Sermons by Bishop Paul V. Marshall
An Altar and a Table--A Place of Trembling and Joy
At the Consecration of the Altar Diocesan House, Bethlehem Maundy Thursday, April 9, 1998[Part of the reason we at Diocesan House have become over the years a team and a community is that we pray together every morning, either Morning Prayer or Eucharist in an open Diocesan House chapel that is literally the focal point for anyone who comes through the front door. On Holy Thursday we dedicated a new altar there, an altar crafted from a black walnut tree by Scot Horst of St. Barnabas Church, Kutztown. During that first Eucharist at our new altar, Bishop Paul offered the following reflections. --Bill Lewellis]
Please lend me your imagination for a few minutes as I talk about this altar and what it means when we think about about our life together.
Altars, unlike communion tables, are places of sacrifice, workbenches for worship. The late Alexander Schmemann defined that word "sacrifice" so well when he said that the essence of sacrifice is surrender, not value given. The essence of sacrifice is surrender, not value given. For Christians that is an observation of judgment as well as fulfillment. Judgment because humanity's imperfection is most easily seen in our inability to give our wills entirely to God. It is a word fulfillment because at this altar we recall that representing all of humankind, Jesus did offer his will totally to God on the cross.
So here our small attempts to offer ourselves, our praise, our thanksgivings, our lives, are met by the representation of Christ's one eternal and cosmic offering. Our measly metaphorical priests lead us in the words and acts that engage us in the ecstatic service of the one real priest, Jesus Christ, who like Melchisidek of Salem meeting Abraham with bread and wine, feeds us with bread, wine, and Salem -- peace. And so we share the bread in peace, and in character.
I'm not talented enough to evoke the effect I am trying for; if I were I would probably write Parsifal, but that's been done already. What it boils down to is that to take seriously what happens at a Christian altar is to enter the surreal in the truest sense of that word, to consecrate by enacting a cosmic drama.
Let me try another complicated word, axis mundi, the center or turning point of the world. All cultures have them. Some people think that the center of the world is Jerusalem, others Rome, still others Hollywood. The rest of us know it is Manhattan. The evolution of Christian worship rather quickly found that the altar in each community functioned as the center of the world. This is especially true for us. We live together in this place in order to offer ourselves for the ministry of all God's people. That sacrifice takes its direction from the daily offering of prayer here, and particularly the weekly offering praise and thanksgiving in the Eucharist. The blending of our offering of ourselves for the people of God with Christ's great offering for the world gives us vision and mission beyond the expressive power of any other words.
So the holiness of this thing, like that of any mere stuff, that holiness is a function of the use to which it is put - the constant visual symbol of the fact that we live in the dimension where worlds intersect, not collide. For if the holy and the ordinary do not perceptibly meet, we are truly to be pitied, and perhaps despised. But this unique work of art and faith says to you each time your have to alter your course around it to go smoke or visit the rooms over there, it says that the holy and the ordinary intersect as often as we will let ourselves perceive them to be doing so.
So we set this apart to be a dreadful place because we meet God here -- and also a sustaining place because we meet God here. It is altar and table, a place of trembling and joy, the eucharistic place that is the center of the universe and of time itself.
Shoppers, please note: This altar is the one item in our worship life at Diocesan House that is not available through any catalog. It was designed in consultation with us, but my sense of Scot is that it was in the long run designed in the context of his dance with the Spirit that suffuses creation - there are the signs of struggle around this thing that say that the Holy Spirit has indeed been mixed up in it. It is a living tree broken apart, as though by lightening or a sword - you can see the scars where its side was pierced. Why else would we, being who we know ourselves to be, find ourselves worshiping on something that is both obviously broken and nonetheless beautiful -- a symbol of Christ and a symbol of our ministry.
We do something horribly presumptuous if it were not an act of faith: in the place where we work, eat, kvetch, gossip, laugh, curse, cry, and hope - but above all, in the place where we serve the diocese of Bethlehem -- we set up a center point in the protection of the strangely open womb of these windows to be the place where we bring our service into focus within the service of the great High Priest Jesus Christ.
You will probably be surprised at how quickly you will see the blue aura of this altar when you come into the building; you will probably be surprised at how quickly it comes to shape your experience of our work place our worship place. It will always give you a sense of uncertainly about the ground on which you stand, the dimension you inhabit, and it will also always tell you that God is at hand.
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