Corpus Christi by Fr Jack

At St Lawrence Jewry & St Mary Le Bow

Do you know what the first ever meal eaten on the moon was?

Holy Communion.

I am told that Buzz Aldrin brought the consecrated elements from his home church. He wanted that moment of landing on the moon to be defined by God’s presence. And he and the others with him, were defined in that moment by what they ate.

‘You are what you eat’, so they say.

Meals in this great City define us too.

City lunches - and I mean proper City lunches. Are they an endangered species or already extinct? They’re legendary either way. Or is it a grabbed protein salad inhaled at a desk between calls and emails?

Perhaps its a run instead of lunch? Whatever it is, it says a lot. How we treat our meals says a lot about us.

On holiday I basically just go from meal to meal. Planning the next one, elongating the current one, scouring Timeout or guide books or blogs to find the right place. It tells you a lot about my priorities!

Poverty is also defining of course. Meals can be simply a matter of gaining enough quantity for survival. That is the defining reality of so many in the human family.

Again, either way, meals define us in lots of ways.

Someone once wrote that Jesus spends His whole ministry going to and fro meals. Pick up a Gospel and flick through it. How much of the action happens on the way to and from a meal, or those vital teaching passages many of which (how easy it is to miss this) happen over a meal.

The Wedding feast at Cana - His first public miracle. The Feeding of the multitudes. Zacchaeus’ table, Peter’s Mother in Law, Mary, Martha and Lazarus’ table. God, in His years incarnate on Earth, chooses to spend them throwing endless dinner parties, it seems.

That’s significant in itself. And should shape the way we think about the meals in our lives. But we can go further, too. Jesus is so often eating with those who he should not be seen with. The outsider, the outcast, the down right bad. He doesn’t sort them out, and then reward them by sharing a meal. He eats with them, and through that relationship they transformed and brought towards the wholeness and life of His Kingdom. He eats with them, and thereby, they are transformed. Hold that thought for a few moments time when we come to this altar.

And then it all comes crescendoing to the night before He dies. A last supper - the climax and fulfilment of all these suppers of his ministry. This, more than any other, is an invitation to eat with Jesus and be transformed.

We said our meals define us. Well, here for Jesus and for us that is true in an extraordinary way.

‘Do this in remembrance of me’.

‘This is my Body’. (St Luke 22)

Here Christ’s body is broken, here Christ’s blood is poured out.

This (what we do here) this feast of love and sacrifice and scripture and song and liturgy and unity and prayer - this is the meal, layer upon layer of being defined by this meal - Him and us.

As the Prayer Book exhortation before Holy Communion puts it: ‘DEARLY beloved in the Lord, ye that mind to come to the holy Communion of the Body and Blood of our Saviour Christ…receive that holy Sacrament; (for then we spiritually eat the flesh of Christ, and drink his blood; then we dwell in Christ, and Christ in us; we are one with Christ, and Christ with us’

Our meals say a lot about us. And this one more than any other.

And shortly, having partaken of this mystery of God with us, we are going to be who we are, out there, in the streets of The City: the Body of Christ (that’s us), carrying the Body of Christ (Him) out into the world. Bearing His grace and love out there to a world that so badly needs it. We do it every time we leave church after the Eucharist, of course, but today we do it with a particular focus on that truth.

This may be the first time Cheapside has seen a Eucharistic procession for a good few hundred years. But, like Buzz and Neil and the crew of the Eagle moonlander: One small step for the Guild Vicar. One giant leap for the City and her churches.

Defined by this meal, tonight and every time we come to Church and go back out into the world carrying Jesus in our bodies, we go into a City of plenty and scarcity, a City of rush and anxiety, of apathy and avarice. Into a wonderful City full of God’s children whom God loves, to bless these people and streets and offices and bars and everything else, and to call them, with joy to this sacred meal at the table of the Lord. ‘Do this in remembrance of me’.