BONUS BLOG: When & Whom Christ Invites

Hannah Adair Bonner

This week, a former student came to me in crisis, because they are afraid they may have to go back to a part of the world where there are no religious traditions that practice an Open Table. I am tormented with grief for this logistical reality. In this time and place, I can still offer an Open Table. An Open Table means that there is no logistical mechanism that can keep me or them from receiving communion. Nothing we are, nothing we do, nothing we say can keep us from the Table. That is a comfort to me as a Queer person in the midst of feeling my rights threatened in a constitutional way in this nation, and wondering how that will trickle down to affect other parts of my life and vocation.

The security of our access to the Table, therefore, is not a matter to be handled lightly, not a matter for journalists, whether secular or religious, to misrepresent, either through ignorance of our system or through personal agenda.

At this vulnerable, and delicate moment in my tradition’s history, as we work to protect my existence as Queer clergy, and as I counsel a young person who has anxiety about whether they will EVER be able to receive communion physically again once they are outside a territory where there are religious traditions that practice an Open Table – I am grieved to see anyone presenting their personal choice not to receive communion, in any of the many places and traditions where it is available, as some kind of invalidation or cause to question the promise of the Open Table that gives our young Queer people hope in this moment.

The sanctity of our practice of an Open Table is not something to bandy about verbally or handle lightly in our privileged and powerful hands.

I once stayed in front of the Waller County Jail for 64 hours straight, offering Holy Communion every 12 hours to anyone who would come – including the guards who watched. One guard, a young Black man, tried to come forward and receive, but was held back by his White colleagues. I would have given it to him. I would have given it to any of them. I would have to give it to Donald Trump if he walked up. That is what an Open Table means. That is what we practice. Let us not be so myopic as to put at risk the hope and trust of the many through inaccurate speech that could promote confusion on that point.

There is no logistical mechanism for anyone, from birth to Bishop, to be kept from receiving Communion. If you hear otherwise, be reassured that even if someone wanted to do that, there is not a means of doing so. It is silly to say otherwise. Our young people, our Queer people, our vulnerable people of any kind need to feel confident in this fact.

I went to 3 years of seminary, and have endured for 14 years as a clergy person – who had to suffer everything one suffers when one is young and single and female and Queer in that role – all to be able to say these words to EVERYONE:
“Christ, our Lord, invites to His Table, ALL who love him. Who earnestly repent of their sins, and seek to live in peace with one another.”

For the sake of those who do not have power, privilege or platform, and who need those words the most, let us be clear that nothing – “neither height, nor depth, nor anything else in all Creation will be able to separate us from the love of God” that we receive at the Table.