Last Sunday, at our Harvest Festival, the theme of our services in church, and of my sermon, was thanksgiving. And that’s a theme that carries over to this Sunday too because our Gospel reading this morning is the story of Jesus healing the ten lepers, of whom only one is grateful enough for what Jesus has done to give thank and praise to God for his healing. So today I’m going to speak about thanksgiving again but this time, not in terms of what we can do in our daily lives to show thanks to God for all he’s done for us, but about what we can do in church to show our thanks, and in particular about the way we can do things in church to show our thanks to God.
During this last week, an organisation called i sing POP visited St Gabriel’s School. If you’ve not heard of them before, i sing POP is a Christian organisation which goes into schools to teach the children Christian themed pop songs. They help the children learn the songs, teach them the Christian values and theology that underlie the songs, and then, towards the end of the week, they hold concerts in which the children perform the songs along with the dance moves and actions they’ve been taught, to accompany them.
On Thursday of last week, as I usually do, I went into school to lead the assembly and because I knew the i sing POP concerts were being held later that day, I spoke to the children about using music as a way of giving thanks and praise to God. I said that this was something we read about in the Bible and especially in the last few Psalms which speak about singing our praises to God and praising him with dancing and with music. After I’d said , I asked the children a question. I asked,
“If you bought someone a birthday present, or Christmas present, and when you gave it to them, they just said something like, ‘Oh, right. Thanks.’ what do you think that would say about that person?”
And the answers I got were that that person was “mean”, “unkind”, “not very nice”, that “they don’t appreciate it” and that “they’re ungrateful”.
Those were the kind of answers I was expecting, and hoping for actually, and I used them to encourage the children show their thanks to God and their praise of God by singing with enthusiasm in the concerts later that day. And I have to say that they did, they did take part enthusiastically in the concerts, they enjoyed taking part, the adults who came to the concerts enjoyed them, and everyone went home with a smile on their face.
But how different is that to what often happens, perhaps usually happens, in our churches on Sunday mornings? Now, I’m not saying that we should ditch our traditional hymns in favour of pop songs. And I’m not saying that we should start waving our arms around when we sing or dancing in the aisles to our hymns, but I think we, and as I said last Sunday, by ‘we’ I mean we in the Church generally, not necessarily just we here, we could show a little more enthusiasm when it comes to singing God’s praises and offering our thanks to God. I’ll give you an example of what I mean.
I remember well one Low Sunday (that’s the Sunday after Easter Sunday) in a church where I served as a curate. This particular Low Sunday was also a Parade Sunday, and the parish had a lot of uniformed organisations. There were brownies and guides, cubs and beavers, their leaders and parents, as well as the regular members of the congregation and so, quite unusually for Low Sunday, the church was packed. So, when we set off in procession at the start of the service, I expected the Introit hymn, which was Praise, my soul, the King of heaven, to raise the roof. The organist played the introduction to the hymn and …… well, instead of the great song of praise to God I was expecting, what we got sounded more like a funeral dirge, and one that hardly anyone in church knew at that; they can’t have done because it sounded like hardly anyone was singing it.
Later, when I went into the pulpit to preach, I looked out at a sea of unhappy looking faces and bored children. And so I asked the children a question that day too. The question was,
“Do you think coming to church is boring?”
I don’t think they, or anyone else knew quite what to make of that, and they just looked at each other, not knowing what to say. So I asked them again, and eventually, and one by one, they said “Yes”. To which I responded,
“I’m not surprised.”
My intention that Sunday had been to say something about the joy of the Easter season but, in light of what I heard and saw in church that morning, it seemed appropriate to ask that question and to ask where is the joy of the Easter season when people in church look and sound like they’re at a funeral or sat in a dentist’s waiting room, rather than celebrating the most wonderful event in all of human history, the Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ? And to ask too, what does that say to those outside the Church and to the young people in church that morning about our sense of thanks to God and praise of God for this most wonderful thing he’s done for us?
Obviously, if we belong to a church that doesn’t have an organist, or any other way of playing music to accompany congregational singing, we can’t sing the praises of God in a literal sense. But that doesn’t mean we can’t show enthusiasm in our thanks and praise. Regardless of whether we have congregational singing in church or not, we can still raise the roof, so to speak, in our praise of God by showing enthusiasm in the way we join in with the spoken congregational parts of our services and in the way we respond to the prayers and biddings in our services.
The core of the Mass, the service of Holy Communion, call it what you will, is the Eucharistic Prayer. The word ‘Eucharist’ comes from the Greek word for thanksgiving, so the Eucharist Prayer is a prayer of thanksgiving to God for all he’s done for us, and if we think about the words of the Eucharistic Prayer, it’s quite obvious that’s what it is. In it we give thanks and praise to God for sending his Son, our Lord Jesus Christ to be our Saviour. We thank God for the saving death of Jesus through which we have hope of the resurrection to eternal life. We praise God by echoing the song of the angels. We recall the Lord’s Supper and invoke the Holy Spirit that bread and wine will be for us the body and blood of Christ. We proclaim our faith that Christ has died, is risen and will come again. We rejoice in Christ’s Resurrection and Ascension; we look forward to his return in glory and celebrate our redemption. We thank God for the privilege of being able to stand in his presence and serve him. We pray that he will accept our thanks and praise. We pray that he will bring us into his kingdom where we can praise and glorify him for ever. And we declare that he should be honoured and glorified for ever. And then the Eucharistic Prayer ends with what’s known as the Great Amen.
Amen means ‘So be it’. Our ‘Amen’ to the Eucharistic Prayer is our declaration that we agree with all that’s been said in the prayer. It’s our declaration that we truly believe in all we’ve said in the Prayer. It’s our declaration that we sincerely hope for all we’ve prayed for in the Eucharistic Prayer. And it’s our declaration that we truly believe that God will grant us what we’ve prayed for in this great thanksgiving prayer. So this is The Great Amen; the Amen, the So be it, to all we believe and hope for as Christians. And yet, at the end of this great prayer, what do we hear? Very often what amounts to a little Amen; a barely audible Amen. Now I know that the clergy are often quite a distance from the congregation when the Great Amen is said but at times, and a lot of times it must be said, it sounds as though a lot of people in church are whispering the Great Amen, if they’re saying it out loud at all.
I‘m not saying that people don’t say the Great Amen, but it often sounds as though they’re doing little more than simply moving their lips, as though they’re saying the Great Amen so quietly that it’s not audible to anyone except themselves. Where is the enthusiasm in that? Where is the enthusiasm for what we’ve just heard and declared and prayed for in the Eucharistic Prayer in a barely audible ‘Amen’ to it all? The Great Amen is something that should be said loudly, clearly, and boldly as the rubrics, the instructions, in the Common Worship Service of Holy Communion puts it.
I know that Anglicans, Church of England people, are often noted for their reserve, for not showing their feelings too much or acting in a demonstrative way that will draw attention to them. So perhaps they think that if they sing or speak too loudly their stiff upper lips may break? I know too that people don’t like to draw attention to themselves because they worry what other people may think of them. They might be genuinely shy people. They might think they can’t sing and so they don’t. The fact of that matter is that, unless there’s some medical reason that they shouldn’t or that they physically can’t, everyone can sing. Not everyone is a good singer, but everyone can sing. And in any case, we’re not in church to win the approval of our fellow human beings, we’re here to offer our thanks and praise to God. And we should do that with enthusiasm because we have so much to give thanks and praise to God for.
One final thought, if we don’t sing or join in with the congregational parts of our church services, or if we only do these things very quietly because we’re embarrassed about other people hearing us and worried about what they’ll think of us, just bear in mind the words of our Epistle this morning. St Paul implies that when we stand before Christ to be judged, he will treat us according to the way we have acted towards him. If we’re too reserved or embarrassed to sing out our thanks and praise to God’s now, if we’re too reserved or embarrassed to do those things enthusiastically now, to do those things loudly and boldly now, will we still be able to hope that Christ will sing our praises to the God the Father when the time comes that we need him to do that?
Amen.
The Propers for the 28th Sunday of Ordinary Time can be viewed here.
Parish Church of St Mark Chadderton 