Sunday, October 4, 2015

Sermon: No Tokens Required

Mark 10:2-16
No Tokens Required
James Sledge                                                                                       October 4, 2015

If you go into our church parlor, you will find a few items from this congregation’s history displayed there. There’s an old pulpit Bible and a curio cabinet with an old hymnal, more Bibles, old photos, and other artifacts. Young congregations tend not to have such displays, but those that have been around long enough often have a history display somewhere.
I once visited an old church with an elaborate display going back to colonial days. And in one corner of this mini-museum, on a curio shelf, were some communion tokens.
If you’ve never heard of such things, they are just what the name implies, tokens that gained a person admission to the Lord’s Supper. They were used back in the days of very infrequent communion, and you got one after elders from the Session (our church governing council) visited and quizzed you about your understanding of the faith. John Calvin suggested such a practice to ensure that people correctly understood the sacrament. He worried about what he saw as magical or superstitious beliefs about the Lord’s Supper.
Calvin may have understood these tokens as a kind of impromptu communicants’ class rather than a gauge of personal worthiness, but even if he did, you can be sure that people were denied tokens for reasons other than insufficient understanding of Reformed theology. Inevitably, the elders made character judgments about church members and denied tokens to those who didn’t measure up.
Use of these tokens largely disappeared in the 1800s, but it’s interesting to wonder about what sort of moral failing would have prevented people receiving one. Could a young, unmarried woman with a child get one? How about those who were divorced? What about drinking or carousing or dancing? Tokens were done on a church by church basis, so there was likely a good deal of variety from place to place. Nonetheless I feel confident that there were plenty of congregations that would not have welcomed divorced folks to the table.
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“Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” When the gospel of Mark wants to take up an entirely new topic, the writer will often change locales, but he tells us about people bringing little children to Jesus with no break at all from the teachings on marriage. Curious.
Jesus has just finished talking about how relationships would work if people’s hearts weren’t out of whack, when the disciples demonstrate, for the umpteenth time, that they still don’t get this kingdom thing. Turn back one page in Mark’s gospel and you’ll hear Jesus saying, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.” He has already said that children in some way exemplify what it means to be highly valued in the kingdom’s way of viewing things, but these disciples are fairly slow learners, like disciples in every age.
This seems to be the only place in Mark’s gospel where we’re explicitly told that Jesus got mad at his followers, “indignant” our translation says. Surely there is some significance here. Surely we are being told to pay attention.

I’ve mentioned this before, but it bears repeating. Children were viewed differently in Jesus’ day. No doubt parents loved their children and sometimes doted on them, but not in the manner of our time. Children were expected to grow up quickly. Daughters were married off at 12 or so, and sons were supposed to help support the family as soon as they were physically able. No sports leagues or enrichment activities.
The children people brought to Jesus were small children, those young enough that they were totally dependent on their parents. They were not yet able to work, to contribute to the household well-being, or to earn or acquire anything on their own.
Jesus says that the kingdom belongs to such as these, yet children weren’t eligible for communion tokens. And when I was growing up, children in Presbyterian churches couldn’t receive the Lord’s Supper until they had made their professions of faith. What we now call confirmation was communicants’ class back then. That’s changed, but we still maintain the original idea behind communion tokens in our current denominational rules. “Baptized children who are being nurtured and instructed in the significance of the invitation to the Table and the meaning of their response are invited to receive the Lord’s Supper…”[1]
I’m all for instruction and understanding. I work hard to make sense of the Bible and faith, but Jesus seems to say that not only can we not earn our way to the kingdom, neither can we understand our way. We can only receive it as gift.
The phrase “faith seeking understanding” is usually attributed to Anselm, the archbishop of Canterbury nearly a thousand years ago, but many Presbyterians, and a lot of modern people, try to understand our way to faith. Of course that makes faith a matter of being smarter or more talented or diligent, or capable. Pretty much like everything else in the world, and not very much like the kingdom that belongs to small children.
The kingdom might belong to those like small children, but the Christian religion that grew up in the wake of Easter and Pentecost did not. It mirrored the power structures of the day, and when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire a couple of hundred years after Jesus, the Church started to look and function very much like the empire. We Presbyterians emerged in a very different context and so we don’t look much like empire, but we do look a good bit like a modern administrative bureaucracy.
Empires and bureaucracies need rules and order and efficiency. They need communion tokens and ways of figuring out who measures up, how to do things correctly, who’s important, what’s the right theological understanding. None of it is very small child like.
That’s probably why Jesus’ teaching on marriage got turned into rules. Naturally it is not God’s design that those joined as one in marriage should be separated. In a world where God’s will is done, people don’t betray or hurt or injure one another. The notion of marriage as something throw-away is a travesty, counter to God’s desire for humanity. So is war and greed and refugees with no place to go and callousness toward those who are suffering and shrugging at gun violence, but those categories were unlikely to get you excluded from the communion table in the day of tokens. Greed and callousness and failing to love your neighbor don’t easily translate into rules that can be efficiently administered. But divorce and children out of wedlock did, at least until the world changed and then they didn’t anymore.
I wonder what sort of religion very young children might design when they received the kingdom. I feel confident it wouldn’t have the big, fat rule book that we currently have. But it might very well have a table with things to eat and drink, a place to see and smell and touch and taste the love of God. And I hope there’d be no tokens required.
I wonder what sort of faith community we adults might build if we were focused more on the kingdom and kingdom ways of seeing rather than human ways of running and managing and controlling. What might it look like to be a community where all really are welcome and can find God’s love and grace: conservative and liberal, Republican and Democrat, male and female, gay and straight, young and old, rich and poor, black and white and brown, all of us equally indebted to the Great Giver, all of us invited to see and smell and touch and taste the love and grace of God. No tokens required.


[1] Book of Order, 2013, W-2.4011 b

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