A few weeks ago we had some online gatherings of parishioners, and one of the things everyone was asked was what they missed the most about the parish during the pandemic. And as I was thinking about how I would answer this question, I thought two things. One of course is being in the church. I mean it’s wonderful what has been accomplished here in the great hall, a million cheers for everyone who has made it possible. But you’re all so far away. Over in the church, we are facing one another, as if we’re sitting around a table at a meal, which is what we are doing after all. That is one of the things the eucharist is, we share a meal with others, we are given food for the journey, and we feel able to go on. So here on this feast of the eucharist I can’t wait to be around the table with everyone again.
But the second thing I realized I miss is another thing that we usually used to do, which is share the cup together, the blood of Christ. Now I have no idea how or when we’ll get to the point when we can ever do that again. It might be a long way off. But I miss it, because it’s a sign of something else that the eucharist is besides a meal. It’s a commitment, it is a promise. In every eucharistic prayer, the priest calls the cup the blood of the new and everlasting covenant, and by drinking from the cup, we are making that covenant all together, we drink and the cup is passed to the next person. It’s a reminder that we are eating and drinking this meal for a reason; we have work to do and promises to God that we want to keep.
That first reading from the Old Testament we heard today sounds strange to us, some kind of primitive ritual, people smearing themselves and everything around them with blood. But when the people of Israel sealed their covenant with blood, it was a way of making their promise as serious as they could make it. They made two promises. The first promise that every person made was to lay down their lives, if needed, for the other person; the second promise was to surrender their own lives if they were unfaithful to the promise. Those are frightening promises to make, and they found the most dramatic way possible of imprinting that on their memories. You might break those promises, but you wouldn’t forget that you had made them. Moses gives his people a chance to back out, but they go ahead, and shout it out, “All that the Lord has spoken we will do.”
And that’s the covenant that the eucharist is for us. Through consuming that bread and wine we have become part of Christ’s body, which of course is just as big a miracle as the bread becoming Christ’s body. This meal isn’t God just giving us a glorious gift, it is us promising in return to become what he wants us to be, and what he wants us to be is literally the body of Christ.
What would that mean for us, to be the body of Christ? The answer is different for each of us, because the body has many parts, we all live different lives with different gifts. But what we do know is that for all of us it would make us someone with a greater power to love than we usually imagine. We would live for other people and not for ourselves, sometimes to the point that it hurts to love as much as we are called to love, we would try to change things we think we don’t have it in us to do, we love people it is hard to love. And yet God gives us everything we need to do this, surrounds us with love, and give us this this meal to keep us going, to make Christ part of us, and us part of Christ.
All of us come to this church each week looking for direction, for something that will make us new people. If we eat this meal, Jesus tells us that we will have it, and all that the Lord has spoken, we will do.