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.
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