Sermon: Corpus Christi 2010

The Very Revd Victor Stock is Dean of Guildford

Preacher:: Victor Stock
Date:: Sunday 6th June 2010
Venue:: St Mary's, Bourne Street, London
Service:: Corpus Christi Procession
Readings:: John 6

‘My flesh is meat indeed and my blood is drink indeed. He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood dwelleth in me and I in him’ – words from the sixth chapter of John in the translation used as part of the Gradual to the Feast of the Most Holy Body of Christ as it is described in the English Missal. The English Missal, for the laity, a small black book still reproduced by St Clement’s Philadelphia, believe it or not, was part of a devotional apparatus on the preacher’s bookshelf when he was a schoolboy, and when he first came to the Corpus Christi Procession at St Mary’s Bourne Street.

As academic work on Scripture as literature has progressed in recent years, so has academic work on the place of memory; memory in the Church and in Scripture, in liturgy and architecture, the place of recall so as to bring to mind. Just round the corner from St Mary’s, this flagship of the Spirit, is that flagship of department stores, Peter Jones, with its strap-line, ‘Never knowingly undersold’, which you could certainly say has been the opposite of the Anglican tendency to understatement. During the early twentieth century the Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson, and his domestic chaplain spent many a long hour working on the rubrics surrounding the Reservation of the Blessed Sacrament in what was to become the Deposited Prayer Book of 1927. His Grace’s preoccupation was to prevent the Adoration of the Lord, hence the forbidding of placing any receptacle for the Blessed Sacrament on or above a Holy Table, and the preference for a discrete aumbry without light or curtain, should a parish wish to reserve the Blessed Sacrament for the Communion of the Sick.

But ‘never knowingly undersold’ could be the strap-line for the tabernacle at St Mary’s. This Ark of the Covenant, this house of gold, remains for many of us in the memory as the antithesis of understatement and, believe it or not, has produced consequences in unexpected places. For from this tabernacle the Blessed Sacrament has not only issued forth year after year at Corpus Christi, but has led this preacher directly to institute such a service in the Cathedral Church of the Holy Spirit, Guildford, where, even as I speak, the Lord Bishop of the Diocese is carrying the Blessed Sacrament in Procession around the Cathedral, the Sacrament held aloft in a splendid monstrance.

‘My flesh is meat indeed and my blood is drink indeed. He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood dwelleth in me and I in him’. Catholic Christianity values its literature, its Scripture, its liturgies and reveres the place of memory; memory which led a schoolboy in the 1960’s to Bourne Street, and Bourne Street’s influence in the mind of a priest, now ordained 40 years, who as the Dean of an English Cathedral, has instituted, in direct apostolic descent from St Mary’s, the Procession of the Blessed Sacrament and Pontifical Benediction. Catholic Christianity is extravagant and generous, not tight-lipped, judgemental or excluding, because we believe in a God who gives Himself to us in the life, teaching, death and resurrection of the Divine Son, the Saviour who is present to us in this most Holy Sacrament that is both meat and drink.

There is a fearfulness about some forms of Christianity, guarded, proscribing, condemnatory, that Catholic faith and life exists to counter and defeat. Thus, in this feast we give thanks for the God who comes among us, though in a simplicity and immediacy that takes us off our guard, surprising us and driving us to our knees. The more we study Scripture and revere the memory contained and handed on within it, the more we are brought to our knees in wonder, love and praise at the humility and vulnerability of God, who placards himself before us within a thin white disc of unleavened bread. For the mystery contained herein far outshines even the splendid vestments of St Mary’s or the gorgeousness of the monstrance carried by the priest. Just as every act of service to others, of identification with the needy, with those from whom justice is withheld and those who are literally hungry as we feast, is meat indeed and drink indeed for them and for us.

Above all, the Corpus Christi Procession drives us to our knees because beyond both understanding and deserving God comes among us in the Divine Son by the power of the Holy Spirit, believe it or not, in this small Victorian stock brick church in Pimlico, where Catholic Christianity has never knowingly been undersold.