In Defense of Open Table

It's Maundy Thursday. What better time to reflect upon the practice of communion?

Recently, a lot of my seminarian friends on Facebook have been posting articles opposing the practice of Open Table in the Episcopal Church. For those of you who don't know what that means, Open Table is the practice of permitting everyone--even the unbaptized-- to receive the Eucharist, instead of restricting communion only to baptized persons. Currently, the canons on the Episcopal Church reserve communion for the baptized, so practicing Open Table communion is currently not sanctioned by the church. However, it is being considered at General Convention this year, and there is a chance that we may strike the sentence in the canons that prevents the unbaptized from receiving the body and blood of Christ Jesus.

I have, I must confess, been a fan of this idea from the get-go, and so has my home parish. My initial acceptance was pretty knee-jerk: Jesus practiced radical hospitality, so therefore we must practice radical hospitality. In fact (and here I think I can reveal to you a not-so-secret, since the priest who performed our ceremony retired immediately afterwards and isn't in any danger of getting into trouble), Open Table was practiced at our wedding, nearly four years ago. I didn't even request it-- our priest, a dear friend and excellent pastor, was just responding to the situation as he saw it, which was that the vast majority of the people present at the service were not Episcopalians, and that most were not even Christians. He saw that these people, most of whom had not be baptized, felt moved by the sight of two Christian people being joined together by the Holy Spirit and wanted to be a part of that sacred moment. It was a good response, I think-- not just pastorally, but theologically.

I have read the theological arguments against Open Table (or, as most opponants call it, "Communion Without Baptism"), and I do appreciate and respect a lot of the thinking behind it. And I agree that, even though I think priests need to feel free to respond to certain situations accordingly (just like at our wedding), Open Table should not be made a part of the canons until we've mulled it over for awhile. I'm not sure, even as a supporter, that we're ready to move here quite yet. I guess I'm a typical Episcopalian in that I think we need a few more commissions, committees, and studies on the subject before we even propose to make such drastic changes.

But even though I respect many of the arguments put forth by the opponants of Open Table, I simply don't agree with most of them. I agree with a few, but I prioritize certain values over others, and quite frankly, I prioritize the values put forth by pro-OT arguments more than I prioritize those expressed in anti-OT arguments. As with most heated religious issues, both sides are, to an extent, correct. Each side simply holds different things dear. Everyone has to decide which correct statements are more important.

I believe that the value inherent in practicing Open Table is more important than the value inherent in restricting communion to the unbaptized.

Baptism as a Prerequisite For Understanding Communion

One of the anti-OT arguments I find most frustrating is that of baptism as a prerequisite for understanding communion. The argument, put forth by James Farwell in the Anglican Theologican Review and by Derek Olsen in his incredibly condescending post on Episcopal Cafe, is that baptism must come before communion because without baptism, we cannot understand the Eucharist. Eucharist without baptism is "grace without cost," Olsen insists, and then even more dramatically: "It represents the offer of intimacy without commitment, love without cost and that, right there, is the crime--for the cost is Christ."

Okay, fine--we'll go with that, for a moment. If you believe that baptism is the "context" of communion, so to speak--if you believe that one cannot come to the Eucharistic table without having been "warned...what awaits [you] at the table," as Olsen says, then we have a lot of work to do.

Because we obviously can't have young children taking communion anymore. I think Kathryn Tanner's rebuttal in the ATR says it best:

"Moreover, while baptism before eucharist, and eucharist as empowering mission, broadly conform with long established church practice, [this] particular understanding of the logic of participation is hard to square with the realities of church life and practice. The idea that only the informed and the committed should participate in the eucharist conflicts with the current practice of allowing infants to take communion. Are babies sufficiently informed and committed by virtue of their baptism?...[this] logic of participation in the eucharist is also in danger of wildly overestimating the degree to which baptized Christians—in any period of church history—are committed and informed…the idea that you “already” know what the Christian life is all about before you get to the table…oddly suggests that baptism somehow completely or finishes the catechetical process. And it completely downplays the capacity of the eucharist to inform and shape the character of Christian life through participation in it."

I'm sorry, but I think, if we want to work under such assumptions, we need to eliminate infant baptism. You can't seriously believe that a five-month-old baby is more committed to the Christian life than a 55-year-old man who began exploring his faith five months ago. That's just...ridiculous.

If you prefer, we could go in the other direction and make confirmation a requirement for Eucharist. That would make more sense. But of course, then we can't let kids have communion, which is not going to please a lot of parents, lemme tell you. If you want a fun PR moment, let someone catch a priest denying communion to their cherubic seven-year-old son. And that still doesn't solve the problem of what to do when baptized Christians from other denominations--ones that don't do confirmation--come to visit. Do we deny them communion, too? What about people with severe mental handicaps, who can't fully understand the theology behind the Eucharist? What about people with severe Alzheimer's, who understood it once but remember nothing now?

Eucharist and the Last Supper

James Farwell argues in the ATR that we must reject the assertion made by scholars of the Jesus Seminar that "the synoptic accounts of the eucharistic meal and the account of 1 Corinthians are retrojections of later ecclesiastical practice into the earliest period," and I do agree with him here. (How could I not, when he's quoting John Koenig? I mean really.) I don't think it's impossible that our Gospel accounts of the Last Supper might be historically accurate--and even if they're not, they still might be theologically reasonable. As Farwell says, "Given his practice of preaching and symbolizing his hope for an inbreaking kingdom of God through meal images and practices, it is not unreasonable to imagine that [Jesus] might have gathered with his disciples in the last hour, under the shadow of the impending culmination of his conflict with temple leaders, for an intimate meal that focused, in symbolic words and actions, the vision of his hoped-for kingdom."

I think that's fair. What I don't understand is the leap from "meal with the disciples" to "meal that is intended ONLY for the disciples, even if non-disciples happen to be there."

Farwell explains that, in light of the Last Supper and the fact that Jesus ate it with his "initiated" friends, "...it is reasonable for us today about who participates in that meal and whether they have committed themselves to the vision that animated Jesus. Such a practice is not inhospitable, but simply focused for a certain 'audience.'" But to my mind, that parallel between the disciples at the Last Supper and the baptized Christians in the "audience" of the church doesn't work because at the Last Supper, there weren't any non-disciples present, either. We don't know how Jesus would have reacted to a non-disciple who wanted to partake.

I don't really see how the Last Supper indicates that Jesus wanted this meal to be a symbolic service only for the baptized. According to my lexicon here, the word "disciple" in Greek is "mathetes," which means "learner" or "pupil." It does not mean "initiate." It does not mean "official member." It means "learner." It means one who is learning, who is in transition. A disciple is not necessarily one who is marked and set apart by the one he/she follows; it is one who simply begins following.

Since we don't have any evidence that there were non-disciples hanging around at the Last Supper, and even if there were, there isn't any evidence that Jesus turned them away from the table or warned them not to participate, I don't think we can conclude that communion as a reenactment of the last supper pressuposes the exclusion of the unbaptized just because the people who were there were probably all baptized. I mean, really, all the disciples (at least the Twelve) were men; do we then pressuppose that the Eucharist is meant to be shared only with men? From what we know of Jesus, if one of his disciples had his kid brother tag along, wouldn't Jesus have shared the meal with him, too? I'm having trouble imagining Jesus looking into the face of a disciple's unbaptized friend or cousin or son and saying, "Nope, sorry, come back when you're baptized."

John 15:15 has Jesus telling his disciples: "I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you." He says this after communion, not before. It was sharing the meal and listening to his words that made the disciples Jesus' friends, not their baptism.

One of the reasons I have always loved the Episcopal Church is because it is liturgically intentional. The pomp and circumstance actually all means something; we don't do it because it's pretty, we do it because it is meaningful to us.

But at a certain point, I think we sometimes forget that theory is much less important than reality. It's fine to think we mean one thing, but if the message that is being sent is an entirely different message than we mean to send, we need to re-evaluate what we're doing, period. The bottom line is that, for me, attempting to imbue a ritual with a particular specific meaning is less important than changing people's lives through Christ. And the fact of the matter is that not everyone's path to Christ is the same. Not everyone's journey with God begins with baptism. Everyone's life is different; we need to be visionary enough to recognize that, just as some babies are born breech, some people may just come into the Christian life backwards, as it were.

The whole point of "radical hospitality" is that IT IS RADICAL. It's hard to be radical when you're always just following the rules, when you keeping doing things one way because that's the way things have always been done. The whole point of radical hospitality is that it challenges assumptions about who is "in the know," about who "belongs." Open Table does that. And no matter what we decide to do, I'm glad and grateful that we've at least taken the time to think hard about what these things mean to us, about what baptism and communion and community are in the Episcopal Church.