WORSHIP NOTES: Corpus Christi Sunday
When I was a young pastor in Saginaw, MI and Cleveland, OH I loved the music of John Michael Talbot. I used to play this over and over…
I am the bread of life – all who eat this bread – will never die.
I am God’s love revealed – I am broken that you might be healed.
John Michael was a midwestern rock’n’roller who converted to Christianity and eventually became a Franciscan monk. If you spent any time with the Jesus Freaks of the 70s or the charismaniacs of the 80’s you probably heard his songs. They were gentle musical reflections on the scriptures using catchy, folk melodies over acoustic guitars and recorders.
I am the bread of life – all who eat this bread – will never die.
I am God’s love revealed – I am broken that you might be healed.
There were a whole batch of mostly white, folk-oriented artists bringing new acoustic music into the church back in the day: think George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord” or the Monks of the Weston Priory or the St. Louis Jesuits. They celebrated the liturgical renewal in the Roman Catholic Church after Vatican II as well as the secular cultural revolution of ethics, aesthetics, politics, and sexuality that swept through Western society after WWII. Allen Ginsberg was the Old Testament prophet who told us that he “had seen the best minds of his generation destroyed by madness,” the Beatles prayed in the hope that all we needed was love, Dr. King articulated a dream where “no one would be judged by the color of their skin, but rather by the content of their character,” Rachel Carson warned of the approaching ecological apocalypse of a “silent spring,” Maya Angelou testified that while a racist, misogynist culture might “write her down in history, with its bitter twisted lies, you may trod me in the very dirt, but still like dust I rise,” and Aretha Franklyn made it clear to anyone with ears to hear that the time had come for “R-E-S-P-E-C-T – better find out what that means to me!”
But the bread and wine – the body and blood of Jesus – are only part of Corpus Christ – the Body of Christ. The other part, too often forgotten or neglected, is that in the Spirit and love of Jesus, WE are the Body of Christ, too. You and me, neighbors and strangers, friends and enemies, those who look and think like ourselves as well as those who are wildly and wonderfully different: we, too are the body of Christ. And reclaiming this sacred connection is essential to a living 21st century faith that recognizes and honors the presence of Jesus in ALL flesh and blood. I grew up using the words, “We accept the cost and joy of discipleship,” and it trained me to believe that emphasizing only what happens at the communion table can be a spiritual diversion from our deeper calling to live as one body with all humanity.
You see, we can argue about the meaning of the body and blood of Jesus for millennia – in fact, we have, feeling self-righteous and sanctified doing so, too – without ever once cherishing the presence of Jesus in those around us. Or those we have learned to hate. Or ignore. Or oppress. And therein lies the cost and joy of celebrating Corpus Christi Sunday at this moment in time: to practice a radically open communion table would mean we recognize the face of Jesus in all people and in creation. Two thoughts from Scripture have helped me extend this radical solidarity: one from St. Paul’s writing and the other from St. John’s gospel.
It might be useful to recall that St. Paul sensed his calling was to welcome both Jewish Christians and Gentile believers into God’s covenant of grace. We often forget that Paul was NOT arguing with Jews who chose not to engage the way of Jesus – that was their right and free choice – and he respected this choice. Rather, St. Paul was challenging those Jews who HAD chosen to follow Jesus yet insisted that Gentile believers submit to the same outward rules that guided Judaism in the first century CE: like circumcision, the rigors of the holiness codes, or dietary regulations. St. Paul came to trust that Christ’s love is what made us one body so our love was how we efleshed Christ with one another. We might have different gifts, traditions, insights and experiences, yet if we loved one another as Jesus loved us, it didn’t what we ate, how we ate, whether our flesh had been ritually cut according to tradition, or if we followed the fasts and feasts of the First Covenant with Israel.
In I Corinthians 12 Paul tells us that now WE are the body of Christ. People have been given
St. Paul said that this love is built into the very fabric of creation: look at your own body; it is one with itself yet has many parts, and all the members of the body, though many, are still one. So too in the body of Christ. We were brought together by love: Jews and Gentiles, slave and free – rich and poor, male and female – and one part of our flesh is no less important than another, right? We need hands, and feet, and tongues, and hearts.
Intuitively we know that the parts we cover up in humility, our private or embarrassing parts, are given greater protection. So, we should do likewise in the living body of Christ – giving our weaker and more vulnerable members greater space and respect because we are bound together in love. And just so that there could be no ambiguity Paul adds that while all of our gifts have been given to us by God’s loving spirit, the greatest of them is love. Those who know me well know that I favor Peterson’s reworking of I Corinthians 13: “No matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I’m bankrupt without love.”
Love never gives up. Love cares more for others than for self. Love doesn’t want what it doesn’t have, doesn’t strut, doesn’t have a swelled head, doesn’t force itself on others, isn’t always “me first,” doesn’t fly off the handle, doesn’t keep score of the sins of others, doesn’t revel when others grovel, takes pleasure in the flowering of truth, puts up with anything, trusts God always, always looks for the best, never looks back, but keeps going to the end. Love never dies. Inspired speech will be over some day; praying in tongues will end; understanding will reach its limit. We know only a portion of the truth, and what we say about God is always incomplete. But when the Complete arrives, our incompletes will be canceled. When I was an infant at my mother’s breast, I gurgled and cooed like any infant. When I grew up, I left those infant ways for good. We don’t yet see things clearly. We’re squinting in a fog, peering through a mist. But it won’t be long before the weather clears and the sun shines bright! We’ll see it all then, see it all as clearly as God sees us, knowing him directly just as he knows us! But for right now, until that completeness, we have three things to do to lead us toward that consummation: Trust steadily in God, hope unswervingly, love extravagantly. And the best of the three is love.
St. Paul is clear that the visible and physically present body and blood of Christ in the world right now is how you and I live as Jesus right now. It is a different form of Jesus after the Cross, but it is how Jesus is present in the world through you and me. Paul goes on to say that the love we share with openness and generosity is more important than how we describe the bread and wine at Eucharist. If there is no love, we turn the feast of communion into a farce. And the apostle wasn’t speaking abstractly. In his day, most worship took place in the homes of believers and before worship and communion there was usually a meal for the whole community. In Corinth, and probably other places, too, what started to happen was that rich believers would get to the house church first, divide up all the good food for themselves, and leave the poor members mostly scraps. Paul said: you can’t do that in love! You can’t do that if you are Jesus in a different form. You are ONE body now, the body of Christ, so you act like it: share equally, paying special attention to those who have less, make the love of Jesus flesh among you. For THIS is how the world recognizes the body of Christ in history. And I sense that St. John teaches this, too.
For all his talk about eating my flesh and drinking my blood in chapter 6 of St. John’s gospel – and I’ll say something about that in just a moment – John’s text never shows us Jesus at Eucharist. In an article in the National Catholic Reporter, the late Roman Catholic Bishop Thomas Gumbleton wrote:: “John does not even mention how Jesus took bread, blessed it, broke it and said, ‘This is my body… this is my blood.” That’s not in his gospel at all.” Matthew, Mark, and Luke have those words at the Last Supper – possibly this was part of the Passover Supper Jesus shared before the Cross – but St. John never does. Do you know what Jesus does tell us to do in remembrance of him in St. John’s gospel? LOVE one another as I have loved you. Gumbleton continues:
In John’s gospel… at that last supper where Jesus showed the disciples more than anything else what he had come among them to demonstrate about God's love, God's wisdom, and what they were to do to follow him. There is one striking example… where Jesus acts as a slave to his friends: Jesus went to each disciple, knelt before them, and washed their feet… When he was finished, he said, "What I have done, I have done as an example for you and you must do the same. Do THIS in remembrance of me."
So what Jesus is teaching us, and how we build up the body of Jesus, the community of disciples, the church, is by reaching out in love to one another… Kneeling in humility and sharing extra-ordinary acts of compassion as Jesus did as a slave. Do THIS in remembrance of me.
Remember that St. John formulated his story of Jesus, his gospel, in a different context than Paul. ST. Paul was at work from about 35-60 of the Common Era. John was writing some 20 years later – after the Jewish community in Jerusalem revolted against Rome, after the second Temple was destroyed, after the Jewish Christian community in Jerusalem refused to join in the Jewish rebellion against Rome, and after many of those in Jewish Christians fled the Holy City for safety in Syria. St. John’s community included Jewish Christians who got out of town, as well as Gentile believers who never lived in Israel and Samaritans who had historically been looked down upon by traditional Jews. By the time John wrote down his gospel, there was real enmity between those still loyal to the synagogues and new Christians who were finding a new way beyond tradition. And that is why St. John puts some feisty words into the mouth of Jesus:
· Eat my flesh? Drink my blood? Contemporary religious sociologists tell us that St. John employed symbolic language with multiple meanings throughout his gospel both to encourage those inside the church and alienate those on the outside. They call this “anti-language” where those who know how to interpret the code are comforted while those who take the words at face value are scandalized.
· In John 6 the face value words sound like cannibalism to those on the outside. To those on the inside, however, flesh has to do with bread – the staff of life – and blood becomes wine – the drink of a celebration. Further it was believed that blood held the essence of life – that is why blood was used in religious sacrifice and given only to God – the essence of life was returned to the source.
In symbolic language, the Johanine community was saying: Jesus has given us the staff of real life to sustain us and welcomed us into the very source of creativity with a feast. When we symbolically eat and drink his essence, we take him deep into ourselves. At the same time, those same words drove those with whom they were arguing wacky! It is, if you will, much like what happens in an intense family feud. I’ve heard – and said – some dreadful things to those I love in those kinds of fights. You may have used words that were not very loving but heated and exaggerated, too. Well, that’s part of what’s going on here. To link bread with his flesh and wine with his blood in John’s gospel is to say the totality of life comes from Jesus – nourishment and festivity -for he was broken so that we might be made whole.
On Corpus Christi Sunday 2020, I want to suggest that this neglected and diminished truth about the body and blood of Jesus be celebrated more than whatever we believe about the bread and wine. The Christian Church is as divided and unloving now as it ever has been in history: some are insisting that this era requires a radical love in the world that breaks down barriers while others demand the imposition of a harsh law and order on everyone who differs from a white status quo. Some of us see a Savior who laid down his life in love for others while others cry out for an avenging angel of judgment.
Some seek to dismantle white supremacy, honor and protect Black and Brown Lives, unlock the cages holding the babies of our immigrant sisters and brothers on our border, wear masks to ensure the safety of our most vulnerable citizens, and reorder our economics so that sharing by all means scarcity for none. While other sisters and brothers celebrate the Confederate flag, believe that there are good people inside white supremacist organizations, and hate anything that has to do with the legacy of Barack Obama. There are those who believe that we become Christ’s body in the world through tenderness, and, those who require a rigid exclusivity to God’s grace that is cruel, punitive, and mean-spirited.
Some of us see a world cracking apart that invites us to step through the portal of change and trust love even in this present darkness, while others seem hellbent on holding on to their privilege with guns, violence and fear. For most of my public life I have believed that the only way to advance the cause of Christ’s radical love in history is to organize better than those who oppose it. And I still believe that organizing matters returning thanks to God for the creative and sacrificial work being done by young justice activists in the Black Lives Matter movement. They are setting the agenda for us all. They are turning heartbreak into compassion and justice and showing us all how our wounds can become the path into deep healing. To reframe this in the words of our tradition: they are showing how the body and blood of Christ – and the wounds and scars of injustice - have been called by God into acts of solidarity for the common good.
· The Eucharist is only part of what it means to celebrate the Body and Blood of Christ. It is the easy part – and as much as I cherish it – if the body of Christ remains just bread and wine, the elements of Eucharist rather than the Christ’s living body of radical love in another form for the common good of the whole community – then who cares? I think Fr. Richard Rohr was right when he said that instead of following Jesus as a way of life, we turned the way of Jesus into a region; instead of going down Christ’s path that brings us into solidarity and union with one another, we created religious clubs that celebrated our insignificant difference.
· And that’s why I have asked you to join with me today to celebrate Eucharist together albeit it digitally on this feast day of Corpus Christi: we need to restore and reclaim some balance to this feast so that the common good is at least as significant as the bread and wine. That may scandalize some – and it probably should. But as a privileged, old, bourgeois white guy I can’t keep breaking the bread and sharing the cup unless I am giving part of my heart to those whose bodies and spirits are broken daily by white supremacy.
Like St. Paul made clear: what strengthens one part of the body, strengthens the whole. And what causes one part to pain, wounds us all. For many of us white folk, we’re going to be somewhat out of balance and uncomfortable for a while. We have a lot to learn about what it means to live as ONE body for the common good. With a twinkle in her eye and a smile upon her lips, the late Maya Angelou used to say, “Do the best you can until you know better. And then when you KNOW better, DO better.” The poet, Maren Tirabassi, in part of her poem, “If Matthew were writing the 11th chapter of his gospel today…” wrote remember:
The world is full of yoke-makers, who take strange pleasure
in pouring out the unrest of their own souls
by creating burdens for God’s children…
This is how you will know that their laws come from the demonic --
they take what God makes light and make it heavy,
for Christ said -- I am gentle and humble, so that by contrast
I sense that in the middle of our fears – in the soul of our resistance – as the inverse of the hatred, and the heart of creativity within the emerging movement for compassion and justice rising up beyond the lockdown of the pandemic there is Jesus saying: come unto me all ye who are tired and heavy-laden… come to me everyone whose burned out on religion and I will show you the unforced rhythms of grace that lead to REAL life. What wounds one, wounds us all and what strengthens one is cause for a feast for all committed to the common good. And THAT is a feast day I can really celebrate.
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