2
“Let us consider then that this sacrament is a singular m
edicine for all poor,
sick creatures, a comfortable help to weak souls, and that our Lord requireth
no other worthiness on our part but that we unfeignedly acknowledge our
naughtiness and imperfection.”
2
Acknowledging without reservation our
“
naughtiness
and imperfection
”
can
perhaps
get people on
the inside of the fence
—
depending on who gets to say
who
has adequately acknowledged said “naughtiness and imperfection
.
”
Fencing was and is not
without its politics, of course.
That’s what gatekeeping is all
a
bout. So it fell to the Session
—
in some early European Reformed contexts,
including
in Scotland
,
Elders
would visit homes and grant tokens for entry. In other
situations
certain people and groups were literally blocked by more than verbal
barriers
—
actual w
alls or fences were built to protect the Table from defilement
.
Calvin, Knox, and other Reformers understood
their
sometimes
–
extreme
acts of
fencing the Communion Table as an ex
tension
of
the Apostle
Paul
’s
exhortations to
the Corinthian church
when he s
colded them
for t
he chaos of their Communion
meals
. This chaos
was characterized by
some starting
to eat
before others arrived,
and s
ome
eating way more than their share while
others got nothing.
Paul’s exhortation
grew out of an impulse to make sure
the
sanctity of the
sacrament was
protected
from behaviors that defiled it
—
like
hoarding, exclusion
,
grasping
, dismissing
,
and devaluing
each other
.
The fencing practices of the Reformers, however, took an exclusionary turn. Instead
of protecting the sanct
ity of the Table by making room, by including,
for them
protecting the sacrament became a practic
e of excluding, of turning away, of
shutting out
—
however the Elders saw fit.
Born from a impulse to prevent violence and harm from diminishing the power of
t
he Lord’s Supper, Eucharistic Table Manners developed into a tool of violence and
exclusion themselves
—
far from protecting the Table from defilement, these fencing
practices
have functioned as
instrument
s
of defilement of a meal Christ instituted to
welcom
e the world back home.
“What do I do with all these [darned] forks? I don’t want to make a fool of myself.”
3
That’s
JD Vance,
author of
Hillbilly Elegy,
calling his girlfriend during an interview
dinner with a prestigious law firm while they were stud
ents at Yale Law School.
When he sat down to dinner and saw nine utensils, including 3 spoons no less, he
had no idea how to navigate the table manners that were obviously expected.