FACEPALM

from Midwest Conservative Journal by The Editor

Reason #899,754 why liberal Anglicans are bad for your blood pressure: the Rev. Dr. Gary Nicolosi, rector at St. James Westminster Anglican Church in London, Ontario, believes that for two reasons, the Church ought to give free bread and wine to anyone who wants it. The first reason is evangelism:

How, in our multicultural and pluralistic society, can our churches be places of hospitality if we exclude table fellowship with the non-baptized? This is not an academic question. In Canada, a growing number of the population is not baptized. Included are people from different religious traditions or people with no religious affiliation at all. Quite likely, some are our grandchildren or great-grandchildren, whose parents neglected or refused to have them baptized.

How can the church effectively minister in a post-Christian world where a significant percentage of the population is not baptized? Some Anglican churches are attempting to meet this challenge by becoming open and inclusive faith communities, ready and willing to support people in their spiritual journeys. They understand that the Anglican tradition has never been content to adopt a sectarian mentality, to insulate itself from culture or to refuse to connect with an unchurched population.

Open communion increasingly is seen as a way to build a bridge between the church and the unchurched. If people are “spiritual but not religious” as several sociological studies indicate, then the desire for transcendence experienced in sacramental worship may well draw them to church.

You know, you people really shouldn’t bang your heads on your keyboards like that. You’ll wear them out. And you’ll need to buy a new keyboard.

But does Nicolosi really believe that people will flock into Anglican churches simply because they can get a little free bread and wine there? Apparently so, since he seems to be some kind of high-church leftist Pentecostal.

We now live in a post-modern world that places heart over head, feeling over thought, intuition over logic and image over words. “We have a generation that is less interested in cerebral arguments, linear thinking, theological systems,” observes Leith Anderson, author of Dying for Change. Instead, they are “more interested in encountering the supernatural,” he says. It is by an experience with the supernatural that people enter into community. It is through community that people come to faith.

Actually it’s by the word of the living God that people come to faith, Nicolosi, you nit…aw, screw it. What’s his other stupid reason? Hospitality or something.

One of the most powerful witnesses of God’s inclusive love is the welcoming table, so prevalent among southern black churches in the United States. At these fellowship dinners, held on church grounds, a large meal is prepared for anyone who might come: rich and poor, black and white, stranger and church member. In the days of the segregationist south, when legal measures were ruthlessly enforced to prevent different races from eating together or even sharing a water fountain, the welcoming table was a powerful witness to God’s inclusive love.

Might not the Lord’s Table in Anglican churches be understood as a welcoming table? Is it possible for us to see the altar as a symbol of inclusion rather than exclusion? Anglican biblical scholar John Koenig and reformed theologian Amy Plantinga Pauw have argued separately that the most pervasive image in the Bible is the banquet table, with God serving as a generous host. Salvation is feasting in the kingdom of God, where people will come from north and south, east and west to sit at table together. In Isaiah 25:6−9, for example, the banquet is a symbol of salvation, with the invitation extended to “all peoples” and “all nations”—not just Israel.

This table fellowship is at the heart of Jesus’ ministry. Jesus welcomed all kinds of people to his table: rich people, poor people, good people, sinners, tax collectors and prostitutes, you name them, and they came to eat and drink with Jesus (Mt. 9:9−10; Luke 14:12−23;19:5). United Methodist Bishop William Willimon has said that Jesus’ open invitation “manifested the radically inclusive nature of his kingdom, a kingdom that cuts across the barriers we erect between insiders and outsiders, the saved and the damned, the elect and the outcast—barriers often most rigidly enforced at the table.”

Know what? If you invite me to dinner at your house and all you give me is a little bit of bread and a sip of wine, you’re a lot of things but hospitable isn’t one of them.

If hospitality is what Communion is all about, then for the love of Whatever You Personally Perceive God To Be, do something about the bread. Since worship happens on Sunday morning, maybe your parish can buy five or six types of pizza; all bachelors know that pizza is perfect breakfast food.

Or if that’s a little too plebian for you, provide sections of pita bread, fancy crackers, things like that, along with various dips and spreads to go with them. French onion dip, those layered taco dip things, various tapenades, etc. And then let people have as many as they want.

A sip of wine? I don’t think so. Try a glass. A bottle per pew, maybe even two. And good stuff too, a really nice Beaujolais or a Haut-Médoc maybe, not that cheap crap you can buy in the supermarket.

That’s hospitality.

Oh and Gary? True, Jesus did eat with sinners all the time but it was at other people’s tables, not His. But when He instituted Holy Communion, the thing you’d like to share willy-nilly with anyone who walks in the door, He had eleven heterosexual men with Him. There wasn’t a woman to be found.

The comments following Nicolosi’s stupid article are interesting. Here are six of them:

I agree with Garry. As an Anglican who was, in the past, refused Communion at my relative’s Roman Catholic church, I know the pain of exclusion. Subsequently, at another Roman Catholic church, the pastor, knowing I was Anglican, made a point of inviting me to receive Communion. This powerfully affirmed my faith. Since that experience I have become increasingly inclusive to visitors who come to the Communion rail. I wonder, who are we to judge the worthiness of a person seeking spiritual nurture?

I am glad that we are having this discussion. I have found it to be confusing when one talks about the openness of God’s love and grace and then shifts to the “but” whereas communion and the sacraments are reserved for… My family is largely Roman Catholic and I as an Anglican Priest find it difficult to know where and in which parish hospitality will be leveied re my recieiving of Holy Communion. We’re are one family but still struggle to have “one table” wherein all are welcome to partake.

A further theological argument that makes a lot of sense to Me deals with the relationship between the sacraments of baptism and eucharist: Baptism is a once-for-all event in which one makes a lifelong commitment to walking in the way of Jesus; Eucharist/Communion is the repeated nourishing and nurturing of our relationship with God. In order to choose to be baptized, we need to be nourished as fully in the faith of the community as possible. Hence, Eucharist nourishes us as we journey towards making the lifelong commitment of baptism. This argument dovetails neatly with the postmodern preference for experience, the notion that belonging is foundational for believing.

There is some serious disagreement among Anglicans about the nature of the Eucharist. Most Anglo-Catholics believe that we receive the very body and blood of our Lord in the sacrament. We partake of these mysteries as an affirmation of the creed we professed just before the mass. It is also for the forgiveness of our sins. Now what is the place of open communion in this? We are just showing how hospitable we are to non-Anglicans? I think the Roman Catholic church though wrong on many levels and on many things has it right on this one.

If the question is: “To receive holy communion, must the receiver be baptized?,” could not simple answer be “yes,” and then we not be so concerned what comes first, the eucharist or the baptism? For both sacraments, cannot one lead to the other?

The article very much comes from a place that over emphasizes the meal dimension of the Holy Communion… If it’s a meal, and one really wants to be hospitable, why not a full glass of wine (or a couple) and a loaf with cream cheese or some such thing! The article is emotionally appealing but beyond that, the author hasn’t been honest about the wide reaching ramifications of such a dramatic departure from historic and contemporary practice. And really, you’ve got to be kidding if you think such a change will pack the pews.