Do We Experience the Best at Communion?

Today’s post is written by Elizabeth Sands Wise:

Jon Stock describes the connections between community, Eucharist, and hospitality in his chapter, “Stability,” from Inhabiting the Church: Biblical Wisdom for a New Monasticism (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2007). Stock points to the difficulty of welcoming the stranger to the Communion table when we can’t identify who she is: “Even in those places that are willing to undertake the weekly practice of Eucharist, it is frequently a Eucharist of strangers. . . . How can a place offer authentic welcome to the stranger and the pilgrim if all are strangers to one another? Christian hospitality suffers in the absence of stability” (109).

There’s certainly a lot of talk these days about community. In the myriad protestant congregations of which I’ve been a part, the Communion table has always been to some degree or another “open.” The bulletins—if we had bulletins—would say something like this: “All who profess faith in Jesus Christ are welcome at this table….” Or this: “All baptized persons are welcome at this table….” Or, occasionally: “All are welcome at this table….” At its best, this has the potential to be hospitality in its finest hour, welcoming the stranger into the heart of our communal life, dining with Christ during his final hours, being a servant to one another as he was a Servant.

But we don’t often experience this “best” of the open Eucharist, this place of potential community and healing. Rather than a welcoming table, it is a lonely one. (Most of us don’t even approach a “table” while practicing Communion; we sit in our pews and pass the elements without making eye contact.) But here’s the truth: We don’t welcome the stranger because we can’t. We can’t tell who she is in our midst. We are a table of strangers.

I’ve been wondering whether the Eucharist can open our eyes to the brokenness in our church communities if we allow it to. The good news, of course, is that it can also show us the wholeness of our communities. So the question, I suppose, is how can it be a conduit of healing for our communities?

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Elizabeth just recently started a blog called Texas Schmexas.  Elizabeth previously wrote a poem for The Everyday Journal 2.1, “A Simple Prayer.”