Communion has always contained the sideways look. At Da Vinci’s Last Supper table, extending lengthways across a room, the disciples are forced to look not ahead or around at one another, but along another axis. On the cross prefigured in that bread broken and wine poured, a man looks not just to God above or the earth below, but to two thieves at his side. Our Greenbelt communion will be focusing on these sideways glances, these places where we turn our heads and look along another axis. Away from money, vanity and power, across to the collision between art and justice and faith. Many of you will remember last year’s wonderful ice sculpture from Brighton group Beyond: they will return this year with something that will take our gaze into the vertical; the scratch choir will be drawing our heads towards song; and Jesus’ parables, those sideways-stories subverting what we thought we saw clearly, will be cutting through our service in their telling and through our participation. In a guest house on that road to Emmaus, it was when he broke the bread that those followers saw someone afresh. That communal invitation to see things differently remains, and will be at the heart of our time together. A time to see ourselves afresh, to see God afresh, to see our earth afresh, and of course a time to see one another again in the uniquely different light that is Greenbelt on a Sunday morning.
Holy Communion – Sunday Morning
