"In Wafer and Woman" - Corpus Christi sermon 6-22-25

† She is one of our more colorful street parishioners – colorful in hair, in nails, in clothing, and in expression. Until you talk with her, you never know if she finds herself in your reality, or will invite you into hers. Sometimes she talks to plants; sometimes the plants answer. She loves deviled eggs and roses. She sings like an angel dropped from the sky. Once she offered to sell me Charles Manson’s switchblade. That was quite a sight – the two of us near the Wells Fargo ATM in the shadow of City Hall, me in my collar, cassock, and cap, flicking the blade to see if it worked. It did. No point in disputing the knife’s provenance – I had my doubts – and I suggested she keep it in case she needed it. Women surviving on the street need an edge. I gave her the few dollars she was hoping for all the same.

She came into the church one weekday afternoon as I was setting up for Holy Hour: lighting the candles in the Lady Chapel, burning incense in the resident thurible, and placing the large consecrated host – the Real Presence of Body of Christ – in the monstrance on the altar, below the statue of his Blessed Mother. We shared reality that day. “I’ve never been in here,” she said. “It smells nice. Can I stay?” “Of course,” I said. “Please do.”

I knelt in the chapel to say some prayers of adoration and then went to sit in the ambulatory, which doubles as a make-shift confessional. From where I sit behind the screen, I can look out through the slightly-parted curtain draping the facing doorway, past the sanctuary, and into the Lady Chapel. Soon I heard her footsteps. Softly, carefully, reverently, I suppose, she approached the Lady Chapel and stood before the altar and the monstrance. The smoke from the incense drifted upward, filling the sacred space. From the silence of the confessional I watched her, as she went to the thurible and slowly … slowly … turned herself round, and round again, bathing in the fragrance that blessed her, as it was blessing the Body of Christ held in the starry vessel, bejeweled and golden. The communion rail of iron and wood separated their two bodies, yet in that moment they were one – the real presence of Christ in wafer and in woman.

I don’t see her as often these days. She doesn’t sleep on sidewalks since she found housing in the Tenderloin. But every so often she turns up, which makes me glad.

“All who eat and drink without discerning the Lord’s body eat and drink judgment against themselves.” What do we make of the stern tone of Saint Paul’s admonition? Just what is the Lord’s body – the Body of Christ, Corpus Christi?

Is it the consecrated thin wheaten disk that scarcely resembles bread, let alone flesh, let alone a full expression of the Divine?

It is.

Is it the people assembled as the Church, in Saint Paul’s day or in ours, who at the same time accomplish great miracles of grace and compassion, and still succumb to the scandal of hypocrisy and foolishness?

It is. 

Is it the individual person – notably the lost and the least, as Jesus suggests, the addicted and the addled – who panhandles or pilfers or prostitutes to feed a habit or scrounge a meal?

It is.

How on earth can any of us worthily discern the Lord’s body when we come forward with outstretched hands and open hearts?

I don’t suppose that we can. But, by the grace of God, we can try. And with a bit of faith we will find the Lord’s body in the wafer and in the wastrel, and in the people who are the Church: the Church universal and the Church local.   

Be what you receive; receive what you are – the Body of Christ, Corpus Christi – receive it wherever you find it, and then live forever. †

Father Daniel S.J. Scheid, SCP

Corpus Christi Sunday – June 22, 2025

All Saints’ Episcopal Church, San Francisco

“In Wafer and Woman: the Real Presence”