Deut 8. 2-3; Rev 19. 1-2a, 4-9; Jn 6. 47-58

Jesus said, "I am the living bread which came down from heaven; any one who eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread which I will give for the world is my flesh." (Jn 6. 52) In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Jesus, present to us so intimately and directly in the Sacrament of the Altar, is our manna in the wilderness; He is at once our food for the long journey toward the Promised Land and our companion along that way. This is the point of today's Gospel reading, and it is the point of our celebration of this Feast Day of Corpus Christi, "Body of Christ," in which we give thanks for the gift of the continuing and true Presence of Jesus with us in that bread and wine which in the Mass has become His Body and Blood.

From the earliest times the followers of Jesus had a sense of His continuing presence with them as they gave thanks, broke bread, and shared it, together with a cup of wine. In that way Jesus was revealed after the Resurrection to His followers at Emmaus: as they stopped for a meal with Him and He gave thanks and broke bread they recognized Who He really was (Lk 24. 13-35). The book of Acts tells how the Church lived in its earliest days after Pentecost: "and they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers." (Acts 2. 42) So do we devote ourselves today.

Like Trinity Sunday, Corpus Christi is also a celebration of theology; how we understand what we believe. The Feast of Corpus Christi began in the late Middle Ages not only as a service of special recognition and thanks for the gift of Jesus's Presence with us in the Sacrament of the Altar, but as a service which emphasized a particular way of understanding the nature of that Presence, an understanding then brand new, called "trans-substantiation." This theory provides one particular explanation of how Jesus is present in the sacrament--the being or "substance" of the physical bread and wine is actually changed, overtaken by the spiritual presence, so that what looks to us like bread--the same as before the prayer of consecration--is now in actuality the flesh of Jesus. It appears to us as bread, but that's an illusion--what seems to us as bread is Really flesh. This was illustrated in late Medieval paintings by the priest's holding up in elevation the priest's wafer, on which a small spot of blood had miraculously appeared. As in the words of the hymn St. Thomas Aquinas composed for the feast of Corpus Christi, "Therefore we before Him bending, this great Sacrament revere . . . faith, our outward sense befriending, makes the inward vision clear." The inward vision, that is, of the flesh of Jesus concealed beneath the mere appearance of bread.

The doctrine of trans-substantiation results from some logical implications of Aristotle's philosophy concerning the nature of being, how "form" and "matter" are related. Trans-substantiation is an especially dramatic way of saying that Jesus is Really Really Present in the Sacrament of the Altar. But it's not the only way of understanding that Jesus truly comes to us in the bread and wine--we need not be limited by Aristotle's categories.

At the Reformation Protestants condemned the doctrine of trans-substantiation--and the carrying of the consecrated Bread in procession and exposing it on the altar in Benediction--as tending toward a superstitious worship of the consecrated Bread which they saw as idolatry. The extreme Protestants came to teach that the presence of Christ was not in the bread and wine at all, but in the faith of the believing Christian who received the bread and wine in the service of Communion, the Lord's Supper. Martin Luther taught a middle ground theory of "both/and" that he called "con-substantiation"--he said that bread and wine after their consecration remain really bread and wine AND they also become really the Body and Blood of Jesus. I remember learning that in my Lutheran confirmation class--and then the Lutheran pastor went on to say that the Roman Catholics were idolatrous as was their doctrine of trans-substantiation!

In the wake of these controversies the feast of Corpus Christi became a political/religious symbol--with a procession of the consecrated priest's host carried aloft, visible through the glass bull's eye of a monstrance, going outside the Church and around the town. Roman Catholics were putting it in everybody's face that theirs was the true belief in the Real Presence. Four acolytes carried a canopy over the priest in the procession, and before him little girls in white dresses walked backward facing him, strewing rose petals on the ground for the priest to walk on. It was like my father's notion of medical dosage: "If a little is good, more is better" or Father Lynn's injunction, "You can't have too much of a good thing." Anglo-Catholics in the nineteenth century adopted the hyped-up ritual of Romanist Corpus Christi, and I once assisted as a deacon at a service where we had the little girls with the baskets of rose petals.

Our ritual today is much simpler and its focus is very direct: on the wonderful mercy of the True Presence of Jesus with us here and now in the Sacrament of the Altar, God's gift of God's self to us as our manna in the wilderness, food for our journey toward the Promised Land. For this we give thanks.

Our adoration of the Real Presence on the altar today is not idolatry, although it is worship. It is worship in its most fundamental meaning, from the Old English weorthscipe--acknowledging worth. In our simplified service of Benediction at the end of Mass we acknowledge the inestimable worth of Jesus's continuing Presence with us. Corpus Christi is no longer about controversy--Anglican and Roman Catholic representatives have signed an ecumenical statement that our understandings of the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist are fundamentally the same, and we are in basic agreement with Lutherans and the Orthodox Churches in this as well. And, as a seminary professor of a friend of mine once said, "Even the Presbyterians don't believe in a Real Absence!" meaning that they and many other Protestants today believe in some kind of Real Presence. So the joy of the Feast of Corpus Christi can be shared in ecumenical love among many Christian communions today.

That is why I have asked that we use as our post-communion hymn this morning a wonderful mystical song from the Lutheran Church of Sweden whose tune is called "Tysk." (The Hymnal 1982, 475) I made a special visit once to the beautiful Baroque church in Stockholm where this hymn was written and first sung, just because the hymn has touched me so deeply over the years. Its words are not specifically Eucharistic but it speaks of the mutual indwelling of Jesus and the Christian soul: "Come abide within me; let my soul, like Mary, be thine earthly sanctuary . . . where I go here below, let me bow before thee, know thee, and adore thee."

Let me conclude with two more points, concerning the other locations besides the Altar where the Real Presence of Christ is to be found. First, look around you. In Baptism we have become Members of Christ's Body, and so the Being of Jesus is just as present in your neighbor in the pew as it is in the bread we elevate, break, and share at the Altar. Yes, Jesus is truly present in that Bread, but He is also truly present in you and me as we gather with Him at each Mass. In this larger sense, the feast of Corpus Christi asks of us to recognize, love, honor, and give thanks for the Presence of Christ in each and every person here today. We are manna for one another as we journey through the wilderness.

Second, look for Jesus as you leave this place. By entering the company of humanity as a baby among us, He transformed all of humanity. Jesus is present in every other human we meet--good or evil, wise or foolish, Christian or non-Christian. The grace of God's love for us can come to us through any one of them, and in any one of them who is oppressed or hurt in any way we can find Christ in thirst, in cold and hunger, in illness, in prison. As Bishop Frank Weston said in an address to the Anglo-Catholic Congress in 1933, "You cannot claim to worship Jesus in the Tabernacle if you do not pity Jesus in the slums . . . It is folly . . . it is madness to suppose that you can worship Jesus in the Sacrament . . . when you are sweating him in the souls and bodies of his children."

So as we give thanks for the wonderful gift of the True Presence of Jesus in the Sacrament of the Altar, let us not fail to recognize His Presence within our company here and also in the world, out to its farthest reaches from this Altar. For what we who have a sense of Sacrament are called to in this present age is nothing less than to recognize and proclaim the re-enchantment of the universe, to re-claim everything that is as God's Creation and Commonwealth. And now as we prepare ourselves to look to Christ on this Altar let us recall the words of one of the antiphons for Benediction, "Let us forever adore * the most holy sacrament." And yet another of those antiphons, "You gave them bread from heaven * containing in itself all sweetness."

Jesus said, "I am the living bread which came down from heaven; any one who eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread which I will give for the world is my flesh." Thanks be to God. Amen.