This Is My Body

Sermon

On the night in which he was betrayed, Jesus took the bread, and broke it, giving it to his disciples saying, “Take and eat. This is my body.”

When I was a kid in Confirmation, I remember the Catholic priest explaining to us how Christ was present in Communion. And I remember thinking, “See, we could prove once and for all whether this Christianity stuff is real. After the priest does the ‘This is my body’ prayer, take one of the bread pieces, put it under a microscope, and see if changed into Jesus’ body’s DNA.”

Now, I did learn in seminary that while nobody believes that Communion bread turns into Jesus’ human DNA, there have been significant debates throughout Church history about how Christ is present, whether the substance of the bread switches to Christ so that only the appearance remains, or the substance of Christ is, like, under the bread, or other things.

These days, I generally find most of these debates kind of missing the point. The fact is, Christ is present in a special way in the Sacrament, and we are nourished by Christ in it.

It’s interesting to encounter this passage in Matthew 25 as we partake in World Communion Sunday, because if you think about it, it’s not unlike what happens in Communion. If we take this passage seriously, it means when we feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, take care of the sick, and visit the imprisoned, we do it to Jesus. So it follows that Jesus is really and truly present in a unique way with these people. Just as Jesus declares “This is my body” in the Communion meal and is present, Jesus sees those who are in need and declares, “This is my body.” It is a very direct identification.

Well, if that’s true, what would that mean? The question that’s usually asked next, especially for those who probably have more means and largely see themselves as those feeding or clothing, is, “Well, what about the homeless person on the street? What if they’re on drugs—should I still give them money? Or what if I help this person in need and yet that person keeps messing up? When do I stop?”

These are real and important questions. But I invite us for a moment to dwell on a different question. What does this passage mean for those Jesus identifies with? The hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the sick?

On this World Communion Sunday, and for some things happening at Westminster Presbyterian Church, we are confronted particularly by welcoming the stranger. There’s our church helping Afghan refugees, plus the Cloisters Gallery show, “The Migrant’s Alphabet,” which I insist as many of you go to as you can. It is a beautiful exhibit of paintings that dwell on the horrors and humanity of mostly black and brown folks who are migrants to the United States, many in hardship.

When I walked through the gallery I was confronted with a very direct question – why did my parents come here from the Philippines? I know what they’ve told me: that they wanted a better life for themselves and their children, that my mom as a child used to beg for rice in her village for her family, that there are more opportunities here.

That’s all true, but why was it like that there, and why did they have to come here? Well, about 500 years ago, folks from Western European powers decided it was their God-given call to expand their resources and spread Christianity through colonizing lands, and the people already on those lands could choose to become good Christians who served the colonizers, be forced into slavery, or be exterminated. And the justification of that decision was them making up a concept called race, where light-skinned folks were blessed by God to have power over darker-skinned folks.

And one of the lands these powers chose to grace was a group of islands with multiple scattered tribes that Spain named the Philippines. The home of my ancestors.

Spain ruled over the Philippines for a little over 300 years, decimating these tribes’ internal economy so that it was all about serving Spain’s interests. Entire indigenous cultures were erased to be “Christianized.” But then, after the Spanish-American War, after the Philippines declared their own independence and the U.S. promised to honor it, U.S. President William McKinley got down on his knees and prayed, and he said God told him that the Filipinos were “unfit for self-governing” and “There was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them.”

There’s a propaganda cartoon at that time of a muscular McKinley scrubbing a brown, crying child in a river, and that “savage” child is supposed to represent Filipinos, my ancestors, my family. The United States then proceeded to brutally take over, killing anywhere from 250,000 to 1 million Filipinos. And American colonization again prioritized the U.S. economy over living, breathing Filipinos, so that the economic forces have so ravaged the country’s resources and systems that it will take generations to rectify 400 years of colonization.

That’s why people like my parents felt like they had to migrate. And what did they have to endure when they came here? To have your dad be told to go back to your third-world country? For my parents to give their lives to service as nurses only to have patients say, “Give me a nurse that speaks better English”? To be a son of immigrants who lived here their whole lives only to be constantly reminded that you are still a stranger here, that your worth is only as much as you can give to the dominant system, to have your experienced erased, to have the shame of your people in America and abroad still starving and struggling even if you end up rising, to carry the burden that no matter how far you’ve climbed up, one wrong move or step out of line and you aren’t welcome anymore, in a country that decimated your family’s homeland in the first place?

In the context of World Communion Sunday, this is the pressing issue confronting the Western church of the 21st century. That in the name of Jesus, we made people hungry and thirsty, deemed human beings strangers, stripped people naked, made people sick, and shackled and enslaved people who by and large make up the global majority, black and brown folks throughout the world, disproportionately on women, and also the erasure of LGBTQ folks from indigenous cultures.

We started with the question, Should we feed the hungry or welcome the stranger if they don’t deserve it? But if it’s true that Jesus is uniquely present with the vulnerable, then the real question is, Do we deserve the privilege of feeding and clothing them? Why would the needy trust Western Christians?

This is a real question for me. I and many people of color wrestle with being part of the “colonizers religion.” But here’s why I believe, why I’m a pastor. Because of Matthew 25. Because if it’s true, then whatever humanity throws at those who Howard Thurman says “have their backs against the wall,” they have God on their side. Just as God told Moses, “I have seen the misery of my people in Egypt and I have come to deliver them,” Jesus says at the very point of your need and vulnerability, I declare to you, “This is my body.” I, Jesus, embody your suffering and struggle and pain, and I will deliver you.

This is what Jesus seems to be all about, at the core. The movement of Jesus followers, by definition, is a poor people’s movement. Not that everyone in it is poor, but that we are a movement of liberation of the poor and oppressed, that we are in this struggle in solidarity together.

And the call for us today is, Are we going to be a part of that struggle together? Do we believe that our own freedom is tied up in the liberation of the “least of these,” whom Denise Anderson reminded us means “my babies, my precious family”? Do we actually listen and stand in solidarity with folks by being in genuine relationship with them, rather than standing over them as objects of pity? Fundamentally, are we committed to keeping Jesus’ “This is my body” declaration with the poor and oppressed at the core of what we’re about?

Because I agree, once we have that center clear, we can wrestle with the nuances. We can’t let ourselves always be taken advantage of in the name of helping others. Sometimes love does look like not enabling. I DON’T know if you HAVE to give every homeless person your money. Some of us NEED to learn differentiation, that you CANNOT PERSONALLY help every individual, even if you are tied up in their liberation as a whole. The larger systemic and structural changes are not always apparent and have to always deal with the realities on the ground rather than utopian ideals—after all, white colonizers are some of the biggest utopian helpers the world has known.

But we have to really make sure we still keep the core the core, and that we truly believe that Jesus declares “This is my body” to the needy, the stranger.

Because even with the nuances, there comes a point where the more you get out of the straightforward nature of the text, the more you have to confront how much of it is putting your comfort with the status quo over people’s lives. And in all the hemming and hawing and avoiding committing to just doing the thing, you have to ask yourself at what point are you just like a kid who won’t believe until you find Jesus’ DNA in the bread. Amen.