It was, the legend tells us, around the year 1208 when an adolescent nun in Liège, by the name of Juliana, began to have strange dreams. In these dreams, Christ appeared to her with a complaint: it was not right, he said, that the church did not have a festival to celebrate the gift of the Holy Eucharist, and specifically of the miracle of transubstantiation which occurred when the priest spoke the sacred words. In taking this position, Jesus was showing himself very much to be a man of the 13th century: the theory of transubstantiation was being developed, and would in fact in just a couple of years be proclaimed official Catholic doctrine at the Fourth Lateran Council. Juliana’s dreams (as often happens with the dreams of teenage girls) were not taken very seriously at first; but she was tenacious. In 1246 (Juliana was mother superior by this time) she convinced the Bishop of Liege to celebrate the feast in his diocese. Then an Archdeacon of Liège became Pope, and her hour had come. In 1264 Pope Urban IV inaugurated the feast of Corpus Christi, and commissioned no less a light than Thomas Aquinas to write a liturgy for it. The feast would be held on a Thursday, like the Last Supper itself – but since Maundy Thursday is not exactly an occasion for unalloyed joy, the Thursday after Trinity Sunday was chosen. And so today in Catholic countries (and until recently in Quebec) the crowds take to the streets to process the consecrated host through the streets.
This little history raises at least two questions for us this evening. First of all, what are we doing as Anglicans celebrating the feast of Corpus Christi? After all – may I remind you – our foundational theological document, the 39 Articles, specifically rejects the doctrine of transubstantiation, stating that it “is repugnant to the plain words of Scripture, overthroweth the nature of a sacrament and hath given occasion to many superstitions.” And it enjoins upon us as well that “The Sacraments were not ordained of Christ to be gazed upon, or to be carried about, but that we should duly use them.” If Corpus Christi is only about transubstantiation and processing the host, then its observance in all but the most exquisitely arcane corners of the Anglican Church would probably be odd. But if we take it simply at its word – Corpus Christi, the Body of Christ – then it is the most natural thing in the world. We are, we claim, an incarnational and eucharistic church: why should we not set a time to celebrate and reflect on what it means for us to gather as the ecclesial body of Christ around the eucharistic body?
The second question is more to our purposes tonight: why do we celebrate the feast of Corpus Christi and a diaconal ordination together? What – other than a coincidence of dates – has one to do with the other. A superficial first reaction might be that we have got it wrong – shouldn’t we be doing priestly ordinations on Corpus Christi? Would that not be fitting for a Eucharistic festival? Is not the Eucharist the “property” of the priesthood?
Well, no, actually it isn’t. The eucharist is Christ’s gift to the church, to the whole church – the body of Christ for the body of Christ. Priests are those to whom the church has delegated the task of administering the eucharist, but it is not “theirs”; it is of the whole church. (And I might remind you that there is nothing inevitable or eternal about this arrangement; in the early church it was only the bishops who presided at the Eucharist.) If the eucharist is of the whole church, then it follows that it is also of the diaconate. It might in fact be very profitable to consider the diaconate in its relationship to the body of Christ, Corpus Christi – and that is what I propose to spend the rest of this sermon doing.
When we speak of the body of Christ, we are speaking, theologically, of at least three things. There is the incarnate body, the human body of flesh and blood by which Jesus shared our human life and died an inhuman death. There is the Eucharistic body, the bread which we share, with which Jesus identified himself. And there is the ecclesial body – the church, Paul tells us, is also the body of Christ. This three are distinct concepts, but they must not be separated from one another. We can’t talk about one without involving the other two. For in a mystical – but very real – sense they are one; far more so than we can imagine. The eucharist is not just a reminder of Jesus’ body which lived among us once upon a time: it is a means of his living and self-giving presence with us today. Similarly, to call the church the body of Christ is not just a figure of speech to talk about a holy club that meets to dress up once a week. When we come together, something else happens to us: we are formed by Christ, through the sharing of his eucharistic body and the proclamation of his incarnate body in the Gospel, to be ourselves his body in this world. “Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.” Word and Sacrament form us into Christ’s body; and it is as his very body that we are called to carry on his ministry of servant love to each other in community and to the world he died for.
“Ministry of servant love” – now finally we are getting close to the heart of what we are here for this evening. The essence of diaconal ministry is servanthood, and our four ordinands this evening (Judy, Dan, Joel and Shirley) are called to and being ordained to a ministry of service in and as the body of Christ.
Now a servant ministry is not the property of deacons, any more than the eucharist is the property of priests. All Christians are called to serve others in love, by virtue of our baptism – that is, I suppose, almost everyone in this room. It is part of the baptismal covenant: “Will you seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving your neighbour as yourself?” All of our candidates have lived as Christians according to that commandment. To take Judy as an example: she is not entering into a new ministry of servanthood today; she will be continuing to live out her baptismal vows in her compassionate care of the elderly, as she has for years. And that ministry was not one whit less important when she did it as a lay person than when she will do it as a deacon – no less important to those she ministers to, no less important to the church. Or looking at the three transitional deacons this evening: they are not being ordained to a year of servanthood as a kind of ecclesial hazing ritual, before they move on to the dignity of the priesthood. Priests too are equally called to servanthood (as for that matter is the Bishop) – and not just because we were once ordained deacons, but much more importantly because we were baptized.
When we call the diaconate a ministry of servanthood, that certainly does not mean that as deacons you are supposed to serve on behalf of the rest of us so that we won’t have to. Rather, you are being set apart to hold up before all of us, in an intentional way, that ministry of service to which we are all called. You are to live out this service publicly and officially, as a sign to the world and to the church. You are, in short, to exercise this ministry not just as individual Christians, but in the body of Christ, on behalf of the body of Christ, as a prophetic sign to and for the body of Christ.
I would even take it a step further: your diaconal ministry is not just a sign, but a sacrament, an effectual sign of Christ’s real presence with his church. You will not just minister in the body of Christ; you will minister also as the body of Christ, carrying out Christ’s own ministry to his people. It is not just you who serves others; in a mystical but very real sense, Christ himself wishes to minister through you. Your caring attention to those in need is very much not about you – not about your compassion, not about your generosity, not about your self-giving (though you will need a portion of all three of these!), but about Christ’s compassion, Christ’s generosity, Christ’s self-giving. Your service is to be a proclamation of the Gospel of God’s love in Jesus Christ. But this proclamation is not just about communicating an idea; through you others will experience the love of Christ, experience it first-hand – yes, first-hand!
There is a bit of a strange disconnect in the way in which the Church has thought about this ministry of Jesus. Sunday by Sunday we read the gospels in church (also a traditional diaconal role!), and a goodly proportion of these readings are stories of Christ’s ministry of service: his reaching out in compassion to heal or feed or lift up the needy and outcasts. These stories make up a large part of what we think of when we think of Jesus. They play a hugely important role for us in teaching us who Jesus is, teaching us about one who lived compassion. And yet when the church has thought more formally about Jesus, we have tended to neglect this aspect. The great systematic theologies and christologies are concerned with the grand themes of Jesus’ incarnation, his death on the cross, his resurrection, his identity as the Son of God, the cosmic Son of Man. To a much lesser extent they consider his words and teachings. But the service of Christ, his acts of caring, receive less attention still. They are usually handled, using the example of the foot-washing, as a kind of moral example for us to follow. Well, they are certainly that: but they are much more. These are not just lessons for us the ecclesial body; before that, they are the deeds that give us the very shape and content of Christ’s incarnate presence. Jesus’ healing the sick, welcoming the outsider, feeding the hungry, eating and drinking with outcasts and sinners, giving respect and attention to the poor, heck, even something as banal as brightening up a tawdry village wedding with a second round of wine – these simple acts are supremely precious and important, as they are nothing less than the way in which Jesus loved us when he came among us.
There is that wonderful Greek word the evangelists use – pardon my Greek, but it is so splendid: splanchnizomai. It is what happens to Jesus when he perceives people in need. We normally translate it “he was moved with pity” or something like that, but the root meaning is somewhat earthier: “he was moved in his guts” or “he yearned in his bowels”. That is what incarnation means – that God took on guts to be moved with pity. That is what we find when we look into the depths of Corpus Christi – we find the bowels of Christ, yearning for us in love. It is that which keeps the Incarnation concrete, rather than just an abstract theological idea. It is that which gives the cross its meaning. It is that too, and that alone, that gives the church its point. We are only the body of Christ if we carry in us the bowels of Christ, if we allow that same compassion towards God’s beloved world to work in us. Without it we are useless. The church is always in danger of forgetting that. And it is your job, as deacons, to remind us of that. To hold up, to us within these walls, and to those without, the simple compassion that is our deepest purpose.
The ministry to which you are being ordained is a truly incarnational ministry – in your service, you are to be not just examples of the proposition that God loves us, but sacraments (if I can venture the word) of Christ’s real presence in his body. You will minister by your simple presence, by being there when others are in need. You will minister by paying attention, particularly to those who receive little attention; by visiting those who are lonely, by listening to those who need listening to. You will minister by your compassion, which is not just a fuzzy feeling, but a prayerful discipline of careful imagination and understanding. You will minister incarnationally, with your body, by a smile, by looking someone in the eyes, by grasping their hands. You will minister by simple practical gestures: the glass of water, the food from the foodbank, the phone call to legal aid. And yes, you will minister in words also, careful and respectful words, well chosen, and rooted in the practice of caring.
In all of this, you will minister as yourselves, with your gifts and challenges; but you will minister also as Christ, minister in his name, which is not just an empty label, the brand name under which you exercise your charity – it is the living presence of Christ in his church, and so in your ministry. And in rare moments you will become transparent, and Christ’s presence will shine through you and be seen, almost consciously, by those to whom you minister. In rare moments you will experience this yourself.
You will do this ministry in the body of Christ, in the face of the whole church. Your ministry here is vitally important to the whole church, because it is a sign to call us all back to the incarnational ministry of service. Again and again the church tries to withdraw into the safe world of theory; you are a sign to challenge us and shame us and inspire us to follow Christ more closely, to be Christ to others more fully and bodily. Without this incarnational rootedness in the practice of compassion, our proclamation will be theoretical and empty, our theology will be abstract and irrelevant, even our prayer will be cold and self-serving.
You will do this ministry in the face of the world, in a society that is largely estranged from Christ and certainly from his church. Your ministry here too will be vital, because so many in our society are tired and distrustful of empty words. It is only through the integrity of an incarnational ministry of service that Christ’s love can be communicated in a way that it can be heard, that it can become real to them.
Now by this time you are probably ready to shout “Enough already’ – the burden must seem pretty intolerable. Let me be clear. I am not suggesting that the burden for saving the church rests on the shoulders of you four. None of us, thank God, is that powerful – not even the Archbishop of Canterbury can do that, as he is discovering! I am suggesting that God may be using the order of the diaconate to call the church back to our real vocation: not just to talk about, but to be the body of Christ in this world. Each of you, in partnership with all of us here, as part of the community, will have your own modest part to play. That part will be burdensome some days, but with a little humility and a lot of prayer you will do just fine. A sense of humour helps, too. And most of all, the knowledge that it is all of it done by grace; that it is not our often far too poor efforts, but Christ himself working through those poor efforts, by which God’s will shall be done. This is the secret of Corpus Christi, the body of Christ: that the same Jesus who once walked this earth, who comes to us in the sharing of the bread and wine, is present also – bodily and incarnationally present – in our acts of caring love carried out in his name. For it is Christ at work in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure. Amen.
Canon Paul Jennings
Director of Pastoral Studies
Montreal Diocesan Theological College