Communion for all

The beauty and scandal of open communion

Housekeeping Note: I have renamed this site from “Wonderfully Made” to “Celestial Navigation.” The new name feels less constraining to me in what I can write about. It also allows for more mystery and uncertainty in finding my way forward, as well as being a play on my own name and a nod to Moana and a delightful episode of The West Wing.

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On Sunday, I took communion¹, walked back to my seat, sat down, and wept. It’d been months since I’d truly cried, but the tears came hard. But why?

What I was taught

I was taught years ago that communion was to be treated carefully, as those without unrepentant sin would “drink judgement on themselves”. Thus, it was a kindness to not allow unbelievers or suspected unbelievers to take communion. I believed this until I found myself on the outside of church membership, but still very much trying to follow Jesus. In fact, I had left that church precisely because I was following Jesus.

A close friend, later that year, said something that upset me deeply. His church practices closed communion, in which you must be a member of a recognized church in order to take communion with them. As I was no longer a member of any church, I would be kept from Christ’s table.

The reason I was no longer a member was because the leaders of my previous church had abused me - psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually. I had suffered deep, dangerous depression at their hands. And because of their abuse, I was told I would not be able to take communion.

When my friend told me they’d make an exception, because there’s “grace” for me, I got even more upset, because grace is something you need if you’ve done something wrong, and I had not.

My friend did later apologize for not considering my situation, but the underlying message was this: leaders in churches get to decide whether you can dine at Christ’s table.

Last year, when I came out as transgender, it became immediately apparent that even if I was a member in a church, I wouldn’t be able to take communion in many. And many churches would deny me membership to begin with.

Did Jesus do that?

In a word, no. Jesus famously served the bread and the wine to his disciples. Scandalously, he served it not just to Peter who would deny him shortly thereafter, but also to Judas who had already betrayed him, a fact Jesus is aware of. Jesus gave no instruction to “only take this if you have repented of all your sins”, or any other conditions. He just said, “take, eat,” and “take, drink.”

Furthermore, Paul writes about communion in 1st Corinthians 11. I’d always heard it said that he was talking about having confessed your sins, but honestly I can’t find that. What I do see is Paul very upset that communion is no longer, well, communal.

“Those who eat and drink without correctly understanding the body are eating and drinking their own judgment.” - 1 Corinthians 11:29 (CEB)

Paul’s statement about “drinking their own judgment” is about understanding the body - the community of believers. And the preceding verses are all about avoiding divisions (as Paul opens the letter talking about), and then Chapters 12-14 are all him explaining the body and the love that should be found within it, with stern warnings against rejecting any part of it on the basis that it is different².

So what is communion for?

Simply put, it is a practice that, as Jesus practiced and then Paul demanded, brings everyone together at the same level. Everyone eats of the same bread³. Everyone drinks of the same wine⁴. No one is given a seat of honor or dishonor.

Different churches and denominations can have wildly different views on exactly what “this is my body” and “this is my blood” end up meaning metaphysically. From transubstantiation in which the bread is said to literally be Christ’s body and the wine literally becomes the blood, to other traditions where it is understood almost entirely as metaphor, there’s plenty of room for disagreement. But nearly everyone agrees that there’s some miraculous transformation.

God became a baby. A baby became a man. The man became a corpse. The corpse became a man again. And somewhere in there, the man became bread and wine, and the bread and wine become sustaining nutrients for the Body of Christ.

As a transgender person, seeing all those different transformations (and then there’s the transfiguration and more) gives me more hope than I can say. God is all about taking one thing and turning it into another and another and another. To those who say that I must be a man because I was born with a penis, I say that why not say that Jesus of Nazareth can’t be God because he was born with skin? Or that the bread and wine can’t be the body and blood in any way because they contain no human DNA?

This isn’t a gnostic view that reality is bad and deceptive. This is a view that within our reality, God has a habit of playing around and changing this to be that or that to be this.

In the body of Christ, we see Paul bring together people of different economic classes (1 Cor 11), spiritual giftings (1 Cor 12-14), male and female, slave and free, gentile or jew (Galatians 3:28). James is similarly irate at the idea of division. Jesus spoke a parable about a Samaritan helping a Jewish victim of violence (his explantion of what it means to love one’s neighbor), and Jesus sought out the Samaritan woman at the well. Across these lines were distrust, contempt, envy, pride, and outright hatred.

And so we see Jesus do one last magic act, perhaps his greatest: Turning enemies into friends. I’m not necessarily saying that he turned his enemies into his friends (though he did), I’m saying that he calls us to love each other across those differences that would naturally scare us, offend us, or ultimately divide us.

And a core piece of that are the sacraments of baptism and communion, at which everyone is the same, all brought together for the same ritual, the same water, the same bread, the same wine.

The Beauty of Communion

And thus we have it: an open table. Any who would come, eat, and drink, are welcome. All are welcome and all are equal at the table that Jesus created. Not one of us has any right to tell any of the others that they are not welcome at that they do not belong. It’s an embodied way in which Jesus reminds us still: that’s your brother. That’s your sister. That’s your sibling. That’s someone I love, and who you should love.

At the Q Christian Conference, something is strange about communion. We all know we’d be denied it at many churches. Many of us have been denied it personally. One man told a story about how he was instructed not to partake and then was physically held in his seat to ensure he would not.

And on some days my cry to those who would exclude us is “How dare you. It’s not your table!”

But on this past Sunday, I wept openly. For maybe five minutes, I cried and cried. Having not openly cried in months, I just let it come.

First and foremost because of seeing the beauty of all of these siblings in Christ take communion together. These beloved people who have been told over and over, “You. Don’t. Belong. Here.” And yet, we come to the table - we take the bread and eat, we take the wine and drink. Because it was never the gatekeeper’s table. It belongs wholly to Jesus Christ, and he invited us. The beauty of that sacred moment will stay with me for a very long time.

But second, I wept because my friends were 1000 miles away, likely taking communion themselves shortly before or after. But they were doing it in a community that would not allow me to join them. And so they don’t get to see the joy of the marginalized being lifted up to be equal in the eyes of God. They don’t get to see the absolute hunger and thirst for communion. The need to be at Jesus’ table with everyone else. To say, “yes, I do this in remembrance of Jesus.”

My dear friend

Billie

took her usual Sunday Selfie afterwards, which she always labels #transinchurch. But this time she gathered as many transgender and gender expansive people as she could find. You’d be hard pressed to find a group more full of love and joy than these, finally experiencing full inclusion with each other and with our siblings.

Friend, I share this to bless you - to let you get a glimpse into the joy the queer community is capable of when we have (or make) freedom to be ourselves.

Sending love to you, however this post finds you.

-Celeste

1. An early version of this was titled “Tearing the veil of communion”. I don’t love that title, as it mixes metaphors (tearing the veil was not related to communion) and I’m worried about potential antisemitic implications of it. I’ve changed it to the simpler “Communion for All”, but can’t change the URL or the emails that originally went out. I regret offense if I have caused any.

2. Or, dare I say, queer.

3. Or gluten-free options, as many churches provide.

4. Or grape juice, as many churches provide.