Transcript

We're in the early morning hours of December 4th, 1912, with an account of a fire, a church, and a remarkable rescue.

At 6.06 a.m., a fire broke out in the basement library the regular meeting room of the Knights of Columbus Smoking Club of St. Philip Neri Roman Catholic Church in the Bronx, New York.

A passerby, seeing the flames, raised the alarm by ringing the meal bell of the adjoining clerical refectory.

Minutes later, a crowd of neighborhood golfers gathered on the street below as the New York Fire Department assembled on Grand Boulevard and the concourse opposite to East 202nd Street.

Deputy Fire Chief Barrett mobilized his crew in the rear of the building and they began the work of containing the now raging inferno.

At 8.21 a.m., Chief Barrett instructed his men that due to the fire being fully involved and fully developed, no one was allowed to enter the church.

The likelihood of surviving Inside St. Philip Neri Church is now approaching zero.

Thanks be to God, no one was inside.

Suddenly, two priests were seen rushing from the adjoining rectory.

These men were Father Daniel Burr and Father Joseph Congedo.

Struggling through the sea of first responders, the men charged into their beloved chapel Disappearing into the smoky interior of the ill-fated façade, no one expected them to return.

Miraculously, moments later, the two priests emerged, Father Burke bearing an object wrapped in a handkerchief, and Father Congedo at his side with lit candle in hand.

What was it that these two men risked their lives to save?

What was this thing?

Bread.

Please, tell me this wasn't just about bread.

Two priests run back in, into a burning building To rescue the Eucharist while everyone else is running out is crazy, right?

But maybe not.

Maybe it's the most sane thing they could have done.

Third century, Roman Empire.

Tarsicius, a 12-year-old boy living during the time of the Roman persecutions.

Tarsicius was sent out to the Eucharist to give to Christians condemned to death.

1581 England During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, It was considered an act of treason to say the Mass.

To make matters worse, there was a bounty on the head of any priest.

Heedless of these conditions, Edmund Campion, an Englishman, seeing his countrymen deprived of the Holy Eucharist, travelled on foot and in secret to Rome to join the Jesuits.

He was soon caught, imprisoned in the Tower of London, tortured, hanged, drawn, and courted.

1900s, China.

In the Chinese countryside, soldiers were in the process of destroying a small Catholic church.

The priest was arrested, the tabernacle stolen, and the sacred hosts were strewn across the floor.

A small girl, whom no one noticed in the back of the church, witnessed the desecration and saw where these 32 sacred hosts had landed.

For each of the next 32 nights, she snuck past the guards back into the church, prayed in front of the Eucharist, and consumed them one by one.

On the last night, after the girl had received the final Eucharist, she accidentally woke the guard.

He chased her down and beat her to death.

1224 was easy, if only.

Foundress of the poor Clare religious order received word that the army of Cedric II, Holy Roman Emperor, was bearing down on her convent, leaving in its wake a trail of horrific pillaging.

Clare went out to face the invading army with nothing more than the Eucharist in her hands.

She raised the hosts high into the air, praying God to save her convent.

The invading army was gripped with fear These are just a few of the countless stories throughout the history of the church of people showing great devotion, sacrifice, and love for this simple bit of bread.

What is it about this humble food that leads people to do such heroic, amazing things?

Maybe it isn't just about bread.

So what do Catholics believe?

The Eucharist is one of the seven sacraments of the Church.

These sacraments are special means instituted by Christ, by which God reaches down to us and shares his divine life.

However, the Eucharist isn't just one sacrament among many.

It's the sacrament of sacraments, that one toward which all the others are oriented.

According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, the Eucharist is the source and summit of Christian life.

At the center of the Eucharistic celebration are bread and wine, that by the invocation of the Holy Spirit and by the very words of Christ, repeated by an ordained priest, become Christ's own body, blood, soul and divinity.

Christ fully present.

The Church has a word for this.

Transubstantiation.

Trans meaning to change and substance refers to the very essence of the thing, what it is in itself.

Even though the outward appearances remain bread and wine, the reality, the substance, has changed into our Lord Jesus Christ.

This sacrament has been given many names.

The Lord's Supper, the breaking of bread, the Holy Sacrifice, Holy Communion.

It's most commonly called the Mass, and often today by a Greek word, Eucharist, meaning Thanksgiving.

The assembly of God's people gathers to give thanks, to partake in this Holy Communion, communion with each other and with the God who loves us.

In brief, the Eucharist is the sum and summary of the Catholic faith.

The Eucharist is the body, blood, soul, and divinity of God.

In other words, the Eucharist is truly God present with us.

I know it sounds impossible, and only God can make it possible, but that's what He's done.

And if you think about it, and you reflect on the Scriptures, And on the history of the church, you'll see that both scripture and tradition point and come to this great truth, this truth that is so beautiful about a God who is so good that he hands himself over and becomes present and available to you and to me.

How big is God?

The God who created life on earth How big can we say our Lord is?

Can he be contained in the earth's largest ocean?

Can he tower over our highest mountain?

Or is he even larger than this?

The God who created the sun, the moon, every star in the sky.

Is there a limit to the scope of his power?

But what about the details?

Does God's attention extend to the smallest cell?

The tiniest photon racing at the speed of light?

The immeasurable closeness of atomic bonds?

Does God know the number of the neurons in the human brain, or the stars in the cosmos?

God's power and love are in all of these things, great and small.

So could God come to us as He truly is, in all of His power, glory and majesty?

In a cloud, in a still small voice, as a child placed in a manger in a tiny village, he comes to us under these unassuming, human, tangible signs, bread and wine.

The most incredible, amazing thing on the planet looks like bread and wine.

And sometimes we can look at this sacrament and think, it looks like bread.

Why would God choose to communicate his very life to us through these things?

You know, if God came to us in all his power, it would be like sitting right in front of a nuclear explosion.

There's no way he'd survive it.

So instead he comes to us in all his love and humility.

All throughout the history of salvation, throughout the whole Old Testament, you see bread show up in these amazing, miraculous ways.

Bread rains down from heaven, the manna during the time of the Exodus.

You see bread, the symbol of life, show up in the tabernacle, in the temple throughout the Old Testament.

Bread, through much of history and across the globe, has been considered a staple food.

I mean, bread's kind of humble.

It's not a luxury.

It's not lobster, right?

One of those basic things that people need to survive.

It actually makes sense when you start putting all of these pieces together that God would actually come in the form of bread.

So how is the Eucharist really Jesus' body and blood?

Because when we look at it, it still looks like bread.

It still tastes like bread.

It smells like bread.

It still feels like bread.

It has all of the outward, sensible appearances of bread.

In fact, it has all of the chemical properties of bread still.

The change of the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ is not a chemical change.

If you were to take the consecrated host and bring it to a laboratory and put it under a microscope, you're going to see all of the chemical properties of bread.

But here's the key.

Underneath those outward appearances of bread and wine, underneath those chemical properties of bread and wine, Jesus is really present.

His very body and blood, the bread and wine, are really changed into his body, blood, soul, and divinity.

All the sacraments are profound mysteries, and yet their outward signs, their appearances, are usually very humble.

They are signs, visible realities, that point to the invisible, to a divine grace.

The water used in baptism poured over a person's head indicates a spiritual reality, a soul being cleansed.

In confirmation, we are anointed with oil to make us witnesses.

Natural things pointing to supernatural realities.

This is what God does.

He reaches out to us in ways we can understand.

In the Eucharist, we eat humble bread, something we all do, something we all understand.

These simple outward signs, bread and wine, signs of physical sustenance, We're really missing out on the meaning of a meal.

Yes, God nourishes us, but meals are a lot more than that.

But we in the modern world, we often don't get it because we don't understand what meals meant in the biblical times.

Typically we tend to think of eating the same way we think of a lot of things in our culture.

We think of it very pragmatically, we think of it very efficiently.

I think in our minds we think the only reason we really eat is because we have to fuel our bodies so we can just get those next calories and we're always kind of keeping track of that stuff.

Which is not what it means to really have a meal.

Particularly in our own country, we don't get this.

The lunch breaks are fast food every day, we eat at our desk, or worse, we eat in our cars.

Food is disconnected from other people.

60% of us eat fast food at least once a week.

We got things like TV dinners, drive-thrus, we Instagram our food.

All these things would make the people of the ancient world absolutely cringe.

Now, the people in Jesus' time understood meals fundamentally different than this.

Meals were not first and foremost about efficiency and just getting your calorie counts.

First and foremost, meals were about being with people.

Meals were so much more than just about the food.

They were about sharing life with other people.

They were about an intimate communion, a bond, a profound relationship being established at that table.

Just looking at the Gospels, look at the number of examples we have of Jesus sharing meals with his disciples.

To share a meal together meant to share in friendship.

Meals meant something.

And we see stories, we see examples, we actually see evidence of this all throughout the story of salvation.

In the book of Song of Songs, a book that's primarily about the intimacy between God and his people, guess what it contains?

A meal.

Psalm 23, this describes the Lord actually setting a table for us.

Even heaven is often described as a meal.

I think of Matthew 8, verse 11, where we see heaven described as sitting at table with the Jewish patriarchs of the Old Testament, people like Abraham and Moses and Joshua, and sharing a meal together.

When you see a meal in Scripture, don't think of the modern picture of it.

Meals have a deeper, a richer meaning.

They signify communion.

The idea is that as we're gathered at that table, the same food that's going into you is going into me.

And that symbolizes a profound bond between us, a sharing of life, a sharing of communion together.

The effect of this communion meal means we're brothers.

We have a profound friendship.

And that's what God wants to do with us at every Eucharist.

In the Eucharistic meal, He doesn't just want to nourish us.

He wants to have an intimate, profound union with us.

He wants to deepen His union with us at every Eucharist.

Now, why would God want to have this kind of communion with us?

Well, first, as St. John teaches us in the New Testament, God is love.

Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have been sharing this love for all eternity with one another.

They are a communion of divine persons.

Second, God created us out of love.

He brought us from non-existence into existence.

He didn't need to do that, but He did it out of love for us.

And not just to live on the outskirts of the universe, far away from Him, far away from anything important, but rather, thirdly, God created us in order to share his love with us.

That we might share his life and his love.

That we might be invited into the communion of the three divine persons for all eternity.

That's who our God is.

The God who is love.

And it's because of who he is, love, that he seeks us out in this most intimate union of love in the Eucharist.

Who is God?

That is the ultimate question.

And to find the answer, we have to turn back to the ancient scriptures of Israel, to what the Jews considered the greatest moment of revelation in the history of humanity, where Moses came to the burning bush and encountered the fiery presence of God.

God says, I am who am.

In other words, as the Hebrew phrase has here, Now, I highlight that because in the Hebrew, that key word is going to be the essence of who God is in this incredible revelation to Moses.

That great phrase, Ea, is an important and deep word.

It means to be.

And he repeats it, Ea, asher Ea. But here's the beautiful thing.

God just isn't simply saying, look, I'm being, I'm existence in some philosophical abstract way.

God gave Moses a very down-to-earth, concrete clue to what this means.

In Exodus chapter 3, God calls Moses to return to Egypt and to encounter and confront the wicked Pharaoh.

And Moses says in response, Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh?

And God gives Moses an amazing answer.

He says, It really doesn't matter who you are, Moses.

It matters that I am with you.

And that's the promise.

By saying to Moses, I am with you.

And now he says, who am I? What is my name?

What is my essence?

In other words, I am the God whose existence, but not just existence in the abstract, I am the God who is presence.

I'm not just being, I am being present to you.

That's the good news that will give Moses courage to confront a wicked king.

And it's the good news that will run throughout the story of Scripture, that God is with his people.

From the earliest parts of the Bible to the end, it's very clear that God wants to be with his people.

We see him walking with Adam and Eve in the garden in the cool of the day.

But beyond that, every time he establishes a covenant with his people, and every time he visits them and reminds them about the covenant, We hear a consistent refrain.

Over and over and over again, the Lord expresses His desire to be one with His people, to dwell with them.

You know, Scripture's clear that God really wanted to be with us, to dwell with us.

Think of the burning bush, the pillar of fire by night, the pillar of cloud by day, the Ark of the Covenant, the temple itself.

He wanted to be with us in a unique and very real way.

When we study these things, we're looking at them like foreshadowings.

They're signs pointing to something.

They're like echoes in reverse.

Instead of getting dimmer and dimmer, the sound is getting louder and louder.

God is doing something.

He was preparing us for something big.

The culmination and fulfillment of God's desire to be with us is fully revealed in Jesus.

We see this most profoundly in the Incarnation.

The Word of God becomes flesh.

God wanted to be with us so badly that he wanted to become one of us.

The Fathers of the Church say that the Son of God became a son of man, so that the sons of men might become sons of God.

That should really make our jaws drop.

God wanted to be with us, to breathe the same air, to suffer, to be helpless, like we're sometimes helpless, in order to save us, to share life with us.

The incarnation of Jesus Christ is God present with his people.

This has been the plan from the beginning.

This is where the whole story reaches its climax.

All this that started with Genesis, all of the Old Testament, hundreds and thousands of years that led up to this moment, where a virgin conceives and bears a son.

And Matthew says, and his name shall be called Emmanuel, God with us.

But at the end of the story, we're told of Jesus' death and resurrection and ascension.

But does Jesus' ascension to the right hand of the Father rob us of God's presence?

Is this great culmination, this great climax with God finally being with his people in this intimate and profound way in Jesus, is that lost with the ascension?

Of course not.

This is the beauty and the mystery of the Eucharist.

For on the night he was betrayed, he himself took bread.

And giving you thanks, he said the blessing, broke the bread, and gave it to his disciples, saying, Take this, all of you, and eat of it.

For this is my body, which will be given up for you.

In a similar way, when supper was ended, he took the chalice, and giving you thanks, he said the blessing, and gave the chalice to his disciples, saying, Take this, all of you, and drink from it.

For this is the chalice of my blood, The blood of the new and eternal covenant which will be poured out for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins.

Do this in memory of me.

Jesus spoke those words to the apostles at the Last Supper.

He told them to do what he had just done.

He had just caused bread and wine to become his body and blood.

He commanded them to do this.

To do what he had just done, and through the apostles, through the bishops, and the priests, down through the centuries, two thousand years, when you go to Mass, wherever it is, whenever you're going, you have just received God, Jesus Christ.

You're not just reading about him in a book.

He is now one with you.

It's like you're the tabernacle.

And then, as Mass ends, he says, go in peace.

There's a whole world out there that needs to see you and to hear you.

Because in seeing you and in hearing you and watching how you live and love, they see Christ himself.

When we're discovering what the Eucharist is, The question we should be asking isn't, what is the Eucharist?

It's, who is the Eucharist?

The Eucharist is not a thing, it is a person.

It is Jesus.

And that's why we heard the story about those two priests who would run inside a burning building, not to rescue bits of bread and wine, no one would do that, but to save something that's real and precious, someone that's real and precious.

That's why those great stories of the men and women throughout history who devoted themselves to lifting up, to preserving the sacred host, That's why our churches have times and places set aside for adoration.

That's why in every Catholic church across the world, there are tabernacles with candles burning, showing us that someone is waiting for us.

Think about this.

The God, the God and the Lord of the universe, the Creator, as powerful as He is, as infinite as He is, as eternal as He is, as holy as He is, Still humbles himself, making himself truly present.

For our sake, he comes to us in the forms of something so simple, so beautiful.

Bread and wine, something we can eat and can give us strength for our journey, but also something we can store, we can keep with us.

So we have the Lord that is giving us not only what we need today, but His presence, His accompaniment to be with us at every moment of our lives in our Blessed Sacrament, in the tabernacle.

So many people today are searching for greater meaning, a greater purpose to their lives.

They're searching for happiness.

They're longing for something more.

They're ultimately searching for God.

But the good news is Our God is searching for us.

He's already seeking us out.

And He comes to us longing for an intimate relationship with us.

He wants to walk beside us in life and help us in life.

And He loves us so much, He comes to us in the Eucharist.

So if you're someone that's longing for God's help in your life, you want to draw near to Him, you want to know Him better, Maybe you need some guidance for a big decision you're making or maybe there's a big problem in your marriage or family life and you need his help or you just need to be encouraged or you're carrying great burdens and wounds in your life and you need his help and his support.

He's there for you.

He wants to draw near to you and to help you.

All you have to do is turn to him.

God wants to be with us.

He wants to be with us because he's all good.

We're not.

He wants us to be good like Him, to perfect us.

It's communion with a direction.

We want to commune with Jesus in the Eucharist so we can be more like Him.

I consume the Eucharist because I want the Eucharist to consume me.

It's not meant to meet you where you are and keep you there.

Jesus in the Eucharist calls you higher.

The Eucharist opens up an entirely new world.

This is why every Mass is centered around the great, mysterious truth Because this is the most precious thing we have this side of eternity.

This is why it's called the source and summit of our faith.

There's so much to partake in something so small.

Thanks for watching!

Music playing.

Music playing.

Thank you for watching!

Thanks for watching!