The Table That Has No Walls

There is a question underneath every table.

Who is allowed to sit here?

Every human community has answered that question with some combination of inclusion and exclusion. The family table has its members and its guests and its empty chairs where people used to sit. The restaurant has its price point, which is its own kind of wall. The country club has its application process. The nation-state has its borders and its documentation requirements and its enforcement machinery. Every table is, in some sense, a declaration about who belongs.

Corpus Christi, the feast we celebrate this Sunday, is the Church’s annual declaration about the table of the Lord. And the declaration is this: the table of the Lord has no walls.

That sounds like a pleasant thing to say. It is actually a deeply countercultural and, in the current political climate, a genuinely dangerous thing to say. And I want to spend some time in this blog post explaining why, before I tell you what we are preaching about on Sunday.

When the early Church gathered for the Eucharist in the first and second centuries, they gathered across boundaries that Roman society considered fundamental. Free people and enslaved people ate together. Jews and Gentiles ate together. Wealthy patrons and destitute day laborers ate together. Men and women ate together in a context where mixed-gender religious gatherings were unusual.

The Romans found this suspicious. Not primarily because of the theology, though they misunderstood the theology too. They found it suspicious because a table that crosses the social categories used to organize society is a table that makes an implicit claim: the categories that divide you out there do not apply in here.

That claim is political. It is not political in the sense of partisan, in the sense of belonging to one party or another. It is political in the original sense of the word: it is about how human community is organized and who has power within it. The table of the Lord is a counter-politics. It enacts, physically, in the act of eating together, a different understanding of who belongs.

Paul writes to the Corinthians that we, though many, are one bread and one body, because we all partake of that one bread. The oneness comes from the table. The belonging is produced by the eating together, not by satisfying a prior condition of worthiness or status or documentation.

The manna in the wilderness, which Deuteronomy holds up as the prototype of the Eucharist, did not fall selectively. It fell on the whole community. Everyone who was hungry ate. There was no means test, no background check, no review of immigration status. The bread fell and the people gathered it and ate and were satisfied, and then in the morning it was there again.

That is the table we are gathering around on Sunday.

I am going to say something plainly, because I think plainness is a form of respect and I think this community deserves it.

We are living in a country that has spent the past several months constructing one of the most elaborate exclusion systems in its modern history. Immigration enforcement machinery designed to remove people who have lived here for decades, built their lives here, raised their children here. Policy after policy designed to narrow the definition of who belongs until the circle is as small as possible. A cultural project built on the explicit premise that some people’s presence here is contaminating, threatening, inadmissible.

That is not the table of the Lord. That is the opposite of the table of the Lord.

And the Church that celebrates Corpus Christi while remaining silent about what is happening to the people being excluded from the nation’s table has not understood what it is celebrating. The feast of the Body and Blood of Christ is not a private religious observance with no relationship to the world outside the sanctuary. It is a weekly enactment of a counter-politics. It is the Church saying, in its most fundamental liturgical act: the logic of this table is not the logic of that world.

At this table, the immigrant who crossed the border without the right papers receives the body of Christ alongside the citizen who was born here. At this table, the queer person who has been told by every other institution they have encountered that their presence is unwelcome receives the same bread as everyone else. At this table, the woman whose call to leadership the institutional Church has suppressed for centuries stands at the altar and offers the Eucharist. At this table, there are no second-class communicants.

That is not a political statement. That is a eucharistic one. And it is the most radical thing we do every Sunday.

Those of you who have been joining us on Thursday evenings for our book study on The Cost of Discipleship will recognize the thread running through this. Bonhoeffer’s central argument is that cheap grace produces communities that can be captured by any sufficiently powerful ideology, because they have never been formed in anything that costs them. The Church that accepted cheap grace in 1930s Germany was a Church that had practiced a kind of Christianity so divorced from its own table that it could not recognize fascism as the antithesis of everything it claimed to believe.

The table of the Lord is not cheap. The bread that Jesus offers in John 6 is his own flesh, given for the life of the world. The cup is his blood. There is nothing cheap about it. And a community formed around that table, a community that has been eating together across every boundary the world uses to divide people, is a community with the theological resources to say no when the world demands that it sort people into those who belong and those who do not.

We are in session six of the book study. If you have not joined us yet, Thursday at 8:00 PM Eastern Time on Facebook and on TikTok at TikTok.com/@saintfrancis30901. Come and think with us about what costly discipleship looks like at this particular table in this particular moment.

On Sunday the sermon is titled “He Nourished You in the Wilderness,” from the Deuteronomy reading. We are going to preach the manna as the prototype of the Eucharist, the table of the Lord as the most radical political act the Church performs, and the specific claim of this community: that the table at 557 Greene Street in Augusta, Georgia, is a table with no walls.

John 6 gives us the hardest eucharistic teaching in the Gospels. Jesus does not soften it when people object. My flesh is true food. My blood is true drink. Whoever eats this bread shall live forever. And the community that gathers to eat this bread becomes one body, many people, one bread, no category of exclusion surviving the act of eating together.

Come and hear it. Bring someone with you who needs to know that a table without walls exists and that they are welcome at it.

Augusta Pride is at the end of June. That is three weeks from now. We need $775 to have a Saint Francis Parish and Outreach booth there, and we are still working to raise it.

A booth at Pride is an extension of everything this blog post is about. It is the table of the Lord made visible outside the sanctuary. It is the Church going to the place where the people who have been told they are not welcome gather, and saying: you are welcome. In person. With our name on a sign. Not just online, not just in a statement, but physically present at a festival where our presence carries theological weight.

If the eucharistic theology of Corpus Christi means anything in practice, it means showing up at Augusta Pride.

Please give what you can. Please share this with people who believe in this kind of ministry.

Venmo:  @saintfrancisparish

PayPal:  paypal.me/saintfrancisparish

Cash App:  $saintfrancisparish

The bread is enough. It has always been enough. There will be twelve baskets left over.

See you Sunday.

Pax et Bonum,

Bishop Greer