In 1923, thousands of the Anglo-Catholic faithful assembled in the Royal Albert Hall in London for an Anglo-Catholic Congress. Mind you, these were the days when Anglo-Catholics were seen as peculiar (perhaps we still are!), and Eucharistic vestments and tabernacles were still somewhat rare in the Anglican Communion. So, Anglo-Catholics, it seemed, were always having to advocate for their “rights” within Anglicanism: to use incense, wear Mass vestments, and reserve the Blessed Sacrament. These battles seem rather tired these days, especially when, in the American Episcopal Church, we are used to a relatively Catholic way of functioning (just look at our Book of Common Prayer). But in any event, those former days of Anglo-Catholicism were the context of a concluding address by Bishop Frank Weston, then Bishop of Zanzibar, at the 1923 Anglo-Catholic Congress. Mark his words:
“I say to you, and I say it to you with all the earnestness that I have, that if you are prepared to fight for the right of adoring Jesus in his Blessed Sacrament, then you have got to come out from before your Tabernacle and walk, with Christ mystically present in you, out into the streets of this country, and find the same Jesus in the people of your cities and your villages. You cannot claim to worship Jesus in the Tabernacle, if you do not pity Jesus in the slum. Now mark that — this is the Gospel truth. If you are prepared to say that the Anglo-Catholic is at perfect liberty to rake in all the money he can get no matter what the wages are that are paid, no matter what the conditions are under which people work; if you say that the Anglo-Catholic has a right to hold his peace while his fellow citizens are living in hovels below the levels of the streets, this I say to you, that you do not yet know the Lord Jesus in his Sacrament. … And it is folly — it is madness — to suppose that you can worship Jesus in the Sacraments and Jesus on the Throne of glory, when you are sweating him in the souls and bodies of his children. It cannot be done.” (quoted in http://anglicanhistory.org/bios/kindly/weston.html).
Bishop Weston was saying that adoration of the Blessed Sacrament has everything to do with mission. Indeed, the truest mission springs from a reverence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament, for to start with mission and then add prayer or worship on top is to get the order wrong. If one can’t fall in awe before Christ’s presence in the Blessed Sacrament, then one will struggle to fall in awe before Christ’s image in other humans. And the risk is that mission will become distorted, either as a placation of privileged guilt or as a means of using other people in a well-meaning, but inevitably warped, quest to “do good” in the world.
Bishop Weston was echoing in more modern language the theology of St. Augustine of Hippo in his Sermon 227 on the Eucharist. We, as the Body of Christ, are what we receive, which is the Body of Christ. After the bread and wine are consecrated during Mass, it is we who are on the altar! What an amazing thought. And again, to paraphrase Augustine, we are to become what we have received.
This should give pause to anyone who deigns to receive Holy Communion frequently and regularly attend Mass and not behave as a changed person outside of the Church. When we fail to treat other bodies in the world as the Body of Christ, we, in some sense, show disrespect to the Sacrament, and we eat and drink judgment on ourselves (to use words of St. Paul).
This Sunday, we will observe the Feast of Corpus Christi (transferred from Thursday) by permission of our bishop. This great feast follows quickly on the heals of Trinity Sunday, when we’re reminded of how God as Trinity is mission itself and how we’re called into that mission. And so, as we transition to the “green” Season after Pentecost, Corpus Christi compels us to see our participation in mission as coming to have a reverence for all that God gives us: the company of other people and all of creation. We learn such reverence, first and foremost, in our adoration of the Eucharist. This is only one of many reasons why going to Mass matters!
We will conclude Sung Mass with Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament. This beautiful service of devotion can’t be properly divorced from our frequent reception of Communion itself, nor should it be divorced from our call to live faithfully as the Body of Christ in the world. “Behold who you are; become what you receive” is essentially what Augustine tells us. In an increasingly irreverent world, it’s not a bad thing that we spend a bit more time in loving adoration during Benediction in order to refresh our awareness of the glory of everything and everyone around us. We, as a Eucharistic people, need to play our part in showing the world how to be better, more reverent, more life-giving, more respectful, more loving. I’ll look forward to seeing you in church this Sunday, as we worship, adore, and then learn to be who we are.
Yours in Christ,
Father Kyle