Between noon and three

This sermon was preached on Sunday, June 22, 2025, at St. Mark’s Berkeley. We kept the day as the feast of Corpus Christi.

Collect: God our Father, whose Son our Lord Jesus Christ in a wonderful Sacrament has left us a memorial of his passion: Grant us so to venerate the sacred mysteries of his Body and Blood, that we may ever perceive within ourselves the fruit of his redemption; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Readings: Genesis 14:18-20, 1 Cor 11:23-26, Luke 9:11b-17

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen:

This Sunday we keep the feast of Corpus Christi. Some of you know this feast as a particularly exotic relic of medieval religion, something not seen north of the Alps since 1539. And you might wonder, what on earth is it doing in Berkeley, California, in 2025? Others might note, it’s only two months since Easter, didn’t we just commemorate this on Maundy Thursday? Still others might be wondering, what on earth is it anyway, and, whatever it is, why are we keeping a feast not in our prayer book? 

I’m happy to say, in response to this last point, it is in our prayer book, or a version of it at least, under the heading “Various occasions” and described as “Of the Holy Eucharist.” There are plenty of churches in our tradition in this country and around the world who still keep it. So what is it? In Latin, the name simply means, “Body of Christ,” and the feast was meant to be an occasion at the very tail end of Eastertide to give thanks for the gift of Christ’s ongoing presence with his church in the Sacrament of his Body and Blood. 

Anglicans have affirmed the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist for so long now, it’s easy to forget how stupendous this really is. What we’re saying is, that the Lord of all heaven and earth is present in these consecrated wafers, in this consecrated wine; that this is not just an amazing ongoing miracle, but that this is the fulfillment of his promise to be with his disciples, to be with us, till the end of the age.

There’s a lot to say about the Eucharist, about what happens when we offer it, and what happens when we make our communions. Perhaps this is why we have a separate feast for it. On Maundy Thursday, when we celebrated its institution, we were also at the outset of the Triduum, the Great Three Days celebrating the Lord’s Passion, Death, and Resurrection, and that rightly tends to take all our focus. A separate feast of Corpus Christi gives us a chance to pause, to dwell, on the mystery of the Eucharist.

All that notwithstanding, it’s worth noting that at present we live in an age where, when we look out at the world around us and encounter mystery, we take it as an opportunity to figure it out; to learn new things about how the world works, to grow in knowledge and in skill and in mastery. We’re convinced that in order to grow in wisdom and maturity as human beings in our relationship to the world, we must understand the systems according to which the world operates, find our place within them, and then wield them successfully to our purposes.

This is a good thing, mostly. It’s how we get everything from quantum physics to airplane travel and vaccines. But it is also fundamentally impersonal. Mystery, in a world like this, is anything I simply do not know yet — the implication being, that once I know it, the mystery is gone, that the proper end of all inquiry is the elimination of all mystery.

But as anyone who has loved another person knows, no amount of knowledge can finally plumb the depths of a human person. A person is always just beyond the reach of our powers of perception, analysis, prediction. We can get to know them very well, but even couples married sixty years can still surprise one another regularly. There is always a further, deeper layer of mystery to a human person, which we cannot ever fully understand, which compels us to stop trying to figure them out and merely to step back and love them. And it’s in this sense that the church talks about the Eucharist as “The Sacred Mysteries.” 

The Mystery of the Eucharist is one we have learned a lot about over the last twenty centuries. The church has prayed about it, sung about it, written, debated about it, been torn apart over it, been brought back together for it — and all this has left an enormous body of writing, devotion, and hymnody for us to read and celebrate today. But there is finally no plumbing these depths, no mastery over what it commends to us, no point at which we become an expert in this field. Because The Sacred Mysteries are for each of us an encounter with the living God, day by day, week by week, and year by year: an encounter we have in community, but which still comes to each of us individually, too. The Host is placed into your hands, after all, and you consume it yourself. Our first and proper response is always to love. Not to stop thinking, but to love first and last.

All this suggests another way of interacting with the world, an older way than the one that invites us merely to mastery over impersonal systems. And that older way encounters mystery not as a problem to be solved but as a presence to be loved; not as a problem to be solved but as a presence to be loved.  

There’s much to be gained in problem-solving, I’m not suggesting we set aside 500 years of Enlightenment and modern living to turn back the clocks. But I do think there is some real wisdom in this approach, and in any case it does seem to be what the feast of Corpus Christi suggests is the primary posture of the Church.

As Christians we are people who go through the world, first and foremost, learning to recognize and respond with love to the presence of God, in the Sacraments, in Scripture, in Christian community, in the beauties of creation, and especially in the sick, the suffering, the dying, the condemned, and those who wish us harm. There are plenty of things to learn here, plenty of processes and systems and doctrines to grow accustomed with. But the work is to love first, and only second to do anything else; to love first, and only second to do anything else.

Because: presence is everything. Christ came to earth not to make us masters of the universe, or enlightened beings who can command all truth, but so that heaven might touch the earth, and that earth might be dragged up to heaven, while both enjoy the full presence of God forever; so that even death itself might play host to the Son of God and his deathless love. It’s a family affair, a household drama, with the intention that all the members of the family leave their wanderings, put down their weapons,  and come home again.

Presence is everything: this is the whole thrust of the Gospel, for all the creatures of God, and creation itself, to be restored to one another, in one family, one household, where sins and injuries are forgiven, death is done away, and there are no further impediments to our communion with one another and with God.

Then what? Then we live, we grow up, we enter the lives we were made for, full of freedom, and vigor, and joy.

This is the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It’s a beautiful vision, and full of grace. But it’s not easy. It’s hard enough to be present to the people in our lives we love, let alone to those whom we really don’t. How wonderful, then, that we are strengthened at this altar with the presence, the Body, of Christ himself. How wonderful that when we leave here, we carry him within ourselves — so if we find it hard to be present in whatever situation may come, we can trust that the Incarnate Lord is present in us, for us.

The challenge is to get ourselves out of the way so he can do in us what he comes to do: to lift up our poor distracted lives, our imperfect loves and our cloudy judgements, our incomplete knowledge and our many sins, to lift them all up and to offer them to his Father, in us, so that we might be as present to God as in this Sacrament God is to us; so we in turn might respond with love to the presence all around us. So may our communion grow, till God be all in all.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: Amen.