Episode Transcript
[00:00:12] Speaker A: Welcome to the Blessed Sacrament Homilies podcast, where our mission is to help everyone recognize and experience the presence of God. We hope you are nourished and encouraged by the Word. Thank you for joining us.
[00:00:26] Speaker B: The Lord be with you and with your spirit. A reading from the Holy Gospel according to John. Glory to you, O Lord Jesus said to the Jewish crowds, I am the living bread that came down from heaven.
Whoever eats this bread will live forever, and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.
The Jews quarreled among themselves, saying, how can this man give us his flesh to eat?
Jesus said to them, amen. Amen. I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you.
Whoever eats my flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him on the last day.
For my flesh is true food and my blood true drink.
Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in Him.
Just as the living Father sent me and I have life because of the Father, so also the one who feeds on me will have life because of me.
This is the bread that came down from heaven.
Unlike your ancestors who ate and still died, whoever eats this bread will live forever.
The Gospel of the Lord.
[00:01:57] Speaker A: Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.
[00:02:00] Speaker B: While this day that we celebrate the body and blood of Christ is our parish feast day, it is also very much our feast day and our identity for all who call ourselves Catholics, for we are a eucharistic people rooted in the selfless giving of Christ's presence to each one of us.
And the Eucharist, like all the sacraments, enter into our lives through our senses.
Part of the definition of a sacrament is a visible sign of God's invisible grace that comes from St. Augustine.
And with that understanding, we recognize that our sacraments touch us, where we experience life through sound, through touch, through taste, through smell, allowing us to experience God's grace the way we experience the world.
But in order to fully enter into the sacraments, we also have to use another sense, one where we look with our hearts and see a deeper level and experience the depth of Christ's presence in our lives.
And in order to understand that vision that comes from our hearts, I'm going to give you a technique that is almost foolproof in how to recognize Christ in our midst.
Now, I've asked you to do this several times, and about a third of you refuse to listen to me, no matter what I say.
I already realized that, but I'm going to be staring at you if you don't do it.
I need you to close your eyes.
Now, with your eyes closed, I want you to turn to your left.
Now open your eyes and pay attention to what you see.
Look ahead again. I know the challenge was which was left and which was right. I could already see that.
Close your eyes again.
Turn to your right and open your eyes and pay attention to what you see there. You have just had a visual clue of Christ's presence in our midst.
And there's one more thing you can do, and that is when you get home, walk into your bathroom, walk up to the vanity, close your eyes, then open them.
And that reflection you see in the mirror is another example of Christ's real presence in the world.
Because what we do in the Eucharist around this table is not just a momentary event, but it is a transformative event that allows that living presence of Christ to become part of who we are.
Even though we may have brokenness, even though we may have struggles, that presence becomes part of of each one of us.
And it's that presence that is infinitely healing and merciful and loving.
Now, with that understanding and that belief which is 100% rooted in who we are, I want to take it a step further.
There is no one here that would be at all disrespectful to the presence of Christ in the reserved Blessed Sacrament.
In fact, I watch you all bow or genuflect or pay some form of reverence to that presence of Christ in the tabernacle and on the altar. And that is 100% appropriate and right.
But if we believe that he's present in us and in those around us, should we not have the same reverence and respect for each other to the point of almost genuflecting before each other and bowing to one another, or at least walking out the door and not screaming at the person ahead of you because they didn't pull out of the parking lot the fastest.
Right?
It's central to what we believe. And if we could just a little bit start to act out and believe that real presence in those around us as much as we do what we gather around the altar, imagine what our world would be like.
