No More Communion for You!

All of this hullabaloo about withholding communion from the President until he yields to the pressure of Catholic bishops on the abortion issue reminds me of Seinfeld’s Soup Nazi. Throw in Galileo’s house arrest for daring to question the authority of the church’s five thousand year old flat earth or Martin Luther’s heresy trials for questioning indulgences, and you have the makings for the most imperfect tempest in a teapot. And don’t forget how the church and the empire started a mutual back-scratching thing during Constantine’s time or when Henry VIII needed a handy divorce so he became the head knocker of his own church extra cathedra.

The current controversy over denying Communion to the President has its roots in this sordid history of the Church. The Roman Catholics used the power of exclusion from the sacraments as a way of forcing the adherents to walk the line. Protestants also used the same tacky tactics to keep their members pure from ungodly errors. Even Presbyterians were not above the fray when they used “communion tokens” suggested by John Calvin in 1560 for those who had kept to the straight and narrow to earn a ticket to the communion table and — by innuendo — to heaven itself.

The modern manifestations of this holy mess emerged from the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision of the Supreme Court which finally allowed women the right to choose to end a pregnancy. The issue became a political hot potato as well as dividing many communities of faith. Within a short time Roman Catholics and Christian evangelicals became strange bedfellows [to use an uncanny metaphor] and a power block of voters courted by the right wingers. While the Constitution allowed these expressions of concern, the same Constitution said “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Thus the abortion issue became the most controversial wedge issue dividing Christians in the United States leading to what may be called a critical communion theory [CCT].

Why in God’s name didn’t Moses, David, Bathsheba, Isaiah, Matthew, Paul, the Virgin Mary or even Jesus himself ever mention abortion as some kind of official sin in order to make it a religious reality? If the Bible doesn’t say it, why do some fundamentalists believe it with such fervor? It has nothing to do with piety and everything to do with politics and the power to create a religious nation that’s run just like Iran.

To the religiously righteous, unwanted pregnancy outside what used to be called “wedlock” was the result of participating in what many consider the most original sin of all. Pregnancy was equated with the punishment of such a crime…at least the woman’s complicity in it. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne was forced to wear the big A as punishment to declare her sin of Adultery which would inadvertently lead to the birth of her daughter Pearl. Today that same letter could be used to declare Abortion a top-rated “cardinal” sin without a single biblical reference.

When I first started serving communion to the Presbyterian faithful, children were not allowed to partake because some older white men known as our Elders thought kids would not understand its mystery and meaning. Maybe the same can be said of some bishops these days who take it upon themselves to limit the amazing grace of God. To paraphrase Jesus…unless you become like Pearl and other children, you can’t enter the Kingdom and there’ll be no more communion.