Most Saturday nights in Georgia, those strange and intense three years I juggled seminary and the pastorate, I would go to Mass at the Catholic church. I'd wear jeans and a hoodie and savor the thrill of being a totally anonymous worshipper in the pew. Yes, it's a holy and precious privilege to preach and lead worship. But it is also wonderful to connect with God without worrying about my sermon. It is a holy privilege to relate to people as a pastor. But it is also restful to occasionally lay that down, and simply be a person in a pew. In that town, that could only have happened in a Catholic church on Saturday night. Ironically, that priest resigned to be a hospital chaplain, and left on the same weekend I left my churches in Georgia to move to Missouri, perhaps in part a holy wink from God to me that Father Patrick and I were really more alike than different. In the life to come we will approach the Table together, Catholic and Protestant, male priest and female pastor, or so I told myself each time I approached the Catholic table for a blessing instead of the Eucharist. But there was a line from one of their liturgy that has stuck with me-- "May this sacrifice we pray, O Lord, advance the peace and salvation of all the world." And that part I believed, that the sacrifice at my hands the next morning at United Methodist altars in tiny country churches really would advance God's plan of liberation.
As United Methodists, we hold that this is an open table. And so I would wince as I watched Catholics on Saturday night receive. I know a lot of other mainline denominations have open tables in practice, but we do both in practice and in official doctrine. Everyone is truly welcome to come receive, regardless of social status, income level, employment, or anything else. Communion teaches us and reenacts for us that God's grace truly reaches for everyone. It therefore witnesses against the world's systems that exclude, divide, and oppress. It teaches the church to be sure whatever we're doing Monday-Saturday, it's also an open table, welcome to absolutely everyone.
Communion leads to correct missiology, to liberating missiology. Communion is a meal, not a program or a charity project. It is fundamentally relational, binding individuals together into church through this common sacrament-- at the breaking of the bread in the United Methodist traditional Eucharistic liturgy: "We who are many are one body, because we all partake of this one loaf.". It teaches the church to make sure that whatever mission we engage in with the world, it is loving, and relationship oriented. Anonymous handouts and paternalistic programs that dictate and manipulate have no place in the church's missiology. They contain nothing of the intimacy of the Communion table.
Communion is also a promise of God's provision. We come empty and hungry to simply receive grace that we cannot earn. It is a promise for the poor that God will feed them and care for them. It is a promise for those of us who are materially wealthier, and seek to be in ministry with the poor, that God will make it possible. I must not and cannot romanticize it. Being in ministry with the poor, with the working class, really is hard. Those years in Georgia were beautiful but difficult, standing with people in crisis after crisis, trying to make church happen with almost no resources. There were times I thought I couldn't keep going. But every time I received the Eucharist, whether in my churches or at weekly chapel in seminary, or received my weekly blessing from the Catholic priest and imagined myself receiving the wine and wafer, it was a reminder-- Jesus is enough. Jesus will feed my people. Jesus will feed me. Grounding my spirit in the Eucharist began to save me from patronizing delusions of grandeur. I can fix nothing and nobody. All I can do is offer Jesus, bread made holy not by my hands but by the Spirit. The Eucharist also saved me from paralyzing anxiety. I am not useless. I can offer Jesus, the bread of heaven.
The Eucharist is also liberating because Jesus' flesh is liberating. In seminary, I spent a summer doing ministry on the streets of Asheville with the unhoused. I felt guilty for leaving my churches in Georgia, but I needed to learn more about my interest in liberation theology, and I needed to explore it in a different context. But in the middle of that summer, I got pretty sick. I was too sick to do anything but lie on the couch and read James Cone. I don't agree with everything Cone says but reading him is like drinking wine, sharp and pure and beautiful. And addictive, really. It was perhaps providential that I had nothing to do but read him in that time and space. I did not know what lay ahead of me after graduation, but I knew whatever I did it would have to involve serving the God of the oppressed, to quote the title of one of Cone's books. Central to Cone's theology is that Jesus is black. Not literally-- Jesus was Middle Eastern, not African (although his skin and hair surely looked more like a black person's than like mine). But Jesus, a homeless Jew born in poverty, murdered unfairly by an unjust state's worst tool of torture, is the Word to the world that God is on the side of the oppressed. And of course, the cross ends not with murder but with resurrection! The resurrection is God's promise to liberate all the oppressed, like Jesus. Unlike Cone, I do believe the cross and the empty tomb are also about the forgiveness of sins, and life beyond death, and sanctification, and so many other things. But the narrative of liberation is an unmistakable part of the Christ event.
And in the Eucharist, we enter into the story. We join the feast of the resurrection. We participate in God's plan to redeem broken bodies. Our own, and all the ones around us.
I think that modern Methodism has lost its historic focus on both the Eucharist and liberation theology. Wesley insisted on community with the poor as a means of grace, and though he would have been a millionaire because of his popular writings, he lived just above the poverty line because he gave so much money away, and taught his followers to do the same. Wesley also taught the duty of constant Communion, trying to receive it every day. In fact, Methodism as an institution, rather than a para-church movement loosely affiliated with the Church of England, began because there were no priests in America to give American Methodists Communion and baptism. Perhaps one of many reasons we have lost a focus on Eucharist and liberation is because we have lost the relatedness of these things.
If Eucharist is all about me and my relationship with Jesus, let's just nix it and sing another song. But if Communion is also about God's plan of liberation for the oppressed, then I have a sacred duty, a wondrous privilege, to participate. If liberation theology is just Monday-Saturday stuff, it becomes easy to ignore and easy to write off as a liberal agenda rather than essential to the character of God.
No, we need both. We need to follow Jesus, from the backwater town of Nazareth, who served the poor and the outcast on the other side of the tracks in Galilee, whose humble meal of bread and wine enfolds us in God's plan of liberation.
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