Solemnity of the Feast of Corpus Christi

Deuteronomy 8:2-3,14-16
1 Corinthians 11:23-29
John 6:47-58

+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

A parish called a new rector. On his first Sunday, his wife found an inconspicuous pew, not in the back, but not right up in front. Someone tapped her on the shoulder. She turned, and a woman told her, “Do you know that you’re sitting in someone else’s place?” What a display of Christian hospitality! What seriousness, what integrity about the mass!

Every time we come to mass we are joining ourselves to Jesus on the cross and in his resurrection. In joining ourselves to Christ, we are also uniting ourselves to one another. That is the purpose of the mass. That is the focus, the thing that matters, but so often we blur the purpose and worry about the wrong things, petty things.

Years ago, I read Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters from Prison. Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran pastor, a talented theologian, and a leader in the Christian resistance to Nazism from the earliest days of Hitler’s regime. The Nazis arrested him, put him in a concentration camp, and murdered him days before the end of the war.

I vaguely remember reading his reflections about learning to make the sign of the cross in his personal prayers. For many of us, making the sign of the cross is something we do automatically, something we’ve always done. When Bonhoeffer sat in jail, he discovered that crossing himself became a powerful new thing to do in his prayers, and he writes movingly of the power it had for him, how he felt that it connected him to Jesus and the cross, how it reminded him of his identity. Of course, not everyone finds it a helpful spiritual practice, but many do.

A woman, a relatively high church Episcopalian, moved to a new city. She went to church. During the service, she crossed herself. Another woman leaned over and told her, “Oh, we don’t do that here.” The new woman responded, “Well, we do now!”

I love that. It takes guts. She’s saying, “I’m part of the Christian community even if you don’t want to accept me.” That happens rarely, but it can be an enormous blessing for a church because it promotes diversity. It shakes up any clubby atmosphere. We often feel threatened by differences, by things we’re not used to, but if we rise above these feelings, control our fears and anxieties, we learn and grow.

Disagreements and differences are inevitable wherever two or more are gathered, but disagreements and differences don’t have to lead to division and disunity. They can be creative and constructive and promote a more profound unity. Last Sunday was Trinity Sunday, and one of its fundamental themes is that the inner being of God, the Holy Trinity, is unity in diversity and diversity in unity.

S. Paul writes his letter to the Corinthians because they were failing miserably to live with their diversity in unity. He admonishes them not on the liturgical particulars of their worship, such as whether they cross themselves, but on more fundamental points – their lack of hospitality, their selfishness, their divisiveness.

In the early Church, Christians met in private homes. There were no churches.

The dining room of a typical villa could accommodate only nine persons, who would recline at table for the meal. Other guests would have to stand or sit in the atrium, which might have provided space for another thirty or forty people. The host of such a gathering would, of course, be one of the wealthier members of the community. ... the host’s higher status friends would be invited to dine in the [dining room] while the lower-status members of the church ... would be placed ... outside. ... [I]t was not at all unusual for the higher-status guests ... to be served better food and wine than the other guests – just as first-class passengers on an airliner receive much better food and service than others on the same plane.1

The wealthier Corinthian Christians were eating fine foods and not sharing it, and the poor had little, if anything, to eat. Paul, of course, regards this as a travesty. He’s outraged. The church’s gathering should be a common meal, symbolic of their unity. Instead the Corinthians are acting as if the cross and resurrection had not changed their relationships, as if God prefers some people to others, as if they have no responsibility to care for one another.

The Corinthians’ celebration of communion had become divisive. It humiliated the poor. It provoked envy and separation. Jesus came to bless the poor and to unite all people. So the Corinthians were doing exactly what Jesus had died to prevent. In essence, Paul accused them of nailing Jesus to the cross.

In other words, the Corinthians’ status-seeking, their callousness, their inhospitality – these things deny Christ. These things are unworthy of Christian community. Paul writes, “Whoever eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord.” (1 Cor 11:27)

For high-church folks, ‘unworthy’ reception of communion has too often been understood as not being introspective enough, not reverent enough. For Paul, unworthy reception of the bread and the cup of the Lord has nothing to do with our theological beliefs about the bread and wine. He’s not concerned about liturgical nuance and private piety, but rather about how we treat one another, and especially how we care for the poor and weak.

For Paul, eating and drinking unworthily means not ‘discerning the body,’ that is not seeing our connection with other people, not seeing others as our brothers and sisters. Those who don’t ‘discern the body’ act selfishly and focus on their own spirituality; they are inward looking and concerned with their own comfort. They miss the point. They tap people on the shoulder and say, “You’re sitting in the wrong pew.” Or, “We don’t do that here.”

At the Lord’s Supper, we unite ourselves to God and to one another. You can’t have one without the other. We can’t have a deep relationship with God without a deep relationship with other people. We need other people to know God, to have communion with him. The Blessed Sacrament, the consecrated host, the communion wafer, is not a magic pill we pop to bring God into our lives.

We hold up and adore the Blessed Sacrament not only because it nourishes our life in God, but also because it nourishes our unity with each other. We hold up our point of unity, what gives us communion with God and with one another, with those like us and those not like us, with those with whom we agree and those with whom we disagree, with those who cross themselves and those who don’t.

We can have communion, we can have unity, with one another because God loves each of us, wholly and equally, without favorites. The Lord’s Supper is an assurance of God’s love for us. “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” (Jn 15:13) The Lord’s Supper reminds us Jesus gave himself for each of us. He died for each of us: “This is my body which is broken for you.” None of us is worthy of God’s gift of himself, but God invites everyone to his table to receive him.

While at the Eucharist we are looking backward, remembering the Last Supper, the cross, the resurrection, what Jesus has done for us, and we are also looking forward to the future. We are glimpsing our future. This morning the choir will sing the ancient text ‘O sacrum convivium,’ ‘O sacred banquet.’ It concludes: et futurae gloriae nobis pignus datur. A pledge of future glory is given to us.

As he concludes this letter to the Corinthians, Paul writes that in the end, all things will be subject to God. In the end, the glorious future, “God will be everything to every one.” (1 Cor 15:28) The Eucharist, the heavenly banquet, is the destiny of all creation.2 We’ll all be together, and the Church is called to show that future reality now.

+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.