"Discerning the Body" - Sermon for Corpus Christi Sunday, 6-7-26

† In five years of walking around the city, I have met people claiming to be Jesus and Satan, archangels and dark angels, soothsayers and savants and secret agents. Once I even met the lost son of the supreme governor of the Church of England. When I am my better self, I smile and nod, offer a moment of my attention and a prayer of God’s blessing, while keeping my skepticism to myself. There is much madness in our world.

So then, you will better understand the reluctance of the people around Jesus to give any credence at all to his “Bread of Life” soliloquy. “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” they ask.

My friends, that is a fair question! The notion of a shaggy rabbi promising eternal life itself is an eye-roller. Offering his human flesh and blood for human consumption is, in most every culture, a stomach-turner; it violates so many taboos. By the end of Jesus’s disputation, all but a few of his hearers walked away, skeptically shaking their heads. It was Simon Peter, speaking for the twelve stalwarts, who said, “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.” And off they went on their way, those chosen few, still far from understanding Jesus fully, but trusting that what he has to say – and what he has to offer – will lead to something more; is something greater. They may have been on to something. Two thousand years later, here we are.

Comprehending the Eucharist – the Body of Jesus found somehow in bread made holy; the Blood of Jesus coursing somehow in consecrated wine – approaching this holy mystery, much less receiving it and consuming it, asks much of us. Faith that what Jesus says is true. Hope that our approach and reception make us but the slightest bit worthy of this gift. And charity that even if we question, as so many have, just how this all works, that for God our desire to be one with Christ by receiving this sacrament is good enough.

Now this is not to say that the validity of the sacrament and the Real Presence of Jesus in the set apart elements of bread and wine depend upon our belief, just as the reality of God’s very existence is not up to us. We assent in our great AMEN at the end of the eucharistic prayer, but the real presence is there regardless.

“This is my Body,” Jesus said; “This is my Blood,” in the Last Supper words of institution. Dare we take him at his word? “We pray you, gracious God, to send your Holy Spirit upon these gifts,” we ask in the Epiclesis, “that they may be the Sacrament of the Body of Christ and his blood of the new Covenant.” The Eucharist is the creation and sole property of the Holy Trinity – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – given freely to us for no other reason than because God loves us. Of practical necessity, and of his gracious gift, God uses our participation in the consecration to make for us the true food and true drink that Jesus gives. But it is God’s work, just the same.

Saint Paul invites us to discern the Lord’s body when we eat the bread of life and drink from the cup of salvation. This discernment cuts two ways. We discern, that is we prayerfully ponder and consider carefully what it is that we are being offered when we come to Mass. The grace given to us in the Sacrament of Holy Baptism is the traditional starting point for this discernment, but all are welcome to taste and see the goodness of the Lord. The Church gives us clear teaching on what it is that we do, and at the same time it gives us wide latitude in the outcome of our own discernment. As I have said before, I will not quiz you when you come forward to receive. I trust that your assent and your desire, as you discern and define them, are sufficient for the grace of the sacrament to work in you.

Discerning the Lord’s body also asks that we extend the same charity that we assume for ourselves out to Christ’s body, which is the Church, which is the people gathered here with us and around the globe. Saint Paul was unstintingly stern in his critique of the conflicts and the social caste divisions among the members of the Corinthian Church. “We who are many,” Paul wrote a few paragraphs before today’s passage, we “are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.” If we fail to discern Christ among us in others, and if we fail to forgive others as we have been forgiven, then we, at our peril, give short-shrift to the grace of the sacrament.

And discerning the body goes beyond recognizing Christ only in the people of the Church. I shall close, as I do, every feast of Corpus Christi, with the words of the Anglican Bishop Frank Weston of Zanzibar, speaking in 1923 to the restored and revived body of Anglo-Catholics within the Church:

“But I say to you, and I say it with all the earnestness that I have, if you are prepared to fight for the right of adoring Jesus in His Blessed Sacrament, then, when you come out from before your tabernacles, you must walk with Christ, mystically present in you, through the streets of this country, and find the same Christ in the peoples of your cities and villages. You cannot claim to worship Jesus in the tabernacles 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 and Jesus on the throne of glory, when you are sweating Him in the bodies and souls of His children … You have your Mass, you have your altars, you have begun to get your tabernacles. Now go out into the highways and hedges, and look for Jesus in the ragged and the naked, in the oppressed and the sweated, in those who have lost hope, and in those who are struggling to make good. Look for Jesus in them; and, when you have found Him, gird yourself with His towel of fellowship and wash his feet in the person of His brethren.” †

Father Daniel S.J. Scheid, SCP

Corpus Christi Sunday – June 7, 2026

All Saints’ Episcopal Church, San Francisco

“Discerning the Body”