Solemnity of Corpus Christi    The Rev'd Dr. Sarah Coakley

Deut 8 :2-3;                           Holy Baptism & Solemn High Mass

1 Cor 11: 23-29;                     & Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament

John 6: 47-58                         May 25, 2008

‘For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes'

‘In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit'.   Amen.

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‘You proclaim the Lord's death until he comes'.  I once asked a priest whom I had only just met what was the most important moment for him, ritually, physically, bodily, in his daily celebration of the eucharistic rite. This conversation happened long ago, before I became a priest myself, or even entertained the thought.   But I was teaching in a Religious Studies department at the time, and I had developed a sudden probing interest in what might be called the phenomenology of the eucharist , a sort of anthropologist's delight in trying to get inside the bodily movements of the rite to see how they complemented, or even resisted, the offical verbal script.  And so , when I had the chance, I asked priests who crossed my path this seemingly innocent question.  Little did I know that this particular priest with whom I was engaging had just undergone a terrible personal tragedy:  his only son had been tragically killed in a motorcycle accident only months before.   And when he had been required by the police to identify the body, it was so broken and bruised and mangled that he was scarcely able to recognize it as that of his son at all.  The sight was so deeply shocking that he had dissuaded his wife from seeing the body altogether. He told me then, in answer to my insouciant anthropological question about the bodily movements of the eucharist , that there was no doubt at all what was the most important moment for him in the celebration of the rite.  In a way it had always been thus, he said; but now it was doubly and painfully and yet strangely comfortingly so.  When he took the host in his hands each morning and broke it, the priest's host giving that little audible crack as it split down the middle and shed a few tiny fragments into the chalice, his son's body was there again, broken and mangled on the tarmac - and yet somehow also miraculously re-gathered and made whole, safely enclosed in the body of Christ, the corpus Christi .   This simple symbolic act was simultaneously the most tactile and yet also the most spiritual pledge - of breaking and mending, of loss and gain, of death and resurrection.

           

I had artlessly trespassed on this man's grief.  But I have not forgotten what he told me.  And now that I am a priest myself I think I begin to understand more deeply what he meant.  What is done here at the moment of breaking (the fraction) when the priest makes that simple symbolic act – the priest who is after all, as Archbishop Michael Ramsey once put it, the one who ‘stands at the altar with the people on her heart' - is a kind of breaking open of all the desires and griefs and yearnings of the people, that that breaking may in Christ be a means of life and hope.   It is a breaking done in the anticipation of Christ's remaking; it is a breaking done ‘to proclaim the Lord's death until he comes'.

           

Perhaps therefore it is a theologically fortuitous, and even a poignant, matter that Corpus Christi Sunday this year intersects with the events of Yale graduation. For these graduation events are meant to be triumphant and celebratory, and are indeed that, and rightly so; but they are events too that – more privately, perhaps - mark no less the breaking and stopping of desire that has occurred in these college or graduate years:  the disappointments, the unfinished business, the missed opportunites , the broken relationships, or the pure tragedy that has happened to oneself or one's classmates.  The rite de passage of graduation marks a moment of reflection on those desires and ambitions which have been blocked or broken, just as much as on those desires and ambitions which have been fulfilled.  It is all these desires – finished and unfinished, good and bad - that we constantly bring to be reformulated, purged and transfigured here, in the body of Christ, here in the eucharist .  That is what the eucharist is about.

           

And that is why, on Corpus Christi Sunday, we should not be surprised at the complexity, and the moral and spiritual demand, that reflecting on the body of Christ involves in this way. St. Paul himself, when he reminded the Corinthians in today's famous epistle passage of what Jesus did on the night before he died, and what he commanded his followers to continue to do ‘as a memorial' for hm , placed his account, most intriguingly, right in the middle of a raging set of disputes in the church at Corinth.  We tend to forget this, when we read this eucharistic passage in Paul out of context; but when Paul launches into this reminder of the Last Supper, he has just come from adjudicating a highly contentious argument on matters of sex and gender and women's roles in worship;  and before that there is an equally problematic one on class divisions and table fellowship.  

Is this all just a coincidence?  I don't think so.  For the whole panoply of arguments in I Corinthians are about how these issues of gender and sexuality and class and food and status and money have all been affected – rendered new and strange -  by entry into the ecclesial ‘body' of Christ, first through the death and life of the waters of baptism, and then through the death and life of the logic of the eucharist .   In every case there is a breaking and remaking of desire; in every case there is an issue of integrity  – the integrity of the ecclesial and of the individual body – which binds all these seemingly disparate themes into one tether.  It is a matter of the reformulation of all our desires – bodily and spiritual - according to the pattern of Christ's original sacrifice, his own bodily passage of death and transformation.  It is a matter, as Paul puts it, of ‘discerning the body'.  It is a deeply serious matter, for unless we see its seriousnes , as Paul says, ‘we eat and drink judgement ' upon ourselves.

           

How , then, can our desires be mobilized, changed, rendered salvifically redolent of Christ's own desires for us in the body?  In an often-overlooked passage in the third part of his Summa , St Thomas Aquinas says something extraordinarily acute about the affections and the eucharist and about how desires are galvanized through the supper over time, even – indeed especially - through a sense of loss or tragedy.  It was because of the intensity of emotion at Jesus's parting from his friends, Aquinas says, that he transformatively invested his own human affective intensity and sense of loss into this new rite; and so, Aquinas goes on, should we do likewise:  ‘the more our affections are involved, the more things are deeply impressed upon our souls', as he puts it ( ST III, q 73, art 5).   In fact the last supper was Jesus' ritualized way of gathering into integrity the affections, memories and bodily responses of his disciples so as to rightly relate them to their souls.  However, and conversely, if this uniquely integrated form of transformation fails to occur (q 79, art 8), Aquinas says, desire is not purged and venial sin ‘hampers this sacrament's effect'. What should be happening, he says, quoting John of Damascus, is that ‘ The fire of that desire within us which is kindled by the burning coal, namely the sacrament, will consume our sins and enlighten our hearts, so that we shall be enflamed and made godlike ' (ibid, citing de Fide Orthodoxa , VI).

           

As often as we eat this bread and drink this cup, we proclaim the Lord's death until he comes. At a time of significant transition such as today we are compelled to think afresh about this matter of the breaking of bread.  I recall again that priest I met long ago and the way he hung on in the impossible chasm between despair and hope, breaking the host daily in his hands as he remembered his dead son; I think of those of you graduating, whose hopes and fears and desires lie no less in the balance as you face the future; and I rejoice with you whose childern are about to be baptized and brought too into this same recurring mystery of death and rebirth.   It is all a matter of the right direction of desire; it is all a matter of bringing our frail human desires to the point of breaking so that the ‘fire' of that Christlike desire within us ‘may be enflamed and made godlike'.  And so ‘we proclaim the Lord's death until he comes'.  Amen.

 

Sarah Coakley

This sermon is written for Dan Lewis, a friend of our daughter Agnes's, and a fellow cellist, who was devastatingly injured in a bicycle accident last summer, while riding across America in aid of Habitat for Humanity .   Pray for Dan and his family.