The following, with some modifications, is an email I sent to a new friend regarding communion. I'll let him post some of his responses/questions in the comments section:
Let me start by saying that it’s Christ’s table. He has issued the invitation. We also come as invited guests. I guess when I start from that presupposition, I think it’s hard to decide that one of us gets to say who doesn’t get to eat. My contention remains that this is a meal. Jesus ate this meal with everyone when he was here. All were welcome. By the time of Paul’s first letter to Corinth, we still see a meal setting. Unfortunately, a mistranslation of what he had in mind by “discerning the Lord’s body,” either intentionally or unintentionally, leads to a re-envisioning of this meal by the beginning of the 2nd century. Suddenly we’ve got people excluded, bishops overseeing things, sacerdotal functions, etc. The community that Christ envisioned is already in the early stage of the church we see today.
I’m a Wesleyan at heart, so I’m sympathetic with Wesley’s notion of the Eucharist as a means to grace. The meaning I attach to the meal is that Christ is present as his body, that is, the members of the church gathered together. That is what it means to discern the Lord’s body. We see him reflected in all of us: rich, poor, black, white, gay, straight, diseased, healthy, etc. Why are outsiders there? Because it was important to Jesus. I suppose there could be some mystical element involved as well: Christ is somehow present in Spirit, but I think that misses the larger point. The Eucharist is the place of invitation. Baptism is the place of initiation; that’s why we don’t invite anyone to become baptized, but we do invite them to the table as the Lord did: Who is thirsty? Let her come to the waters and drink. Let him buy bread at no cost... You get the point.
Unfortunately, this Eucharistic meal has become a shadow of what it was supposed to be. Now it’s a wafer and a thimble of juice instead of food and drink shared amongst friends at a table with a cup of blessing. The invitation to all who are hungry and thirsty has been replaced with “Let no one take this meal in an unworthy fashion.” Do you actually think Paul meant that any of us are worthy to take the meal in terms of personal righteousness? I think he meant that we failed to care for the hungry and the poor and the pariahs in our midst at those love feasts, and in so doing, we took the Eucharist in an unworthy fashion: we failed to discern Christ in the least of these. We are doing it again. By closing communion, even by limiting it to believers, we usurp the place of the One who sits at the head of the table. Remember Jesus’ words: Friend, who told you to sit here? Move down the table... Hmm...what could he have meant? The Eucharist is a shadow and a herald of the “marriage supper of the Lamb.” (In that sense it is a sacrament. I think we've conflated sacrament with ritual these days and that has led to a misunderstanding of what the Eucharist is all about, but that's a subject for the next post.) Jesus is the host. He issues the invitations. Last I heard, he wanted all to come: sinners and saints.
