At EFM last week, we did a theological reflection on John 14:1-3. The second verse of that passage contains the familiar words, "In my Father’s house are many dwelling places". (The King James says "many mansions", which is more poetic, but was perplexing to me as a kid: a mansion is bigger than a house, so how can there be mansions in a house?)
"Many dwelling places." Reflecting on those words we thought about the welcome they imply, that there’s plenty of room in God’s house. If that’s so, shouldn’t our church also be welcoming, also have room for all who seek to enter? For example, we asked, are our Canons wrong to limit participation in the Eucharist to baptized Christians?
As so often happens with EFM, I continued to ponder these questions after the meeting was over. Our other EFM group is reading Paul’s epistles right now, so that group is also grappling with the question of welcome. The "foolish Galatians" thought that before a pagan could become a Christian, he must first become a Jew, with all that that implied (circumcision, dietary laws, etc.). Paul insisted that this was wrong, that no such ceremony was required as a condition of full membership in the Body of Christ.
I was in a particularly "Pauline" state of mind last week, because I was reading a marvelous little book by N.T. Wright, called What St. Paul Really Said: Was Paul Of Tarsus The Real Founder Of Christianity? Are we Episcopalians like the foolish Galatians when we insist that, before you can share Eucharist with us, you must go through the ceremony of baptism?
I recall when, several years ago, I invited a Jew to Communion. The occasion was a wedding in an Episcopal Church, and this young man was one of the groomsmen. After the rehearsal, he asked whether it would be proper for him to take Communion during the wedding service. As a general rule, I’m not a big enthusiast for "the conversion of the Jews", but this man clearly was not getting spiritual sustenance from the faith of his fathers. You don’t show respect for a thirsty man’s opinions by denying him a drink of water. I told him no one would object to his participating in Communion, and I encouraged him to do so.
At the time I was not aware that my advice was contrary to Canon Law, but had I known it, I doubt that it would have made much difference to me. Excluding this young fellow from Communion would have seemed to me – if you will pardon the word – unChristian. On reflection, though, now many years later, I think that I was wrong. My heart was in the right place, my motives were pure, my intention was admirable, but I was wrong.
As it happened, the Jewish groomsman did not feel comfortable taking Communion with us, and so he declined my invitation. But suppose he had done what I suggested; what would the experience have meant to him? He would have eaten a little piece of bread (or perhaps a fragment of what looks like an oversized Necco wafer), and had a sip of sherry (or whatever that parish used for Communion wine). He would have heard it recited that these were, respectively, the body and the blood of a man who died twenty centuries ago. He would not have believed that it was "really" flesh and blood – if he had believed that it was flesh and blood, he would have run screaming from the church. Being, I think, a sensitive person he would have felt that the people around him were deeply moved by the experience, but he would not have been moved himself.
He would not have been moved, he would not have been uplifted, he would not have felt himself joined in the mystic body of Christ, the community of all faithful people, because he had not come to believe what the Eucharist means to believers. Communion would have been a disappointment to him; at least it would have been a disappointment if he had expected much from it.
The Eucharist isn’t a magic potion, it doesn’t make you feel something unless it's already there in your heart. The Eucharist is a way of recalling, of making more real, what is already in your heart, and sharing that experience with others who feel the same way.
The Eucharist is a marvelous gift. It’s natural and commendable that we would want to share it with others. But just inviting someone to the rail for a taste of bread and wine won’t convey that gift to them.
My friend was unbaptized because he grew up in a different faith than Christianity. Many other unbaptized people grew up in families with no religious faith at all. And of course, there are people who were baptized as infants but, as adults, have no faith or understanding of faith.
As I’ve said on this blog before, baptism does not seem to me to be an entirely satisfactory preparation for participation in the Eucharist – not, anyway, in a church in which infant baptism is the norm. There may be many "baptized Christians" who are spiritually no more ready to receive the Eucharist than was my Jewish friend, and who get no more out of the experience. Baptism is a minimum requirement, at best. But understood as such, it does make sense.
What, then, about Christian welcome? Do we run the risk of treating our church like an exclusive club by limiting Communion to those who’ve been through the ceremony of baptism? Yes, I think that’s a risk, but one that we can avoid. We can avoid it by offering baptism to any and all who seek it. That’s our welcome to them.
We must make it clear to those we welcome that we do not regard baptism as a mere ceremony, a meaningless initiation rite. We regard baptism as profoundly important to each individual who receives it, and to the entire Christian community that witnesses and participates in it. And we should offer this profoundly important sacrament to the unbaptized – not just "offer" it; we should urge it on them – as a free gift. And then we would offer the newly baptized the Eucharist, not as a ritual that anyone can participate in just because they walked in the door, but as a communion among those who have become the Body of the Savior of the World.
This is the welcome we should offer: Welcome to full membership in the church, welcome to full membership in the community, welcome to full participation in all the gifts we have to offer.
* * *
On a closely related point, I mentioned that I’d been reading a book by N. T. Wright about Paul. Here’s a very powerful passage from that book:
The Pauline doctrine of justification by faith strikes against all attempts to demarcate membership in the people of God by anything other than faith in Jesus Christ; particularly, it rules out any claim to status before God based on race, class or gender. Any attempt to define church membership by anything other than allegiance to Jesus Christ is, quite simply, idolatrous. . . . It is by the church living as the one believing community, in which barriers of race, class, gender, and so forth are irrelevant to membership and to holding of office, that the principalities and powers are informed in no uncertain terms that their time is up, that there is indeed a new way of being human. [N.T. Wright, What St. Paul Really Said, at pp. 160-61.]
Think about that. To define church membership by anything other than allegiance to Jesus Christ is idolatrous. Barriers of race, class, gender, and so forth are irrelevant to membership and to holding of office.
"And so forth" must include sexual orientation. Having written these words, N.T. Wright ought to be at the forefront of the movement toward full inclusion in the Anglican Communion. I don’t know why he’s not, but his words provide compelling support for that movement.
Welcome to the church everyone.
8 comments:
Thanks Godfather.
I wouldn't be surprised if NT Wright does hold "sexual orientation" in that list, as would, in fact, most people with a traditional view on the subject: but sexual orientation (whether or not it is a valid category) should not necessarily mean sexual behavior. There's a difference between welcoming all kinds of people and welcoming all kinds of acts. And this is a distinction upon which even so "progressive" a mind as Rowan Williams insists.
Well, Sam, of course there's a difference between orientation and behavior. But on what basis can one condemn the natural sexual behavior of people that God made gay?
Well that's easy. Because the received Tradition universally condemns it. (Putting aside what "natural" might mean here.)
To say that people have sexual orientation is not the same as saying that "God made people gay." That is the same logic as saying that because there is sin, God made it. And as tempting as that is, I'm with St Augustine in saying that such a statement reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of what sin is -- the privation of the good. It has no being in itself. By extension sexual orientation can be disordered -- not properly ordered towards the Good (God), as with any "natural" desire. Anyway this cannot be interpreted as saying that homosexually oriented people are "bad" -- because they are good, insofar as they exist. As with all of us. We are sinful in that we lack certain goods. We sin when we grasp towards that lack, towards that insubstantial nothingness out of which we were created.
All that is a rather heady Augustinian statement on good and evil. But if we cannot condemn certain sexual behaviors simply because they are seen to be (by some extra-ecclesial definition) "natural," what can we condemn? Sin is, after all, pretty damned natural. Just because I find it easy to lie -- and want to lie -- doesn't mean that God made me a liar. "Nature" is unhelpful here because we can call anything at all "natural" because our "natural" desires are only natural insofar as they are limitless. We can conceivably desire -- and do desire -- anything imaginable. That doesn't mean all such desire is good. Our desire has to be oriented towards God -- and it is only by binding itself to what is infinite that our desire can be fulfilled. (This "natural desire" stuff comes straight from Paul Griffiths' inaugural lecture last week.) My question for you is, what is your description of sin if what is "natural" cannot be sinful?
Sam, I appreciate your comments. It's nice to know that someone is reading my posts, even if it's someone who disagrees with me.
Of course you are correct that "natural" behavior may be sinful. I don't think I said otherwise, but if I did, I recant.
But consider your own example of a "natural" behavior that is sinful: Lying. Lying hurts other people, but homosexual behavior between consenting adults who are so oriented does no harm to other people. On the contrary, prohibiting or supressing such behavior causes great harm. Where then is the sin?
I'm not seeking a debate here. I'm just asking you to think and pray about this issue.
Best wishes.
"Lying hurts other people."
I don't mean to start a debate or to belabor the point, but this statement is not necessarily true.
Consider an instance in which person A lies to person B concerning the whereabouts of person C because person A knows that person B intends to kill person C. Wouldn't that be an instance in which lying is beneficial to other people? Where then is the sin?
You're right of course, Bryan, sometimes lying is NOT a sin, because it does more good than harm ("Is Ann Frank hiding in your attic?" "No, mein Herr."). But my point is that IF it's a sin it's because it hurts people. Love between two gay men doesn't hurt anyone. If one calls it a sin, one needs a different reason for doing so.
That all sounds lovely, but it's not a Christian concept of sin because it assumes there can be some way of judging human actions abstracted from the fact that there is a God. To say that lying is a sin when it hurts people is an absurd reduction because in order to make it one needs a definition both of "hurt" and of "people," both of which are moral terms which imply one or another theology or atheology. "Hurting people" is sinful because people are creatures made in the image of God; but if the grammar of Christian faith assumes that people are made in the image of God it presumes that sin is that which distorts this image. Classically, all sexual behavior outside of marriage is such a distortion. One can argue otherwise -- and I do think that there are some decent arguments out there (probably made by Eugene Rogers and Rowan Williams, to name some) -- but if we want our thinking on human sexuality to be Christian we must take care that we do not give in to these abstract terms of civil discourse like "hurting people." One doesn't need to travel that far in the world to find that "hurting people" is not a universal self-evident moral category.
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