortal, but turning away from sin and being faithful to Christ is the starting point and destination of finding ourselves, our loves and passions: Christ loved us first; we can find our assurance and identity in that love, a love that sees beyond self-preoccupation, either in the form of over-inflated egos or self-deprecation, and sees us as we are and as we can be.

This is the Christ who judges without retribution and with mercy. ‘Miserere me, Domine’ - Have mercy on me, O Lord - is not, for us, a desperate plea but, because of Christ, a confident declaration. This is in complete contrast to the crowd that gathered in judgement to stone the woman caught in adultery. They could not bear the threat that she represented to their sensibilities and supposed perfection: something that they could not claim, as became apparent.  They were acting narcissistically and saw no need for mercy. Rather than live with her less-than-perfection they would rather lynch her than forgive her.

In the face of their rampant and violent perfectionism Jesus wrote in the dust of the ground. We are dust, we are less than perfect; but therein lies God’s mercy and capacity, in Christ, to raise us up from the dust, breathe new life into our nostrils and form and re-form us in his image and likeness. Christ writes his love and life into our hearts: destination, Easter.

Is that possible? Can he do it? Surely, we say, I am a phony Christian, I am a phony person, my life a sham, I am an imposter waiting to be found out, just daring to call myself a Christian.

As sons and daughters of God we might well feel like imposters, and yet, Paul reminds us, we are true. As he says elsewhere this is possible because, ‘it is not I who live, but Christ who lives in me’ (Galatians 2.20)

If nothing else this Lent, be assured that you are no imposter but as you seek to be faithful, to grow in holiness and to follow Christ you will be more truly yourself and more deeply human than the judgements, distortions and phoniness of the world can conceive.

That cross of ash marks you out as more yourself and not less; that you are someone who gazes into the face of Jesus Christ and knows that you are precious, valued and forgiven beyond measure simply because you are.

God loves you.

© Andrew Bishop 2016

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[1] Jean M. Twenge & W. Keith Campbell The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement, (New York: Simon & Schuster).

[2] Twenge & Campbell, 4 .

Thou, the anointing Spirit art

This was first a sermon preached as Preached at the Cathedral Eucharist, Guildford, 24^th January 2016. The key texts were 1 Corinthians 12.12-31a; Luke 4.14-21

‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, for he has anointed me’

+ In nomine Patris…

The great prophet Samuel set off one day

to anoint a new king over Israel.

The first king, Saul, had been an unmitigated disaster,

as the LORD had warned,

and so a new king was chosen.

Samuel’s task was to find the one God had chosen

and to anoint him king over Israel.

This was a treacherous act.

Anointing a new king, when the old one was not dead, implies regime change,

and rulers and powers don’t like that.

Samuel filled a horn,

- possibly a ram’s hollowed out horn -

with pure olive oil

and set out to find the new king.

He didn’t use a customary flask

so as to be discreet,

just so that the outgoing king, Saul, didn’t find out.

You can read the detail in the first book of Samuel. (1 Samuel 16.1-13)

Suffice it to say Samuel uncovered the least likely candidate,

as the LORD’s chosen,

and that was David, the youngest of eight sons.

Samuel anointed David by pouring the oil over his head:

David was the Anointed One,

in Hebrew, Meshach, in Greek Christos, in English, Messiah or Christ.

The Sprit of the Lord was upon him; and he was anointed as king.

Many years later the prophet Isaiah

spoke of the Spirit resting upon someone,

someone who will spring from the stump or root,

the family tree, if you prefer,

of Jesse.

And Jesse was the father of David, the Anointed One (Isaiah 11.1).

The descending Spirit would be one

of wisdom and understanding,

of counsel and might,

of knowledge and fear of the Lord.

Then, in a later part of Isaiah’s book

we read what Jesus read

from the scroll in the synagogue that day:

The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me,

because the LORD has anointed me; (Isaiah 61.1a)

Isaiah describes one who is anointed for a purpose.

Being anointed is not an end in itself

or a cause for self-satisfaction:

it is a commission, a sending,

to proclaim

to bring

to liberate.

He has anointed me to bring good news to the poor…release to the captives…recovery of sight to the blind…release of the captives and proclamation of the year of the Lord’s favour. (Luke 4.18-19)

This is the messianic promise and challenge.

This is what being anointed means.

Our first reading shows that anointed life as being

in baptism and in the Spirit:

‘For in the one Spirit we were all baptised into one body

– Jews or Greeks, slaves or free –

and we were all made to drink of one Spirit’ (1 Corinthians 12.12)

These scriptures give us

the empowering, liberating theme of the anointing power of the Holy Spirit.

This gift is both personal

to you and me,

and corporate,

to us as the Church.

Baptism is the possibility, promise and challenge

of being anointed by the Holy Spirit.

One of the beautiful actions at baptism is the act anointing with oil.

This very action performed on prophets, priests and kings,

it draws us into the royal priesthood of the Church (cf 1 Peter 2.1-10).

Oil is the wonderful, sensual symbol of this,

and like all true symbols it speaks beyond itself.

Oil soothes.

If ever you have dry, cracked or gnarled skin,

oil will soothe it and relieve it.

The anointing Spirit of the Lord

has the same effect

on dry, cracked and gnarled human hearts,

softening, soothing  and freeing them.

Oil lubricates.

To undo an overtightened screw just needs a drop of oil.

So oil releases

and eases things that might not work otherwise.

The anointing Spirit of the Lord releases.

She opens up apparently intractable situations,

allows stony hearts to flow with living water.

Anointing means that possibilities open up for things to change.

Oil gives light.

Before electricity, oil was a fuel for lamps.

The anointing Spirit literally in-spires us,

ignites, kindles, fuels us,

to proclamation, service and vision.

The anointed one brings recovery of sight to the blind.

As the ancient hymn Veni Creator Spiritus says,

‘Enable with perpetual light,

The dullness of our blinded sight’

This is talking about enlightened hearts.

Oil heals.

You might recall that the Good Samaritan

on finding the man beaten and dying by the roadside

bound up his wounds (Luke 10.34)

after first pouring oil and wine into them.

Olive oil is known for its healing properties.
And this is highly topical (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/tWtLcz30LZm3YTk5VfZ307/is-olive-oil-really-good-for-me) 

So it’s little wonder that the Holy Spirit is associated with anointing:

for the Spirit soothes

and is balm to the heart;

she lubricates and releases;

enlightens, heals

and gladdens the heart.

This is the Holy Spirit that rests on and in the Anointed One,

Jesus Christ.

And what Jesus declared at Nazareth

he bestows upon us at baptism.

Through water and the Spirit we are born again

and the Spirit anoints us.

In the context of baptism the anointing oil touches us

as prophets, priests and kings.

In the words of the Jesuit, James Quinn,

in his contemporary translation of the Veni Creator Spiritus,

that ancient hymn used at ordination and confirmation,

As once on Christ the Servant’s head

the oil of sevenfold grace you shed,

so now anoint from love’s deep springs

your chosen prophets, priests and kings.

The Eucharist draws us together,

and sends us out,

as a royal, prophetic and priestly people.

Now, we draw down this anointing power

as we gather at the table of Jesus Christ.

Lord, send you Holy Spirit

on this bread,

on this wine,

on your people.

The Church is called to be bound together as one,

And so is human society

Bound together like the oil and flour

that bound together,

made small cakes for the prophet Elijah,

and the widow of Zarephath who hosted him.

The oil and flour were inexhaustible,

carried on feeding them him and her

and sustained them beyond their expectations. (1 Kings 17.8-16)

In the Eucharist we gather,

as God’s anointed ones:

sharing in the life of Christ;

drawing on the life of Christ;

feeding on the life of Christ

and anointed by the inexhaustible Holy Spirit.

For she anoints us and,

in the words of the 23^rd psalm,

we say,

You spread a table before me …

you have anointed me with oil,

and my cup shall be full. (Psalm 23.5)

That day,

in the synagogue in Nazareth,

the congregation heard the scripture fulfilled in their hearing.

Today,

in this cathedral church in Guildford,

reading this blog,

may we in Christ’s name and anointing power

find that we, too, are the fulfilment of this scripture.

© Andrew Bishop, 2016

Manifold and Great Mercies: Re-considering the Prayer of Humble Access in the Year of Mercy

Pope Francis inaugurated a Year of Mercy in December 2015. As an Anglican I have been pondering his inspiring call to reflect on mercy. In this piece I want to do that through re-reading the distinctively Anglican prayer known as the Prayer of Humble Access and its characterisation of God as full of ‘manifold and great mercies’. At the end I have included a contemporary rendering of the prayer.

We do not presume to come to this your table, merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in your manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under your table. But you are the same Lord whose nature is always to have mercy. Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of your dear Son Jesus Christ and to drink his blood, that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body and our souls washed through his most precious blood, and that we may evermore dwell in him, and he in us. Amen.

The Prayer of Humble Access is widely disparaged – the ‘humble crumble’ – as a totem of a residual, nostalgic, Book of Common Prayer (BCP) sensibility and culture. It appears to be unremittingly negative about the body, soul and spirit.

I did not grow up with the Prayer of Humble Access in its BCP form, but a bowdlerised version in the Alternative Service Book 1980. The prayer is not a nostalgic one for me but has connected with me quite recently as a personal prayer of preparation before receiving Communion. Why do I think that?

The question of unworthiness is a tricky one. How can I be unworthy if the forgiveness of my sins has been declared in my baptism, the Sacrament of Reconciliation and the general confession at the beginning of the Eucharist? A sense of unworthiness before God and other people can be crippling. It can also be enabling. For example, Moses, the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah, Jonah and the Blessed Virgin Mary, are all aware of their unworthiness in the face of what God calls them to do. They respond to God in the face of the inadequacy: Moses’ inarticulacy (Exodus 6.12); Isaiah’s unclean lips (Isaiah 6.5); Jeremiah’s youth (Jeremiah 1.6); Jonah’s sense of unworthiness was marked by flight from God’s call (Jonah 1.3); Mary’s wonder at what was being asked of her (Luke 1.34). There is such a thing as a healthy sense of unworthiness. It acknowledges the capacity to receive the worth that God gives each of us created in God’s image and likeness (Genesis 1.26).

More than unworthiness the prayer calls us away from an overblown sense of our own righteousness like the Pharisee in Jesus’ parable (Luke 18.9-14). Un/worthiness and un/righteousness is overhauled by God’s ‘manifold and great mercies’, the God whose nature, ‘is always to have mercy’. I become more and more aware that trusting in my own righteousness is entirely wrong way to approach God and my neighbour. The Pharisee approaches the holy place trusting in his own righteousness, the publican ‘[does] not presume’ to trust in anything other than God’s mercy.

Daniel prays, ‘we do not present our supplication before you on the ground of our righteousness, but on the ground of your great mercies’ (Daniel 9.18b). A deeper understanding of the rich Biblical seam of mercy is very timely. What do we mean when we say, ‘Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer’, ‘Merciful Father, accept these prayers…’ or ‘Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison (Lord, have mercy, Christ, have mercy)? How do we articulate the Christian understanding of the ‘merciful Father’ to Muslims who know God as Compassionate and Merciful? (See also James. 5.11b).

The momentum of the prayer is one of approaching: there is a forward trajectory. It evokes Moses approaching the bush that was on fire but miraculously not consumed, and the LORD told him, ‘remove the sandals from your feet for the place on which you stand is holy ground’ (Exodus 3.5).

The sandals of our vanity and egoism are what we take off as we approach God in the Sacrament. In vivid language the prayer expresses our unworthiness – much as the publican – but the abject language grates for many. Why do we have to say that we are not worthy, ‘to eat the crumbs from under thy table’? The Syro-Phoenician woman got it (Matthew 15.21-28; Mark. 7.24-30) – ‘woman, great is your faith’ – after first approaching Jesus saying, ‘Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David’ (Matthew 15.22).

Left there the prayer outright denies the rich language of the declaration from God that in Christ, we are profoundly worthy. By baptism we are his Body before we share in his broken Body of the Sacrament.

After we acknowledge the disabling and dissembling character of ‘our own righteousness’ which frustrates God’s loving purpose, the prayer changes gear. There is new trajectory.  The Lord’s property is to have mercy, that is to act kindly and justly and consistent with the purpose that we, believing in him, ‘should not perish’ and that Christ does not come to condemn (John 3.16-17).

The approach we make is to share God’s life. We are not spectators like Moses, but partakers in the Divine Glory. Like the Bush, we are set on fire in the Spirit but are not consumed. Boldly, Peter declares that when we set the corruptions of self and the world, we become ‘participants of the divine nature’ (2 Peter 1.4).

So we approach, prompted by God, ‘the Father of Mercies’ (2 Corinthians 1.3) to share at his table where we are not just worthy to be, but invited.

This is where another layer of biblical allusion is added. We need to go to the sixth chapter of St John’s gospel where we find this vivid language of Christ’s Body and Blood. Jesus speaks of the bread, the manna, which the Israelites ate in the wilderness. It sustained them only a day at a time (John 6.49). The Living Bread that comes down from heaven will feed, sustain and give eternal life: eat it and you will never die. But Jesus moves us on from thinking that this is simply bread or perishable manna; it is his flesh. As it was for many of his first hearers, this is a stumbling block to so many (John 6.60).

In the prayer this fleshly language continues, ‘that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body, and our souls washed through his most precious blood’. In a time when we are so alert to the corrosive effect of low self-esteem and poor body image to speak of ‘our sinful bodies’ seems beyond the pale. Where is any sense of valuing the human body, which is, ‘a temple of the Holy Spirit within you’ (1 Corinthians 6.19)?

It comes back to a profound honesty about who we are, and, actually, the great dignity of not being abandoned. It is the lost sheep who is sought out and brought back by the Good Shepherd; the lost coin sought out by the woman; the wayward son welcomed back by the father (Luke 15).

To say ‘our sinful bodies’ acknowledges that they are in need of repair, healing and redemption and can be made clean and whole by God’s grace. After all, the woman in the parable swept and made clean her house as she searched for the lost coin (Luke 15.8). This is the redeemed washed in the blood of the Lamb (Rev. 7.14).

The prayer is about much more than any sense that it’s only about me sorting myself out. As Pope Francis reminds us, drawing from the Fathers, ‘The Eucharist, although it is the fullness of sacramental life, is not a prize for the perfect but a powerful medicine and nourishment for the weak.’ (Evangelii Gaudium §47, p. 29). It seems to me that the prayer makes that clear.

It is God who makes me a worthy recipient of his grace in the Sacrament: he first loved me (1 John 4.19) and all my life is about catching up with that reality.

That reality, and human-divine interplay, is total in Jesus Christ and is the source and summit of my life. The prayer ends with a great restatement of human worthiness in Incarnation of the Word, that, ‘he may dwell in us and we in him’.

A contemporary version of The Prayer of Humble Access

Most merciful Lord,

your love compels us to come in.

Our hands were unclean,

our hearts were unprepared;

we were not fit

even to eat the crumbs from under your table.

But you, Lord, are the God of our salvation,

and share your bread with sinners.

So cleanse and feed us

with the precious body and blood of your Son,

that he may live in us and we in him;

and that we,

with the whole company of Christ,

may sit and eat in your kingdom.

Amen.

Text of the prayers from Common Worship © Archbishops' Council 2000

© Andrew Bishop 2016