Corpus Christi, June 19, 2025

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Ephrem Arcement, OHC

Corpus Christi, June 19, 2025

Click here for an audio of the sermon

Feast of Corpus Christi

“In Your Bread there is hidden the Spirit who is not consumed,

in Your Wine there dwells the Fire that is not drunk:

the Spirit is in Your Bread, the Fire in Your Wine—

a manifest wonder, that our lips have received.” –St. Ephrem

My personal relationship with the Eucharist has taken many turns over the course of my life.  Born into a Roman Catholic family, I distinctly remember making my first communion in second grade.  Tellingly, I have to admit that I recall my class practicing receiving communion more than the actual ceremony itself.  As an eight-year-old, my curiosity was peaked: how will the wafer taste?  What if I drop it?  What do I do if it sticks to the roof of my pallet?  My teacher prepped us well, and the ceremony went on without a fuss.  But why do I remember the logistics of receiving communion and have almost no recollection of the meaning and significance of the reality that I was receiving?  As I look back, what was important was that I made my first communion, not that I actually entered into communion with the Body and Blood of Christ…and these two realities are hardly the same.

When I look back on my Catholic childhood, I see that I, like many others, was sacramentalized without really being evangelized.  When, at 16 I came into contact with the gospel in a way that I could more fully understand (through a Baptist friend of mine), I began to resent the fact that my Catholic upbringing, as I experienced it, put so much stock in the sacraments and so little in helping me develop my personal faith in which and on which the sacraments are based.  So, I did what many evangelicals tend to do, throw the baby out with the bathwater and focus entirely on the personal to the exclusion of the sacramental, which, I thought, had become not a means of grace but its obstacle.  

Several years go by before the next turn in my journey with the Eucharist.  Now in divinity school and studying under professors of various Christian denominations, I came in contact with both mainline Protestants and faith-filled Roman Catholics who embodied a more holistic approach when it came to the sacraments.  Faith and sacrament could be lived out where each served and enhanced the other rather than threatened it.  It was my first exposure to a both/and consciousness and my way out of the either/or consciousness that I detoured into during my evangelical years.  Up until then, I knew what it was like to have the sacraments with little to no faith.  I knew what it was like to have faith with little to no sacraments.  Now I knew what it was like to have both faith and sacraments and the fullness of the experience of Christ in the coming together of the two.

Since returning to the more sacramental expressions of Christianity, I have often thought to myself, and sometimes expressed to others, that I could never again be a part of a tradition that doesn’t place the Eucharist at the center of its life and worship.  As much as I have benefited from these more non-liturgical traditions, for me there is one glaring omission: the sacramental encounter with the real presence of Christ communicated to me in the physical elements of bread and wine.  Preaching is very important but may fail to inspire.  I may or may not feel the Spirit move amongst the congregation.  I may not have it within me to have a genuine encounter with God when I offer myself in worship.  But one thing that I know for certain is that, in the Eucharist, God encounters me.  I taste, I chew and eat, I drink and swallow, and I feel the wine burn in my belly and am confirmed that once again I am loved beyond measure.

The Eucharist is one of those Christian mysteries that is polyvalent in nature:  it means many things at the same time.  From today’s readings we see that the prototype of the Eucharist, the manna from heaven, signified God’s provision for God’s people struggling along their journey of faith through the wilderness.  It was a sign of God’s fidelity and care. 

Jesus would use these meanings and attach them to himself and his imminent crucifixion at the Last Supper.  God is now demonstrating a new kind of fidelity and care for God’s people…one that is no longer bound to the temporal realm of our wilderness journeys but one that gives us a taste of a far greater reality.  If the primary function of the manna was to get Israel out of the wilderness, the primary function of the Eucharist is to allow Christ to enter more deeply back into the wilderness, the wilderness of our lives…to not just sustain us and care for us along the way…but to transform us and to open up to us a new, deeper realm of being in the wilderness.  What the Eucharist bestows is not just physical bread and wine, but a type of bread and wine full of power and glory…the exact same power and glory which was manifested in Christ’s death and resurrection.  In each Eucharist heaven invades earth and God knocks on the door of our hearts seeking entrance.  And what God seeks is communion…a mutual sharing where human and divine become one in the gift of each to the other.  Heaven becomes one with earth and the veil between the two is rent asunder.  

What results, or at least what should result, is not a way of life that seeks to escape from our earthly, often messy, embodied existence but a life which is more capable of embodying the divine and manifesting Christ in our own earthly, often messy, existence: “The cup of blessing that we bless, it it not a sharing in the blood of Christ?  The bread that we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ?”  Especially in the Eucharist, the church becomes the body of Christ, not in metaphor but in sacramental/mystical reality.  

No one has explicated the implications of this sacramental reality for the contemporary church, in my mind, more that the twentieth century Jesuit scientist and theologian Teilhard de Chardin.  Teilhard saw the Eucharist as the indispensable reality in the ongoing incarnation and, what he called, chrsitification of matter.  For Teilhard, the evolutionary impulse was something divinely inspired, fueled by the love of God…that which is taking on more and more of the divine life in its gradual unfolding.  Spirit and matter, for Teilhard, were not separate realities…there was only spirit-matter: two interdependent dimensions of one reality.  Teilhard saw all of creation as sacramental with the Eucharist being the Sacrament of sacraments.  The cosmic Christ is arising in creation, especially in the church, and especially in those who share in the Body and Blood of Christ and join their own bodies and their own blood to this cosmic Christ communicated in this Sacrament of sacraments.  Created reality reaches its climax in the Incarnation whose end is not the crucifixion, or even the resurrection, but the Omega Point when all creation is assumed and transfigured by the Body and Blood of Christ.  As he writes, “And then there appears to the dazzled eyes of the believer the eucharistic mystery itself, extended infinitely into a veritable universal transubstantiation in which the words of the consecration are applied not only to the sacrificial bread and wine but, mark you, to the whole mass of joys and sufferings produced by the convergence of the world as it progresses.”

As a true mystic, Teilhard, at this point, can’t help but burst into ecstatic prayer, one of the most profound reflections on the Eucharist that I’ve come across:  “In a true sense the arms and the heart which you open to me are nothing less than all the united powers of the world which, penetrated and permeated to their depths by your will, your tastes, and your temperament, converge upon my being to form it, nourish it, and bear it along toward the center of your fire.  In the host it is my life that you are offering me, O Jesus.  What can I do to gather up and answer that universal and enveloping embrace?  To the total offer that is made me, I can only answer by a total acceptance.  I shall therefore react to the eucharistic contact with the entire effort of my life — of my life of today and of my life of tomorrow, of my personal life and of my life as linked to all other lives.  Periodically, the sacred species may perhaps fade away in me.  But each time they will leave me a little more deeply engulfed in the layers of your omnipresence: living and dying, I shall never at any moment cease to move forward in you.  The eucharist must invade my life.  My life must become, as a result of the sacrament, an unlimited and endless contact with you, that life which seemed, a few moments ago, like a baptism with you in the waters of the world, now reveals itself to me as communion with you through the world.  It is the sacrament of life.  The sacrament of my life — of my life received, of my life lived, of my life surrendered….”

May God give us eyes to see as Teilhard saw and a like hunger to live in the same sacramental world full of God’s fire and glory.  Amen.

Corpus Christi - May 30, 2024

 Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Randy Greve

Corpus Christi, May 30, 2024

• Deuteronomy 8:2-3
• 1 Corinthians 11:23-29
• John 6:47-58

The Bread of Life discourse in John 6 has read to me for a long time as a rough draft in need of a good editor.  The repetition especially seems like overkill.  But by digging a bit more into the context of the Johannine community, I have come to appreciate the motivation for the emphasis.  The scholarly consensus is that the community from which the gospel of John came were settled in Ephesus. Ephesus was an important center of pagan worship with a large temple and the ritual that went along with it.  The worship of Artemis provided social identity and cohesion.  If we were to go back in time and talk to a typical resident of Ephesus, he or she would describe a world in which the pagan gods were higher and more powerful than human beings and held the right to punish or bless.  Seeking through ritual sacrifice to appease the gods was a way to earn favor and avoid hardship and pain. Our imaginary Ephesian believed a great chasm is fixed between the realm of the gods and the realm of humans.  They believed that we earthly creatures are defined by our deficiencies - we lack immortality, we lack freedom from flesh and pain and death, we lack freedom.  

    The gods are our idealized selves, the truly free beings who have real power. By sharing in their benevolence we participate in those attributes and can aspire to escape our dreadful enfleshed state and touch the eternal, our true home.  Life is about the hope of escape and freedom from limits.

These beliefs are the backdrop to the gospel of John. The gospels' description of the incarnate Son of God is in every way the exact opposite theology of the pagan gods.  This deity does not escape flesh, but becomes it, does not find freedom by ascending above us, but by dwelling among us.  When the gospel is read as a renunciation of pagan theology by the revelation of the incarnation, it comes alive in a richer way. The Bread of Life repetition serves a rhetorical and catechetical function.  The Son of God is not one more addition to the program of sacrifice and appeasement. The Christ event is an utterly original and reorienting revelation of the nature of God in the world and our human vocation.  The minds of the new converts needed to be “de-paganized”, programmed as they were to see the world one way, now in Christ it is revealed as something else, with a truth, beauty, and goodness entered into by belief.  

How do I become a clean insider so that I may approach the Son of Man?  “whoever believes has eternal life”. Christ is not like that.

My social status and sin exclude me from participation in the life offered by Christ…  “whoever eats of this bread will live forever…” The Son of God welcomes whoever.

How can I climb up to reach Christ?  “This is the bread that comes down from heaven…” The incarnate Christ comes down to us, we do not go up to him.

    This life in Jesus is sent down into the Incarnate One to earth; from divinity, for humanity in whom Jesus is the great Reconciling One. The material and the earthly now become the means of embodying and reflecting life eternal now.  Jesus’ words and actions set out the contours of the human and divine relationship. We are made participants in the divine life through the initiative of God - not something we ascend to possess, but life that Christ descends to give freely, without respect for the person.  “Whoever” stresses the individuality and particularity of God’s gift in Christ; our true identity, our true home is found as we put ourselves inside this word, “whoever”.

    The narrative acknowledges the scandal and the stumbling block of believing and receiving: “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” The scandal is how the life offered is a great equalizer of human worth and value.  I cannot increase status or favor or value.  The fullness of the divine image is always already present and secured by God and cannot be revoked.  In believing, eating, and drinking, we are set into the wondrous glory and limit of being a creature made in the divine image, yet dependent on our creator.  Being truly human is cooperation, not competition.   To receive this gift is to believe that I am welcomed along with you. The scandal is that I am welcomed no differently, not ever less or more than you.  

    Christ’s “whoever-ing” of all humanity reveals the essential unity and shared glory of every human person.  Even as we differ in gifts, responsibilities, and roles, in Christ we eat and drink from the same gift offered in the same way to each of us.  For John and his community, life is not a new legalistic hierarchy of conformity, but a universal invitation of living as brother and sister in Christ.

To the extent that I receive this hospitality in and for me, I am formed to recognize and welcome in my brothers and sisters the same dignity and Christ-indwelt sacredness.  This mutual recognition faces difference and conflict in the context of our shared call by Christ and the need of Christ.  We express our positions and preserve boundaries and give and receive consequences and solve problems and reach consensus not with the goal of yielding power over the other, but in the assurance that our shared “whoever” is inviolable and that anything that denies or harms our mutual welcome cannot persist in the community.  

    As enmity, insult, and abuse engulf social discourse, perhaps hearing Saint John’s repetition is necessary.  As divisions swirl around us and rivalry would tear at our very humanity, the words of life ring with renewed prophetic hope.  To eat and drink and live is to renounce these evil powers and affirm our common dignity.

    The Holy Eucharist itself is the eternal now of this common receiving of the one gift of life offered as and by Christ equally with whoever is willing to believe and eat and drink.  As we gather as a eucharistic community, we are practicing the reception of one another in the reception of bread and wine.  Help us believe in your words, Lord Christ: “Bread of life, living bread, those who eat and drink have eternal life, abide in me, live forever.”  Amen.

Corpus Christi - June 16, 2022

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Robert Sevensky, OHC

Corpus Christi - Thursday, June 16, 2022

Deuteronomy 8:2-3 

1 Corinthians 10:1-4, 16-17

John 6:47-58

Blessed, praised, and adored be our Lord Jesus Christ: on his throne of glory in heaven, in the most holy Sacrament of the Altar, and in the hearts of his faithful people. Amen.

In 1982, the World Council of Churches issued an influential paper titled Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry which emphasized the many theological convergences which the various member churches had arrived at regarding these three essential elements of Christian faith and practice.  They prefaced the document with the usual caveats, noting that important divergences remained.  And they also emphasized the practical missional dimensions that are intrinsically related to these theological reflections.  It is worth quoting:

“We live in a crucial moment in the history of humankind. As the churches grow into unity, they are asking how their understandings and practices of baptism, eucharist and ministry relate to their mission in and for the renewal of human community as they seek to promote justice, peace and reconciliation. Therefore our understanding of these cannot be divorced from the redemptive and liberating mission of Christ through the churches in the modern world.”  

Forty years on it is still worth reading and reflecting on this ecumenical statement, seeing both how far we have come and how far we still must go.  

As some of you know, the Episcopal Church is again considering the relationship between Holy Baptism and the Holy Eucharist and specifically whether baptism is a necessary precondition for the faithful reception of Holy Communion. It's a complex relationship historically and canonically, not to mention theologically. But wherever you come out in this current debate, it is I think undeniable that there is, and always has been, an intimate relationship between baptism and the Holy Eucharist. And when we ignore that relationship and see the Eucharist as just one, albeit central, sacramental rite unmoored from the larger picture of God’s saving action in Christ Jesus, we run the risk of making Holy Communion into a thing rather than a doorway into an ever-deepening relationship with God in Jesus Christ and with all God's people in every place and in every age.

The 1982 document reminds us that baptism—our participation in Christ’s death and resurrection and our incorporation into Christ’s body—is both God's gift to us and our human response to that gift. And though only a momentary experience, it is related to lifelong growth in Christ. In continuity with Christian tradition, the document states that baptism is an unrepeatable act.  But then it goes on to remind us that: “Baptism needs to be constantly reaffirmed. The most obvious form of such reaffirmation is the celebration of the Eucharist.”

This is important.  What we do at this altar and what we receive at this Holy Table are not separate from or other than the grace that comes to us in Baptism.  Nor from the countless other vehicles of growth in holiness: the Word of God heard and studied, the practice of prayer, the exercise of mutual love, the service of neighbor.  All these are gifts and paths towards fullness of life.  They are the regular reaffirmation, or better, the nurturing and renourishing of our very selves, our souls and bodies, equipping us for the joys and struggles of Christian living and human flourishing. 

In this simple food given us, and in the Holy Presence promised to us in and through it, we feed upon the One who is the Way, the Truth and Life itself.  And yes, we adore that Presence made tangible, made available, made present for us here and now.  

I confess that I don’t really understand this mystery.  I do know that there have been times in my life when taking this Bread and drinking this Wine have touched me to my deepest core.  I also know that most days, I am like a child who needs nourishment and does not even know that this is what I need. I approach mostly unaware, in hope and faith that the Lord understands and that in this holy Sacrament feeds me in ways beyond my knowing and despite, or perhaps because of, my unworthiness and brokenness.  That is God’s way, isn’t it?

I’m not much of a fan of Richard Rohr, but what Sr. Sarah Hennessey, FSPA says of him and his Eucharist theology I find refreshing:

“Eucharist reveals the scandal of the particular, suggests Richard Rohr. Yes, all of creation is holy, so what does eating this piece of bread and drinking from this cup of wine really mean? When we focus on one moment of truth, eating this particular bread, we have to struggle with the meaning of it. We have to love it, resist it, eat it, drink it and be with it—in this moment. This struggle toward being fully present leads us to closer union with God in the whole cosmos. Rohr reveals to us that how we love anything is how we love everything. Eucharist is, above all, an invitation to love.”

Yes, above all an invitation to love. It is an invitation that begins with baptism and blossoms again and again on the Tree of Life, nourished and renewed, strengthened and purified, healed and matured by eating this particular piece of bread and drinking this cup of blessing, this Body and Blood of Christ. 

May the gracious Lord feed us, his people, now and always. Amen.

Corpus Christi - June 3, 2021

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Aidan Owen, OHC

Corpus Christi - Thursday, June 3, 2021

Deuteronomy 8:2-3 

1 Corinthians 10:1-4, 16-17

John 6:47-58

Click here for an audio version of this sermon

In the name of the One God, who is Lover, Beloved, and Love Overflowing. 

Almost every Sunday before pandemic time, I used to take communion to our brothers Laurence and Rafael in the nursing home. The way Laurence received communion struck me every time. He would close his eyes, receive the bread onto his palm, and place in gently in his mouth. Then, eyes still shut and head bowed, he waited for a moment in silence.  

Then he would pray the anima Christi in a low voice. At the words “O, Good Jesus, hear me. Within your wounds hide me,” his voice took on a timbre of such love and such longing that it brought tears to my eyes almost every week. 

 I’ve never discussed this experience with Laurence. But I’ve wondered if having essentially fasted from Communion for a whole week sharpened his longing and deepened his gratitude at being able—finally—to receive his Good Jesus in the flesh. 

Most of the Church was not able to receive Communion for over a year during the first part of the pandemic. Bishop Dietsche used the metaphor of exile to describe the experience. Once restrictions on in-person worship began to ease, I started to hear stories of people receiving the sacramental Body of Christ for the first time in over a year. As people would tell me these stories, their faces would light up from within and usually tears would fill their and my eyes. The pain of a year’s separation, the joy—the ecstatic joy—of return and reunion. 

We here at the Monastery chose a different Eucharistic witness during this time of pandemic. We chose to witness to the abiding, daily presence of Jesus in the bread and the wine. I don’t think that was a wrong choice. But I did notice in myself a longing to fast from the Eucharist as most of the rest of the Church had to fast. There was a part of me that wanted to join the wider Church in its exile. 

I recently shared that desire with a guest of ours. He understood where I was coming from. And he also expressed his deep gratitude that we could be a tabernacle, holding onto the sacramental witness of Christ’s Body and Blood while the rest of the Church sojourned in Babylon. 

Either way, the contrast of our fullness of our Eucharistic witness here and the barren witness of the Church in exile has highlighted for me the deep dimensions of fullness and emptiness within the Eucharist itself. We need both fullness and emptiness to experience the totality of God’s sacramental and bodily presence among us. We need to feast and we need to fast in order to know the fullness of God’s love for us and all the world. 

In her seventh revelation of divine love, Lady Julian offers the following: 

[God] revealed to me a supreme spiritual delight in my soul. In this delight I was filled full of everlasting surety, powerfully secured without any painful fear. This sensation was so welcome and spiritual that I was wholly at peace, at ease, and at rest, so that there was nothing upon earth which could have afflicted me. 

This lasted only for a time, and then I was changed, and abandoned to myself, oppressed and weary of my life and ruing myself, so that I hardly had the patience to go on living. I felt that there was no ease or comfort for me except faith, hope, and love, and truly I felt very little of this. And then presently God gave me again comfort and rest for my soul, delight and security so blessedly and so powerfully that there was no fear, no sorrow, no pain, physical or spiritual, that one could suffer which might have disturbed me. And then again I felt the pain, and then afterwards the delight and the joy, now the one and now the other, again and again and again, I suppose about twenty times. And in the time of joy I could have said with St. Paul: Nothing shall separate me from the love of Christ; and in the pain I could have said with St. Peter: Lord, save me, I am perishing. 

This vision was shown to teach me to understand that some souls profit by experiencing this, to be comforted at one time, and at another to fail and to be left to themselves. God wishes us to know that he keeps us safe all the time, in sorrow and in joy; and sometimes a man is left to himself for the profit of his soul, although his sin is not always the cause. For in this time I committed no sin for which I ought to have been left to myself, for it was so sudden. Nor did I deserve these feelings of joy, but our Lord gives it freely when he wills, and sometimes he allows us to be in sorrow, and both are one love. 

Both the sorrow and the joy are one love. 

In the reading from Deuteronomy this morning, Moses teaches the Israelites something similar: God humbled you by letting you hunger, then by feeding you with the manna […] in order to make you understand that one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord. 

Sometimes God hides his face from us in order to stir up our longing. We feel God’s absence so sharply that we call out for relief. Particularly when we have fallen into the slumber of the ordinary routine, or the self-regard of our own obsessions and illusions, we need this sharp jab in the stomach to wake us up to our need of God. 

At other times, God feeds us tenderly and sweetly. God reveals his face to us in all its simplicity and beauty, and our whole being is flooded with love for God, for ourselves, and for one another. 

In the classic language of Christian spirituality, we might call the former experience desolation and the latter consolation. But Julian would call both of them love. It is for love that God hides his face from us, to stir up our longing. And it is for love that God reveals himself to us and feeds us with himself. And both are one love. 

Picking up on this theme of fullness and emptiness, the Founder’s rule reminds us both that we should welcome the appointed times of fasting with joy, seeing in them an opportunity to free ourselves from our own disordered attachments. In so doing, they become for us a spiritual feast. And also that our feasting too must have something of the character of a gracious simplicity that is readily recognized as proper to the monastic life. In other words, feasting and fasting are two dimensions of one love. Fullness and emptiness both have their part. 

Strange as it may sound, today’s feast of the Holy Eucharist is not a celebration only of our fullness in God. It is a reminder, too, that we must empty ourselves of whatever is not God. We must allow our hunger for God to be so stirred within us that we allow ourselves to be satisfied with nothing less than our Good Jesus. 

It is so easy to see in comfort and fullness the signs of favor or success. To the extent that we are genuinely wearied by the changes and changes of this life, as one of our Compline collects so poetically puts it, we may long for comfort. But monastic life—indeed any Christian life faithfully lived—exists on the knife edge of fragility, where we don’t know what will happen next, whether we will perish or whether we will thrive. That is where faith is born, and it is where faith leads us. 

God continually draws us out into the deserts of this world and of our own lives, not to abandon us, but to reveal the fullness of his mercy, to pour down mana from heaven, to teach us with his indwelling Word, to reveal the full glory of his face where there is nothing to distract us from absorption in the holy. 

The bread that we break and the cup that we share every day at this altar are a kind of spiritual amuse bouche. They are meant to stoke our hunger for God, even as they satisfy that hunger in part. They are, in the words of our tradition, but a foretaste of the heavenly banquet. The feast at this altar should inspire in us a fast from all that is not God, so that in us feast and fast, too, become one love: the love of God poured out for the world through us who are also, united, the Body of Christ. 

Whether we feast or whether we fast, I pray that like our brother Laurence, our love and our longing may be so joined that we can pray to be hidden in the wounds of our Good Jesus. And so with one voice and one love we make our prayer (please join me if you know the words): 

(Anima Christi) 

Soul of Christ, sanctify me. 

Body of Christ, save me. 

Blood of Christ, inebriate me. 

Passion of Christ, strengthen me. 

O, Good Jesus, hear me. 

Within your wounds hide me. 

From the wicked foe, defend me. 

Suffer me never to be separated from you. 

At the hour of my death, call me and bid me come to you, 

That with your saints I may praise your Name forever. Amen. 

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!

Corpus Christi - Year B: May 31, 2018

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br.  Randy Greve, OHC

Corpus Christi - Thursday, May 27, 2018

Deuteronomy 8:2-3 
1 Corinthians 11:23-29

John 6:47-58

To hear the sermon in its fullness click here.

“The Buried Life” by Matthew Arnold:

“But often, in the world’s most crowded streetsBut often, in the din of strifeThere rises an unspeakable desireAfter the knowledge of our buried life:A thirst to spend our fire and restless forceIn tracking out our true, original course;A longing to inquireInto a mystery of this heart which beatsSo wild, so deep in us – to knowWhence our lives come and where they go.”

The poet intimates that there is something more, beneath the noisy, crowded streets – it remains unspeakable and buried, yet it calls. He is touching on the big questions of meaning, of purpose, of love – of the big “whys” of why me, why now, why here. Jesus has something to say in reply – not in formulas, dogmas, rituals, moral absolutes or easy steps to happiness. Jesus speaks in reply and unburies life, frees life, deepens mystery. This is strange and indecipherable language about what we most desire, yet it lures us with its opacity, haunts with its confidence:  from the gospel reading:  “Eternal life; Bread of life; Living bread; Live forever; Life of the world; Living Father; I live; Live because of me; Live forever”. I sense perhaps the beginnings of a theme. The Greek word for life contains a sense of movement which is impossible to bring over into English without lots more words. 

The English for “life” would be something like “the meaning-bearing energy of spirit beyond mere physical existence that is continuously being given and being received without loss or beginning or end”. Jesus speaks in the declarative and definitive. His life, most graphically put in language as his very flesh and blood, received and consumed, is and brings eternal life. The image could not be any clearer – he repeats it in several different ways. It is almost as if he is straining to express what to him is obvious, what to him is his own abiding in the Father – the life without which he would not be, not know who he was or what he was to do. He describes himself and then us in relation to his being. The intimacy is startling and offensive. It is all so achingly beautiful, so purely mystical, and so absolutely beyond us. Jesus is addressing the soul, the quality of human existence in perfect union with the love of God, the divine within that because it is held in the embrace of God lives in the eternal satisfaction and fulfillment of hunger and thirst. The mystics talk often about how we get an inkling of the presence and grace of God in our souls when the consolation of feeding on the body and blood of Jesus, abiding in him, leads to a deeper desire, which consoles us more, which creates desire all the more, and so on. The nourishment of God brings peace and a restless longing for more. The life of which Jesus speaks is an end of the journey, the filling of desire, only to send us at the same moment onward to new searching and hollows our spiritual bellies to create anew the very appetite he himself feeds.

Insofar as language can apprehend the mystery of Jesus’ identity as Bread of Life, the nourishment that satiates and leads to hunger is a theme woven through the contemplative tradition of the faith. Truth claims held with care and humility, knowing their power is beyond our comprehension. It is, however, a lousy evangelism program. While our souls abide in this mystery, our self-will recoils from this mystery. Rather than dwell in it, savor it, my ego wants to fix the mystery, solve it, escape it, above all to know, understand. When I do not attend to the soul, when I give in to fear and react from control, the mystery at the heart of love sounds like so much nonsense. What fills the void is what Daniel Taylor calls the myth of certainty - a set of immutable, rationalized, precisely defined and defendable beliefs. 

These beliefs make sense and predictability out of an often senseless and chaotic world. The beliefs may in themselves be true, but when used to avoid transcendence and reduce God to my understandable and controllable categories, certainty is idolatry. And as I look at American Christianity, certainty sells!  The commentaries on this gospel are full of it – full of language that seeks to explain with the mind language addressed to the soul. One streams says, We know from the Bible that salvation is by grace alone, through faith alone, so eating and drinking Jesus must refer to our faith in him as he gave his life for us on the cross. Another stream of the Church would say; clearly the language points to Holy Communion and proves that within the first century Christians believed that Jesus was present, infused in the elements of bread and wine; that this food and drink is more than mere memorial, but the living Christ himself. The text itself does not contain the words salvation, faith, sacrament, eucharist, or church. This is, perhaps most dramatically in the Gospels, language that confounds and unsettles any attempt to easily and neatly fit it into an existing box. It is fine to seek to understand scripture through other voices in scripture. It is more problematic to leap to a conclusion that conveniently fits my theological lens.

Certainty, while tempting and marketable, is not what we most deeply desire. The poet is right to name the nature of our souls – longing for life, real life, but often settling for the safe and comfortable. The buried life that calls through the noise is meaning – something far more valuable than mere certainty. Meaning derives from an abiding, eating and drinking relationship with God, based on risk and commitment. It infuses theology with wonder and knows when mind must give way to mystery. What God in Christ offers is not certainty, but a person, a relationship; not rules and a formula, but security through risking all; not safety, but unity and community.

Our response, in the end, is to come back to the essence of the human response to the divine lover; to receive the gift offered, in the myriad of ways it is offered, open to ways that gifts gets digested from grace into love.

The Holy Eucharist of which we will partake today is a gift of life - the meaning-bearing energy of spirit beyond mere physical existence that is continuously being given and being received without loss or beginning or end. It is the most powerful enactment of the eating and drinking of which Jesus speaks. Eating and drinking the body and blood of Christ points to the deepest meaning and mystery in the sacrament, not so that we may reduce the presence of Christ to the certainty of our hands, but so that we may become in all of life that which we eat and drink. Amen.

Corpus Christi B - Jun 4, 2015

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Peter Rostron, OHC
John 6:47-58 , Thursday, June 4, 2015

Several years ago I saw a movie  called King Corn. Not King Kong, but King Corn. It’s a documentary that came out in 2007 about the politics and economics of corn and how that has contributed to a decline in the healthfulness of our diets. The focal point of the movie is a one-acre plot of corn that the two young filmmakers cultivate in Iowa, and they follow and explain the entire process from planting to selling the corn. The film vividly describes the serious, negative consequences of the politically-manipulated corn industry in this country. The opening scene especially is quite startling, as a University of Virginia professor analyzes a hair sample from one of the filmmakers, which reveals, based on the substances in his body, that over 50% of his diet is corn. Farm animals are corn-fed, soda and many juices are largely corn syrup, and corn oil is a very common choice for cooking fried foods. The subtitle of the film is You Are What You Eat, and indeed the film disturbingly reveals the ill state of health of our own physical bodies as well as our collective social, political, and economic body because of all the corn and corn byproducts that we ingest.

It matters what we eat. It matters for our own, individual health and for the health of our society. But, there are so many bad foods that taste really good, and often they’re very convenient, so it takes a lot of self-discipline in order to make the right choices. And that’s tough. It can be a challenge to consider the larger ramifications every time we make a food decision throughout the day. Do I eat this hamburger? Should I give in to my craving for some Twizzlers? What about this glass of cranberry juice? What are the ingredients? What fertilizers or additives were used? Where did it come from? I must admit that I can be lazy when it comes to such things, and too often I choose to eat foods without investing much reflection, investigation, or discernment in the process. And I suspect this is true for many of us. We have a desire, and we seek to satisfy it. That’s it. Unfortunately, what we desire and how we satisfy that desire may not be good for us. As the film says, we are what we eat. We might become corn, or at least unhealthy, and I don’t believe that is what God desires for us.

Just as this may be true for us now, it was true for the Israelites wandering in the desert millennia ago. They did not live as God wished them to. We know there was plenty of grumbling among them on their journey. In Exodus, we are told that “the whole congregation of the Israelites complained against Moses and Aaron…[saying] ‘if only we had died by the hand of the Lord in Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread.’” In other words, “we’re happy with the status quo; it’s too much trouble to pursue change.” And today in the book of Deuteronomy we heard Moses tell the Israelites that God led them to hunger so that they would learn to desire what he would provide and change their ways. And we heard Paul point out in his letter to the Corinthians that the rock from which the Israelites drank was Christ. He went on, though, to say that, “nevertheless, God was not pleased with most of them, and they were struck down in the wilderness. Now, these things occurred as examples to us so that we might not desire evil as they did.” The Israelites did not know Christ, for God had not yet revealed him to the world, but we do. And we hear Jesus tell us in John’s gospel, “Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died…[but] I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever.”

This truth is central to our Christian faith. We declare it each time we gather around the table to celebrate the Eucharist and partake of the body and blood of Christ. On this Feast Day of the Body of Christ, we are placing special emphasis on the significance of this truth, yet we do not always live accordingly. Like the ancient Israelites, we do not always choose to feast solely on God’s word. In many ways, we are wandering in our own, 21st-century wilderness, lost, grumbling, often wanting to eat and live simply to satisfy our selves, not God. We do not fully listen to God or act based on what God wants for us, we do not live in community as God wants us to live, and thus we are not yet ready or able to enter the Promised Land, not yet ready or able to establish God’s Kingdom on earth. We must keep in mind Paul’s words of warning. Still, like the Israelites, we keep going, we keep trying, despite the hardships and setbacks and discomforts. We stray, we grumble, we sin, but God keeps forgiving us and calling us back. We continue on our journey, we hunger, and we look to God for sustenance. And, as the Israelites did not, we have the benefit of the presence of Christ.

God sent us his son, and God does provide for us, but still we must choose to eat the good food and to say yes to God’s word. We can choose wisely or we can choose foolishly. We can eat food that is unhealthy, out of laziness or impulse or convenience or cost, or we can eat food that will truly nourish our bodies and energize us. We can also think beyond just food and include everything that we take in and that becomes part of us: the air we breathe, the music we listen to, the movies we watch, and the ideas and politics that inform our opinions and behaviors. All of the things that we ingest become us. And by us I mean each one of us as an individual, but also, all of us who together make up one single us, a social, political, economic, and spiritual body. This is a concept that the Israelites were much more attuned to than we are, but it is significant. All of our individual little choices add up to become the path that our community, our nation, and therefore each of us, will take.

So, choose well. As indeed we will in a few moments when we gather around the table to consume the ultimate food, the spiritual food of the body of Christ. When we do this, we become the living Christ, nourished and enlivened to do God’s work, to create God’s kingdom on earth, to move toward the promised land. So, on this feast day of Corpus Christi, come, celebrate, joyfully eat this bread that has come down from heaven and that will lead us to eternal life. We are what we eat.

Corpus Christi - Jun 19, 2014

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Bernard Delcourt, OHC
Corpus Christi – Thursday 19 June 2014

Deuteronomy 8:2-3
1 Corinthians 11:23-26
John 6:47-58

Bread and wine; Body and Blood

“One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord” says Deuteronomy. And in the gospel according to John, Jesus tells us “I am the living bread which comes from heaven. Anyone who eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I shall give is my flesh, for the life of the world.”

*****

Today, we celebrate our joy at having the sacrament of the Eucharist. Nine weeks ago, on Maundy Thursday we commemorated the institution of the Eucharist but our attention was divided by the washing of the feet and the praying at the Garden of Gethsemane that led to the passion of our Lord Jesus Christ. 

Today, with singular focus, we get to celebrate the presence of our Lord in the bread and wine that is consecrated for us in the sacrament of the Eucharist.

*****

Corpus Christi, or the feast of the Holy Eucharist, is a feast whose origin goes back to the Middle Ages, and I am not a little proud to say, to Belgium.

The institution of Corpus Christi as a feast in the Christian calendar resulted from approximately forty years of work on the part of Juliana of Liège, a 13th-century Norbertine canoness.

Juliana de Cornillon, lived in Liège, Belgium, a city where there were groups of women dedicated to Eucharistic worship. Guided by exemplary priests, they lived together, devoting themselves to prayer and to charitable works.

Juliana was orphaned at the age of five. She and her sister Agnes, were entrusted to the care of the Augustinian nuns at the convent and leprosarium of Mont-Cornillon, where Juliana developed a special veneration for the Blessed Sacrament.

She always longed for a feast day outside of Lent in honour of the Blessed Sacrament. Her vita reports that this desire was enhanced by a vision of the Church under the appearance of the full moon having one dark spot, which signified the absence of such a solemnity.

In 1208, she had her first vision of Christ in which she was instructed to plead for the institution of the feast of Corpus Christi. The vision was repeated for the next 20 years but she kept it a secret. When she eventually relayed it to her confessor, he relayed it to the bishop.

Juliana also petitioned the learned religious leaders, and Robert de Thorete, Bishop of Liège. At that time bishops could order feasts in their dioceses, so in 1246 Bishop Robert convened a synod and ordered a celebration of Corpus Christi to be held each year thereafter.

The feast spread from there until Pope Urban IV in 1264, instituted the Solemnity of Corpus Christi on the Thursday after Trinity Sunday as a feast for the entire Latin Rite, by the papal bull Transiturus de hoc mundo.

Juliana of Cornillon

*****

As monks, it is our joy and privilege to participate in the Eucharist most days of our life. At times, we run the risk of taking that Eucharist for granted as part of our daily routine. It behooves us to remember often just how lucky we are to be given daily a visible sign of God’s loving presence amongst us and in us through the Eucharist.

*****

To our outward senses, the Blessed Sacrament can appear to remain a simple wheaten wafer and regular sweet wine. But our inner senses perceive otherwise. We know that consecration transforms those simple elements into what we poetically call “the bread of heaven” and “the cup of salvation.” At consecration, those simple elements borne from creation and the labour of humans are transformed into the body and blood of Christ.

*****

At Ascension, our human nature was exalted into heaven to the right hand of God the Creator. At Pentecost, the Spirit was given us to have the strength and courage to announce the good news of God’s Kingdom and to be the Body of Christ in the world. On Trinity Sunday, we were invited to ponder the mystery of the Three Persons of God as one community of Love and Light.

Now, at Corpus Christi, we draw on our human nature celebrated with God and in God the Son, we draw on the ever-abiding presence of God and and we draw on the loving unity of God to step into the long season of Pentecost, to live God and be church in the world.

At Corpus Christi, we celebrate the sacrament that regularly reinvigorates our strength on the road to God. At Corpus Christi, we are reminded that we are One Body, the Body of Christ, uniting God’s beloved both on earth and in heaven. “He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood lives in me and I live in him” says Jesus.

At Corpus Christi, we rejoice in a sacrament that gives us visible and tangible unity with our ever-present God. In that way, the feast of the Holy Eucharist is very much a feast of the Incarnation.

At Corpus Christi, we rejoice in a sacrament that gives us eternal life with God. Jesus said “As I, who am sent by the living Father, myself draw life from my Father, so whoever eats me will draw life from me.” and “anyone who eats this bread will live for ever.”

*****

Today especially, as we approach the Lord’s table to partake of the feast offered to us, I invite you to taste and see that the Lord is good and to give thanks in your heart for the gift of the Blessed Sacrament of Jesus’ body and blood. And may we remember our good fortune every time we get to participate in the Holy Eucharist.

Amen.