Brief synopsis of the readings: We can tell that we’re out of Easter season because the first reading comes not from the Acts of the Apostles but from Genesis. Here Melchizedek (the King of Salem) brought out and blessed bread and wine. Luke’s Gospel recounts the miracle where Jesus fed the crowd with two loaves of bread and five fish.

The Feast of the Body and Blood of Christ (known in Latin as “Corpus Christi”) commands an important place in the lives of Catholics, and varying degrees of importance in other Christian religions. I pray my words will find value for Catholics and non Catholics alike.

The first thing I notice about this is the name of the feast: the Catholic calendar is replete with feast days. In addition to feasts that celebrate saints (St. Patrick on March 17th, St. Francis on October 4th, etc), there are other feasts. On February 22nd we commemorate the “Chair of Peter,” known in Latin as “Cathedra Petri.” Trust me, there are several others.

My point is this: Most Catholic feasts were translated from Latin to English in the 1960s. Nobody celebrates “Cathedra Petri” anymore. But the translation of “Corpus Christi” is “The Body and Blood of Christ” while most of us still call it Corpus Christi.

Why is this? Perhaps it’s because “Corpus Christi” is shorter than “The Body and Blood of Christ” but perhaps it’s more. There is something mystical about Latin, almost as if it is a “secret language.” Fifty years past the Second Vatican Council there are still Catholics who miss hearing the mass in Latin. For many, Latin is “God’s language.”

And there’s something mystical about food. With the exception of air nothing is more pressing on our existence than food and water. From the time of Moses we’ve always recognized that God not only created us, but sustains us, whether it be manna from Heaven in Exodus or Jesus’ own body and blood in the Gospels.

But curiously today’s Gospel doesn’t depict the scene of the Last Supper where Jesus takes the unleavened bread and pronounces the words: “This is my body.” Instead we read in Luke’s Gospel how Jesus and his disciples fed a crowd of thousands.

I don’t think this is an accident. Corpus Christi can easily be seen as only a “Catholic feast” as Catholics have a different understanding of Eucharist from most other Christians. But Corpus Christi is a feast not only about receiving Communion at Catholic Mass, it’s about food and how it sustains us.

I spoke about our need for air, and it’s real. Most of us will start dying if we go without air (oxygen) for more than 5 or 10 minutes. We can go longer without food (despite what the advertising world tells us) but not forever. This isn’t an exact science but most of us won’t survive more than a week without water; our survivability without food depends on how much we have stored in our body but even today we won’t survive more than a few weeks without food.

I say “how much we have stored in our body” because the last few hundred years have allowed us a luxury that was almost unheard of for most of human history. I’m going out on a limb here, but I’m guessing that nobody who reads this lives with a reasonable fear of starvation. As a matter of fact many of us struggle not with consuming enough calories but with decreasing or burning off enough calories to remain healthy. Our disease is not poverty but obesity.

I do genealogy as a hobby and that means I spend an embarrassing amount of time poring over public records. About six years ago I came across the death certificate of Joseph Arthur Calixte Lizotte, my 7th cousin twice removed. He was born in Greenville, New Hampshire on May 16, 1914 and died on September 23, 1915. According to his death certificate his causes of death was cholera (which he suffered for 3 days) and malnutrition (which he suffered from birth).

My distant cousin lived only four months and seven days but I wonder what he would think about the feast of Corpus Christi. He was the eighth of fourteen children and twelve of the fourteen lived into adulthood. Given all that faced them, his parents and siblings were lucky.

But his death points to an uncomfortable reality. Air (oxygen) commands our most basic need for life but, let’s face it, it’s everywhere. We measure air pressure as a way to predict the weather but unless we choose to climb Mt. Everest we’re not likely to be in a place where we have to be deliberate about how we consume air.

But while God has chosen to spread air evenly, food and water are uneven. Some parts of our world provide generous amounts of fresh water while we classify others as deserts. Growing crops comes easy to some parts of our world and not in others.

What do we do with that? We’ve spent most of our history as humans seeing the uneven distribution as a given. From the beginning of our time on earth we have sought out food and water and directed our lives in that direction. But we now live in the second decade of the twenty first Century since the birth of Jesus and we’ve learned enough about our planet to drive the consumption of calories instead of being subject to the variables of weather, disease, or luck.

And I think this new reality calls us to rethink how we commemorate the feast of Corpus Christi. Previous generations looked on this feast as “food for Heaven” and it was certainly true those who didn’t have enough to eat were comforted by the belief that Eucharist, this “food from Heaven,” would make their earthly sufferings acceptable because it would lead them to eternal paradise.

That image worked well when we all spent our lives in search of enough food, but now we need to look at the reality that some of us have too much while many have too little and we have the power to change that.

If you’ve been reading/hearing me for any length of time you know I’m not a fundamentalist. The Scripture we read today was written thousands of years ago and I believe Scripture speaks to us not only in the historical record but also to our experience today. And while our circumstances differ from Luke’s audience, our values persevere. And the value of shared resources calls us to look at food, at the Body of Christ, as Corpus Christi, with modern eyes.

Simply put, uneven distribution of food and water is no longer a given. The loaves and fishes in Luke that were distributed to a crowd of thousands in Jesus’ time can now be distributed worldwide if we choose to do so.

I write/speak often of how God loves us enough to write us into the plan of salvation and make us not only recipients but also participants. Just as God distributed air (oxygen) evenly throughout the world so we all can breathe and have enough, we are now given the ability to distribute food and water evenly so that all may eat and drink and have enough.

I’m not naive enough to believe that accepting this responsibility will be easy or popular. The fear of not having enough food, no matter how remote, calls the “lesser angels of our nature” to hoard the calories that cause us type two diabetes when those same calories could end the malnutrition of another who may live not far from us.

Corpus Christi begins with a miracle where Jesus promises us his own body and blood. But if we continue to think of Eucharist as simply “magic bread” we miss the dreams he has for us. We have been given a gift that we are called to spread. Maybe it calls us to give our “doggie bag” to a homeless person we meet on our way home. Maybe it calls us to volunteer at a food bank. Maybe it calls us to vote for a candidate who shares our values that poverty and hunger are not self inflicted wounds or the logical result of laziness.

No matter what, we have to believe that we live Corpus Christi when we imagine a world where food and water are as evenly distributed as air and oxygen.