"The Mystery of the Human Eucharist" | The Rev. Dr. Charles Lemert | March 15, 2026

Charles Lemert / March 15, 2026

The text this morning is biblical, but it is from our weekly liturgy:

Therefore we proclaim the mystery of faith:

Christ has died.

Christ is risen.

Christ will come again.

In a short while we will all hear and say these words. But what does it mean that we will proclaim the mystery of our faith?

Liturgies are meant to be repeated, time and time again. So often do we say these words that, if you are like me, we seldom wonder what they are asking us to believe? It is not hard to believe that Christ died. But we also say we believe that  He is risen, and will come again. I, and perhaps you too, cannot say what these words mean. We understand the words as words, but what do they mean, really. Risen? Coming again? These are the true mysteries of our faith.

When we participate in the Eucharist we repeat words that we have repeated many times before. They are the liturgical words that are meant to keep Christian worship alive. Just the same I cannot know intellectually how this is meant to work.

The reason I don’t know what I do most Sundays is that the Eucharist itself is the work by which we enter into communion with Jesus—which itself is a mystery. He drink his blood and eat his body. Wine and bread are consumed as if they are somehow the blood and body of our Christ. Really? Technically, we might say that these elements are simulacra—things that stand in for the real things. But this does not get us very far.

Hence: the mystery of faith. Our God is absent but also present. Mysteries describe something that cannot be fully understood.

And here is the rub in the mystery of drinking and eating Jesus. Said this way the mystery of experiencing Jesus Christ can be upsetting, disconcerting, and frightening. The Eucharist ought to be at least surprising, even though it seldom is. This is the way of mysteries. It is difficult to explain what their secret clues mean.

One of the classic mystery stories is about Cinderella, an abused young woman living in emotional poverty. Miraculously she becomes glamorous and enchants a royal ballroom. But at a given hour she must flee for home, but she loses the slipper that brought her public joy. But then the slipper is found by the prince who gives her the  good life she deserves.

The puzzle of mystery stories like this is that they are all the more mind boggling when the mystery is that God made Himself  into a bodily Christ—a spiritual mystery-man who caused others to hate and kill him. Jesus thus was crucified for being a god, which led to his return to his Father in order that he might come again. This, our liturgy says, is the mystery of our faith.

What is it about human beings that allows us to live with spiritual mysteries? A good answer was offered years ago by a French scholar, George Bataille, who wrote about the first signs of primitive humans expressing a spiritual nature. He visited the caves in the South of France where there are primitive drawings on the cave walls.  These drawings led Bataille to think about primitive art as an early spiritual practice. He came to make a remarkable statement about human spirituality that may serve us today to solve the mystery of our faith: “Children’s art and primitive art present exactly the same characteristics”.[1]

Why this? In part, because children experience the world through feelings, with their guts from which they make imaginary line drawings.

Primitive art found on cave walls is composed as line drawings that are very much like the first drawings of all children. Hence, I suggest that the bread and the wine in Christian communion, like the unrolling of the scroll during Jewish sabbath services, or the knee bending and bowing during Muslim prayers are local —and very personal expressions of a spiritual truth deeply stored in the believer’s gut, not her mind.

We think with our minds. But we feel with our viscera which are where faith begins. Trusting a mystery arises, when it does, from deep within our bodies where we who consume the life-giving bread and wine feel the nourishing  spiritual possibilities that make life livable—another mystery of mysteries.

To swallow elements of a god is to be primitive, and child-like. Young children feel first, think years later.

When Anna Julia, now 27, was 2 or so, she had a hard time sleeping. On my nights to lull her toward sleep, I would ask her what she saw out the window of her second floor bedroom. Her answer was invariably something that was not there—a bird, a woman floating, or a dream of desire. None of it was there to be seen; but all of it was real to her in those moments.

So too with us, if we allow ourselves to slide back into a dreamworld in which our God comes to us, dies, rises, comes again. Dreams come from the heart and the gut, not the head.

I come bluntly to the point: We here need to be spiritual children looking out some night window to see what the darkness might tell us.

I add that this is exactly what we do in our relations with each other. Forgive me if I call these relations a Sociological Eucharist. When we come here to find Jesus,  we dream that we are all about the same spiritual business, which of course cannot be so. But this dream allows as to get along as well as possible. We here this morning are not of one mind—this is what makes us human. [Examples] But it is possible that we can also be good enough to stay put and listen even when we hate the sermon, or the preacher, or someone in the next pew,…. whatever.

Just as deep as the mystery of the Eucharist, is the mystery that here in this place very different people come together in spite of our differences. Our Great Commandment teaches that both mysteries are connected. Love God/love thy neighbor.

Then too, we can believe that, as troubled and ugly as the world is now, we in America like those in Iran, and others still, can look beyond the bombs to the mystery of all human spiritual being.  We can because in our deepest spiritual gut we know we are nothing without the others.

If we give thanks to our mysterious Christ, we must also give thanks for God’s mystery of human relations and believe that we can rise beyond the ashes of differences and one day return to a normal world.

[1] Georges Bataille, The Cradle of Humanity: Prehistoric Art and Culture (Zone Books, 2009), 35.