Once again my friend Elizabeth Kaeton+ has
put up a challenging article. She
challenges her readers to discuss the issue of the reception of Holy Eucharist
of those who are not baptized. This is
one of those topics that is near and dear to my heart and I pick up her
gauntlet.
The Book of
Common Prayer (BCP) does not tell us anything about who and who cannot receive Holy
Communion. That is only found in the
Constitution and Canons (Title I.17.7).
I must admit I was surprised to find it in the canons but not
terribly so. It is of the nature of the
C & C’s to be about the legal character of the Church. The BCP deals with the pastoral needs of the
Church and there is not proscription of the unbaptized from reception of the
Eucharist.
An organization
or a Church has the right to determine who comprises membership. It is an important part of being an
organization. I have no problem with the
Church determining who is and who is not a member. It is a necessary aspect of maintaining order
within the organization. What I do have
a problem with is demanding that the Sacrament of Baptism be a prerequisite for
the reception of Eucharist. And I think
it is significant that the BCP does not make it a requirement.
From very
early in my catechism as a Roman Catholic I learned of the Baptism of Desire (Baptismus Flaminis), an understanding
that those who have come to faith yet die without the benefit of the sacrament
of Baptism are deemed saved by their faith.
It is an understanding that the mere desire to be baptized is enough. It
is an understanding that it is not the human action of pouring water is what
makes the baptism efficacious. It is the
act of God. With this in mind that I have often communed those who present
themselves for Holy Communion without the benefit of the initiatory rite. Who am I to determine who is worthy of Christ’s
invitation to the table?
The
Eucharist also had a similar understanding.
If a person cannot receive Eucharist for some reason, it was always
understood that others could receive the sacrament in the name of the other and
the grace of the sacrament would be upon the one who could not receive. It means that the grace of sacraments is not
bound by the outward and visible sign, but by the inward and spiritual grace of
God. In other words, God is the arbiter
of the desire for faith, not the Church.
At times
during the history of the Church, the Church needed to guard the integrity of
the Sacraments of the Church. When
Christian sacraments devolved in popular theology into magic, it was necessary
to prescribe solid theological understanding for those who found in the
sacraments the necessary spiritual support to sustain them. It is interesting that the Eastern Orthodox
understanding of Baptism is much more elastic than is that of Western
Christianity. The Eastern understanding
that baptism conferred salvation was always understood in a spiritual
context. In the West, Roman discussion
of the sacraments until the Council of Trent was a bit vague, too. The advent of the Reformation in the 16th
century drove Roman Catholicism to articulate a rather rigid and demanding
understanding of the administration of the Sacraments in order to refute the
protestant critique.
In the
Anglican Communion we have had two different understandings of the sacraments:
one catholic and one evangelical. And
although Anglo-Catholicism draws its roots from its Carolingian forbearers,
most of its heritage comes to us today from the Tridentine manifestations of
Roman Catholicism that made the sacraments almost mechanical in their efficacy. Most Anglo-Catholics eschew the evangelical understanding
of baptism that it is the result of the grace conferred in the surrender of the
believer to the grace manifested in the salvific work of God alone. But Anglicanism has always been a faith in
which both the catholic and the evangelical approaches to the sacraments have
been held in tension. In other words, we
Anglicans have been rightly hazy about our theology of the sacraments in a way
that is not only acceptable but laudable in a pre-Reformation way.
Consequently
when presented with those who wish to receive Holy Communion, I want to err on
the side of the generosity of Jesus’ life and invitation rather than being ‘protective’
of God’s grace. If we truly trust in God
to make known the efficacy of the signs of God’s presence, then I do not have
to be a watch dog.
If I were to
note that someone that I knew was not baptized was regularly coming to the
altar, as a pastoral response, I would ask them why or invite them to a class
leading to Baptism. But I do not choose
to have a ‘window into the souls of men [sic]’ as someone is making the
decision to commune with their God.
Baptism does not need to be the gateway to Eucharist.
I too am
aware that many are coming to our churches who have never been baptized. At a
recent new comer luncheon there were at least 5 who admitted that they had
grown up in no religious tradition. There are those who come to weddings and
funerals that have never seen the inside of a church and yet present themselves
to receive Holy Communion. But I will
not refuse them because we as Church need to recognize that we have brought on
this problem ourselves. By failing over
several generations to educate our members in a solid theology of faith and the
signs of their faith, we have to recognize that we now have generations of
attenders who have some really skewed sense of religion in general and
Christianity in particular.
In her book Christianity
After Religion, Diana Butler Bass shows that somewhere in the last 50 to
100 years we who call ourselves Church have promoted faith by adherence to
tenets of faith. We have invited to our
membership those who would embrace certain doctrinal points and called that
faith. If someone had some water
splashed over them, then they were baptized.
If they had hands laid upon them, they were confirmed. If they had received Communion three times
and were known to the treasurer, they were then considered to be ‘in good
standing.’ But we never inquired into the relationship they had with God. Oh yes, we taught the history of the Church
and how we had come to this wonderful place in which three-legged stools
supported their faith. And we counted
them on our parish records, but we never went deeper. We never invited them to a life of personal prayer.
We developed few programs on personal prayer or invited anyone to anything
Eucharist. We made the Eucharist not
only the ‘primary worship ’ but in most cases the ONLY manifestation of
worship. We counted all heads at Mass, but we never really talked about how
people could love Jesus. (Of course,
good Episcopalians would have never used those words—it might sound too
evangelical)
We used the
Belief-Behavior-Belong progression to gather the people to Church never really
recognizing that we had really gotten the progression wrong. The community of Faith—the Qa'hal Yaveh is
really developed first by Belonging then Behaving and then Believing. And if we are going to last in this new era
of ‘spiritual AND religious’, we must put much more emphasis on how we welcome
those who are longing for an encounter with the Holy.
Part of the
belonging has to do with table fellowship.
Jesus knew this. He ate and drank
with everyone—tax collectors, sinners, women, etc. It is at his table that people knew that they
were welcomed and loved. And when he
called them, they knew that they were a part of his family (Mt. 12:48). It is the community in worship that molds the
faithful into claiming their faith and articulating that faith.
As I see it,
the future is going to be determined by just how we invite those who seek relationship
with God. We don’t invite people to encounter
the Holy by denying the Eucharist. Jesus
never said you had to be baptized to believe in him. He just said ‘Follow me.” And I would suggest that Baptism may just be
the sign of one who has come to the place in their lives that says I wish to
follow Jesus. Sacraments need to be
signs of God’s grace, not barriers to community. Baptism should be in every Christian’s life. But it should never be a barrier to
communion.
Granted, I
come to this from the position of a pastor rather than an administrator who is
responsible for numbers that need to be reported. I come to this theology not just from my Catholic
roots but also from a type of Anglicanism that straddles fences for a good
cause. I also come to this way of
sharing in God’s holiness as a priest who recognizes that we have failed
generations of thirsty seekers by demanding the Christian jump through hoops
just to be deemed one of us. It is time
to re-think the sacraments.
Just as the
Blessing of Same-Sex relationships is calling us to re-think marriage and
blessings, so this new Age of the Unbaptized calls us to re-think what are the
signs of God’s love in the world. We
know that Christ instituted Baptism and Eucharist. No conditions were placed upon those marks of
Christ’ presence, however. How then, can
we?
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