"
Come to supper, Bobby Gene!"
It's been more than fifty
years since I last heard my mother cry out her evening
ritual to summon her wandering, playing boy to dinner. Back
then, everyone in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, lived in their own
houses, with their own yards, so there was plenty of room
for kids to roam about in the pre-supper dusk before
dinner.
Though I hated to quit my
play, there was a wonderful comfort to mother's call to come
home. The only pre-requisite to a good supper was to wash my
hands.
God gives us a similar
comforting summons at Holy Communion: "Come to supper, Bobby
Gene" and all the rest of us, "Come to my supper and share
the bread and wine of God's love."
I wonder why the early
church began to fence off the Lord's Supper. By the second
century, as time for sharing communion approached, all
non-baptized persons were required to leave the church. That
practice seems to me to fly in the face of the open table
and inclusive hospitality which Jesus practiced. He told
several stories about love feasts and banquets and his
emphasis was always upon how utterly welcoming God
was.
But fence off the
communion the church did with various rules and regulations
and even curses at the time of the Reformation and
Counter-Reformation. Catholics and Protestants were so
damned by the other side and there was no possibility that
these evil heretics could be welcomed to the Lord's
Supper.
All that has been
changing in one generation, and on October 3l, l999, at
Augsburg, Germany, where the division all began with Martin
Luther's 9l theses tacked on the cathedral door, leaders of
Rome and of the German Lutheran Church sign a great
agreement of reconciliation. The mutual curses which each
church placed upon the other more than 400 years ago are now
lifted; and a common doctrinal understanding about salvation
because of the grace of God is now affirmed.
This happy turn of events
does not mean that we are as yet welcomed at each other's
celebration of the Lord's Table. Roman Catholics are still
prohibited from receiving the sacrament from any hands than
those of a catholic priest. However, millions of Catholics
and Protestants have, in practice, already moved beyond
those barriers, willing to go forth to the supper of Jesus
in another church when circumstances and contexts of travel
or inter-faith celebration make it appropriate to their
consciences.
We are getting back to
the Lord's simple invitation: "Come to supper,
everyone!"
Pastor Gene Preston