Eucharist and ethics: an example

During my days in grad school at Notre Dame I had the good fortune to be a member of Broadway Christian Parish in South Bend, Indiana. Under the leadership of a series of remarkable pastors beginning in the late 1970s, this United Methodist congregation decided to celebrate the Eucharist every week in its one Sunday service.

Those who are not United Methodist, or have not been United Methodist at some point in their lives, may not be able fully to understand just how radical and courageous a decision that was.  For not a few United Methodists, a weekly Eucharist was something "Catholic," something very un-Methodist. Of course, such critics tended not to know that the original Methodist revival in the eighteenth century had been a Eucharistic revival as much as it was an "evangelical" revival.

For this congregation, restoring the weekly Sunday celebration of the Eucharist had as much to do with ethics as with liturgy. The congregation had existed since the teens of the twentieth century, and over the course of several decades the congregation's neighborhood changed. Closures at the Studebaker auto factory had hit the residents hard. By the late 1960s what had been a middle-class neighborhood had become an area of inner-city poverty.

Unlike other mainline Protestant congregations at the time and later who responded to such change by moving to the suburbs, Broadway stayed in the neighborhood of its birth.

Accompanying the decision to restore the Sunday Eucharist was a decision to serve the residents of the neighborhood, members or not, as an ethical act flowing from the celebration of the Eucharist itself.

One of the several things this decision meant in practice was to begin a community meal to be held each Sunday after worship. This meal, prepared and served by members of the congregation, was to be open to anyone who wished to attend. As part of an extended period of theological reflection on the Eucharist and the life of the congregation, members decided that such a meal was a natural, even necessary, extension of the feast of the Eucharist. Receiving the body and blood of the Lord entailed going from the altar of the Eucharist to the altar of the poor (St John Chrysostom or St Basil the Great, I'm working from memory here).  The community meal was an act of love and service born of the experience of receiving Christ in the Eucharist.

I was privileged to share in this life, and I have to say that I have not found a Christian community like it since.  The closest I have come was an Orthodox parish in St. Petersburg, Russia, in which the theological renewal associated with the martyr Fr Alexander Men' had taken root. Doubtless there are others; I would love to know of them. In much of mainline Protestantism in the United States, the liturgical movement was eclipsed eventually by the contemporary worship movement. Congregations like Broadway are still a tiny minority.

But although Broadway is in the minority everywhere, it still serves as an example for Christians of all traditions, one worth examining closely, emulating, and thanking G-d for.

Eucharist and the Other

In the Eucharist we encounter the face of Christ: in receiving his body and blood, and in the liturgical encounter with fellow members of the liturgical assembly.

Is it Levinas who says that in the face of the Other we encounter an absolute ethical demand?

Have we for whom, to whom,  the Eucharist has been given - have we experienced that absolute obligation towards the Other?

Eucharist and ethics

We Orthodox have rightly insisted on the centrality of the Eucharist for ecclesiology. Have we as strongly insisted on the importance of the Eucharist for ethics?

Exile and ecclesiology

Is the concept of exile helpful in understanding and interpreting the experience of alienation from the church that can follow from suffering at the hands of the church?

Back soon

I'm down with a really bad cold, will return in the next day or so.

Broken-hearted

There are many kinds of bitterness a person can feel. In a sense each specific disappointment precipitates its own unique bitterness.

Here I want to reflect on the bitterness felt by those who have deliberately chosen the church over other religious (and non-religious) options and then suffered at its hands. Such people have given themselves wholeheartedly to their new (or, sometimes, renewed) faith, sometimes becoming church leaders. To have given oneself only then to suffer in the beloved community is a grave wound to the soul. Disappointment, disbelief, anger, resentment, alienation, sadness remain in the heart, a broken heart.

Estrangement from the church is sometimes the fruit of this experience.

A common response to this situation is to say that the church is "only human," and that it is a mistake to view the church as different from any other organization. I think saying this throws overboard a lot of Christology, ecclesiology, and soteriology I'm not (yet) willing to abandon.

Putting the matter in terms of heartbreak and estrangement immediately evokes marital and relationship metaphors. Should we then consider the language of divorce? Separation? Are there better, more useful metaphors?

I hesitate to use the metaphor of divorce or separation. Why? More in the next post.

Human kindness

It sometimes seems that the church is the very last place one finds human kindness.

Sure, I know that "human kindness" isn't on any list of theological virtues, nor is it to be found in the scriptures.

And yet, that fact is not license for cruelty, indifference, lack of compassion in the church.

Yes, we have candied the concept of love, made it a syrupy emotion.

That is no excuse to turn love into its opposite.

As Christians, we ought to look as these matters in light of the Incarnation. One way to understand the Incarnation is in terms of acknowlegement and recognition. In Christ, God chose not to ignore us. In Christ, God's eyes see us, acknowledge us and all we are. Those eyes are compassionate eyes, eyes that do not pretend not to see.

Our understanding of church is that we are the Body of Christ, in a most realistic sense. It is not simply a metaphor.

This means that our eyes must also shine with compassion, recognition, acknowledgement. Salvation means that our eyes have been opened, have been transformed, to so shine.

When we do not find that human kindness in the church,  we need to find places where it does exist, create places where it is able to exist, and take refuge.