Today’s Gospel lesson prepares us for the Lord’s Table by getting our hearts in the right place. In the lesson the Pharisees ask Jesus one of their favorite impossible questions. “Which is the greatest commandment?” The catch was that all the commandments are commandments of God, and if He chooses one over another it could appear that he slights the Word of God. Jesus response is a quote from Deuteronomy 6:5, and Leviticus 19:18, but His tag is even more revealing: “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” He is saying, “If you understand this, you understand not just the Law, but the prophets as well.” It is the explaining principle behind godly living, the wise, compassionate and correct ordering of our relationships

Then Jesus turns the table on them: In Psalm 110 David calls the Messiah his Lord: “The Lord (God) said to my Lord (the Messiah)….” Yet we call the Messiah David's son. In their thinking the son follows the pattern of the father, so the son cannot possibly be greater than the father, and yet clearly the Messiah is greater than David. In Jesus both are true. Jesus is the Son of David in that as David was king over God’s people, so Jesus is King over God’s people. But He is greater than David in that the Kingdom of David was earthly and temporal, but the Kingdom of Jesus is heavenly and eternal. The father image no longer means the one who sets the bar, but the one who casts the prototype, gives us the models by which we can begin to understand something greater.

And so we share is a meal, but it is more than a meal. Like the great commandment that becomes the pattern by which we understand all the other scriptures, and like the kingdom of David by which we understand the Kingdom of Heaven, so by this earthly meal we participate in the heavenly feast of the Lamb. It is an expression of and effects the right ordering of our relationships with God, one another, and the world.

In the Eucharist the next liturgical after the Our Father is the Fraction. The priest takes the host and breaks it in two. Here is a symbol of the crucifixion—the breaking of the body of Christ. All that we laid on the altar at the beginning of the service is caught up in Jesus, its brokenness is broken as it is sacrificed. By it we share in the death of Christ.

Then depending on the season, we sing or say the Agnus Dei: Lamb of God…. On the night before their deliverance from Egypt the Hebrews were commanded to slaughter the Passover Lamb. The death angel passed over the Israelites who had followed the commandment, and their firstborns did not die. When John the Baptist saw Jesus, exclaimed, “Behold, the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world!” Jesus is our Christian Passover meal, and the reason why we do not celebrate the Passover.

The Presentation is where the priest invites the people to the feast. As David’s kingdom is a foreshadowing of the Kingdom of Heaven, so this feast is a foretaste of that great heavenly banquet to which we are all invited at the end of time. The presentation is your verbal invitation, the only RSVP needed is baptism.

We follow with Communion, the shared meal, the participation in the Body of Christ. It has two meanings: 1) We participate in that Body that was sacrificed for our sins—dying with Him in His death, and rising to new life in His resurrection. 2) We participate in that Body which is the Church, the corpus of believers that are His presence in the world. In other words, it joins us to our Head and the Body of which He is head. (Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and your neighbor as yourself….) This is for the baptized. In the early centuries those preparing for baptism were ushered out after the Peace. These were the “arcane mysteries” in which they were not yet prepared to participate.

Here at St. Christopher’s we talk about Sippers, dippers and skippers: Sippers take a sip from the large chalice as it comes by, Dippers dip their bread in the small “intinction cup” provided for dipping, when it comes by, and Skippers need not, for whatever reason, be partaking of the wine. Christ is equally communicated to you through bread or wine.

Then we clean up. Whatever is touched by God is never the same. Once baptized, always a Christian, once consecrated, always sacrament. Left over sacrament is consumed or otherwise disposed of in a respectful way. Bread can be crumbled up and left outside for the birds, wine can be poured out on the ground or into the “piscina” a special sink whose drain goes out onto the ground. It is never disposed of in the normal trash. Alternately, it may be reserved in the Tabernacle for later use.

At the 10:00 service we bless the Eucharistic Visitor. The body of Christ includes all Christians everywhere. The Bishop allows lay people to extend our feast to the sick.

Then comes the Blessing of the People. Like the Eucharistic Prayer, the blessing is is performative language—it effects what it says. The words are not powerful—God's Spirit behind them is. The priest pronounces them in obedience to God, not by personal initiative. It is a sacramental act, for by it God gets involved in your lives.

We process out to a hymn. Think of the people of Israel processing across the Jordan into the Promised Land, or the Army of God marching out to wage goodness and peace in a corrupt and war-torn world.

Finally the Dismissal sends us out into the world: The transforming power we have known here must be carried out with us into the world that so desperately needs it. The sense of the dismissal is aptly summarized in the statement you may have heard: “The Mass is ended, the service has just begun.”

This has been indeed a trip to heaven and back, reaffirming and renewing our connection with God, and empowering us to live God’s presence and do God’s work in our world. There is no holier moment in the life of the Christian except perhaps when he enters the fullness of what we celebrate. We should be eager to be here as often as possible, if for nothing else than this great mystery!

Fr. Paul Moore+