Corpus Christi - Thursday, June 20, 2019

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Rev. Matthew Wright, CRC
Corpus Christi - Thursday, June 20, 2019

John 6:47-58

Click here for an audio version of the sermon.

Corpus Christi.  The day we’re given to celebrate the mystery of the Eucharist; the mystery of the sacrament of Christ’s body and blood; the mystery of the food that’s at the heart of our lives when we journey with Jesus.

And the Gospel reading appointed for today might make our relationship to this food sound a bit ominous: “Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.”  So on the one hand, there’s the cannibalistic edge—really it’s more than an edge.  And on the other hand, there’s the seeming exclusivity of it—if you don’t do this, there is no life in you.  But rather than brush this off as some kind of outdated, exclusivist theology, let’s take it seriously for a few minutes,  What does it mean: “…unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you”?

Well, first of all, if this is true, then the reverse is also necessarily true: “If you have life within you, you do eat of the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood.”  As Jesus says elsewhere in John’s Gospel, “I have come that you might have life, and have it abundantly.”  And so abundant life, life fully alive, is the sign of Jesus’ eucharistic presence, the sign that one has feasted on Christ’s Body and Blood.  So we should look to those who are fully alive if we want to see what it means to truly eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood.

And I imagine we’ve all known at least one such a person over the course of our lives.  Someone whose presence we love to be in because they radiate joy, life, love; or maybe even someone who’s presence we’re a little afraid to be in, because they bear so much truth, so much love.  Whichever the case may be, we’ve all likely known someone who was abundantly alive—and they may or may not have been formally religious, or maybe even Christian.  If you have abundant life within you, you eat of the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood.

The life of Christ is the life of the world.  It is the life of a river or a tree or a star, the life of the poor, and the hurting, and the hungry; it’s the life within you and me, begging to be liberated and feasted upon.  And so we have to be careful to never make this mystery of Christ’s life, Christ’s Body, smaller than it is.  Nothing falls outside of the Mystery of Christ—“All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.”  On this Feast of Corpus Christi, Jesus gives us bread and wine, grapes and wheat, earth and water, to remind us that this whole universe is his body and blood.

And so we also have to be careful to not sentimentalize this Christ-life, to not make it something tame and precious and manageable.  The Christ-life, life fully alive, is wild and beautiful—and sometimes a little scary—and it spills over and outside of our neat boundaries and our tidy boxes—and yes, our beautiful tabernacles.  It’s all of life.  And so to truly eat his flesh and drink his blood is to fully participate in and embrace this wild, messy, glorious life we’re given.  That’s how we eat his flesh and drink his blood… and when we don’t do that—when we don’t participate, embrace, engage—that’s when we have no life in us, when our life becomes small and tight and fearful.

“I am the bread of life,” Jesus says.  The bread that is life is Jesus.  And so can we learn to meet and embrace and receive each moment of life as bread?  As sustenance?  As nourishment?  As Jesus?  Admittedly, it’s a tall order.  There are some moments in life, there are some people in life, I do not want to receive as bread, as Jesus.  But can we find, or at least look for, the bread, even there?  Can we look for the way in which a difficulty or a frustration if embraced might be able to strengthen us, teach us something new about ourselves, push us more deeply into community, engage us more fully in this feast that is life, that is bread, that is Jesus?

Now sometimes, of course, it’s too soon, sometimes it’s only years later when a difficult moment from our past suddenly becomes a morsel of bread now, becomes strength now, in the present.  Sometimes it takes a long while for one of life’s experiences to be ground and milled into flour and to be baked and to rise into bread, into nourishment.  Kabir Helminski, a Sufi teacher, says that “Eventually, we begin to see that even a bitter drink is sweet, when it is from the Beloved.”

Can we find the sweetness within the bitterness, and see even those moments as the blood of our Beloved Jesus poured into the chalice of our life?  Can we see his hands kneading the dough that is the difficulty and pain of our lives and our world so that, little by little, all of it can become Communion bread?  Paula D’Arcy says that “God comes to you disguised as your life.”  And not just the “good parts” of your life.  God comes to you disguised as your life.

“I am the bread of life,” Jesus says.  And so, if life is bread, and that bread is Jesus, are we always willing to say yes to Jesus?  If life is bread, and that bread is Jesus, do I always want to receive it?  Eucharist is practice for learning to say yes to all of it.  Week after week, and here in the monastery, day after day, we come forward, extend our hands, receive the bread, drink the wine, and say “Amen.”  We receive and accept the gifts of God and we say, “Yes.”  And never forget that these are broken gifts—broken bread, crushed grapes, poured out wine.  And in a very real way, we’re receiving and saying yes to our own brokenness, we’re receiving and saying yes to each other’s brokenness, and we’re being reminded that this messy thing we call being human that we’re all doing—this is the bread of life, this is Jesus.

I think of all the weddings, and funerals, and baptisms, and house blessings, and ordinations, and professions of vows at which I’ve shared in Holy Communion.  In moments of celebration, of grief, of welcome, of commitment.  At each of them, Eucharist.  This is what we do to remind ourselves.  This is what God does to remind us.  Each moment—a birth, a wedding, a profession, a death—all of it, the Body and Blood of Christ.  The Eucharist is a mirror of our life.  We are the Body of Christ, coming forward to receive ourselves, to say Yes, Amen, Thank you, and to eat the gift of our own lives.  “God comes to you disguised as your life.”

Jesus goes on to say in the Gospel, “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.”  What if we heard this not as the creepy language of cannibalism, but instead as the language of pregnancy, of the interabiding of a mother and child?  Just as an infant abides in its mother’s womb and is nourished by her flesh and blood, her body, so too we abide in Christ and Christ in us.  Julian of Norwich says of the Eucharist: “A mother can give her child milk to suck, but our precious mother, Jesus, can feed us with himself.  He does so most courteously and most tenderly, with the Blessed Sacrament, which is the precious food of true life.”

Our Mother Jesus, the Word Incarnate in all creation, is the very life of the world, the life that we have to embrace and consume in its fullness if we are to be truly alive.  The flesh of the Son of Man is the flesh of our human experience, the Body of this moment.  “God comes to you disguised as your life.”

And so, as we all come forward shortly and the two arms of the circle that we’ll form around the altar begin weaving in and out around the bread and the cup, look around and see what’s happening—the bread and the cup the heartbeat of Jesus, and here we all are in the great circulatory system of the Body of Christ, receiving nourishment and being sent out, and learning every time we come forward to once again say Yes.  Yes to our brokenness, yes to our beauty, yes to our Jesus who is bread that is life.  Yes, yes, to all of it, yes, amen!