This talk is born from work.
I've done thinking about the practice of the Eucharist as
a reflection of one's Christology, which sounds perhaps like common sense.
But this, I found, is really only common sense within traditions that have elevated
the Eucharist to the highest point of Christian worship.
So mainly Catholics and Orthodox for the rest of us, Anglicans included.
I'm convinced that it's time to come back to the table, to have a think about the
implications of what we say we believe about the table and about Christ, to
challenge them and to see where this leads us.
And I'll highlight this undercurrent in Wesley's thought,
justified, in a sense, by the deep theological work of Lutheran robert W.
Jensen.
A quick definition before I outline how I want to approach this topic today.
What is opentable communion?
Well, the definition is a little vague.
Opentable communion is, at its most
liberal, the welcoming of literally any person to the table with no caveats.
At the conservative end.
It's the welcoming of all baptized people,
even if they're not members or have been baptized in your specific tradition.
Some folks wouldn't consider this
conservative option open at all, since it denotes a basic requirement of baptism.
But I would only label traditions that
require you to be baptized in that local church, denomination, or branch as
celebrating what might be called closed communion.
But we're not talking about that today, and nor am I going to be talking
specifically in this paper to traditions such as the Salvation Army,
who are fairly unique in its views on the Christian sacraments.
Happy to delve into that more in the question and answer time.
So in this talk, I have two goals to begin working toward.
The first is to invite the Westlands of various affiliations among us who hold to
open table communion in any sense, to reconsider the necessity of weekly
participation in the Eucharist and two, to invite the Anglicans or the
Anglican leaning amongst us to consider a fully open table communion positively.
Not only because of the way Wesley was
able to maneuver his way around the Book of Common Prayer, but because of the deep
Christological import of what I'm going to say.
So there's a sense in which I realize I've named this talk poorly.
It is indeed both for Wesleyans and Anglicans.
So the first issue that I think needs to
be covered is trying to get at an answer to an overarching question that pops up in
nearly all the literature is actually extremely important to get right.
I think our debates about the Eucharist,
or indeed, is the ritual itself just about hospitality?
In a 2007 article by James Fitzgerald that I'm going to use to frame a lot of this
argument, he's expanded this major question into three sub questions.
Number one, is it inhospitable to restrict
access to the Eucharist or to fence the table?
And number two, if the table is fenced,
what are the requirements for admission, who is to be invited?
And three, how should requirements for admission to the table be enforced?
And Fitzgerald offers what I consider to
be actually kind of disappointing answers to these questions.
But he does do the important historical work for us by trying to trace what he
calls an arc of Wesleyan liturgy in practice.
In realizing that the Eucharist is not not
about hospitality, but it is certainly significantly more.
To the first question, Fitzgerald points
to the tradition Wesley inherited from the Book of Common Prayer, with its strict
admonitions to those who would come to the table and receive unworthy, which seems to
have meant doing so without confessing sins and making restitution.
Otherwise, a participant opens themselves to quote, the increase of their own
damnation and personal entrance of the devil.
Fitzgerald does some great historical work that I don't need to rehash in
demonstrating that quote, there was considerable opportunity for variance
between the written instructions and the pastoral implementation thereof.
Interesting, Fitzgerald notes that Wesley's climate then was actually one
that did not shy away from fencing the table, yet did not want to fence it in
such a way that kept earnest parishioners away.
Other than this, Fitzgerald does not
really offer an answer to that first question.
I think Wesley actually tackles this issue effectively from a bird's eye view, though
as we'll see when we approach his second question, there's a disconnect from the
theoretical and what Wesley actually promotes.
In Wesley's sermon on the Duty of Constant Communion sermon 101.
He makes two fascinating moves.
First is his explicit critique of the
common Anglican practice, whereby parishioners rarely receive communion, the
root of which we'll come back to when dealing with question three.
The second move he makes is a little more implicit and actually resonates throughout
many of his other reflections on the Eucharist, and that is how truly
misunderstood one Corinthians eleven was among Anglican clergy because of how they
fumbled the connection between Christ and the sacrament.
And the partaker
exegetically the command of Christ to celebrate the Eucharist as often as
Christians gather trumps all other conditions for Wesley.
He says it is a plain command of Christ.
It is his dying words to all his followers.
And anyone, quote who does not receive either does not understand his duty or
does not care for the dying command of his Savior, the forgiveness of his sins, the
strengthening of his soul, and the refreshing of it with the hope of glory.
Those are intense words.
Turning his attention to all the objections to Constant Communion, wesley
does some good exegesis what it means in the context of one corinthians to receive
the Eucharist, unworthily, is, quote taking the holy Sacrament in such a rude
and disorderly way that one was hungry and another drunken.
But what is that to you?
Is there any danger of your doing so?
However worthy you are to communicate, there is no fear you're communicating.
Thusly therefore, whatever the punishment
is of doing it, thus unworthily, it does not concern you.
You have no more reason from this text to
disobey God than if there was no such text in the Bible.
So the real fear of damnation, for Wesley comes from disobeying Christ's command to
receive the Eucharist, because to not receive is to reject the mercy of God.
Though Wesley says preparation for taking communion is preferable to not taking it
at all, he notes that this doesn't need to be an overly involved process.
All the preparation that is absolutely necessary is contained in those words.
He says, repent you truly of your past sins.
Have faith in Christ, our Savior.
So I think the real answer is yes, it is inhospitable to restrict access to the
Eucharist, and I'll work this out more as we go along.
But the key point I want to reiterate here
is that this question goes two ways churches who do not offer frequent
communion are in the same camp as those who do and are overly restrictive.
To the second question what are the requirements for admission to the table?
Fitzgerald relies on Randy Maddox to note that though baptism was historically held
as the minimum requirement, wesley himself did not properly address this question.
We might assume some things, however,
based on Wesley's split with the Moravians over the way they fenced off the table.
For only those who had full assurance of
faith in Christ, wesley, Fitzgerald says, came to believe that the Eucharist itself
could be the very moment that assurance was experienced.
Most significantly, Fitzgerald points to Wesley's discourses at Federer Lane from
Sunday, June 22 through Saturday, June 28, 1740.
On Friday, June 27, Wesley actually
states, quote experience shows the gross falsehood of that assertion that the
Lord's Supper is not a converting ordinance.
Ye are the witnesses for many now present
know the very beginning of your conversion to God.
Perhaps in some the first deep conviction was wrought at the Lord's Supper.
Then on Saturday, Wesley made this even more explicit the Lord's Supper was
ordained by God to be a means of conveying to people either preventing or justifying
or sanctifying grace according to their several necessities.
The persons for whom it was ordained are all those who know and feel that they want
the grace of God either to restrain them from sin or to show their sins forgiven,
or to renew their souls in the image of God.
Even more importantly, however, Wesley
goes on to admit that, quote no fitness is required at the time of communicating but
a sense of our state, of our utter sinfulness and helplessness.
Everyone who knows there are fit for hell being just fit to come to Christ.
So there's something significant happening here.
Wesley does a very almost patristic thing
in framing his theological discussion around degrees of practicality.
In other words, he thinks in degrees of best case scenarios.
But he is entirely comfortable pushing his positions to their theological balance.
Fitzgerald says that while Wesley's table
was much more open than prevailing Anglican positions, still it was not a
blanket invitation given to all, regardless of intent or desire.
I am not certain I agree
there's a point to be made about the exclusivity Wesley exercised in
establishing class meetings and the way the Eucharist was implemented therein.
This is the most closed the table can get.
But on the whole, as Karen Westerfield Tucker points out, even by the mid 19th
century, due to disputes with the Baptists, Methodists, quote were reluctant
to concede the necessity of baptism prior to Communion.
It was only a little later that this necessity was written into stone, namely
by the Free Methodist Church and then the Church of the Nazarene.
So again, no definitive answer by Fitzgerald.
And while I hazard to give a definitive
answer myself, I think Wesley's theory is clear, even if his practice isn't, and
thus the question I will wager might be moot.
To the third question, Fitzgerald notes
that the Anglican Church tried pretty hard to make sure those coming to the table
were fit, including by home visits from the parish priest and the issuing of
tokens to folks who had paid their contributions to the Church.
And as mentioned above, the class meetings
had their own ways of enforcing eligibility.
Practically too, this particularly Methodist way of being exclusionary led
directly to the dropping of the exportations of the BCP about spiritual
preparedness from Wesley's Sunday service liturgy.
So it seems that we move in an ironic
direction, given Wesley's theological justification for openness.
The practical result was actually, by and
large a closed table, only to loosen very gradually as the years moved on and the
Methodist Episcopal groups further split over interestingly expressly exclusionary
social issues such as slavery and women's suffrage.
The unfortunate disciplinary move in these split groups is to reassert with
the BCP the tired and erroneous appeal to one corinthians eleven.
Fitzgerald's answer to this third question
is more fully elaborated upon in his conclusion that, quote it is possible,
even preferable, to simultaneously focus on extending an invitation to the table to
those not yet converted and develop more specific ways of fencing the table.
Essential to this approach is a renewed emphasis on the Lord's Supper as a means
of grace, not just a memorial of the death of Christ.
Here he relies on Jeffrey Wainwright to restate his position.
To limit the scope of the invitation is poor hospitality.
But to extend an invitation that fails to give the truth of the new life to which
one is invited is likewise poor hospitality.
In the end, he favors the assessment of
Tom Odin, who states that, quote A community with no boundaries can neither
have a liturgical center nor remain a community of worship.
To eliminate the boundary is to eliminate the circle itself.
The circle of faith cannot identify its center without recognizing its perimeter.
Fitzgerald concludes that the quote goal
of fencing the table is not to create a boundary that is impermeable.
Instead, we delineate one that is clearly
marked with an open invitation to all to enter the boundary's.
Intent is less to keep people out than it
is to mark a threshold that all are invited to cross.
I might ask at this point, is this not
saying the same thing as what Odin was talking against?
If a boundary is fully permeable, what is it dividing?
A simple answer to Fitzgerald's third
question, then, might be you can't enforce any particular requirements.
But of course, the third point becomes
moot if you remove all boundaries from the table.
But even if you don't, we might add
what are we actually afraid of when someone receives the Eucharist?
It seems to me that the obvious major
potential worry for Anglicans stemming from these points is that it's dangerous
to start from phenomenology and then work backwards to doctrine.
Anglican doctrine seemed pretty clear.
Wesley knew the 39 articles finalized and included in the BCP in 71, and definitely
knew articles 25 and 28 on the sacraments through which the witness to the Eucharist
as an effectual sign of grace helped elucidate that the supper of the Lord is
actually a sacrament of our redemption by Christ's death, insomuch that to such as
rightly worthily and with faith received the same.
The bread which we break is a partaking of the Body of Christ, and likewise the cup
of blessing is a partaking of the blood of Christ.
In the words of Article 28,
the English reformers were taking a strong stance against Catholic transfigurational
mysticism by emphasizing the importance of personal faith when receiving the
Eucharist, with dire consequences to those who do so recklessly.
Such a large emphasis was placed on this personal examination, however, and such
harm was caused by associating financial contributions with participation in
worship that even what mystery remained in the Anglican perspective on Christ's real
presence stopped holding sway in the minds of parishioners.
The result is that even Anglicans stopped offering frequent Eucharistic services.
What we see today with weekly worship only regained momentum in the mid 19th century,
with an emphasis on the assurance of God's grace for salvation.
And only by the mid 20th century did
weekly Eucharistic services again become the norm.
And this is where we bring in our friend Robert W.
Jensen, perhaps too little and too late
for this talk, but hopefully in a way that spurs further thought for those unaware.
Jensen was a loser and theologian, passed away just a few years ago.
He's mainly known for his two volume Systematic Theology, and his theology
takes very seriously the place of the Church and her sacraments in the
trajectory of the biblical narrative of history.
Most interestingly, perhaps, is the way
Jensen identifies the sacramental Church with the risen Jesus Christ.
And I fear that Wesley's practical fencing
of the table via the establishment of societies and classes and bands, which led
to centuries of continued misunderstandings of one corinthians
eleven paralleled by Anglicanism's weakened Eucharistic theology together
miss the most amazing aspect of the Eucharist that Jensen brings to the fore.
Not only that it acts as a grace that
remits sins, but that it is that which connects us to the person of Christ as the
gathered church in a real way, what we might call an ontological way.
In an essay that is helpful for situating
what the Eucharist is about in a Christological sense, wesleyan theologian
John Drew calls us to resist reducing the Eucharist to just one aspect of its
timeliness, or the way it reflects just one office of Christ, which is excellent.
He uses a handy diagram, which you'll see in the slide there, to show how different
traditions get pigeonholed into one or two particular points of emphasis.
Where I think I must depart and agree more with Jensen, however, is
in how Drury notes that those quote who assert that Eucharist makes the Church
highlight only the past tense royal work of Christ.
He says by instituting the Eucharist, Christ constitutes his Church,
establishing the apostolic community as his body on earth.
But jury wants to say so much more than that.
So he sort of leaves that point as is as simply one option of reductionism.
And I think
this sort of view greatly influences the way actually many evangelical Protestants,
especially those in the Wesleyan tradition, view the Eucharist.
But I want to assert with Jensen that to say that the Eucharist constitutes the
Church actually encapsulates all these areas on the chart.
I would argue that this constitute of
activity is an appropriate way to think about the connection between Christ and
those who participate in the Eucharist and in fact, provides the Christ a logical
justification for the open table whereby those who are so inclined to celebrate the
Eucharist join with Christ in a very real way, baptized or not.
This not only reflects the open hospitality of Christ's life and work, but
also the sheer mystery of what the Eucharist is.
In Jensen's words, the quote church
assembly is the body of Christ, that is Christ available to the world and to her
members, just in that the Church gathers around objects distinct from herself the
bread and cup which are the availability to her of the same Christ.
This means that to a certain extent Drury
is right that we cannot pigeonhole ourselves into a section of that chart.
But in reality the whole chart is subsumed.
It is because the Lord has come, but nevertheless is yet to come, in the words
of Jensen, that the Church's life is sacramental.
Jensen highlights how many Protestant
traditions veered from any sort of fool and viewing of the Eucharist with the
power of Christ Himself, such as, we might say, Wesley, allows for in the way that
they, quote, substituted the faith of the individual for the power of the Church.
Jensen offers a correction here.
Interestingly, in the middle of a discussion on resurrection, by implicitly
insisting that we read One Corinthians Eleven in light of One Corinthians Twelve,
Paul says unequivocally that you are the body of Christ.
Jensen unpacks this quote we are the one
body in that we do something that can equivalently be described as sharing in
the body of Christ and partaking of the one bread.
In the context of these passages, there is
no way to construe body as a simile or other trope.
That does not make much of Paul's arguments.
So Jensen is saying, in Paul's language, somebody's body is simply the person, him
or herself, insofar as this person is available to other persons.
What this means is that the Church,
according to Paul, is the risen body of Christ.
She is this because the bread and cup in
the congregation's mitts is the very same body of Christ.
So when Paul is saying in One Corinthians 1129 that the congregants failed to
discern the body of Christ, he's talking about both the sacrament and the group
gathered around the sacrament at the same time.
Now, there's a tricky bit to navigate
here, and something I admit I'm still thinking about.
Jensen generally assumes a chronological priority to baptism here.
First we are baptized into Christ quite literally.
Then we renew our bodyship, in a way through Eucharistic participation.
It would perhaps be too far a stretch
then, for Jensen to say that it is possible for a person to truly be Christ's
body in the Eucharist without first dying and rising with Christ.
However, I'm willing to take a risk on a Wesleyan reading of Jensen.
Insofar as the Eucharist is Christ's
availability, it is so to the world as he says.
This must mean
that it evinces the convenient grace with which Wesley sees things that are, by
their practice, if not their very nature, sacramental.
Would it then be fair to say that perhaps
reading Wesley through aquinas the fact that justification and forgiveness of sins
are found in the sacrament of baptism through faith might mean that the
experience of Christ raw and not through mere symbolism through the Eucharist,
might be that very thing which ignites the faith of the believer?
Is our constraint of chronology too simple
a metaphysic for whatever it is God is doing in these sacraments?
That might be the case.
To sum up, there are a couple of major
points I can restate as we make furtive glances across the aisle at one another,
Wesleyans and Anglicans and all the rest, which eventually bring us back to some of
the finer areas of applicable reflection on One Corinthians Eleven and Twelve.
What does it mean to take the Eucharist unworthy?
Does it have to do with one's own personal
understanding of what's happening in the Eucharist?
What are we to do with considerations of unworthiness and sin?
Or the book of common prayers and joinder
that quote as the benefit is great with penitent hearts and living faith.
We receive the Holy Sacrament, so is the
danger great if we receive it improperly, not recognizing the Lord's body?
Finally, what are we to say about baptism in light of all this?
First, to Wesleyans, a varying denominational ilk, for communion to truly
be open in any sense of the word, it must be available.
This point bridges not only theological issues but indeed practical ones as well.
It doesn't matter what your handbook says.
Just because you're mandated to celebrate at least once a quarter with Wesley, I say
there's nothing saying you can't celebrate more often.
And in fact, there seems to be a louder voice saying you should.
The Eucharist is the rehearsal of our uniting with Christ.
I can think of no better jumping off point for a discussion on, say, Christian
perfection than by starting with the sacraments.
The real hurdle is not the theological for Weslings, I think, but the pastoral.
How do you treat the topic of the Eucharist in your church?
What opportunities lie before you as you
face a potential onslaught of but we've never done it that way before.
Second, to Anglicans, I have to pose what might be more difficult questions, perhaps
theoretically, but that get to the root of our explication of First Corinthians.
I'm not usually one to engage in what a
baptism, but there comes a corollary question related to baptism.
What is it the baptism actually does for a
Christian if we allow that it has some power to forgive and save?
Might we also concede that the Eucharist has, as well as Wesley thought?
Which is to say that if we are able to
undo faulty exeges as the first Corinthians eleven and now twelve which
has traditionally been held as a reason that partakers of the Eucharist at least
need to be baptized what is left but praying for the power of
the Holy Spirit to use the Eucharist as both the grace bearing impetus for union
with Christ and the opportunity for that union itself?
Or as Charles Hefling says, quote, an
opentable invitation could constitute an acknowledgement that those who accept the
invitation may well be cooperating with the pervenient operation of grace in
response to a drawing on which the Church may not presume to set boundaries.
But here we have practical considerations as well.
The Anglican Church has long supported communing with other Protestant groups,
the history of which I don't have time to mention here, but when was the last time
an unbaptized person attended a Eucharistic service at an Anglican church?
And, well, maybe we could just stop there and was at the very least invited to come
forward with hand over heart to show desire to participate?
How many priests are actually telling folks how to do that?
How do we make our liturgies instructive, even leading folks toward baptism,
as we would hope and truly taking the missional question seriously?
What are we to say to those who sense the
Spirit and feel drawn to participate but are turned away.
See, in practice, I don't actually know a priest who would do that.
So why are we not thinking more thoroughly
about the theological justifications for allowing it?
In a short essay on Jensen's sacramental theology, jeffrey Wainwright points to the
connection between Wesley and Sacramento Humidity and Jensen's radical
Christological presence in and with the Eucharist as the truest evidence for what
John and Charles together expressed doctrinally in Hymns on the Lord Supper, a
volume to which, no doubt some of you were surprised, I haven't yet referred.
There resides of this gem him 81
that I think encapsulates the possible marriage between Jensen and Wesley's on
why I believe opentable communion is not a thing that should worry us.
And I'll use this as my concluding remarks.
The final verse he bids us drink and eat imperishable food.
He gives his flesh to be our meat he bids
us drink his blood whatever the Almighty can to pardon
sinners, give the fullness of our God made man.
We here with Christ receive. Thank you so much.