Homily for June 10, 2007 Feast of The Body and Blood of Christ

In my letter in the bulletin this week, I throw out a distinction between saying that the Church has a mission and saying the mission has a Church, or saying that we have the Eucharist or saying that the Eucharist has us. I want you to keep that distinction in the back of your mind as I talk.
My ego is very good about deciding some things. I trust it and I need it to decide when I'm going to get up in the morning. It helped me decide what shade of black I would wear when I got dressed today. It helps me organize my schedule, and it helps me make it through the day. But it's not very good at planning the overall direction of my life. For that I need to go someplace much deeper.
In our Church we have our plans, and they're very important. The choir got here at nine and practiced music for an hour before Mass. I'm glad they did and I'm sure you are, too. I had to look up the readings today, the readers got prepared. We have our plans. But the sense of mission and direction comes from someplace deeper.
A word about the readings today. In Luke's Gospel there are, I think, twelve banquets that describe for Luke what Eucharist is all about. The Gospel today is the third of those banquets. The first one was a dinner with tax collectors and sinners, and that spoke to the inclusiveness of God's Kingdom. The second was a dinner in the house of a Pharisee that's portrayed by that window back there, where the woman washed the feet of Jesus with her tears.
The third is the feeding of the five thousand. The fourth is dinner in the home of Martha and Mary. The fifth is dinner with the Pharisees when they question why the disciples didn't wash their hands before dinner. The seventh is a dinner in the home of a Pharisee when He heals. The eighth is dinner with Zaccheus. The ninth and tenth are the Last Supper, and then there are two meals that He takes with His disciples after the resurrection.
All of those say what Eucharist is about. We have two of those meals represented in our readings today. The feeding of the five thousand - that's about mission. You notice what happens in the Gospel. The Apostles are reacting with their ego and they tell Jesus, "Send the people away. Let them go buy food for themselves."
And Jesus says," No, you give them something to eat." Can you imagine their panic? "All we've got is it five loaves and two fish and we don't have enough money to go to the store to buy all of that." But Jesus invites them into His mission, and He feeds the crowd. So you see in that Gospel the mission takes hold of them, and they distribute the food to the people. When I read that Gospel this morning I thought of our activity around Thanksgiving and Christmas when we have our food basket distribution and when people come from all over the city to help us with that. That represents, doesn't it, a moment when we are possessed by the mission. And we might say the mission has a Church.
The second reading describes the Last Supper. And by the way, between the feeding of the five thousand and the Last Supper, Jesus explains to His disciples that the Messiah will suffer and die and rise again and they don't get it. Well, I couldn't help but think of the contrast between our Mass here at Thanksgiving when the church is packed and our Mass at Holy Thursday when there is only a handful of people in church. And I thought, we don't get it yet, either. So, in a sense, the mission has not fully absorbed us and we haven't fully entered into the mission, but in each case the mission has a church. It's not that we begin with our plans and our desires, but we allow God's desire to take hold of us.
We celebrate the Eucharist today, the living presence of Jesus in our midst. There are times when we are together that I really feel that Presence has us and that we enter into it. There are times when, before Mass, it's chaotic and there's noise. And yet occasionally at Mass there are times when I feel a silence come upon us, and I feel that we are gathered into the living presence of Jesus. Do you know what I mean? Have any of you felt that from time to time? We don't always feel it.
One of the Carmelite nuns says our life with Jesus is about 99 percent touching the hem of His garment as He walks away and about one per cent face to face. But there are times when it feels to me like that Presence has us. I remembered as I was thinking of that, of one Sunday after Christmas, many many years ago, here. I had wanted to get away after Christmas and my plans fell through. So I woke up on a Sunday morning after Christmas and I didn't want to be here, and I came to church and I was really not in a good mood. And that happens every now and then, I think, to all of us. But as I was giving out communion I just felt overwhelmed with a sense of God's love for everybody that was coming forward, and that was a moment for me when I felt that the Eucharist had me, not that I had the Eucharist. \
Can you feel the difference between that, between saying, as the Church, that we have the Eucharist - and we do – and saying that the Eucharist has us? It's in our tabernacle, it will be on our altar, it will be in our celebration today - and the living presence of Jesus in His body and blood will be with us. So it's true in a sense to say that the Church has the Eucharist. But I hope also, as we worship today, we can have a feeling, if only an inkling, that the Eucharist has a Church, and that the Eucharist possesses us, and that we can enter in to the living presence of Jesus seeking, as He did with the twelve in the feeding of the crowds, to draw us into His mission and His love for all of creation and for our brothers and sisters.