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For Donald and Ellen
And for Leesy
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Rabbis soon shifted their focus from the purity of the diners to the purity of their dinner foods—and the kosher kitchen was born. Today Jews welcome non-Jews to their tables, while Christians cannot agree formally to eat with each other. Instead, we mimic Jesus’s opponents, with their various chaburoth for diners variously purified. Then in what sense can we call our official closed-Communion policy traditional? Recent essays deploring the Open Table appeal to ancient theologians who indeed required Baptism before Communion, and a few writers side with those for institutional reasons, against Jesus’s radical sign of biblical orthodoxy. Yet not one of those ancient Christian authorities would ever have done so. Their purpose was to follow Jesus fully, and their arguments appeal to scripture first, as every Christian theological argument must.
“Fashionable liberal” values do but support our practice. Welcome, acceptance, and openness are indeed important to the gospel but the current debate about such virtues’ rightful place within eucharistic discipline sidesteps the main point. It is as though after Jeremiah broke the pot at the garbage dump, the faithful had debated for twenty-five hundred years How God Wants Us to Recycle Trash. (Who should take the trash where? Who may receive it? Who should say what words?) Like the virtue of hospitality, recycling is important: it shows our respect for the environment and our responsibility toward Mother Earth, and may impact our chances for a human future on this planet, but recycling was hardly the point of Jeremiah’s sign. Likewise, welcoming strangers and telling them God loves them, building community, and growing bigger and more effective ministries are all fine things; moreover they yield moving stories about people introduced to Communion for the first time. Sara Miles’s book Take This Bread: A Radical Conversion18 recounts her change from atheism upon first Communion at St. Gregory’s, and how she founded a famous feeding ministry in response. Yet these noble results were not the chief point of Jesus’s sign. His chief point was: God is reconciling people who scarcely imagine how they belong together, and making peace among them—God is doing this everywhere in the world, not just in churches—and if we do not recognize what God is doing, we are headed for disaster.
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