Oh my, we have quite a busy day here today! There’s the Blessing of the Backpacks. I’m so excited for all you kids starting a new school year. Are you ready? Parents, how bout you? Also, this is my last Sunday before my sabbatical begins. You will be in great hands while I’m away. Mo. Eliza will be here, along with Rev Michelle, who lives here on our campus with her family. I’m so grateful to both of them.
For my part, this will be the longest I’ve stepped away from being a parish priest in 25 years, and I’m curious to see what that feels like! I know I’ll miss you all. I have plenty to keep me busy and a lot of books. You’ll enjoy having other clergy around, and I’ll be back with you in Advent at the beginning of December, which will be here before we know it.
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Inspired by today’s Gospel lesson I thought back this week to sensitive dinner arrangements I’ve been a part of, times when I’ve been memorably placed.
My husband and I used to be guests for Easter lunch at the home of a “distinguished resident” of the Hudson Valley. After about 3 years there was no mistaking that I, as a member of the clergy, always got one of the best seats at the host’s table with whatever exciting guests she managed to bring up from the city. The host of those lunches was of the generation where you always put clergy at the main table. Of course you never seat spouses together, but Andrew somehow always got placed at the table furthest from the host--he called it the Kids Table (not actually kids, though he might have preferred that). He always took it graciously … until we got home!
When I started my ministry I used to do a lot of weddings on the weekends. Back then I didn’t understand the bride and groom invite you to the reception to be polite, not because they want you there. I spent a lot of time at half-empty tables in dimly lit corners before I figured that out.
Where we sit, where we’re placed, is a sensitive issue. I want to think I don’t really relate to this passage and the human weakness for rank and place that it calls out, but I do. We all do.
Even the church isn’t shielded from this. There’s an Episcopal Charities Dinner every year at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and I’ll confess I’m always curious where they’re gonna put St. James. Will we be in the front near the bishops’ table and the people from Rye? Or will we be towards the back where the tables and attendance start to thin out? I don’t even know if there’s really a ranking like this or if it’s just my imagination, but they’re trying to raise money and I suspect there is.
This is going to happen. It's just a fact of living in the world. There are more important tables, and there are less important tables, decided on by hosts and event planners. Even at church events, this is true sometimes. We can’t make this go away, but we can, for a moment, stop to appreciate--and learn from--a banquet we celebrate here every week that rejects all this posturing and holds up a different vision of what the world should be: and it’s right here in our practice of Communion.
Whatever the complex world of social hierarchies we’re stuck navigating out there, in this space when we come to this table, It doesn’t matter who you are, where you’ve been, what you’ve done or haven’t done, how old (or young) you are, the color of your skin, how you vote, what you earn, your status outside these walls--every seat is a seat of honor.
This has real world consequences, too. In his memoir that some of us here read a few years ago, the former Presiding Bishop Michael Curry tells the story of how his father, as a young black man in the 1940s, came to be an Episcopalian. He was dating the woman he’d soon marry, and she took him one Sunday to her church in Chicago, an Episcopal Church. He’d never been before. Now, it’s easy to make assumptions--many of them probably correct--when you walk through the doors of an Episcopal Church. The formality of it, the Englishness. He remembered all the white people dressed up and thought he had it figured out.
When it came time to receive Communion, He went forward to the rail. The chalice was coming down the row of communicants and he just assumed Oh no, here we go. He took a sip, and froze to see what the white woman to his right would do next.
She put the chalice to her lips. And it kept going down the row.
This was the 1940s. You couldn't share swimming pools, you couldn’t share schools, in the South where he had been raised you couldn’t share train cars, or lunch counters, hotels, waiting rooms, or drinking fountains. But if black and white people were so fortunate as to find themselves together in church, you could share a chalice. You’d better share a chalice. This is God’s table, and God makes the rules here.
Bishop Curry writes, “When [my father] told that story, he would always say, ‘Any church in which Blacks and Whites drink out of the same cup knows something about the Gospel that I want to be part of.”
This happened in other churches, too. Of course it’s not just us--and we certainly had our less inspiring moments, especially back in those days. But what we do that stands out is observe Communion every Sunday in the inclusive environment that has become our tradition, the Episcopal Church. You can tell this same story for so many groups that society over the years has placed in the lower spots: black and brown people. Gay people. Trans men and women. More recently in our country it seems, the undocumented, those who don’t speak perfect English or who speak it with something different than an American accent. Go to half the churches in our diocese and you’ll be at the Communion rail with someone who’s used to being put in the lesser seats out there in the world. But here, at this table, they have places of honor. Because we all sit in places of honor.
Whenever I teach a newcomer class here at St. James, someone inevitably asks What we believe about Communion--by which they mean, Is Jesus really present in the bread and wine? Do we believe in transubstantiation? Fine questions to ask, but there’s also the social, communal, importance of Communion that says, The ideal world isn’t the one of rank and class we default to out there, but one where we regard each other as God does, equal and equally deserving of love and dignity.
Every time we come to this rail, whether we’re conscious of it or not, we’re holding up God’s vision for the world.
And then if we do what this whole service is designed to do, we don’t leave this vision here, but we take it out there, with us. We give places of honor to those society puts down here. We put ourselves in our proper place, and (I can assure us all) it’s not up here. Who we talk to, the places we go, the people we prioritize, and the place we put ourselves -- it all has the potential to be transformed by this simple, weekly, rote act of Holy Communion. So let it change you. More than that, let it change the world.