Corpus Christi

John 2:1-11; I Corinthians 12:1-11

John 2:1-11

¹ On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. ² Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding.

³ When the wine gave out, the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine.” ⁴ And Jesus said to her, “Woman, what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come.” ⁵ His mother said to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.”

⁶ Now standing there were six stone water jars for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons. ⁷ Jesus said to them, “Fill the jars with water.” And they filled them up to the brim. ⁸ He said to them, “Now draw some out, and take it to the chief steward.” So they took it.

⁹ When the steward tasted the water that had become wine, and did not know where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew), the steward called the bridegroom ¹⁰ and said to him, “Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the good wine until now.”

¹¹ Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.

I Corinthians 12:1-11

¹ Now concerning spiritual gifts, brothers and sisters, I do not want you to be uninformed. ² You know that when you were pagans, you were enticed and led astray to idols that could not speak. ³ Therefore I want you to understand that no one speaking by the Spirit of God ever says “Let Jesus be cursed!” and no one can say “Jesus is Lord” except by the Holy Spirit.

⁴ Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; ⁵ and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; ⁶ and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone.

⁷ To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.

⁸ To one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, ⁹ to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, ¹⁰ to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the discernment of spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues.

¹¹ All these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses.

The Sermon

When the silver communion tray came down our row and was passed to us, I watched my brother take the glass thimble with the grape juice in it. I was five years old. He was 12. He was taking his first communion. I wouldn’t have mine for another seven years, a length of time I couldn’t conceive because it was longer than I’d been alive.

But I remember the solemnity of that moment in the old, red-carpeted sanctuary with the vast ceiling, and the the century-old stained glass, and the immovable wooden pews.

And I remember having been made aware that something special was happening for our family. The oldest of the three boys had completed confirmation class, and from now on would take communion, just like all the grown-ups. The middle brother and I would have to wait.

Of course when you can’t have it, it looks like the greatest thing in the world; you get the bread first, and then the grape juice—and how cool were those tiny little communion cups? I asked him what it was like, and he said the most generous thing he could have said in the circumstances: He knew I wanted some, and he said, “It just makes you thirsty.”

Nowadays the assumptions governing children and the communion table are different. The guidance now is: if your child has some comprehension of the meaning of the sacrifice of Jesus and the meaning of the bread and wine, particularly of the sacramental nature of the elements, then it’s up to the discretion of the parents. Some households have had that conversation with their children, and allow them to take communion; some wait until confirmation.

But when I was growing up, the understanding was you waited until confirmation, which wouldn’t happen until you were at least 12 years old. And so in that service, Tom had joined in that communion and taken his place at the table.

A decade later, I was a gawky, rising high school freshman with Brillo Pad hair and a space between his front teeth in which you could park a DC-9, who for some reason occasionally felt somewhat self-conscious.

It was summertime, and I was with most of my friends and about 120 other high school kids at our church’s summer church camp. It was very much like the Montreat Youth Conference model; we’d spend the days in worship and large group events, and then small groups a couple times a day and some amazing mornings and evenings listening to the ministers and others who, as we gathered on our blankets on the grass by Lake Geneva in Wisconsin, seemed to be the deepest people on the planet.

They gave us no easy answers and had absolutely no tolerance for empty Bible-thumping. We learned what was real, not what would be nice if it were real. All Christian denominations have their strengths, and one of the Presbyterians’ is the high value on the intellectual search and a complete dissatisfaction with trite nonsense.

So by the last night, everybody was worn ragged, between all this genuinely gripping talk about God, and Jesus, and how we can take our place as committed disciples—not to mention how tight your small group has become, and of course the hormones are flying off the wall anyway, and add in the lakeside, and the early mornings, and the starry nights, and the long talks with people, everyone in his or her own way putting out into deep, deep water.

In the early evening of the last night, we had our last small group meetings, and then all the groups gathered in the main building, a large pagoda with a concrete floor and high ceiling and screens and screen doors all around. A long table was set up in front of the rows of folding chairs, and we all quietly found our friends and our places, and sat down.

The ministers served communion to the elders who had been our advisors for the week. Then the elders took their places behind the communion table. And then they waited.

The freshmen didn’t really know what to do. Everyone had been instructed to come forward when we were ready, but nobody really knew how to do it; we’d never taken communion like that before. We waited for somebody else to make the first move.

I saw a small group of grad women get up and go to the table; they each knelt in front of it and took communion from the elders. After a minute; they got up, went back to where they’d been sitting together, and I noticed tears running down their cheeks. They sat down and had their arms around each other and they were just sobbing. I thought, What must the elders have said to those poor girls?

Then I saw two brothers go up to the table, and this was interesting. One was a grad and one was a rising senior. Both were model-handsome, and tall, and popular, and athletic, and had perfect teeth; you just wanted to slap ‘em. And they had a public sibling rivalry that is probably still taught in postgraduate psychology courses. It was competitive. And I think that may have caused some real tensions during the week. 

The younger brother, Dave, had come to church camp with his leg in a cast, which, irritatingly, had only made him more appealing to all the model-gorgeous young women that week.

The two brothers went up to the communion table together, and Dave managed to lower himself into something like a kneeling position, and his older brother knelt right beside him, and they both took communion. When they had received it, Doug put his arm around his younger brother and physically lifted him to his feet, and together--seriously together--the brothers walked back to their places.

Then a few more of the grads and seniors went forward, and then the mass movement began, and by that point, people weren’t returning to their seats.

Do you remember, those of you who were around at the time, the days after 9/11, and the spirit that rose out of that satanic ash-heap in New York City? Even acquaintances were concluding conversations and signing off e-mails with words like, “Love you, brother.”

In all my phone calls with church members or colleagues or close family or distant friends that week, there was an air of mutual dependence, and an unspoken recognition that our lives were better because of our relationships with the people in our lives. I suppose the word I am describing is “love,” and its omnipresence was made known to us all in those wounded days when we were all, temporarily, stripped of all our pretentions.

That is exactly what this communion felt like, except the cause of it was not incomprehensible human tragedy, but an astounding sense that something had changed for us all, or maybe just that many of us were recognizing it for the first time.

I was back home a few days later, going through that weird kind of decompression after an event like that, when a family member said, “You were at your church camp last week, right?” I said yes.

He said, “Did you come back a changed person?”

I had to think for a second. That was just the kind of thing that, as a rising freshman majoring in cynicism, I used to just loathe.

But I had come back a changed person. Of course, the initial shock wore off after a couple days. But something was, undeniably, different. And I said, very quietly, to my surprise, “Um…yeah.”

And he said, without prejudice, “Tom used to come back that way too.”

And suddenly I was back in the sanctuary as a five-year-old, sitting next to a much more grown-up kid who’s taking his first communion.

The wedding at Cana comes at the very beginning of Jesus’ ministry. He came to be baptized by John the Baptist, and then the next day he called his first disciples, and the second day he called Philip and Nathanael, and on the third day was the wedding in Galilee, where the wine ran out, but Jesus took something ordinary—water—and made it extraordinary; you might even say, sacramental.

Not long after the wedding at Cana, he will take a couple of fish and five loaves of the cheapest, coarsest bread, brought by a gawky kid who doesn’t know any better, and making it into a sacramental meal to feed thousands of families.

And that’s just the beginning of the story.

But even when this gospel comes to its conclusion, with Jesus gone from the earth, returned to breathe life into the disciples, and then forever gone from their sight, it’s still just the beginning.

Because now the body of Christ is not only the earthly body of Jesus, his earthly hands and feet. Now there is miraculous bread and wine everywhere in the Church.

And some have the gift of wisdom, and others have the gift of articulating knowledge, and some have the gift of faith, and some have healing, and some have a prophetic voice.

And some can teach. And some know their way around a budget. And some are awesome with a set of hand tools. And some can do a casserole like nobody’s business. And some can pick up the phone and talk to anybody, and some can pray, and some can organize, and some can play music, and some can build a mission program from the ground up, and some can drop whatever they’re doing when it’s time to get something done.

All these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses.

To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.

And pretty soon, ordinary water and regular bread are being made into something extraordinary, something sacramental, something made by God, given by God, for God’s purposes.

And now, you are corpus Christi—the body of Christ.