“Table Manners”

“Table Manners”


Date: July 2, 2017

TABLE MANNERS
SCRIPTURE: JEREMIAH 28: 5
9; MATTHEW 10: 40
42
GRACE COVENANT PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, ASHEVILLE, NC
July 2, 2017
The Rev. Dr. Marcia Mount Shoop, Pastor
If you and I were gathered
on a Communion Sunday
in
the
1500s in Geneva or
in
17
th
century
Scotland or
even today in some Church of Scotland congregations
or
some Presbyterian congregations in this country
, this
homily
preceding
Communion
would have one purpose and one purpose only
to make sure no one ge
t
s
to this
Communion Table who shouldn’t
be here.
It’s called fencing the table and it was how the early Reformers
protected the
sanctity of the sacrament
. In Reformed theology
it
is the communal aspect of the
meal
in which
the Spirit moves with transformative power.
The
purity of the meal
wa
s protected by making sure no one ate the meal who was an unrepentant sinner.
The purpose of the proclamation before Eucharist was to
fence the Communion
Table
to keep some out, and to keep others in.
For
John
Calvin
and
John Knox,
our theological foref
athers,
this moment in worship
was exhortation for all in the congregation to examine themselves for readiness to
receive the sacrament.
And readiness had to do with the moral status of your heart.
For if you receive it wrongly,
they warned, “
you are eat
ing and drinking your own
damnation.
Our forbearers in the faith sure knew how to roll o
ut the red carpet didn’t they!
Just listen to Calvin’s Service Book in Geneva:
And therefore in the name and authority of the Eternal God and of His Son Jesus
Ch
rist I excommunicate from this table all blasphemers of God; all adulterers;
all that be in malice or envy; all disobedient persons to father and mother,
princes or magistrates, pastors or preachers; all thieves and deceivers of their
neighbours; and final
ly all such as live a life directly fighting against the will of
God
.
1
There are tales of sermons th
at went on for a LOOOOOONG time to assure readiness
.
Some preachers complained that these exhortations could result in even they
themselves not
being
able
to take the sacrament when everything was said and
done.
After an extended time of exhortation and verbal flagellation
, the Eucharistic door
might
be cracked. Calvin’s directory put it this way:
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.

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