Episcopalians don’t only focus on what we believe about the Eucharist. But how we get there, what we find, and dealing with what we have learned.
[Note: this is an early draft of a paper I presented last week.]
Before I start, there’s one annoying bit of housekeeping I’ll put right up front to make things easier, OK?
The Episcopal Church is in communion with the Church of England. This makes us part of the worldwide Anglican Communion, the third largest affiliation of churches in the world. The difference between a Communion and a Church is significant, but also beyond the scope of this talk.
So, for the sake of shorthand, let us merely refer to the Episcopal Church as our local branch of the Anglican Communion, which originates in the Church of England.
The Episcopal Church has the most open communion of the traditions at this table, which means we allow anyone baptized with the historic trinitarian formula (of being blessed by Father, Son, and Holy Spirit [or Holy Ghost]) to receive communion at any of our churches.
So in practice, we welcome most Christians to commune with us.
To understand why this is the case, let’s do a little time traveling, shall we?
Into the Time Machine
Imagine it’s the middle of the 16th Century and the King of England has asked you to come up with a way of doing church that doesn’t change your current practice or core theology at all. What is different is that now you’re in charge of all the churches in the country.
Protestant and Catholic.
[Oh, and we’ll just cut out references to the pope and Rome. No biggie, right? {wink}]
And within your borders you have warring factions with both religious and national identity; because it isn’t just England, but Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. Identities are mixing, boundaries are forming, wars are raging and you are responsible for keeping the whole thing together as part of the small-c catholic (which means universal) church.
What do you do?
I mean, let’s assume in this hypothetical that you can survive the battles for the throne and the wild swings toward Protestantism and Catholicism. Archbishop Thomas Cranmer who wrote the Book of Common Prayer didn’t. But let’s say you got lucky.
Responsibility
It’s easy to blame kings and queens and patriarchs and popes for their guidance of the church. They become easy scapegoats for the violence of their Christian followers. And it’s also easy to blame the people for succumbing to the winds of tradition and culture.
But the crucible of the moment and the weight of an empire is on your shoulders to end the fighting, build unity, protect the church, govern the people, proclaim the good news, and build the church of tomorrow from the ashes of the past.
So, good luck with that.
It’s easy to speculate what your convictions would tell you, but what do you do when the wrong side is right and the right side is wrong; the right side is right, but for the wrong reasons and the wrong side is wrong, but for the right reasons; the right side is wrong for the right reasons and the wrong side is right for the wrong reasons. Oh my gosh, my head is gonna burst.
Everyone is tainted. Blood isn’t just on everyone’s hands, it covers everyone’s vestments.
What do you do?
Let’s come back home now. You don’t have to be the Archbishop of Canterbury anymore. Thank God for that. It’s a thankless duty to sit in a thankless seat.
But it is important to see how the Church of England is formed first as a universal national church and second to maintain an inherited theological and liturgical identity. Which meant it was constantly facing choices and ultimately compromises for the sake of unity rather than singularity of conviction.
So we take for example the heart of the Eucharist debate between Catholic and Protestant (which I trust Pastor Sutton will gracefully cover) about real presence. To make the church a bigger tent we continue to ensure that Catholic and Protestant theology is present in the prayer we know as The Great Thanksgiving.
So for the sake of unity, we make sure both the memorial and real presence are invoked every time. This doesn’t ensure unity will happen, but we start from a place of common communion.
So this preference for unity isn’t just about calming the fires and ending the conflict. We seek unity above stating our deep theological conviction. This is the order of priority.
This has often meant that in comparison to our brothers and sisters throughout the faith, we have a tendency to not take a position or to weakly state our theological convictions. But, as our most significant theologians, including Richard Hooker and Paul Tillich, have revealed: that unity and generosity of theological conviction is our great theological conviction.
A Practical Theology
Practical theology is theology because it is the direct living out of our convictions.
So, we don’t just want to get together at a table and pray and share with only those people who agree with us as a pre-condition. We believe that getting together to share with people different from us leads to unity.
Therefore we turn on its head the need to define what is “really” happening in the Eucharist to allow the Eucharist itself to have the sacramental power to create unity in the midst of diverse convictions.
So the only thing which would preclude anyone from receiving communion would be their personal piety or the piety of their tradition. But that isn’t a matter of our inclusion or exclusion of them, but their conviction not to receive from us.
So the practical theological conviction of opening our communion to those who are baptized in the Trinitarian formulation AND inviting people to come to the table from a variety of backgrounds AND doing so without checking people’s membership cards at the door has the Episcopal Church wrestling once again with its theological convictions in light of our present moment.
[Which also happens to be what Episcopal theologians do for fun. This stuff may make the people frustrated, but I’m telling you, for many Episcopal priests and theologians, this is our idea of a good time. If this, therefore that.]
Avoiding the Slippery Slopes
I’ve often described it this way. Episcopal theology is like watching your Catholic friend slide down a slippery slope. Then your Protestant friend laughs at the first friend while he himself slides down a different slippery slope. And then looking around, only to discover bunches of new friends all exploring new slippery slopes! And you’re holding on for dear life saying “None of those ways gets you to where you want to go!”
Which, by the way, totally explains why we can never change our lightbulbs. We need a committee to talk it to death.
But we’re constantly trying to find what being fully welcome means AND what being fully community means. Much like the nature of Christ as fully human and fully divine, it is our deepest conviction to be both: open and spiritually connected to one another.
And many of our theological convictions compromise that reality.
The Big Tent Revelation
So to do that, to be a big tent populated by varying theological convictions, embodying a common table with common prayer shared in common speech, with a commitment to our sacramental theology rooted in our common tradition, it means we need to use our God-given brains to figure some of this junk out for ourselves today.
And the most fascinating thing about our brains is that the best way to learn something is to do it. Over and over again.
So I am convinced that the only way to understand communion; what is happening to you, to your neighbors, to the community gathered, to people receiving communion at that very moment all over the world is by doing it. Over and over again.
Imagine learning to play guitar by a book and only ever getting to play it after you’ve been tested on your book learning and then the church has the audacity to suggest that all learning came in the reading of the book and the passing of the test. You can’t do until you fully know. But you can’t fully know until you do.
Every new encounter I have with the divine through my experience in the world teaches me about communion. And vice versa.
What Would You Learn?
So what does this actually mean for you if you were to walk into St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church this Sunday morning? What would you learn?
We will welcome you to join us and encourage you to participate in the service. And when we get to communion, I’ll invite anyone who feels called by God to eat with us to come forward with joyful expectation.
Some may cross themselves to receive a blessing. But if I don’t know you, I’m not going to deny you. And while I have the power to restrict the sacrament, I’ve seen how doing so also creates sin.
Of course, then we would have to figure out how to restore community.
But that’s what we do. Over and over again.
This was an early draft of my presentation as part of a local Symposium on the Lord’s Supper. I gave the final draft of the presentation, One Table, last week. The Symposium gathered presbyters from Roman Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran, and Episcopal traditions to speak about communion.
In many ways, this draft I’m sharing today would have fit better into the Symposium. Especially in light of the other presenters’ focus on closed communion. But after spending a couple of days writing and rewriting this one, I concluded showing our theology was more important than telling.
Particularly in light of how thorny questions of inclusion actually become in real life. Even within our own communion.
And, as a matter of course, some of this delightfully came out directly during the Q+A at the end. So even though I didn’t present this specific material, I used a bunch of it anyway.
You can watch the whole thing here on Facebook.