Sermon for Corpus Christi, June 6, 2010
Solemn Mass, Procession through Times Square & Benediction
By the Reverend Stephen Gerth
Deuteronomy 8:2-3; Psalm 116: 10-17; Revelation 19:1-2a,4-9; John 6:47-58
 

At the end of his book Eucharistic Origins, Paul Bradshaw concludes that the changes that took place in worship in the first four hundred years of the Christian era are greater than all that follow.[1]

I used to think he was right. The biggest fights Christians have ever had, over the Persons of the Trinity and over the nature of the union of the human and divine in Christ are taking place then. But, there have been really big changes from those first years that fundamentally altered how those who came later could and would follow Christ.

I’m sure it never occurred to Christians of those first centuries that there could be Protestant, Orthodox and Roman Catholic communities, most of whom would officially refuse to share the Eucharist with one another – but that is the reality we have inherited.  And I’m pretty sure also that no Christians of the first centuries could imagine a celebration of the Eucharist when only the priest or bishop at the altar would eat the Bread and drink the Cup. It was simply unknown. In the first centuries of the Church there was no festival of Corpus Christi. They didn’t look at the Bread; they ate it.

At the beginning of Nathan Mitchell’s book Cult and Controversy: Worship of the Eucharist Outside Mass, Mitchell asks how an “action” – the taking, blessing, sharing of bread and wine – became an object – something to be looked at, reserved, adored.[2] It’s a good question and one that is not unrelated to the decline in civilization – education and trade – in the early Middle Ages. It also not unrelated to the way in which Western Europe experienced the advent of Islam and the onslaught of the Black Death, the plague.

In the middle of all of that, the Eucharist became more about Jesus’ death than about his resurrection, more about sacrifice than nurture, more about the past than the future, more ritual than meal. When did the Eucharist stop being food is a useful historical question. Perhaps more important for us is, “Can the Eucharist be again more about his resurrection than his death, more about the future than the past, more about the meal than the ritual, more food than sacrifice?”

Most Episcopal churches will not be celebrating Corpus Christi today – much less on its more traditional day, last Thursday. But Saint Mary’s always has kept this festival; it’s very much inherent in our DNA, as it were.

Here in New York, in 1867, three men became the first members of a new branch of a recently formed British devotional society for laypersons and clergy, the Confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament. One of those men was a young priest Ferdinand Ewer who would found the Church of Saint Ignatius of Antioch here in the city. One of the others was our own founder, Thomas McKee Brown.[3] They and their parish communities were among the first rank of leaders in the renewal of congregational worship in the Episcopal Church. The seventh rector of this parish, Donald Garfield, would be a part of the Standing Liturgical Commission that established unambiguously the rule that the Eucharist is the principal act of Christian worship on Sundays and Major Feasts of the Church year.

Saint Mary’s has never been a really large parish and certainly never economically or socially prominent by the standards of this world. But we’ve been a place where the Eucharist has mattered. We are a place where the Eucharist matters today.

Today’s gospel is not about the Last Supper accounts of Matthew, Mark, Luke or Paul, but from the Eucharistic tradition of John’s community. After the feeding of the 5000, which is in all of the gospels, John’s account continues with the discourse of we call the Bread of Life. These words speak powerfully in many ways. And if you know that in many early Christian communities, people took the Bread home from the Eucharist so that they could feed daily on the life-giving Jesus, it’s even more powerful.[4] It seems that before there was an organized ministerial priesthood, and centuries before there was a daily celebration of the Eucharist anywhere, many Christians ate the Bread of life daily.

Saint Mary’s is no longer largely a local residential parish as it was for the first eighty or ninety years of its life. We’re what the English would call “a city center church.” But we are a place where the doors remain open seven days a week, and the regular services of the Church are offered daily.

More importantly, we are a place that has in fact been open to change since the beginning. Sometimes our buildings and our common life may suggest we are about the past, but we are about the future. Saint Mary’s would not look like this if we weren’t founded to be about change and for change. Nothing quite like this parish church had been built in the Episcopal Church until Saint Mary’s built it. I know this place, this altar, our community is still unlike many others. But I hope that were Christians from those first centuries to be with us today, they would know they were with their sisters and brothers, sharing the meal their Savior gave them, the meal that took Jesus from death to resurrection. Jesus’ Body and Blood is food too, to take us from through life and death to resurrection.

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

Copyright © 2010 The Society of the Free Church of St. Mary the Virgin, New York, New York.

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