THE SOLEMNITY OF THE MOST HOLY BODY AND BLOOD OF CHRIST 

Genesis 14:18-20 | 1 Corinthians 11:23-26 | Luke 9:11b-17

Oh God, who in this wonderful sacrament have left us a memorial of your passion, grant us, we pray, so as to revere the sacred mysteries of your body and blood that we may always experience in ourselves the fruits of your redemption, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.

Today’s feast marks the end of this particular period in the liturgical calendar that we follow as we listen to the stories of scripture placed together in a formula or in a form, you might say, that reveals the unfolding of this wonderful, incredibly interesting and fascinating story about God revealing himself to his people.  If we go back to Ash Wednesday, which was some time ago, we see that we’ve prepared for this season of Easter by going through a period called Lent, and during that time, we’ve reflected upon the process of preparing — how God has prepared his people for the fullness of the message.  And then we came to the fulfillment of this message in Easter Sunday, and then after that, we have been studying and reflecting upon the results, let’s say, of this new way of life that God has revealed in his coming onto this earth with us and revealing the fullness of who he is.  And so after going through the story of Jesus and his evolution as a human being, becoming fully — revealing himself rather, as more than a human being, as God incarnate, we’ve grown to the point of — we say, “All right, we’ve established something radically different than the Old Testament.”  There’s been a major shift in this story, from the temple to a church, and the interesting thing about those two things, a temple by its very definition is a place where God dwells.  In the Old Testament, the temple was everything, because the temple was the place that believers felt God was there.  Only a few very, very holy, very special people could ever get close to this God, but they knew that God was near, in the temple.  And they did everything they could to make that the most beautiful and the most wonderful place. 

And Jesus comes on the scene and reveals the darkness of an institution that comes to somehow not truly represent who dwells within that temple but use the temple for their own benefit, and they distorted the message, and they turned it into what Jesus called a den of thieves, robbing people rather than filling them with what was there, robbing them of their God-given right to feel close to this God by talking too much about sin and about breaking laws and about being rejected.  So we have this new message coming through Jesus, a new way to understand who God is and where God is.  So the temple is somehow now destroyed, and in its place, there is this thing called the church, and two Sundays ago, we celebrated the Feast of Pentecost.  Pentecost is considered to be the birth of the church, and the difference between a temple where God dwelled and a church, a church really, basically might be considered a building like the temple, but it’s not.  If you understand the fullness of the message of Jesus, the new temple is our heart, the new covenant.  “I will come and dwell there.  I will write my law on your hearts.  I will change you into the people you’re called to be, not through your own effort, not through all your own discipline.  No, I will gift you with who you are called to become.  When you feel me doing that in you, with you, you can only feel one thing for me, and that is love, union, communion with me.  I want you to experience my presence in you.”  So we have this new image of the dwelling place of God is not the temple but the heart, and we call that church, the place where God dwells.  In the Vatican Counsel, when they were renewing the liturgy, I love the image that they gave me in one of the documents on environment and art, and that was the whole notion that God, who dwells in us, makes this place so special.  And the buildings that we build for this celebration of the presence of God in us through the Eucharist is called not a church but a house for the church.  I love that image, the house for people who are filled with Spirit, with presence of God.   

So we have this celebration just two Sundays ago that we celebrated the beginning of the church, Pentecost.  And what’s so unique about that feast to me is what it says about this new understanding of who God is dwelling inside of you, and that presence of God inside of you is not just for you.  It’s for the world.  It’s for the world.  We are not the ones who can receive this gift and turn in on ourselves and close ourselves off from the world.  No, our challenge is to be in the world bringing this message to everyone.  So in Pentecost we saw that happening in the most mysterious, mystical way, that this message is now in the hearts of human beings, and as they think and reflect upon the marvelous works of God, this sense of what those marvelous works are is communicated to others outside of this small community of believers, and it goes into the world.  But the most mystical, magical, mysterious thing is that what’s happening is that they’re — it’s not being conveyed by words, that those who had this Spirit in them, this presence of God, are speaking about it, but the people that are listening speak different languages.  And they can’t understand that language, the word itself, but they’re feeling and knowing what it is in this person.  That’s such a beautiful image of what the church, human beings are capable of, communicating this message of life, love, light, not so much through our words but who we are.  It resonates through us.  It underscores to me the most interesting part of what it means to be a believer, that when we are believing that God is in us enabling us to be a source of life and we intend it, we want it, we want to have an impact on people that is life-giving — we’re not there to take from them or to use them or to abuse them in any way, shape or form.  We want to give life to them.  Then you are absolutely manifesting the intention of God when it comes to your destiny.  That’s what we’re here for, to be filled with these gifts and this power and this insight and these awareness’s and then share them with people.  It’s called church.

And then we celebrated the Feast of Trinity, which is all about this mysterious thing that this indwelling presence carries with it, and it’s this fullness of God.  And what I love about the fullness of God is, when you listen carefully to the words we shared last week, you’re going to realize that, in this fullness of God, we have this loving, creative figure, an artist who, while wisdom watched on, created this beautiful, beautiful world for us.  He did it for us.  And then the Son is the manifestation of who he is. The Father, the Son — the Son is love incarnate.  He is the presence of God in a human being, which is the church, and when it resonated out to other people, they are transformed, healed.  And that healing is a oneness that comes over us, a oneness that keeps us from falling into the trap of thinking we’re unworthy of God, we’re separate from him, we’re not connected to him because of our weaknesses.  It heals the division that happens to us when we feel that there’s something in us that’s wrong, that’s not right, that we are feeling shame and fear about it.  It unites that broken part of us to the wholeness that is our inheritance when we are filled with the understanding of what forgiveness is.  And then there’s, in that Trinity, the wonderful Spirit that teaches, that teaches people who they are and who God is and what their role is in the world.  So we have the fullness of God just celebrated last Sunday, and now we just fine tune the whole thing and realize that in essence, the best way to celebrate this thing called church, the best way we can engage in this wonderful life that God has given us is to believe in indwelling presence.  It’s everything to me.  God the Father, God the Son, God the Spirit living inside of you and resonating a message to the world that they are loved, that they are forgiven, that they are called to something extraordinary. 

And being filled with this awareness of this presence inside of us, we have an image in this particular set of readings that’s so important.  It’s the heart of what I want to share with you today, and that is what does it mean that God is inside of you?  Well, first of all, this set of readings is interesting.  It starts off with the image of a great priest, Melchizedek, and in the Old Testament, Melchizedek’s role as a priest was to bless the kings that went to battle.  And over and over again in the Old Testament, we see that God manifested his power in the people who would believe in them by giving them power over their enemies.  They would conquer those who were trying to conquer them.  Think of this as an image initially inside of us of who we think God is. God is the one that’s going to come into our life and fix everything that is out there that will rob us of what we want life to be.  It’s like, if we see the world and the way the world is as an enemy, it’s something that’s attacking us or frightening us, and we turn to God and say, “Take these enemies away from me, and I’ll be — I’ll follow you forever.”  Isn’t that interesting?  You see this evolution of the beginning of what religion was in people’s minds, a God who would take care of our enemies, and it’s not that God reveals himself fully as that.  But imagine a God who goes from destroying your enemies to forgiving your enemies and healing you of their power over you through forgiveness, not through destruction, not through attack. 

So we have this presence of God manifested in the second person of the Trinity who forgave our sins through an act of pure love, and then we learn that not only does this God, who now comes into the world, live inside of us, meaning that we are now the temple of the Holy Spirit, we see that his presence in us is there not just for us but for others.  So we need to be people who have been nurtured by this awareness of God in us, and now it’s time for us to turn and nurture our brothers and sisters to be in the world with this message of life and light and truth.  And what’s so interesting to me about that indwelling presence is it’s like there’s a mystical part of these three feasts.  How is it that the mysterious way in which the message of God flows from inside someone’s heart to someone else without using words?  How is it that this Trinity of God is one, that three is one?  That’s not logical.  It’s mysterious.  It’s mystical, and then the mysticism that’s out in this last image of indwelling presence and this trinity of feasts that we’re celebrating, it’s so beautiful, because what it’s really saying to us is that when we have this power in us, we need to believe in its ability to do the thing that it has done for us to others.  If one feels the love of God in you, healing your brokenness, bringing unity out of the destruction of the separation that guilt and shame create, when that all becomes healed, you don’t go off and say, “Oh, thank you, and now I have a wonderful life.”  No, you’re in the world there to feed and to nurture, but the danger is it’s not you that does this work.  And when I think of the church, when I think of the people that are there in the world who represent this figure Jesus and his indwelling presence and the resonance that comes from that indwelling presence that changes lives, it’s so risky to think that they get too much in the role, and they become somehow the source of power and energy for a community.  I’m thinking of leadership that becomes too much self-centered, too much self- — using people, using their authority to feed their own ego and to feed their own power, and we get this sort of pseudo-religion, cult-like issues.  And they’re terrifying, and they’re there to remind us of something over and over again.  This indwelling presence that is in each individual is the power of the church, and that power of the church flows between people who realize that they are not the source of what they’re giving to other people.  That’s what’s so beautiful about the image in this gospel.

Jesus has just learned about the death of John the Baptist, and he’s the end of the Old Testament.  And he’s with his disciples, and he wants them so much to understand what the new temple is like.  And it’s about people being filled with an awareness of who they have become because of God’s goodness to them, and that resonates out of them.  They aren’t the ones doing the teaching and the changing, but the indwelling presence of God is.  That’s why there is enough food to give to these people in this story.  It’s crucial, because we aren’t the source of that nurturing power.  We are the bearers of it.  It’s abundantly in us, and when it flows out of us without any even consideration that we’re the source of it, it works so beautifully, and there’s plenty left over.  I love that.  So that indwelling presence of God inside of you that creates the church is the most exciting thing and the most exciting way to end this great season and be ready to hear the story, through Luke, of how this work of Jesus continues in the world and how it continued in the world the first time it went through the world.  Amen.

Father, bless us with the receptivity to the mysterious way in which you have called us into this work we call church.  Sharing you, sharing your message, sharing your presence is beyond what our logical mind can comprehend in terms of its fullness, so open our hearts.  Open our imaginations to enrich the world with a gift that it longs for, and we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.