I want to share with you a passage from a work called “Hymns of Divine Love,” by Symeon the New Theologian. Symeon was an Eastern Orthodox monk from Macedonia in the 10th& 11th Centuries, who taught that it was possible, through the Holy Spirit, to receive direct experience of God’s love in this life. He left a prestigious and lucrative life as a diplomat in the Byzantine empire because his yearning for God was so intense that he wanted to dedicate himself entirely to prayer and to service as a monk. He wrote and taught of these beatific experiences of union with God through Christ. He was charged with heresy for this. But he successfully defended himself and managed to turn the tables on his accusers saying, how is it we accept theologians who presume to speak about God in such abstract ways without direct experience? You could say it’s like someone claiming to be an expert of a city when, under questioning, it becomes clear they have never even visited it, only looked at maps.

Symeon became honored in the Eastern Orthodox world for the authenticity of his witness to God’s Love as known through Jesus, and came to be called “The New Theologian.”

This is from his “Hymns of Divine Love”, translated from the Greek by Stephen Mitchell:

We awaken in Christ’s body
as Christ awakens our bodies,
and my poor hand is Christ, He enters
my foot, and is infinitely me.
I move my hand, and wonderfully
my hand becomes Christ, becomes all of Him
(for God is indivisibly
whole, seamless in His Godhood).
I move my foot, and at once
He appears like a flash of lightning.
Do my words seem blasphemous? — Then
open your heart to Him
and let yourself receive the one
who is opening to you so deeply.
For if we genuinely love Him,
we wake up inside Christ’s body
where all our body, all over,
every most hidden part of it,
is realized in joy as Him,
and He makes us, utterly, real,
and everything that is hurt, everything
that seemed to us dark, harsh, shameful,
maimed, ugly, irreparably

damaged, is in Him transformed
and recognized as whole, as lovely,
and radiant in His light
he awakens as the Beloved
in every last part of our body

Isn’t this extraordinary? Symeon is describing a profoundly embodied experience of God’s agape Love, through Christ. He is not talking about the soul getting beamed up out of the body and flying off into an abstract sky world. Instead this experience is very visceral, permeating every last corner of the body. This is an experience of joy. It can come, Symeon says,  because Christ opens himself to us, in love, so deeply, that all we need to do is to allow ourselves to receive this love.

Symeon goes on to say that the implication of this is that any shame we may feel in our embodied lives, anything we feel to be damaged or to be ugly about our bodies, anything we want pushed down into the shadows, because of shame or guilt or wounding, is held in this love from Christ, embraced and made whole, lovely, radiant, a location for Christ’s awakening through us.

Are there ways this could be a healing gift for you?

We can trust Christ for this healing because Christ can be for us Christians, the embodiment of God’s love, who isn’t impossibly distant from us, some disembodied purified abstraction of holiness, but has shown himself to be within and through all aspects of the human condition, suffering brokenness and rejection and shame, only to bring forth from that brokenness the triumph of divine love that embraces us and all of humanity simply as we are.

The sacrament of Communion is one way we can ritually experience this, the visceral nearness of God’s love-nature we can find through Christ.

On the face of it, it’s a very strange ritual. Folks who aren’t Christian can and do point out that our practice of Communion is weird. “You eat bread and drink wine as a way of ritually eating the body and drinking the blood of your savior?! That’s kinda spooky, dude.” To which I reply, “Yep.”

Yet I have found in partaking of this sacrament there is a great power and mystery that can seize me. There is a sacred power and mystery at work through these elements that can enter into me and metabolize to pervade every nook and cranny of me, body, mind, and soul. Communion has helped me to realize that God is indeed nearer to me than I am to myself, to paraphrase Augustine.

Jesus said that the Realm of God is like yeast that a woman folds into dough, which proceeds to grow and rise. The Realm of God is a dimension of earthy elements, that feed us and nourish us, knit into our muscles and sinews and organs and bones, pervading and sanctifying existence itself, as it is. Jesus embodied this so utterly he became a physical avenue for us to come to know that the infinite is intimate.

In trying to find words for the mystery of the Eucharist, Martin Luther wrote that through the sacrament, finitum capax infiniti: the finite is imbued with the capacity for the infinite. Or I think about what a theologian named John Nevin wrote, who was from the German Reformed Tradition, one of the ancestor denominations of the United Church of Christ, and who taught at a seminary in Mercersburg here in PA. Nevin wrote a book called “The Mystical Presence,” in which he said this about the Eucharist: the Eucharist “embodies the actual presence of the grace it represents in its own constitution … the very life of the Lord Jesus Christ himself.” Through this very life we enjoy the, “inward living union between believers and Christ, in virtue of which they are incorporated into his very nature, and made to subsist with him by the power of a common life” (John Nevin, The Mystical Presence, Philadelphia: S.R. Fisher & Co, 1867, pgs. 56, 54).

Christians have fought very bitterly with each other over how to properly understanding the meaning of the Eucharist. In our denomination we have an ecumenical approach and aren’t interested in excommunicating anyone for “incorrect” theology. That said, I do advocate for approaching Holy Communion not as literally the body and blood of Christ, on the one hand, nor as purely symbolic and abstract, on the other hand. Rather, speaking from my own lived experience with Holy Communion, I share a more mystical understanding: Holy Communion contains a real spiritual presence in a deeply embodied way, as disclosing the real presence of Christ that, out of love, God makes available to us as nourishment, through which we can experience something of our union with Christ as embodied souls and ensouled bodies, helping us to realize divine love that can free us from internal division, free us from guilt and shame, and awaken in us the joy of our truest fulfillment.

Do my words seem blasphemous? — Then
open your heart to Him
and let yourself receive the one
who is opening to you so deeply.
For if we genuinely love Him,
we wake up inside Christ’s body
where all our body, all over,
every most hidden part of it,
is realized in joy as Him,
and He makes us, utterly, real …

Thanks be to God

Delivered Sunday, August 2, 2026, by Rev. Nathaniel Mahlberg, at the United Church of Christ at Valley Forge.