Jesus himself could walk into many churches and be ignored, and, indeed, is forgotten and missed when we fail to engage the stranger. Inviting people to the feast is not about making my table more attractive than yours, and it's not about eating only with your friends. It's about transforming this world so that the party goes on all the time, so that the banquet feeds everyone. It's about tikkun olam--"the repair of the world"--and all creation living in shalom. - p. 63
God is revealed in relationships. God's own self is about community. God is the one who created us with the freedom to choose to enter community. God is not about control. We don't have to be in community, but relationships are the only place we're going to learn what wholeness, holiness, or salvation is really about. God draws us into community, invites us, even lures us, but God does not pull strings to get us into relationship, and God does not compel us or shame us into it. - 69
Call me a radical, but I know that God's table should be an open table. I always feel a bit put off, when attending Mass at Gannon where I teach, because the Roman Catholic understanding of communion is that it is the Communion of the Roman Catholic Church that is being affirmed in participation in the Eucharistic liturgy. To receive is to make an absolute affirmation of full participation in all parts of that faith tradition. Therefore to be a participant, one must be able to say that they are in communion with the Bishop of Rome, a.k.a. Pope Benedick XVI. When they ask that those who are not Roman Catholic please not receive, they are doing so with an ecclesiological theology that has a particular understanding of the word "communion."
I can explain it...theologically. But I can't understand it in Jesus Christ. Nor can I agree with our own Episcopal Church view that one must be baptised using the Trinitarian form ("In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit"). While attending Holy Eucharist at the National Cathedral during Epiphany this past January, they invited everyone...meaning EVERYONE to the Lord's Table. Full participation, regardless of where anyone was on their faith journey.
We are a tradition with many gates, and many of them come from Holy Scripture. "No one comes to the Father except through me." "Unless you be baptized of the water and Spirit, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven." And somehow we become gatekeepers, in our sundry traditions, of how we allow those to enter into our liturgies and participate in our worship.
++Katherine begins her next unit, "FUNNY PURPLE SHIRTS: The Church in the New Millenium," with challenges to clergy about how we celebrate servanthood and respond to God's call to invite others to God, especially those who have been shunned or neglected by our two-thousand year old Christian tradition, and with challenges to all of us to enter into community with others who we may not normally relate.
It is exactly what we as the Episcopal Church have done for two centuries, opening our doors to the marginalized and making ministry a possiblity for all who are called to a holy life of leadership and service. It is why we're in trouble with many of the more medieval (not necessarily meaning less intelligent but certainly meaning pre-Enlightenment) theologies of the conservative Christians who want to drive us out of the mainstream. We are a place of the understanding not just of grace, but of the radical, unrestricted, ungated grace of God in Christ bestowed on all of God's creation. It calls us to a holy life, both clergy and laity, and building relationships with all of God's holy people.
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