One Body
AM Psalm 89:1-18 • PM Psalm 89:19-52
Gen. 49:1-28 • 1 Cor. 10:14-11:1 • Mark 7:24-37
Though I was a communicant at four different churches between my becoming an Episcopalian in 1975 and my moving to Fayetteville in 2005, St. Paul’s is the first church I have attended that commissions members of the congregation to take communion to the elderly, the ill, and the shut-in. I absolutely love the sentence we say at the end of the brief commissioning statement: “We who are many are one body, because we all share one bread, one cup.” I remember the first time I heard this sentence. I was moved, practically to tears, by its beauty and simplicity.
I was delighted, therefore, to find the source of that sentence in today’s readings. In the passage from first Corinthians, Paul instructs the congregation in Corinth how to understand what happens theologically and spiritually in the Eucharist: “Is not the cup of thanksgiving for which we give thanks a participation in the blood of Christ? And is not the bread that we break a participation in the body of Christ? Because there is one loaf, we, who are many, are one body, for we all share the one loaf.”
The key word in this passage, I’d maintain, is participation, a word that’s been in the English language since the early 16th century. Its origin is a Latin verb, participare, meaning “to share” or “to share in.” So when we take (or administer) Holy Communion, we share in the body and blood, the very essence, of Christ.
We regularly sing a hymn, number 305, the third verse of which expresses this idea in lovely language written by the Anglican priest George Wallace Briggs in 1933: “One body we, one Body who partake, one Church united in communion blest; one Name we bear, one Bread of Life we break, with all thy saints on earth and saints at rest.” The tune for Hymn 305 is Rosedale, composed by the famous American musician Leo Sowerby. There’s also a beautiful setting of the words in the 1940 hymnal: Hymn 207, Knickerbocker, composed by Frank K. Owen, the long-time organist at St. Paul’s Cathedral in Los Angeles, whose student William Crosbie was my first Episcopal choirmaster.
Here, for your listening pleasure, are the organist and choir of the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, playing and singing Hymn 305, “Come risen Lord and deign to be our guest”:
Written by David Jolliffe
...who, like our organist-choirmaster Jack Cleghorn, has many hymns that are “one of my favorites.”