Grace be unto you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Let us pray. We are at thy feet now, Jesus of Nazareth, thou Christ of God. Of thy grace and wisdom speak words of understanding and conviction to our hearts. Amen.

"For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup you do show the Lord's death till he comes." This text takes us to the heart of the gospel, just as St Paul wanted to take the turbulent Corinthian church to the heart of the gospel. And therefore he says: "1 have passed on to you what was passed on to me," the central content of the Christian tradition, which is Jesus Christ crucified and risen. This is what is passed on from generation to generation in the true apostolic succession of the church, as Christ comes to us afresh again and again, especially as we draw near to the table of the Lord and partake of his Body and his Blood. The eucharist is commemoration: "This do in remembrance of me," and Dom Gregory Dix asked, "Was ever such a command so obeyed by brave persons fighting, by fugitives hovering in caves, by the old on the brink of death, by the young about to be married?" "This do in remembrance of me," not as a dead past memorial, but as a living encounter with the one who entered once into the holy place for us all: the once for allness of his sacrifice and salvation becomes new and fresh whenever that is remembered. It is also proclamation, for the earliest visual education of the Christian church was the eucharist, where the very content of the gospel is openly displayed before our very eyes. St Paul could write to the Galatians how the gospel was placarded before their eyes. It was good and sad that the highest cannot be spoken, it must be acted, and the eucharist is a living enactment of the Christian gospel. It is also communion where we draw nigh unto him and commune with him who is our life. What we receive in communion is not something; what we receive is Christ himself and all his benefits, and we are thereby brought into communion with our sisters and brothers in Christ. We are members of his Body, and He is the Head and we are in him. But the eucharist, as this text points out, also looks to the future, underscoring the dimension of anticipation. Let me underscore this dimension as we prepare to sup together and then to depart to our separate homes and responsibilities.

"You do show forth the Lord's death till He comes." This is an affirmation that history has an end, an end in the sense of "telos" or fulfilment, and that end is Jesus Christ. Today we live under so many threats, but the end seems to be almost shortened, so that we walk each day as if that day is the last. Anyone born since 1945 has been born under the threat of atomic and then nuclear extinction. Added to that is mass population and mass starvation, the hunger so poignantly described by our brother from the Sudan yesterday, the predictions of the wide-spread famine already having come true. And then the threat of a limited planed with all the ecological heralds that surround us, our choking atmosphere, our dead environments, streams; and then the threat of genetic control and a host of other biological menaces waiting in the wings. No wonder that a new generation coming along complains that "You have stripped us of the dimension of hope, for you have given us a world that has no future." This is what bothers me about the new cult of futurologists that abound today. With the best will in the world they seem to prey on this kind of pessimism. While they mean to inspire us to do something about the various threats, so often the result is just the opposite. It leads to moral and spiritual paralysis. Thus we have become a generation not known for what we are accomplishing, but a generation that has tended to turn within, and to preoccupy itself with analysis. We are the most analysed generation in the history of the human race. There is nothing about us or our society that has not been counted. But whereas we are the most analysed, it seems too often that we are the least able to cope, without the kind of psychic and spiritual energy that will lead us forward to encounter the threats that abound and to do something about it. History has an end, the New Testament affirms. It does not run down. It does not simply peter out, nor does history reach a stalemate with good and evil balanced; rather we believe and confess that the one who was crucified dead and buried, also rose again and ascended into heaven and now is enthroned and in authority in power, and one day the veil will be lifted and it will be revealed for all eyes to see that He indeed reigns as the Lord of life in history. To be sure He suffered on a cross, but He suffered on a cross only a few short hours, ever after to reign as Lord of life and of death. Suffering love is also victorious love. We go back to Paul's letter to the Corinthians in an earlier section: "We preach Christ crucified, the wisdom of God, and the power of God"; this is not our wisdom or our power, but God's power is the power of suffering love, to be triumphant in the end.

In the second place history has many struggles, trials, and false promises. This has always been true, and is the eloquent testimony of the Apocalypse with which the New Testament ends. It is written to seven churches: that is the perfect number, we would say. It is a letter addressed to the ecumenical church and the theme of this special letter is the church on the field of history, and one reads through the chapters where all of the false promises, the false Messiahs rise up, only in the end to be crushed. For there is One, and that is the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world, to whom power belongs. The church as she has gone through history has always been tempted by seducing temptations. We have seen in the 20th century so many gods that have failed: a thousand year kingdom, a classless society, or a free society where freedom is abridged. We have followed so many sirens, each an ideology. But what we are reminded of as we come to the Lord's table, is that the Christian faith is not an ideology, the Christian faith is first of all a relationship with a living person whose promises are not false, whose encouragement is always present, for He is with us, even with, yea especially even the least of these my sisters and brothers. Sometimes I think St Paul introduced the doctrine of the Holy Spirit into the New Testament literature because of the disappointment of the early church that the expected coming had been delayed. The Holy Spirit is given to the church to enable us to understand and to participate more easily in what is going on in history, and to test the other spirits lest they be the seductive ideological spirits that so often tempt us. Scripture, by announcing the Lord's death until he comes, says that history has a meaning, and that meaning is justification by faith, and forgiveness of sin.

When Karl Barth was in Princeton for the celebration of an anniversary at the Seminary, at a luncheon given in his honor, I presented to him Arthur Link - a great historian - who has won already two Bancroft prizes for his work on Lincoln. Dr Link greeted Professor Barth with these words: "1 want to thank you for teaching me the meaning of my discipline," and Barth typically responded: "Oh, so you don't think I am anti-historical." "No," he said, "reading your commentary on St Paul's Epistle to the Romans taught me that the meaning of history is justification by faith and the forgiveness of sins." Isn't that the meaning of your history? The real meaning of your history is that you can confess your sins and God will cancel your past, that God will justify you by opening a new future, with new possibilities, and new strength. And he does this not just once but again and again...and that is what gives meaning to our history. Furthermore what we individually do, nations can do as Jonah reminds us. The meaning of all history is justification by faith, and the forgiveness of sins.

The main thing that is missed by the pessimists who deal in futurology in our time is the central affirmation of the gospel: "The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us." God identified himself with humankind, not at the heights, not at the level of spiritual achievement, but at the lowest, in the depth of despair and rejection. Here at the lowest God identified himself with humanity so that from that moment onward, God and the human being are one; God's future is now our future, our future is now one with God's future; we cannot understand the future without knowing that in Christ we have been taken into God's future. And this gives us what the world so desperately needs today, the precious ingredient of hope. It has been discovered among suicides that the one common characteristic is an absolute abandonment of hope. But Alan Paton writing out of South Africa says: "To hope is to desire with expectation." Long ago Tertullian wrote: "Hope is patience with a lamp lit." When the great emperor Yang was crowned in China, a contemporary philosopher wrote: "Blow out the candles, the sun has come out." As you come to the Lord's table this morning, blow out your guttering candles, for you come in the full light of the sun, who is the Son of man, and the Son of God, who reigns as Lord of Life and of Death.

In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, Amen.

This sermon, transcribed from tape, was preached on Friday August 27 1982 in Knox Presbyterian Church in Ottawa.