One of the saddest fruits of the modern desire to reinvent the architecture of the Church has been how modern buildings struggle to speak with any clear voice of who the Church is and what the Church does. In the place of the old, we do not have the new but instead a cacophony of incoherent voices shouting to be heard instead of speaking of what God has said. There was a time when even the stones cried out of Christ and Him crucified, when the clear message was the body and blood of our Lord, incarnate in the Virgin's womb, living holy for the unholy, dying for the terrible cost of sin, living so that sin would never gain the last word in death, and giving the fruits of His redeeming work without cost to those who deserved nothing of His mercy.
Clearly certain forms were clearer in this than others, so much more clear than the confusion of circular shapes that test the boundaries of usefulness for the Church they are supposed to hold. The cruciform shape of the building made it clear that we preach Jesus Christ and Him crucified. Easter does not leave behind the cross but frames its meaning and power. And in that cruciform shape there is the altar. The altar is Christ on that cross shaped foundation. From that altar the blood and water flow in the Eucharistic and baptismal means of grace. The Gospel is words but not only words. The pulpit is the mouth that speaks but not in place of the body and blood and water. No, it is with these that together Christ is made known, known, and made known more.
It occurs to me (though undoubtedly I have borrowed this from someone along the way) that the only ones who really see this are the members of the altar guild. They have the best job in the Church or at least the best vantage point of it all. They are like the men who brought the body to the tomb and the women who came to complete the burial. They are near while the rest are far removed from the center of it all. The altar is marked on the top with five crosses to mark the five wounds of Jesus. The altar cloth is like the burial linen, the shroud if you will, that wraps the body and touches its flesh. On this altar cloth are transferred the burial marks, the five wounds. They absorb the blood that flows from the body not as a back up in case of accident but because that is the reason for their existence, why they were made. With the altar cloth is the corporal on which the sacred vessels sit and the purficator which cleanses the chalice as the blood is distributed. These are like the face cloth of Jesus which He folded up and placed on the side of where His body lay. And the paraments are like the outer garments, the seamless robe too precious to tear which adorns Him who is alone worthy of wearing it. The sacred vessels are lifted up not in offering of sacrifice to the Father but so that the Father might countenance their filling -- the blood that flows into the cup turning sacrifice into sacrament.
Everything in the building and at the altar speaks. It speaks of body and blood. From the pulpit body and blood. The stones do cry out and with them the ministers who carry these gifts in their hands and lend to Christ their voices and every aspect of the chancel and nave. The stained glass are visual words of God's work of our salvation in His Son. The organ is the massed choir of voices of God's people who have been set free to sing the unending song of what God has done. It is and, according to Revelation, will always be about the body and blood, the Lamb who sits upon His throne and the saints gathered around Him. But of all people, the altar guild folk get it best. They who handle the things of God along with the ministers of Christ see what too often the people in the pews do not see. Christ is here. He is literally here. The same body in Mary's belly comes to yours that the Lord of life might be incarnate in you too. The same body hung upon the cross that you might bear yours in Him as He bore for you. The same body laid in the tomb but the tomb could not hold Him. As He was stripped and laid bare, the Church will soon strip the chancel and lay it bare -- so bare that it cannot be anymore missed or ignored. Christ crucified for me.
The palms wave with joy for the day -- not because they know not what awaits the Lord of glory as He comes but precisely because they do. He is come for this. My hour is now. My glory is here. And the busy altar guild leads us through the unfolding of the days from palms to lilies, from death to life, not as a play but as the true and real divine drama is done before us in remembrance of the once for all and forever is told. Curiously enough, the body and blood of Christ are never spoken of as signs or symbols ever. One of the reasons why John 6 cannot be symbolic. Real food, real drink, real flesh, and real blood. No, Jesus does not and no Scriptures speaks of His body and blood as symbol of another else or sign of something not there. Sure, other things may symbolize that which is the most real of all reality but not the other way around. And the altar guild knows it all, sees it all, hears it all, and works that we all might know and see and hear it so that we might give witness to it in word and deed. Thanks be to God for the altar guild. Join up. It is the closest seat to the mystery of the ages which unfolds before us every week.
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