One of the issues that The Episcopal Church
will be discussing at General Convention in July is “the Open Table.” In other
words, we are reflecting on whether we should continue to specify that only
baptized Christians can receive the Eucharist, or whether we invite everyone
present to come forward and receive Christ’s Body and Blood. I have
experimented with different kinds of invitations to the Eucharist here at St.
Thomas, and I tend toward defending the open Table. It seems clear to me that Jesus’
radical hospitality in all of our Gospel accounts should not be ignored by the
Church who seeks to follow in his footsteps. But this is a complex issue, much
too complex to do justice to in one sermon. I also understand the people who
say that having an open Table damages our concept of baptism and changes our
understanding of Church. If we are going to change our practice, they point
out, shouldn’t we be able to defend it theologically first? Is it OK to fling
open wide the gate around the Altar without a “deeper,” theologically-based
reason than the desire to welcome?[1]
I was delighted to find that today’s
parables in Mark’s Gospel, both the short, strange one about the seeds that
grow without tending, and the well-known one about the mustard seed, speak to
this question. Our parables today are not just nice little pieces of
encouragement about the spread of God’s Word or about the hope that great good
will come from small beginnings. Today’s parables are meant to open us up to
the reign of God. Like both baptism and the Eucharist, they are meant to change
our relationships to God and to each other. As parables, they both put us
before different sets of jarring images, images that do not go together, images
that force us to look at things differently.
In the parable of the mustard seed,
we have Jesus comparing God’s mighty reign with an invasive shrub that would
have been considered “unclean” in any self-respecting Jewish field. Moreover,
that invasive shrub is then compared with the great cedar of Lebanon referred
to in several texts of the Hebrew Scriptures, a tree that represents Israel,
God’s chosen nation, who will magnanimously shelter the other lesser nations of
the world in her branches. Jesus is therefore telling us that God’s Kingdom is
somehow like an illegitimate, tainted, invasive, common bush replacing the
strong, proud, special tree as God’s place of welcome and refuge.[2]
It makes me wonder: What is our Cedar of Lebanon that Jesus wants to transform?
In what do we find our identity and security and pride? In our liturgy? Our
music? Or even our baptismal theology? Divine shelter and growth will be found
elsewhere, and while this growth is now hidden in something so small that you can barely see it, it will burst forth and take over, says Jesus in our parable.
And in the same way, in the parable of
the Man Casting Seed, we have fields unregulated by human hands, fields that
produce grain purely by God’s grace, like the untended fields of the Jewish Sabbatical
and Jubilee years. Yet mixed in with those fields of grace, we have a reference
to God’s language of apocalyptic judgment from Joel, about the “Day of the Lord”
when Isaiah’s peaceful plowshares are beaten back into swords and God judges
the nations in a final harvest, with sharpened sickle in hand. Just as Jesus
turns the proud Cedar of Lebanon into a scraggly bush, in this parable, Jesus turns
God’s presence of violent judgment into God’s presence of abundant grace.[3]
What is our image of God’s judgment that Jesus wants to mold into grace? Did
you know that the pastors of Protestant, Reformed churches used to give out little
Communion tokens only to morally upright, faithfully-attending members? One
could come forward to receive Communion only if one had a token to deposit
in the hands of the Elders. We don’t do that anymore, of course, but such an
attitude would certainly look like the well-ordered fields and the harvest of
judgment that our parable describes. Could our insistence upon baptism also be serving as kind of an intangible coin and an orderly barrier to God's action in the world? Could the open Table, then, be a field
of grace, producing fruit for a harvest that we do not control or understand?
Author Nora Gallagher tells a story
about a time when her ex-mother-in-law was dying. She had been divorced from
the woman’s son in her early twenties, and she had not kept in touch with the
family. The day after the mother-in-law’s death, however, Nora’s former brother-in-law
called to ask Nora, a well-known Christian author, to speak at the funeral.
As you can imagine, Nora was very hesitant to walk into such an awkward
situation, but something pushed her to accept the invitation. It turned out to
be a wonderful moment of healing and grace for all involved. In writing about
the experience, Nora contrasts “the world of propriety, rules, and regulations,
what is done and what is not done, lines that are drawn to keep people out … a
world of sticking to principles” with a world of grace, a risky world of
vulnerability and invitation and joy and welcome. In the world of propriety,
she would not have been offered, nor would she have accepted, what turned out
to be a grace-filled invitation.[4]
Our parables, too, show us such a world in which grace is stronger than
propriety, in which messiness is no barrier to God’s presence—indeed messiness
and a certain “letting go” are the way into God’s presence.
I had a day-dream this week that
sprung up like a seed, I don’t know how. In my dream, there was a little
Episcopal church where the priest didn’t like finishing all of the wine out of
the chalice after every service. Since the wine had been blessed, it was holy
and was not to be poured down the sink like old Coca-Cola that had lost its
fizz. Instead, the members of the Altar Guild carefully opened the stained
glass window in the Sacristy and poured the left-over wine out onto the ground.
Sometimes it splashed against the bricks in a messy way that worried the Altar
Guild ladies, though. Visiting priests sometimes frowned at this barely
acceptable practice. Sometimes there were broken pieces of bread, too, or
wafers that had gotten stale or damp, and they were put out the window and out
onto the ground for the birds to eat. Day after day, service after service, tiny bits
of holy bread and small sloshes of holy wine were returned to the earth right
outside of that window. It was, despite a certain lack of respectability, a
peaceful, ordered, simple act, done without reflection and with great respect.
One Easter, the children were having
an Easter Egg hunt, and a couple of five-year-olds were poking around outside
that Sacristy window looking for eggs. Down in the grass, they saw something
that looked hard and round, like a cement egg, so the children kicked at it
with their shoes and then dug at it with their hands. Quickly realizing that it
wasn’t an egg or a prize, they ran off in search of more fertile ground. The
little stone mound, though, kept growing, somehow getting taller and taller
every morning. Finally, one day the lawn service company reported that, as they
were cutting grass, they found what looked to be a miniature bird bath under
the sacristy window. They reported it to the Building and Grounds Committee,
but the Committee had bigger headaches to deal with than little birdbaths in neglected
corners of the property, so no one did anything about it.
One day, the rector was walking
through the Meditation Garden and was shocked to see what looked just like dozens
of baptismal fonts bursting up through the lawn outside of the Sacristy window. It was a sight that was
almost obscene, reminding her of those dozens of toilets on the lawn in the
movie The Help. “Who could have done
such a thing,” she wondered? If she had
been strong enough, she would have hauled those errant fonts down to the
basement. Fonts don’t belong outside, where they can get covered in bird
droppings and where anyone can mess with them. What if those skateboarding
teens use them as an obstacle course?! In a tizzy, she went inside to call the Wardens.
By the time that the Wardens could
get there, the fonts had multiplied and filled with wine, wine that was
spilling over the sides and watering the ground which seemed to be producing
more fonts as they looked on. What should the Rector and the Wardens do? Should
they gather the people outside and cry with one voice, “It is right, and a good
and joyful thing, always and everywhere to give thanks to you, Father Almighty,
Creator of heaven and earth?”
Or should they try to control the chaos?
Or should they try to control the chaos?
Decide which world you want to live
in, says Jesus.
[1] See
Stephen Edmondson, “Opening the Table: The Body of Christ and God’s Prodigal
Grace,” Anglican Theological Review
91:2.
[2] Bernard
Scott, Hear Then the Parable (Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 1989), 386-87.
[3]
Ibid., 370-71.
[4][4] Nora
Gallagher, The Sacred Meal, (Nashville:
Thomas Nelson, 2009), 82.
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