"What we must recognize is that to be Christ’s body in the world is to be Christ’s broken body, whose boundaries stand open to the outsider."

Well, yes. That's exactly why we baptize. The Church's boundaries are, as it were, fluid (pun intended).An argument for Communion without Baptism grounded in the assertion that "the Church can be itself only as it only as it embodies in its liturgy precisely this welcome," seems to see the Church's liturgy solely in terms of the Eucharist, and ignores the Church's welcome in Baptism. It represents a partial view of the liturgy at best.

I'm bemused by arguments I've read lately for CWOB that attempt to link the practice with ministering to the oppressed (which this article seems to hint at toward the end), as if the two classes of (A.) the unbaptized and (B.) the societally marginalized, were coterminous. They aren't, of course - the unbaptized is just as likely to be a Junior Leaguer or an attorney as they are likely to be homeless or an undocumented worker. And, of course, the opposite is also true.

And I point out the potential straw man set up in the insinuation that proponents of CWOB stand in opposition to those who favor "keeping the company of its adherents pure," as if purity were the argument upon which opponents of the practice relied. There may be some who do see the Church's traditional sacramental discipline as keeping the Church pure, or as "protecting God," but these are not the arguments that one normally hears from opponents; on the other hand, they are frequently put into the mouths of opponents of CWOB by those in favor of it.

Bill,

Not asking you to agree, but does the argument of the character of the company make more sense to you if you hear 'prepared' or 'ready and accepting' in place of 'pure'? The question I hear isn't about 'them' - outsiders, but about all of us, unworthy, unprepared and, all transformed in the presence of a Body of Christ which/who is among us not simply 'being the body of Christ' but doing or becoming Christ all in all. I think of a couple of George Herbert poems, and right now the line 'such a feast as makes a guest.'

Donald, as a member of the CBS, I'm all in favor of preparation before Holy Communion, but preparation as such is not my main issue with CWOB/OT (willingness and acceptance may come somewhat closer). I think the issues that separate us are rooted in what we believe happens in Baptism and the Eucharist, and the nature of sacramental grace itself. I'm a little reluctant to expand on that, for fear of making the comment thread about CWOB/OT in general rather than in terms of the issues raised in the article, but I can if need be.

This is excellent! Yes, I agree the emphasis should be far less on the eucharistic elements and more on the community.

I particularly appreciate: "Farwell’s point carries some persuasive weight, but an ironic implication of his argument leaves the Church, in its central and constitutive meal, betraying the Kingdom’s mission of unconditional welcome as a way precisely to highlight and uphold the mission."

Gary Paul Gilbert

"the Kingdom's mission of unconditional welcome"

Unconditional welcome, or acceptance, or some other synonym seems very popular in progressive Episcopal talk. What exactly is this supposed to mean?

Bill,

I mostly don't use language of "unconditional welcome" or "acceptance" or "inclusion," but I do know there's a range of pastoral and theological writing that does. Pointing the same direction but sticking closer to scripture and narrative-shaped images, I'd suggest (as Stephen Edmondson has elsewhere) that we're talking of something like the father's embrace of his returning prodigal son in Jesus' parable, or what Will Campbell called "the most radical passage in the Bible" - "God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation" (II Corinthians 5:19 RSV).

Another telling of it that I love (and which uses the word "welcome" and expounds the rest in narrative form is that George Herbert poem that begins, "Love bade me welcome."

Or maybe, “Welcome one another as Christ has welcomed you.”

What stands out for me in this essay is this quotation from James Farwell -

“... the logic of participation in the Eucharist, whereby we are nourished as members of Christ’s unconditionally welcoming body, demands that only those who have embraced this reality, committing themselves to this welcoming, should participate in it. Allowing those who have not committed themselves to Christ’s Kingdom vision to participate in the Eucharist belies the integrity of the mission.”

This reads to me as an excessively romanticized description of what happens when a baby is baptized. When I was baptized on Christmas Eve of 1948, I was about ten weeks old. Was I committing myself to the reality of God’s new kingdom? No so much. I was blessed with parents who were themselves committed to that new kingdom – but shoals of babies were baptized in the Forties, and the Fifties, and the Sixties, and onward, just because baptizing babies was the right thing for Christian parents to do, or – for more earnest believers – because it kept the babies from going to Hell. So, should they happen into an Episcopal congregation today, they are “qualified” to receive the Eucharist.

The APLM statement on font and table [here: http://www.associatedparishes.org/images/The_Huron_Statement.pdf] similarly dramatizes what was, for most of us, an unremembered moment in infancy:

“It is precisely the offense of the cross that confronts us in both Baptism and Eucharist: we submit to being “crucified with Christ” as we descend into the water; we “proclaim his death until he comes” as we eat his body and drink his blood. As my eyes are opened by the revealing spectacle of the cross, I see that my whole world is judged by it, and my very being comes to a dead-end. Thereafter, the only future open to me is the new being offered to me by the risen Lord who holds out bloodied hands in forgiveness and peace. In Christian tradition, baptism is the definitive way to accept that offer.”

And again:
“Baptism is the defining moment in one’s life, incorporation into a new sacramental identity and vocation for the sake of the world, from which there is no turning back...”

Uh-uh. Nope. Baptism was just what respectable Christian people did with their babies. Perhaps as adults we’ve had these moments of profound conversion of heart – but, except in anecdotal cases, they were not attached to sacramental Baptism.

“Restoring a baptismal ecclesiology” strikes me as yet another dramatic, romantic term, part of a idealized soteriological algebra that probably is as successful as most attempts to organize the Holy Spirit. Parishes can go for years without a Baptism. A friend told me recently that, while she was on retreat at Gethsemane Abbey, the people were asperged each night at evening prayer. Making “Remember your baptism!” a part of every Eucharistic liturgy strikes me as a good way to get Baptism back into the life of the Church as a possibility, making it more ordinary and intimate. Not the Big Huge Event Of Your Lifetime – just something simple, like bread and wine.

Pamela Grenfell Smith
Bloomington, Indiana

@Donald - It seems odd, though, to put so much weight on one parable (the Prodigal Son) while ignoring others (the Wedding Garment, the Talents, or the Sheep and the Goats - which isn't really a parable, so sue me). Ditto privileging one verse from II Corinthians, when Paul's writings on balance do not give the impression that union with Christ is exactly no-strings-attached.

It strikes me as a half-truth at best. God accepts us where we are, but that doesn't mean that God will let us stay right there. To invoke an extreme example, God reaches out to murderers, but there's no question of their continuing a career in homicide after accepting that welcome. George Herbert’s difficulty in that poem is a sense of unworthiness arising from guilt over past actions, not an intention to continue doing the things that made him feel guilty. There’s no way for us to earn God’s welcome, but saying that is very different than saying that it’s impossible for us to make that welcome ineffective.

@Pamela – The part of the Huron Statement you quote seems to be about the central place of Baptism in the Christian’s sacramental life, while your objection deals with its place in the participants’ memories and intentions. They’re not the same thing. To use a bad analogy, Baptism is the most important point in my religious history the same way that being born on American soil is the most important point in my political history. Both had real consequences. That I don’t remember either event, and that those consequences weren't my parents' primary concern, doesn’t matter. You could argue the wisdom of baptizing babies, but I don’t think you can argue from an Anglican stance that baptizing them is ineffective.

As for parishes going years without a Baptism, I’m having trouble imagining the circumstances under which a healthy parish could go years without one.

Bill,
You’ve offered a number of comments that push us deeper into the topics I address. I’d like to address all of them—and I will make a couple of notes. The phrase “unconditional welcome” is Farwell’s, not mine, though I think in fairness that he pulled it from other writings on the Open Table. And yes, my thinking does privilege the parable of the prodigal son as a lens through which we can understand much of the rest of scripture—I privilege it because I find it coherent with the overall scope of the biblical story and Jesus’ Gospel….

What I would like to hear more about, though, is your understanding of grace and, more specifically, the grace of the Eucharist. This post builds on my previous post which was precisely about such grace—it’s nature, power, and purpose—so I think that you can comment on this without straying too far from the scope of the series of posts that I’m offering.

One note I will make---in my previous post, I write about the grace of the Eucharist as both a reconciling grace and a sanctifying grace---that while it is a grace that is unconditional and loving (Jesus simply gives himself to us at table and on the cross) it is also a grace that changes us.

The point of my understanding of the Eucharist is that Jesus does change us at table, so shouldn’t we invite all of us there to experience this grace of change.

(One final note---when I speak of the Eucharist as God’s gift of self to the alienated and broken, I mean to all of us—homeless and housewife, clergy and lay, churched and unchurched alike. While I have seen in many Open Table congregations powerful ministries to the socially and economically disenfranchised, the thrust of my comments are directed to the spiritually disenfranchised, and I find that to be a status shared by humanity as a whole.)

Sorry--I don't know how to get my posts to sign my comments to sign my name. That last comment was by Stephen Edmondson

just put your name at the end of each post - like you did here ~ed.

Bill,

I really liked everything Pamela said about baptism and I like this response of yours as well:
"...to use a bad analogy, Baptism is the most important point in my religious history the same way that being born on American soil is the most important point in my political history. Both had real consequences."

I'm glad for Stephen's response on the Prodigal Son, but would add that I wasn't proof-texting with that or II Corinthians, but responding to your question about what a particular language meant. I do think that Jesus' teaching in the Gospels and the calculus of following and integrating Paul's eschatology, 'being in Christ,' and 'Christ all in all' lead to a point of God's universal embrace of humanity and all creation. I'm fully aware that this universalist strand parallels another different strand in New Testament and patristic thinking and teaching.

And on repentance, the Gospel as I heard it as a child and young person was very, very clear that only our full and adequate repentance gained access to God's forgiveness and we heard a lot of preaching challenging us to scrutinize our moment of repenting our sins and accepting Christ to make sure it had been sincere, real and authentic. That mindset haunted me through seminary and pushed for a kind of scrupulosity (and anxiety and provisional guilt) that made me as frightened (and resentful) of God as Martin Luther before he'd grasped God's grace. And the moment I heard Jesus in the Zacchaeus story in Luke inviting the sinner to feast with him BEFORE any sign of repentance, when I heard "Donald, come down, I'm going to feast with you," so Zacchaeus and my repentance were a spontaneous expression of love and gratitude and not the condition of blessing and communion, I mark that moment about a year after I was ordained priest as my real conversion.

Dr Edmondson, thank you for responding to my comments, and for clarifying the use of “unconditional welcome” and the unbaptized/marginalized issue. In my defense regarding the second, I have read defenses of CWOB/OT that specifically made a connection between the societally marginalized and the unbaptized – one post here at the Café used an undocumented worker (IIRC) and a small child as examples of the unbaptized.

It seems to me that the only way that you can privilege the Prodigal Son in terms of Eucharistic practice is by ignoring other parables that historically have been understood to have some bearing on the subject. I’d be very interested to hear how the Wedding Garment figures into your understanding, for instance.

I've identified five concerns I have with the practice of giving the unbaptized Holy Communion. Just to be extra tedious, I've numbered and labeled them...

1. Purposes of the Sacraments - Different sacraments do different things. The Eucharist is not how we become members of the Body of Christ – that happens in Baptism; the Eucharist renews, reinforces, and nurtures a relationship that already exists. Giving Holy Communion to the unbaptized makes no more sense to me than giving them sacramental Absolution or ordaining them would.
2. Commitment - The targets of CWOB/OT most often mentioned are seekers who intensely want communion with Christ but who, for some reason, cannot or will not seek Baptism first (if ever). The stated reason for this is usually an unwillingness to make the commitment that Baptism represents – as if Holy Communion were some sort of commitment-free test drive. I don’t think that the Church has ever taught that Holy Communion is a no-strings-attached hook-up, though, and don’t see why we should start now. If the Church teaches that participation in the Eucharist carries very definite expectations of commitment for baptized Christians (and I think it does), it doesn’t make any sense to lead the unbaptized to think any differently.
3. Fetishizing - Sacramental grace is not magic, but CWOB/OT seems to treat it that way by inviting everyone present to take Holy Communion. “Everyone present” is not limited to the sort of earnest seeker I refer to above, but could easily include casual visitors with no more exposure to Christianity than the first 20 minutes of a weekday Eucharist (to which they may or may not have been paying attention). I have read defenses of the practice that suggest God will supernaturally break through any possible ignorance or lack of interest on the part of such communicants and turn their hearts. That’s not our ordinary experience with receiving the Eucharist, of course: Christians who happen to make a careless Communion don’t usually have important, positive spiritual experiences; I know I haven’t. Expecting someone to be zapped that way, as it were, seems to treat the Eucharist not as a sacrament but a sort of fetish. Not every unbaptized person who receives Holy Communion has a Sara Miles experience.

I’ve read accusations that opponents, in not inviting the unbaptized to communicate, actually deny them contact with God - as if the physical reception of the Eucharist were necessary for that. That sort of insistence on the physical reception of the Sacrament as necessary for contact with the Divine strikes me as another fetishizing of the Eucharist and (as a glance at the BCP’s Communion of the Sick would show) a pretty unAnglican one at that.
4. Balance - Proponents often seem to send mixed messages about the Eucharist. That is, statements about God zapping the nonchalant communicant with sacramental grace are reserved for answering objections to the practice, while the invitation itself almost invariably speaks only in terms of table, meal, and hospitality. Yes, the Eucharist is a shared meal. It’s not only a shared meal, though, and framing it solely in those terms presents a false picture of the Sacrament to the intended recipients of the invitation.
5. Disappointment - Christians don't expect every Communion to be a profoundly moving experience, and know (or ought to know) that sacramental grace is not dependent on "spiritual experiences" or emotional transformations. There's no reason to suspect that the unbaptized communicant knows anything about this, though; they might very well expect that eating the Body of Christ and drinking his Blood would necessarily be accompanied by some intense mystical experience. I worry that if that doesn't happen (which I think is more than likely) the person will be disillusioned, think "There's nothing to that, then" and resume their seeking someplace else.

I don't pretend to think that every single person I've ever offered the chalice to as an EM has been baptized, nor do I find that particularly troubling. I don't pretend that, in exceptional cases, God cannot zap the unsuspecting, unbaptized communicant and effect a conversion. I don't pretend that very extraordinarily, there might be a situation in which a priest might encourage an unbaptized person to receive the Sacrament. Using mistakes, the miraculous, or the extraordinary to frame sacramental norms, however, seems like a very bad idea.

"might *not* be a situation in which a priest"

I'm sorry not to have included this in my previous comments...

The assertion that "[w]e must be wary of the attempt to define our communion through the clarity of our boundaries, for these inevitably tend to exclude and become, themselves, oppressive" seems problematic. Is this in fact true? Do we really find that we ourselves experience such boundaries as oppressive? Is the fact that religions with very clear boundaries - Islam, Judaism, Sikhism, Hinduism, Parsiism, or even individual Christian confessions like Eastern Otthodoxy, the Armenian Church or the LDS - see us as falling outside those boundaries really oppressive? Does the refusal of groups like the Druze, who not only regard me as an outsider but reject the possibility of my ever joining their community, really harm me in any way?

Bill, Any identity necessarily excludes. Cat is not dog, says structural linguistics. The question is how much to exclude.

The prodigal son is a much more popular parable than that of the wedding banquet. One could say each passage is equally inspiring or that some passes really are better because the community has found them more helpful. This would be discernment. Then there is the parable of the dishonest steward. That one could inspire some people too.

The parable is a very open genre and can be read in different ways. The father who welcomes the son back need not be allegorized as God. If one sees him as any old landowner, a question would be how he made his money, as William Herzog says in his book Parables as Subversive Speech: Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed.

Gary Paul Gilbert