Fr Robert Hendrickson

Dear Friends,

Today, we celebrate the Feast of Corpus Christi. It is the celebration of the gift of the Eucharist to the people of God. You'll notice this feast comes closely on the heels of Pentecost and Trinity Sunday. This is no accident. Pentecost is the gift of the transforming Holy Spirit coming among us to forge us into community - a community that shares in the life of the Trinity and feeds together on the Bread of Life and the Cup of Salvation.

Christ comes into the world freshly and powerfully in each celebration of Communion and we are then confronted with a host of other questions which are not pedantry but are crucial to our whole selves meeting Jesus in his risen self.  Do we sing?  Do we kneel?  Do we come with joy or with trembling – or with trembling joy? All of this is to say that the question of whether it is or is not Jesus then triggers in us a deep and ongoing dialogue around how we engage the reality of the claim and the truth of the Presence of Christ with us in Bread and Wine.  

Only the agnostic can look away untouched by such a reality.

Are we alone?  Do we alone approach the throne of grace by ourselves, in sinful or altruistic isolation?  Is it me, myself, and my God?  Or are we coming as a community of grace?  Are we coming as a community in the throes of the Holy Spirit to find ourselves ever more deeply in Communion with one another in the shadow of the throne of Grace? 

A community of faith approaches the Altar with faithful assurance that just as Thomas touched the wounds so we are being invited to touch the bare reality of an ever-given salvation offered to us as the gathered Church.  This is not ours by right or by entitlement but by grace alone and it is found in the lived experience of the Church at the Altar.  

Gathering along with us, as we say at Communion, are angels and archangels – and we are joined too by the long dead and the recently mourned.  We are joined by those of ages past who live in the greater presence of the ageless one.  We are joined by the prayers of saints and sinners, the hopes of children and the childless, the dreams of the prisoner and the prince, the heartache of the widow and those who think themselves unloved.  We gather as a Body to take in that which we are to be - grace deep within simple things.

Communion is the shared reality formed by the Fracturing of the Body on the Cross.  The nobility of the Incarnation, the inhumanity of the Cross, and the promise of the Resurrection are laid bare on every Altar and given to be the food of every Christian.  To this we respond in the only way we can – with adoration and a great thanksgiving.

This Corpus Christi may we give thanks for the Christ we receive at the Altar, the Christ we find in the community around us, and the Christ welling within us.

Robert