So people become members of the Body of Christ through the Eucharist, but not members of the local congregation?

Brother Stephen, it seems to me that, at least from your description, Bauman is playing semantics, and that rather badly. There is an important etymological relationship between "bond" and "boundary." So where a community is defined by what "bonds," where those "bonds" exist the community is "bound;" and where they do not exist there is a "boundary."

I agree with you that in some sense we are all in relationship in and through Christ; but our real experience of that waits for the fullness of the Kingdom. I agree with you that we are called to expand those relationships as much as we can while we wait for God to bring in "the sheep we do not know;" but it is the relatonship that we have to establish first.

Now, the Church has always understood the relatonships to be established, made incarnate, in Baptism. Eucharist sustains them, but we do not understand it to create them. And after all, even open doors have thresholds. We know whether we are on one side of the other. Natural systems have their boundaries. Forest and field have places they touch, and even narrowly blend; but they are still distinct. Ocean meets shore, and the tides sometimes cover more and sometimes less; but we can distinguish one from another. Even though the tide rises and falls, it is false to pretend they are not different.

But, even more profoundly, I want to return to establishing the relationship. If speaking of who is in and who is out (boundary imagery) is a lazy way of defining community, coming alone and apparently ex nihilo to the Table is a lazy way of defining relationship. What needs to happen first, and what I think God calls us to, is the incarnational relationship: that is, to meet person to person, face to face, at handshake and hug distance. Communion without baptism will likely always be exceptional, not primarily in the sense of our rules, but in the sense that only occasionally will a person be interested. However, if we can truly establish the personal, incarnational relationship with the individual, if we can bring them within "the boundary" by how we "bond," then it will find expression both at the Font and at the Table.

Marshall Scott

Stephen,

Thank you for these pieces and for your thoughtful effort to frame new questions for the ongoing open communion conversation.

And Bill, Gary Paul, Pamela, and Marshall - thanks for taking Stephen's invitation.

It feels like we're listening to one another more intently and patiently than I've experienced in most of our Cafe conversations on this important topic. Maybe it's just me listening to the people I disagree with, but I keep discovering new pieces of understanding both perspectives because of how we're listening here.

Donald - sort of the message from this coming Sunday's Gospel text?

Stephen, I'm finding your getting us thinking about boundaries and bonds really powerful. I've got some important data around those two words from the early days of St. Gregory's (1978-1982 or so) which culminated in our making explicit, liturgical invitation of all present to communion. I'm thinking about how best to narrate that piece of this story and will post something later today.

Meanwhile, Marshall, I was thinking about distinguishing boundaries and bonds in processes of making a circle. If I take one of those old-fashioned Mason jar lids and use the inside open circle to inscribe a circle with pencil on paper it may look quite like a circle of the same size made with a pencil, compass and paper. I'd call the first boundary and the second bond. And I think with asking how the Body of Christ emerges in evangelism and community making and Christian formation we're definitely talking about process.

Ann, thanks for the question about Sunday's Gospel. Jesus teaching and healing on the border and with strangers. Yes. Benedict Green's commentary in the Matthew version of this - "It's not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs." is that the woman's response - "IT IS TOO FAIR, even the little dogs...etc." is never translated accurately. Her "NAI!" in Greek is emphatic "YES" of contradiction. And Eucharist? How do the Gospel words and practice about eating and food touch on the "institution narrative of the Last Supper." Interestingly Nathan Mitchell, writing about the initiatory power of the Eucharist addresses the question of making a dichotomy (another boundary) between Jesus' meals with sinners and parables about eating and The Last Supper. He insists that the major Eucharistic teaching of the Gospels appears in the meals throughout and the parables about eating and he observes (quoting another scholar) that Mark, our earliest Gospel account of the institution narrative omits "Do THIS in memory of me," and says some scholars speculate he drops the line of what's apparently already traditional (that we have in I Corinthians) because people are making a bread and wine focused interpretation of communion that was already distancing "sacrament" from Jesus' meal practice.

Yes, Mark's Gospel takes Jesus to and across the territorial and ethnic-religious boundary of the chosen people and has him giving the best he has to offer - freedom, blessing, acknowledgment of good faith, healing. hmmm.

More on bonds and boundaries - let's recall what Biblical scholar James Barr warns us of, what he called "the etymological fallacy" - words that have a common root don't necessarily mean the same thing. Some strange things happen as language evolves. Does "villain" "really mean" a country person from a village because that's how the word came to us? We discern the meaning of words from hearing how they're used, not where they came from.

I hear "what connects us" in "bonds" as in "bonds of affection" or "bail bond." "boundary" in my hearing refers to what outside us holds us together and marks the line between us and those outside who, in respect of the boundary are "not us."

Bonds has me thinking about desire, affection, and what draws and holds people in affection, hope, appreciation, wonder. I offered "bail bonds" because clearly there are leashes, shackles, and chains that have nothing to do with desire, but in the discussion of our connection with Christ and one another, I think we've got to talk about the place of desire. And Stephen, I think you've invited that.

Donald, I honestly think that arguments for CWOB/OT based on Jesus' eating with sinners are ill-considered. I've heard them used before and you mentioned the sinners in a comment just now, so even though it hasn't been a main topic in this discussion I'd like to address it.

The sinners at Jesus' table are not the analogs of the unbaptized; bad Jews as they were, they were still Jews, still part of the People of Israel. In eating with them he was crossing boundaries of purity, of respectability, of religious observance, but not boundaries of community. The true outsiders were the Gentiles like the Syro-Phoenician woman; they were the ones who were "aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world" in the words of Ephesians. Gentile is to Jew as unbaptized is to Christian. And Gentiles are conspicuously absent from Jesus' table.

What's more, it seems to me that there is a real risk in equating the unbaptized with the sinners that Jesus ate with - a risk that Eucharistic hospitality will be interpreted as condescension. "Welcome to the Lord's table. We feel free to offer you a place at the table because our Lord ate with prostitutes and quislings, thereby setting a precedent. C'mon in!" Not only is it not terribly hospitable to compare one's guests to harlots and publicans, but claiming to include them because of Jesus' example could also very easily be seen as putting the baptized in Jesus' position.

There are Eucharistic lessons to be learned, I think, from Jesus' table fellowship, just not lessons about CWOB/OT. Most importantly, Jesus' practice should prevent the exaggerated value given to guilt and sin that used to make people stay away from Communion because of a sense of unworthiness. We, the baptized, are the sinners sitting at Jesus' table. No past effort on our part won our place there, and no past sin deprives us of it.

Even though it fell out of favor in some circles in the 70's, I like the Church's use of the Syro-Phoenician woman's words in the Prayer of Humble Access. Properly understood, I think it deals pretty effectively with scrupulosity and shame in ways that assurances that "Now, now, you're not that bad" cannot. My parish uses it regularly, and what I hear each time is something like, "Quite right - your're not worthy. No one is. If you were worthy, you wouldn't need to eat the flesh of Jesus Christ and drink his Blood - the Eucharist is a gift made in mercy to the unworthy. So stop even thinking of being worthy and come up and eat and drink."

Bill,

I agree with this completely:

"We, the baptized, are the sinners sitting at Jesus' table. No past effort on our part won our place there, and no past sin deprives us of it."

And I deeply appreciate the ways you read the question of worthiness/unworthiness in Eucharistic piety - needing to address what holds us back and silence our narcissistic protestations of guilt.

What you say about the disruptive/transgressive Jews that Jesus shared table with also makes sense to a point. I do read his eating practice in terms of Isaiah 25, a prophetic enactment of God's feast that welcomes all. And I read the Book of Acts and the circumcision and kosher controversy there and Paul's mission to the Gentiles as a the logical unfolding of the work Jesus began in his own context. I assume your evidence for who was not present at Jesus' table is words like "sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel." I think it's a little difficult to argue that in the cosmopolitan, diverse mix that we have other evidence for along that Eastern coast of the Mediterranean, and with Galilee of the Gentiles, and with description of those on the edge as having made themselves Gentiles, that there were no Gentile tax collectors or Gentile prostitutes among those Jesus ate with.

I'm struck by the similarity between the bonds/boundaries analysis of the open table and that of the feminist critique, in which relationship is primary, in contrast to "membership" (in the modern sense of the word) which focuses on qualifying in order to belong. When I look across the Table as I celebrate, I'm delighted with everyone who is there, whether or not I know them, because it is not my feast, it is Christ's, although I know about inclusion from my own experiences of feeding people.
I recall the accounts of his feeding large crowds of people, numbering in the thousands (not counting women and children) and I see him extending hospitality to everyone present, without exception. His relationship with them was that of spiritual teacher and nurturer, and he spreads this inclusive table over and over again. In fact, if we can take these accounts fairly literally, it would be logistically impossible for Jesus and the disciples to "vet" everyone before giving them food--too big a crowd! Would that our crowds were so big!

I'd like to offer two different kinds of experience to this conversation. I'm going to do this in two separate responses.

First on bonds and boundaries and desire -

when we started St. Gregory's in 1978, the plan we submitted to the diocese addressed the practical and organizational question of membership in a way related to but different from "communicant status." Drawing on Tavistock Institute of groups, authority, leadership, and group resourcefulness in problem solving, and specifically the Tavistock observation that groups' anxiety about who was "in" as a member kept prompting people to give decision-making authority to those on the margins (hoping to keep them around), we said that there would be a defined membership to St. Gregory's in a definition crafted by participants in organizing and launching the church. Membership would address questions of commitment with specifics of giving time, money and declaring oneself for regular church attendance. Members (knowng specifically by a specific, declared commitment that would be defined by the group together) would be those committed to supporting the work and would make decisions shaping the church's life together.

Meanwhile the Godly gifts of the community would be shared freely. Initially we were using language of "with all baptized Christians," and I've written in Anglican Theological Review on how that shifted to inviting all to receive communion -
http://www.anglicantheologicalreview.org/read/issue/54/

For our purposes here, what I want to suggest is that there are several different places and ways that one can acknowledge clear boundaries and yes, it makes good sense to think about them when we're talking about people's commitment when they're making decision to invest the community's resources and their time to get the community's work done.

We found that people took the decision to sign on organizationally as members very seriously, after attending faithfully for quite a while and giving good support to the congregation while they decided whether they'd declare themselves ready to be members.

Please hear that we're talking members organizationally, something like a self-regulated active communicant list to determine who was shaping and guiding a mission congregation (began with a dozen members).

As I wrote in the Anglican Theological Review article referenced and linked in the post above this, St. Gregory's founding document and plan used language of "all baptized Christians" where it talked about participation in the Eucharist -
http://www.allsaintscompany.org/resource/plan-mission-st-gregory-nyssa

What shifted our thinking and then our practice was a combination of teaching contemporary Gospel scholarship to laypeople and experience of how they handled communion when they had the bit of authority they each discovered sharing communion as part of a circle of people gathered around the Table.

What we heard before we made the announcement and public welcome of all, and what we've continued to hear since, is that people made a serious personal discernment about whether to receive or not. In our missionary setting with a steady stream of visitors, our regulars were often offering communion to strangers, and the strangers regularly decided not to receive or to receive. More often than not those who decided to receive wanted to talk about it afterwards. Invariably they spoke of desire, deeply wanting to receive. And they articulated as good a eucharistic theology as most of our regulars. No one said, "It was just a little piece of bread so I decided it didn't matter." Experiences like Sara Miles describes of feeling overwhelmed at being offered Christ and then choosing to receive his presence in the eucharist were common. I hear they're also common in other missionary, new church, congregation-planting settings. We're not hearing about how we weren't or were not protecting a boundary or inviting people to cross a boundary. What we heard again and again was that people saw/hear and felt what we were declaring was true - that this was Christ's Body and Blood. And what we heard again and again was that people choosing to receive felt blessed, welcomed, touched, and in the power of something hugely greater than themselves.

Did they come back? Yes, many of them did.

Additionally, after we started making an open invitation to all to receive, baptized people venturing back to church from hurt, injury, or lapsing into apathy repeatedly said they decided to stay because of the invitation. "I'm baptized," someone would tell us, "but I have so many questions and I've been gone so long. I' coming back next week because of what I heard in that invitation. It made it so clear that this place and this communion was ready to include me." Please hear this piece of experience - through all the period of building our congregation from wholly unchurched people and lapsed dechurched people tentatively venturing back, in the very secular San Francisco Bay Area, we repeatedly heard that the baptized people who were lapsed felt the welcome to ALL made it clear that they could be part of the Body that God was making of us because of how they heard ALL welcomed to receive.

And woops, the note directly before this was the "bonds" and desire half of the two on "boundary" and "bonds." The ritual and sacramental power of what we do stirs holy a desire in people. I know that because they tell us so. It's not a boundary of wanting to avoid being rude but their desire to receive that is the bond, they say, that draws them. And it's the bonds of desire that moves the regulars to want to share communion with visitors, again not a fear of seeming rude, but a heartfelt, devout desire to share freely what they've freely received.

I do not claim that what I've offered in these couple of notes should somehow compel those who disagree with offering communion to all. But I do push to include actual experience in the conversation. Speculation and imagination about what communion could possibly mean to a stranger or how a stranger could 'get' what we're doing doesn't match my experience of thirty years of offering communion to all. People hear an invitation that includes them and making a conscientious, spiritually formed (or at least partly formed) decision to receive or not.

' I assume your evidence for who was not present at Jesus' table is words like "sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel."'

I hadn't thought of that, but now that you mention it...

No, my reasoning is based first on the fact that the Pharisees accuse him of eating with sinners. Eating with prostitutes and tax collectors would be bad enough, but had he been eating with Gentiles it would have been a much bigger scandal, with a perhaps an immediately violent reaction, rather than mere catty comments about his choice of dinner companions. And the gossip wouldn't have been that ate with sinners, but that he ate with Gentiles. As far as I know, "sinner" isn't a synonym in the Bible or rabbinic literature for "Gentile."

Further, the whole business of Peter's vision, Paul's withstanding him to his face, and all the rest of the drama surrounding opening up the Church to non-Jews would not have been necessary had they had a precedent of inter-ethnic fraternization set by Jesus during his lifetime. It was big, big news and an unprecedented move on the part of the Apostles to associate with Gentiles - it's not likely something that the Evangelists would have forgotten to mention if Jesus himself had done it.

What a wonderful set of responses. Thank you! I want to reply to Marshall because his thoughts go to the heart of what I’m getting at.

The whole key to this is establishing relationship. I think that Donald is right—that most non-baptized folks who approach the communion rail don’t do so casually. There is something serious to their intent, whether they understand that intent or not. I believe that Jesus offers himself to them—he meets them face to face, soul to soul—at the table as a way of drawing them more deeply into that relationship. That relationship only comes to full fruition through baptism—I regret that we haven’t had a chance to explore that more—so this emphasis on bonds not bounds doesn’t marginalize baptism—it rather emphasizes it not as a the crossing of a boundary but as the consummation of a relationship.

Marshall, you make the statement that Baptism, traditionally establishes our relationship with Jesus and that the Eucharist sustains it—and that is consistent with the tradition of the church. For me, what I see in the gospels is a picture of table fellowship with Jesus initiating a relationship, and baptism consummating it.

It comes back to that passage from Augustine that I mentioned in my first post, a couple of months ago:

“You have called, You have cried out, and have pierced my deafness. You have enlightened, You have shone forth, and my blindness has vanished. I have tasted You, and am hungry for You. You have touched me, and I am on fire with the desire of Your embraces.” This is the incarnate relationship that Jesus establishes in the Eucharist---We move to baptism in response when we are “on fire with the desire of [Jesus’) embraces.”

Peace,
Stephen Edmondson

Bill,

Your comments about meals and Gentiles are significant and point to some important questions.

Yes, to understand Jesus' meal practice and how it was deliberately scandalous or taken as provocative and by whom, we've got to look at how purity and fellowship were understood and practice in the several strands of first century Judaism in Galilee and in Jerusalem. Everything I've read to date presents a very, very complex, fragmented picture in Roman Israel and an extreme version of it in "Galilee of the Gentiles." As I have read Biblical accounts and scholarship the rabbis question (and who else's question?) wasn't who one ate with but whether one intending to keep the law observed the rabbinic distillation of how food was slaughtered, prepared, and served and how diners observed cleansing/washing rituals.

Norman Perrin's *Rediscovering the Teaching of Jesus* argues (compelling I think) that Jesus scandalized religious leaders by enacting their rabbinic teaching banquet with a ragged, implicit, "unclean" gathering of disciples, in other words that he dared imagine that God made the gathering holy by its welcome of all (and I hear in this a deliberate choosing and prioritizing of Isaiah 25, the mountain feast of all over John's sign of baptism).

If you're account is accurate, that the real scandal would be eating with Gentiles and that Jesus was in effect proclaiming the inherent purity of the circumcised male Jewish community (including the lapsed), I'd want to reassess.

I'm going back to sources, re-reading scholarship I knew and will check on any shift on what I learned when I was doing most of this reading 20-30 years ago.

I hope it's clear that this response comes from taking your picture seriously. I'll be back in a couple of months with some kind of piece for the Cafe, and if you contact me through All Saints Company, I'd be glad to get what I write to you ahead of posting it. I do think the distinction you've raised is important, and I hadn't heard it exactly that way in previous posts from other responders to open table who were arguing that everyone Jesus associated with were Jews (so more or less 'the baptized' in the context of his community).

Donald, I'm flattered that you're treating my comment so seriously.

A quibble. You wrote, "If you're account is accurate, that the real scandal would be eating with Gentiles and that Jesus was in effect proclaiming the inherent purity of the circumcised male Jewish community (including the lapsed), I'd want to reassess."

I wouldn't necessarily say that Jesus' observing the practice of the times as proclaiming anything, necessarily, much less a concern for purity (which seems to have been way down on his list of priorities). People do things for different reasons: an Orthodox Jew washes hands ritually before making a blessing in order to remove tumah (impurity); a Reform Jew might have different reasons for doing so, but probably isn't concerned with categories of purity much, if at all; a Christian priest does so at the altar, but not because of distinctions between tumah/taharah.

And while Paul draws connections between circumcision and Baptism, I don't think that Jesus' behavior here would be privileging circumcised males. The concern for avoiding contact with Gentiles isn't doesn't seem to be based on concerns over circumcision, since Gentile women were also avoided. If he *were* being a Jewish chauvinist, his chauvinism would probably embrace the whole Jewish community over the whole Gentile one.

The whole idea, spoken by Jesus or not, that there was still much to teach that the disciples couldn't bear right now, I think plays into this. This tells me that the early Christian community knew that the implications of what they were doing would take them much farther toward inclusion than they ever wanted to go, and that they would die a little on the inside because their very identities were rooted in boundaries and privileges. Folks, surely you all know that dying on the inside is a tough and cheerless process until it's done. Sitting here, I am thankful for this insight: that all the rest of the virtues are practiced to make this interior dying easier to accomplish and less hellish. If you practice compassion and openness already, if you only adore God and not the writings about God and so on, it will be easier to move forward. If you practice patience, it will be easier to wait on those who haven't caught up; if you practice humility, you won't put yourself above all those who still haven't budged, or haven't moved far enough for you yet. If not for these and countless other virtues, it will hard or impossible. If you are rich with stuff, including those inner decorations that are trophies of your inclusion in the boundary, then it's hard to carry all that through the eye of the needle. And so on and so on.

Persecution does strange things to communities, and in many ways some of us pine for a golden age of excitement that probably never existed. But I would say that the persecution of early Christians did damage to the Body of Christ that we're still reeling from, and haven't moved beyond. This probably includes a still secretive Eucharist, even when celebrated in the town square. The vocabulary of "holy mysteries" is excellent and evocative even today, but we are no longer a secretive sodality around a mystic table in some wealthy lady's home.

All this being said, the Eucharist very early on got the title of Sacramentum, and so inherited a quality of being a sign of loyalty, affiliation and identification for and with Christians. If this is to be stripped away, then we have to be very deliberate about this and know that this is an innovation that overturns thousands of years of accumulated power. So far, Fr. Schell seems to be one of the few voices whose work in this area - and it looks to be a life's work - seems to have the research, study and insight to be persuasive, not just a knee-jerk liberalism without caution and discernment. If more of y'all share Fr. Schell's convictions, get to work because I for one would like to see the case built more persuasively and on firmer foundations than just trusting nice people that the Holy Spirit is moving them to do this.