What was derelict can be restored

Sermon for Corpus Christi Sunday, 7 June 2026 at St Barnabas Jericho, preached by Fr Christopher, Vicar

The word Corpus, of course, means body. Not ghost. Not idea. Not something abstract: but a real Body. And the feast we celebrate today is rooted in something physical.

We come here every Sunday to receive what looks for all the world like ordinary bread and wine. Many Christians have always taken seriously what Jesus says with directness in John’s Gospel today : my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. True food and real presence. And the feast of Corpus Christi exists to make sure we never quite get over the astonishment of it. It is one of those feasts which needs us to rely a bit more on heart and experience rather than head and thought.

But sometimes - and this is the quiet danger of a feast as beautiful as this one - we can dress it in so much gold and incense and ceremony that we almost forget where it began. It began in an upper room, with Jesus taking bread (the kind of bread people ate every day) and sitting at a table said: This is my body.

In a way Corpus Christi combines all the great Feasts into one: Incarnation (Christmas), Revelation (Epiphany) and death and Resurrection (Easter). God doesn’t hover in a distant way above creation, directing operations from a safe and divine distance. God enters it, taking flesh. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (from John 1) and then, at supper the night before he died, he takes the stuff of the material world: grain, grape, hands, a table, and makes it the vehicle of his very self.

St Irenaeus of Lyon, writing in the second century, saw this with extraordinary clarity. Irenaus said that the Eucharist shows us that matter matters to God (Against Heresies). The bread and wine are not bypassed, not dissolved or superfluous: they are taken up, blessed, broken, given. This is the same logic as the Incarnation itself: God doesn’t escape creation; God redeems it from the inside.

Moses, in Deuteronomy, asks the people to remember the wilderness years. God had led them through a place of desolation. He fed them there, with manna - a food that neither you nor your ancestors had known. He met them in an unexpected place, with a different kind of bread, by a surprising grace. They might have been forgiven for thinking the wilderness was God-forsaken. It wasn’t. God was there ahead of them, waiting to nourish them in the very place they thought was beyond nourishing.

Today, we finish our Mass with a procession. And I want to suggest that our procession is not primarily about display. Our task is not primarily about putting God on show to an indifferent world. It’s about something far more incarnational than that. We take the Blessed Sacrament - the Body of Christ - out into the open. Not containing him within these walls, beautiful as they are. We carry him outside, into the air, into Jericho. Because a body, by definition, takes up space. A body goes somewhere. A body acts in the world.

This year, however, we don’t go far. We go to the west area outdoors - the space just beyond these doors that has, for too long, been neglected and derelict. And we go there to do something simple and profound: to dedicate it to God again. To say: this ground is holy too. This corner of Jericho belongs to the Kingdom.

There’s a beautiful echo of the wilderness here. In what looked like a barren, unproductive space - God is already there, waiting to do something with it. With thought, with skill, with love and prayer and community support, with people planting, quite literally, seeds of life, this derelict space is becoming something new. Plants will grow there. Perhaps without quite realising it, people will pray.

This is what Corpus Christi is really about. Not only the Host elevated in a monstrance - though that is real and beautiful and entirely proper. It is also about the Body of Christ taking up space in the world. Bread broken and shared. A community becoming what it eats. A neglected corner claimed for hope.

What was derelict can become alive again. With thought and effort and grace. The same grace that takes bread and wine and makes them the Body and Blood of Christ. The same grace that took a stable in Bethlehem and made it the birthplace of the world’s salvation. The same grace that takes us - ordinary, sometimes derelict, sometimes glorious - and makes us the living Body of Christ in this neighbourhood.

As we process today to that little patch of newly restored ground, let us carry with us not only the Blessed Sacrament. Let us carry the conviction that resurrection is always possible. That desolation is never the last word. That even the most neglected corner of creation can be claimed anew for life and beauty and the glory of God.