St Barnabas, Hove Corpus Christi 23 June 2019

I want to do some thinking with you this morning about the meaning and power of the eucharist. Since this is at the heart of our life together as Christians, it's good to consider what we receive and what we put into Sunday worship on the great Feast dedicated precisely to such reflection.

The Eucharist is the Hour of Jesus. We come as the Lord's people to the Lord's house on the Lord's day around the Lord's table - to be impressed by Jesus! Just like when you miss your morning prayers the day gets jumbled, when for trivial reasons we miss this Hour, the Sunday Hour of Holy Mass, we find some disarray in our week. It’s as if the attention we give for an hour to eternity brings eternity to bear on our use of time. The urgent things give way to the important!

Nowadays the Church’s Holy Days of Obligation on weekdays run to six: Epiphany, Ascension Day, SS Peter & Paul, the Assumption, All Saints and Christmas Day. Few devout Christians though would omit New Year’s Day, Ash Wednesday and Holy Week as days to find during the week the Hour of Jesus - or maybe a half hour Mass! Some like myself come day by day. When people ask me about such devotion I explain I see the Eucharist as Jesus' embrace. When we were children we received tender loving care from our parents. As a mother consoling a hurting child the Lord embraces in this rite our hurts, as well as joys, along with those of the whole world.

The Eucharist is also the place that builds the Communion which is the church.

It is Christ's Sacrifice and ours, the memorial of his once for all redemption.

It is Christ's Presence at the table of his word and the altar of the sacrament.

The Eucharist is lastly a great Promise, the pledge of glory.

These four headings Communion - Sacrifice - Presence - Promise are  stated poetically in the refrain for Corpus Christi on the pew sheet. Let’s start by looking at and reading the refrain together and see what thinking emerges. Have a look through the antiphon. It was written by St Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century from a scripture base and possesses noble simplicity.

You might recognise the four themes of Communion - Sacrifice - Presence - Promise

Let me read it: O Sacred feast in which we partake of Christ, his sufferings are remembered, our minds are filled with his grace, and we receive a pledge of the glory that is to be ours.

Let’s look more closely at four phrases in this antiphon addressing the four headings I mention:

O Sacred feast in which we partake of Christ… The Eucharist is firstly the place that builds the Communion which is the church. We are made one not by having the same feelings but by sharing one bread in penitence, not trusting in our own righteousness but in God's manifold and great mercies. Christians share the same doctrine - or should do! We share a good variety of spiritual experience but, against certain forms of Evangelicalism and Pentecostalism, there is no subjective experience held in common within mainstream Christianity save sharing the one bread. As the Apostle Paul says in the chapter before today’s set reading from 1 Corinthians 11, we who are many are one body, for we all partake  of the one bread. (1 Corinthians 10:17) As today’s prayer over the gifts expresses it, this unity is a gift both expressed and effected at the celebration of Mass. We come united to be made more united in our sense of need for God’s grace which is itself the secret of a church that’s together. God deepen our sense of need for him, especially in the inevitably troubled seas of a pastoral vacancy! I speak as retired priest covering one 3 years old at St Bart’s - God spare you that!

His sufferings are remembered… The Eucharist is Christ's Sacrifice and ours. It is the memorial of his once for all redemption. As we heard in the second reading Until the Lord comes… every time you eat this bread and drink this cup you are proclaiming his death. (1 Corinthians 11.26). We stand at the Cross.

Obedient to Jesus we take, bless, break and share. It is our grand invitation to enter into the movement of his self-offering. I’m grateful to holy priests and people who over the course of my life have lifted the veil covering the sacred mysteries for me by their teaching and example. They’ve helped me see beyond this brief action with scripture, bread and wine the power of Christ’s Sacrificial Prayer to which my intentions are joined day by day I’ve gained confidence in a transformative dynamic summarised in Our Lord’s promise that ‘I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself’ (John 12:32). All people, but also all things as St Paul writes of all things being ultimately put ‘in subjection under Christ, so that God may be all in all’ (1 Corinthians 15:28). Such ultimately is the power of the eucharist expressed in a verse of George Bourne’s Communion hymn: Paschal Lamb thine offering finished once for all when thou wast slain in its fullness undiminished shall forever more remain cleansing souls from every stain.

Our minds are filled with his grace… The Eucharist is Christ's Presence at the table of his word and the altar of the sacrament. How else can people come close to Jesus in this world other than through word and sacrament? My flesh is food indeed Jesus says to us. We come here for the empowerment Holy Communion effects just as in the days of his flesh the hungry were fed by Our Lord in the Gospel from Luke Chapter 9. We note a parallel with the Lord’s action at the eucharist as we read how Jesus raised his eyes to heaven, and said the blessing over bread, breaking and handing them to the disciples. To this day priests, Jesus’ men, imitate that action lifting their eyes upwards before they say the Lord’s words at this sacred meal, This is my Body...this is my Blood offered for you to the Father, given to you in Communion. It’s good Anglican practice to bow or bend the knee as we come into Church or leave Church, or as we approach or leave the Altar, practice honouring the Real Presence of Christ. Outside the eucharist, it’s believed Christ is present, truly present, under the veil of the Tabernacle or Aumbry where a light burns perpetually before the safe where the Sacrament is reserved, for Communion of the housebound or for our corporate devotion as in Benediction. To honour that perpetual presence, by bowing or bending the knee when coming and going, doesn’t deny that presence elsewhere through prayer, the reading of Scripture, in Christian Fellowship, in the beauty of nature, in holy people and so on.

We receive a pledge of the glory that is to be ours… The Eucharist is a great Promise, the pledge of glory, like the cinema advertisement, a preview of forthcoming attractions. Last month I was privileged as Priest Associate of the Holy House at Walsingham to be present with up to a thousand at a day when Mary’s effigy was brought to stand on the coronation pavement before the high altar of Westminster Abbey in a great day of devotion. You could see these words behind the statue, inscribed over the high altar, from Revelation Chapter 11 verse 15: ‘the kingdoms of this world are become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ’. I found this deeply moving. It made for a day not just aspirational but touching on the reality of the Eucharist there and then as hundreds did business with God bringing the nation on their hearts. The coronation eucharist sets earthly kings and queens to be servants of the advance of Christ’s kingdom which is both present and to come. The use of material objects at the eucharist reminds us that God is transforming the whole universe building up the new creation in which indeed the kingdom of this world becomes the kingdom of our God and of his Christ. At Mass the priest invites us to Communion with the words ‘blessed are those called to the supper of the Lamb’ and this phrase has a double resonance - the Supper is here and it's to come, a preview of the forthcoming attraction of the banquet of heaven. As today’s postcommunion prayer expresses it: may we delight for all eternity in that share in your divine life, which is foreshadowed in the present age by our reception of your precious body and blood.

To summarise this is the hour of Jesus, the communion of the church, Christ’s sacrifice, presence and promise.

O Sacred feast in which we partake of Christ, his sufferings are remembered, our minds are filled with his grace, and we receive a pledge of the glory that is to be ours.

Corpus Christi June 10th 2012

Do this in remembrance of me!

"Was ever command so obeyed?

For century after century, spreading slowly to every continent and country and among every race on earth, this action has been done, in every conceivable human circumstance, for every conceivable human need from infancy and before it to extreme old age and after it, from the pinnacles of earthly greatness to the refuge of fugitives in the caves and dens of the earth"
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Do this in remembrance of me!

"Men have found no better thing to do for kings at their crowning and for criminals going to the scaffold; for armies in triumph or for a bride and bridegroom in a little country church; for the proclamation of a dogma or for a good crop of wheat; for the wisdom of the Parliament of a mighty nation or for a sick old woman afraid to die; for a schoolboy sitting an examination or for Columbus setting out to discover America; for the famine of whole provinces or for the soul of a dead lover; in thankfulness that my father did not die of pneumonia; for a village headman much tempted to return to fetishes because the yams had failed; because the Turk was at the gate of Vienna;

Do this in remembrance of me!

"..for the repentance of Margaret; for the settlement of a strike; for a son for a barren woman; for Captain so-and-so, wounded and a prisoner of war; while the lions roared in the nearby amphitheatre; on the beach at Dunkirk; while the hiss of scythes in the thick June grass came faintly through the windows of the Church;

Was ever another command so obeyed as this?

"Tremulously, by an old monk on the fiftieth anniversary of his vows; furtively, by an exiled bishop who had hewn timber all day in a (Russian) prison camp; gorgeously, for the canonisation of (a Saint) - one could fill many pages with the reasons why men have done this, and not tell the hundredth part of them. And best of all, week by week and month by month, on a hundred thousand successive Sundays, faithfully, unfailingly, across all the parishes of Christendom, the pastors have done this just to make the holy common people of God".

Do this in remembrance of me!

Was ever another command so obeyed as this?

In these immortal words the Anglican monk, Dom Gregory Dix celebrates the awe and wonder of the Holy Eucharist we thank God for this day.

It is primarily an action, "do this"..and it has been done for 2000 years at a million altars. This is a day for standing still and taking stock of this great wonder we celebrate week by week, day by day in St. Giles lest we presume upon the grace we celebrate and receive.

As Dix puts it in his book The Shape of the Liturgy still used in Anglican Theological Colleges "the eucharistic action (is) inextricably woven into the public history of the Western world...the eucharist (has the) power of laying hold of human life, of grasping it...in the particular concrete realities of it..laying hold of them and translating them into something beyond time".

I find great depths in the words of Dom Gregory Dix. Forgive me for reading them at such length. They seemed to me to do as much as any preacher could to set the scene on the Feast of Corpus Christi.

Our Lord Jesus ordained the sacrament of the Eucharist in order that we might be able to join on earth in the pleading of His eternal sacrifice before the face of God the Father.

Then, secondly, that He might feed our souls with His sacred Body and Blood and unite us into One Body, the Church, the Body of Christ, Corpus Christi.

I wonder how many of us would remember or believe or continue to hold fresh in our memories from Confirmation training those facts - I mean: Our Lord giving us the eucharist first to allow us to plead His Memorial Sacrifice and offer our lives with Him to be consecrated lives and then second, second, note, to give us heavenly Food and make us One Bread, One Body?

Or do we rather tend to make our default  the second purpose of the Eucharist? Do we come to Church like we go to Sainsbury’s to get "tanked up" with goodies, so to speak, and to meet our friends?

That should come second. We come first to offer the eucharist - to plead Christ's Sacrifice for the needs of the living and the dead, for others as well as for ourselves.

That long list from Dom Gregory Dix reminded me how all through my life the Eucharist has been a powerful means of sanctifying the lives I minister to, of taking, blessing, breaking sometimes a situation brought on my heart or the people's hearts to the Altar for Christ to carry in Sacrifice to His Father.

As I just quoted from Dix "the eucharist (has the ) power of laying hold of human life, of grasping it...in the particular concrete realities of it..laying hold of them and translating them into something beyond time".

"Laying hold...and translating into something beyond time".

When the Eucharist has been offered for a particular intention there is a profound guarantee that it is "over to the Lord" from there. I felt this recently with Stephen & Victoria Fretten marking their marriage at the parish eucharist, with Alice Batsford last month as we celebrated a eucharist for the dying at the Hospice or as we celebrated that eucharist around Daphne Seidler’s coffin in the Lady Chapel. Last weekend’s Coronation re-enactment included Boy Bishop play acting the Archbishop giving bread and wine to the Queen and Duke at the Coronation eucharist. All are examples of the making holy of life at this service.

Each Eucharist, majestic or simple, pleads Calvary.  Pleads, note, not repeats. Christ died once for all. His death cannot be repeated but his Sacrifice abides for ever. It is that sacrifice he renews before us as he blesses bread and wine through the priest.

"This is my Body...this is my Blood" offered for you to the Father, given to you in Communion. It is a good practice to bow or bend the knee as we come into Church or leave Church, or as we approach or leave the Altar – for there is a special Eucharistic presence. Outside the eucharist, Christ is present, truly present, under the veil of the Aumbry. Even when the altar lights are blown out the light by the Aumbry burns on where the Sacrament is reserved for Communion of the housebound or for our corporate devotion as in the Benediction or blessing given from the consecrated Host at times during evensong. On Monday we were reminded of this symbol of God’s perpetual presence with his people in Horsted Keynes when the Jubilee Beacon was lit from the everlasting Aumbry light.

Incidentally to honour that perpetual presence by bowing or bending the knee when coming and going from before the Aumbry does not deny that presence elsewhere through the reading of Scripture, in Christian Fellowship, in the beauty of nature, in holy people and so on.

Yet mindful of Christ's Presence let us never forget its vital link to the first purpose of every Eucharist, which is action, sacrificial action. The Eucharist is about giving, giving to God. Jesus the Son gives himself in loving Sacrifice. We are to give our lives, our souls and bodies, our needs, our joys, our sorrows, our hopes, our fears, in union with his perfect Offering. Lives so given are lives consecrated, lives transformed by the Gift of the consecrated elements, "The Body of Christ", "Amen", "The Blood of Christ", "Amen".

Through Him, with Him and in Him, then, let us give glory to God the Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit this Corpus Christi Day, confident that God will accept our self offering and as ever give us more than we can ask or imagine in this most Holy Sacrament.