By the summer of 2005, I knew I was no longer Roman Catholic. The revelations about the child sex abuse scandal that the Boston Globe began publishing in 2002 combined with the conservativeness of the young seminarians I'd met while studying at a small Roman Catholic university in Texas, as well as the prospect of spending any more time arguing for "the basics" such as women's ordination and acceptance of LGBTQ+ people, led me to realize that I needed to go elsewhere to find a faith community that shared my core values.
One year prior, I'd boarded an Amtrak train for a three-day trip to New York to begin studying for my Master of Divinity degree at Union Theological Seminary. Taking a train was both a romantic and terrible decision that I regretted as soon as I settled into my seat. Nevertheless, the train eventually brought me to Penn Station to begin my life in New York. After a tumultuous year of adjusting to life in the city, I was determined to try to find a religious community.
My first attempts were unsuccessful. Over the course of that first hot summer in New York, I tried attending both a United Church of Christ and Lutheran church near Union Theological Seminary, but in each case shied away on account of the lack of racial/ethnic diversity of those congregations. The shift from Mexican-American Roman Catholicism to nearly all-white mainline Protestant congregations proved too much for me to bear, and as a general rule, I take it as a red flag when people you've never met decide that coffee hour is just the time and place to practice their Spanish on you.
This meant that on a bright and clear Sunday morning I headed north from Union Seminary toward West Harlem to check out a small, racially-diverse Episcopal congregation that several seminarians had already mentioned to me. How could I have known what I was getting myself into when I walked through the red doors of St. Mary's Episcopal church for the first time?
While I wasn't fully aware of St. Mary rich history of justice work at the time nor of the special role this place would play in my life, I immediately sensed that there was something different about this community. I now know that I was entering into the story of a congregation that had been - and remains - a place of hope and justice-seeking for people living in West Harlem for almost two centuries.
There were two fundamental stories that I heard over and over again as I joined St. Mary's, clues to how it ended up being such a socioeconomically diverse congregation committed to God's justice, for this congregation had the rare trait of being an economically diverse congregation. Congregational leadership included people experiencing homelessness as well as those with multiple graduate degrees. Columbia students sat in the pew and listened as lectors with elementary school educations occasionally struggled to read lessons. St. Mary's was the first place I came to know people experiencing homelessness by first and last name, and it was where I - a recently arrived New Yorker cloistered behind the walls of a seminary - began to receive a separate education about how this city of extraordinary wealth disparities treats the poor.
Early on, the rector of the parish, the Rev. Dr. Earl Kooperkamp, mentioned to me that St. Mary's of Manhattanville was begun as a mission parish of the wealthier church of St. Michael's of Bloomingdale, and how it was the first free Episcopal Church in New York City, referring to the fact that St. Mary's abolished pew rentals in 1831.1 The charging and renting out of pews was a controversial source of income for Anglican, Catholic, and Presbyterian churches, one that only served to heighten distinctions in social status. St. Mary's had begun charging pew rentals in 1829 but eventually realized it was more trouble than it was worth given the meager returns. This meant that in 1831 St. Mary's became the first free-pew church in New York City, and this idea and spirit of St. Mary's as a place where people of many different socioeconomic backgrounds could come together was still evident in 2005 when I quietly took my seat in the back pew.
This scene in My Cousin Bobby begins somewhat mysteriously with a quiet shot of St. Mary's sanctuary and some commotion at the altar. Only gradually does it become clear that six young Black and Latino men, in military uniform, were lifting the altar to ceremoniously carry it outdoors. The carrying of the altar from the sanctuary into the street was part of a liturgical procession replete with processional cross, offering baskets, and all the items for celebrating an outdoor Eucharist. But rather than going to a park or beach, they set the altar in the middle of 125th street and Old Broadway, in West Harlem, right beside a community health clinic and close to the police precinct offices. From that intersection, Rev. Castle preached - yelled, really - about the need for a traffic light and how long they'd been asking the city to install one. He points to a gigantic pothole in the street and tells the young boy holding the heavy processional cross to take it to the pothole. When the child had moved the cross on the edge of the pothole, Fr. Castle cried out, "For one month we have been trying to get the city to repair that hole... We have come to say that we are good people. We are poor, we are black, we are Hispanic, but we are good people. And we demand what is right for us and we will take nothing less than justice. And there will be no peace until there is justice."3
Of course, not all Eucharist services at St. Mary's involved potholes. Most of the ones that I attended over the course of the five years were as simple as they were transformative, yet in addition to the common elements of bread and wine, the weekly Eucharists also represented the coming together of people from radically different backgrounds.
It was through Eucharist services at St. Mary's that I began to fully grasp how little I actually knew about the experiences and challenges of people living in poverty in New York City. Even though my parents and grandparents had been migrant farmworkers at one point in their lives, they had done everything in their power to insulate my siblings and me from hardship and even city life - and it showed. When I was six, we had moved from San Antonio to a ranch house in the Texas Hill Country, a well-calculated move aimed at placing us in one of the best, although nearly all-white, public schools in the region. And while that ranch house with its water well and horse trough certainly wasn't fancy living, the fact is that my siblings and I grew up surrounded by the incalculable riches of present and loving parents who let us play wildly in a beautiful region with few fences.
This also meant, of course, that I was utterly unprepared for understanding poverty in New York City. It was at St. Mary's that I began to understand the specific policies that were impacting the lives of New York's poor. The first time I came across the term "Stop-and-Frisk", for instance, wasn't at Union Seminary or even in a news article. Rather, it was in a sermon by the then-rector the Rev. Dr. Earl Kooperkamp. As was oftentimes the case, he'd ascended the creaky wooden stairs of the pulpit to deliver - without notes - a fiery condemnation of what was then a still relatively new policy whereby New York City's Police Department was systematically harassing young Black and Latino men across the city.
As is now widely known, this program which operated from 2002, peaked in 2011, and officially ended in 2014, resulted in over five million people being stopped-and-frisked over the course of twelve years, with the overwhelming majority of those stopped being young Black and Latino males between the ages of 14 and 24.4 The New York Civil Liberties Union states that "at the height of stop-and-frisk in 2011 under the Bloomberg administration, over 685,000 people were stopped", meaning that many Black and Latino males were stopped on multiple occasions in a single year. This policy continued for more than a decade, across multiple administrations, despite the fact that it was known early on that in nearly 9 out of 10 cases, stopped-and-frisked New Yorkers were found to have been completely innocent. The policy was a complete failure if measured against its purported goals but was a resounding success when understood as a sustained campaign of harassment against Black and Latino young men, a reinforcement of the American caste system.
Although I would come to read many articles about Stop-and-Frisk over the course of those twelve years, the place I really learned about its impact was at church. It was through periodic sermons and, more importantly, through the responses of the mothers and grandmothers in the congregation that I learned how this harassment campaign was impacting families. It was by watching the fathers of the congregation sit up and then applaud when finally someone voiced - in both sermons and prayers - how dangerous this policy of harassment was for their sons and grandsons. These are lessons about how policies directly impact families that can only be learned in community.
Another example had to do with the way seemingly small things -- a stop light at an intersection, the fixing of a pothole, and even 5¢ - could have a major impact on the life of the congregation when a significant portion of the community is poor. This was captured in an article in the New York Times entitled "Value of Redemption? From 5¢ to Priceless" by journalist David Gonzalez. In it, Gonzalez tells the story of St. Mary's choir member Charles Kelly's work as a "redeemer." "[Charles Kelly] makes his livelihood filling bags with bottles and cans of soda and beer, hauling them through the streets and redeeming them for the 5-cent deposit. It is hard work, braving the night and the cold -- and often the frosty attitudes of grocers -- to survive as an urban gleaner."
In 2009 an amendment to New York State's Bottle Bill allowed for water bottles to be collected for an exchange fee. St. Mary's celebrated this seemingly tiny change -- one that certainly never made any frontpage headlines -- because Charles Kelly and other members of St. Mary's "The Redeemers" group had been prominent advocates for this reform for many years, and also because of its immediate impact on multiple members of the congregation. A couple of cents for water bottles made survival in New York just a tiny bit easier, and the celebration itself was a stark reminder of how many people in the community were living right on the edge.
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As I've wandered about the Church, I've oftentimes met people who describe themselves as having a Eucharistic piety, a spiritually profound relationship to Christ's body as it is present in the consecrated host. I'd like to believe I have a Eucharistic spirituality as well, although in truth, who gathers around the table has always seemed to me to be as equally important as the elements on the altar itself.
At St. Mary's, while standing in line to receive communion, I'd reflect on the fact that the line was composed of people from very different backgrounds, of people both housed and homeless, of people of immense security and privilege as well as those living right on the edge of an abyss. In this, the congregation was one of those rare spaces in American society where people of radically different socioeconomic backgrounds came together for a common meal. I've come to believe that this diversity is a transformational aspect of the Eucharist, and it is striking, then, to see how this diversity is emphasized in some of the earliest available writings about this sacrament.
In what follows, I will be returning to the writings of Paul from the first century who expressed fury at how the Lord's Supper was being celebrated in Corinth. In Paul's eleventh chapter of 1 Corinthians, one finds the first historical reference to the words of institution embedded within a broader discussion -- a chastisement, really -- about the way that the wealthy have separated themselves out from the poor at the Lord's Supper. In light of how rarely the socioeconomic dimension of the Eucharist is mentioned or considered in general discussions of the Eucharist, it is striking how Paul sees the Eucharist as profoundly connected to the lives of the poor and how important it is for the Eucharist to be a time of bridging socioeconomic divides.
Paul
The first historical reference to the Lord's Supper and words of institution are part of Paul's broader chastising of the wealthy Corinthians for how they were separating themselves from the poor when celebrating the Lord's Supper (1 Corinthians 11:17-34). This passage in 1 Corinthians 11 and the chapter on the Body of Christ that follows underscore how Paul saw the celebration of the Lord's Supper to involve the coming together of people across socioeconomic divides.
Paul was one of the leaders of the first generation of Christians, oftentimes considered to be the most important person after Jesus in the history of Christianity. Paul was a Greek-speaking Jew from Asia Minor who was born about the same time as Jesus (c. 4 BCE). Until about the middle of his life, Paul was a member of the Pharisees and was a persecutor of the nascent Christian movement. Paul participated in St. Stephen being stoned to death and afterwards he "made havoc of the church" by searching out Christians and handing them over to prison and death.6 Then, while on the way to Damascus, Paul had a vision in which Jesus Christ rebuked him and told him he was destined to take the Christian faith to the Gentiles.
After traveling to Arabia for what appears to have been an initial unsuccessful mission, Paul's journeys took him to the eastern Mediterranean, and finally to Rome, where he died sometime in the mid-60s CE.
In his history of Christianity, Diarmaid McCullough notes that "entering Paul's theological world in his letters is rather like jumping on a moving merry-go-round: the point of entry hardly matters. It is an intensely painted set of portraits of how a Christian community works and what a Christian community signifies..."7 Paul's attempts to persuade the early Christians to see and do things his way reveals just how difficult it was for people rooted in the Hellenistic culture to assimilate Paul's gospel of Christ and its implications for personal and community life and for their relations with the larger Roman imperial society. It appears this was especially true in a city like Corinth.
Paul's first letter to the Corinthians included a series of responses to news he had received through "Chloe's people" about some of the serious conflicts that had emerged within the Corinthian community after he had left, including dubious practices around celebrating the Lord's Supper.
In 1 Corinthians 11:17-34, Paul expresses anger and horror at the creative means by which the wealthy had separated themselves out from the poor during the Lord's Supper to instead engage in status-specific dining. It is within this broader context that the first reference to the words of institution (1 Corinthians 11:23-26) occurs: "For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, 'This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.' In the same way he took the cup also, after supper, saying, 'This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me." For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes."
As familiar as these words are to many Christians, less familiar is the surrounding conflict that led Paul to first write these. Specifically, in this passage, Paul was accusing the wealthier Corinthians of bringing their own food and drink to the assembly, separating themselves out from those who are poor and hungry, and eating their meal among members of their own social class.8
In Remember the Poor, Bruce Longnecker somewhat medically describes Paul's indignation as tied to "a situation in which economic factors of corporate identity were being overlooked by some Jesus-followers." Paul is fierier in his own words and forcefully condemns the way the Lord's Supper had become yet another opportunity to display social division and class status. Paul's voice seems to break with hurt and bitter sarcasm when he says, "Indeed, there have to be discriminations among you, for only so will it become clear who among you are distinguished."9
The notion of a congregation composed of the rich and poor and sharing a meal was as challenging a concept then as it is now, yet this breaking down of caste is clearly part of Paul's vision. In his letter to Galatians, Paul writes of what Christ means for social divisions: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus."10 Almost two millennia later, the antebellum abolitionist U.S. Senator Charles Sumner, would say something similar as he fought against segregation in the Boston school systems. "The separation in the Public Schools of Boston, on account of color or race is in the nature of Caste, and on this account is a violation of Equality. Caste makes distinctions where God has made none."11 Both then and now, this of vision of God's equality cuts against the grain of what was considered acceptable in a rigidly maintained caste system.
Even so, the recipients of Paul's letter were likely surprised at Paul's indignation as status-specific dining was a widespread practice in the Roman Empire. In a somewhat humorous passage written around the turn of the second century, the Roman magistrate Pliny the Younger bitterly complains about a dinner host who had assigned three different levels of food and wine in keeping with the three levels of social orders present at the table. "One was for himself and me; the next for his friends of a lower order (for you must know, he measures out his friendship according to the degrees of quality); and third for his own freed-men and mine."12 There is also historical evidence of clubs and associations serving different types of meals and drink to different levels of donors.13 Separating one's self out by social status at meals, therefore, was as widespread and seemingly acceptable as the more recent practice of segregation and the zoning of neighborhoods by wealth and race.
Nevertheless, Paul's fury at the wealthier Corinthians leaps off the page. He is furious for how their separation humiliates those who have nothing to eat. Jesus himself, the writers of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, and many in the first Christian assemblies would likely have had a direct experience of a period of prolonged hunger in their lives, and nearly all would have carried anxiety and fear of hunger as a result of sudden food shortages caused by natural disasters. The Roman socioeconomic hierarchy was one of stark inequality with an imperial & aristocratic elite (1-3%), a middle group with moderate surplus resources (7-15%), and "the poor" who were either stable near subsistence (22-27%), at subsistence (30-40%), or below subsistence and therefore lacking necessary food, shelter, and clothing (25-28%).14 In this agrarian subsistence economy, therefore, between 75-90% of the Roman world lived close to subsistence level -- near, at, or below -- and were struggling for survival and sustenance on a daily basis.15
Paul, therefore, angrily condemns such status-specific separation: "When you come together, it is not really to eat the Lord's supper. For when the time comes to eat, each of you goes ahead with your own supper, and one goes hungry and another becomes drunk. What! Do you not have homes to eat and drink in? Or do you show contempt for the church of God and humiliate those who have nothing?"16
It is with this searing condemnation still in mind that we should reconsider Paul's warning in versus 1 Corinthians 11:23 that the Corinthians eat and drink judgment against themselves when they fail to 'discern the body.'17 Over the centuries, a great deal has been made about Paul's statement that one must 'discern the body' during the Eucharist. I am not so foolish so as to negate the later thought that this refers to Christ's real presence in the bread and wine. What I will say is that - in addition - we should be considering the fact that this phrase occurs between Paul's chastisement of the wealthier Corinthians for separating themselves out from the poor and his meditation on the Church as the body in the next chapter, a body in which he says the most vulnerable parts should be treated with greater honor. When one looks at this important phrase in light of both chapters 11-12, I think there is a reasonable case to be made that he is reminding the Corinthians that they should be able to see both the strongest and most vulnerable members of the church body when approaching the table for the Lord's Supper.
While broader Roman culture encouraged the wealthy to separate themselves out from the poor for status-specific dining, Paul notes "The eye cannot say to the hand, 'I have no need of you', nor again the head to the feet, 'I have no need of you. On the contrary, the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and those members of the body that we think less honourable we clothe with greater honour, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect; whereas our more respectable members do not need this."18
How might this apply to today? I believe it's in the spirit of Paul in 1st Corinthians to begin to ask some questions about how we celebrate the Lord's Supper. When attending a service, we should ask ourselves:
1. To what extent does this Eucharistic service represent the coming together of people across socioeconomic divisions, particularly the wealthy and the poor? Or is this another example of the wealthy separating themselves from the poor for a status-specific service?
2. To what extent is one able to 'discern the body' at this communion service, including those who Paul describes as the most vulnerable and least respectable/honorable? Or does this represent one part of the body saying to another "I have no need of you"?
Of course, the tendency of the wealthy to separate themselves out from the poor is alive and well within both broader U.S. society and mainline Christianity. We are currently living in a period of almost unprecedented inequality and all too often these disparities are reinforced, rather than countered, by the makeup of our churches and the priorities of our ecclesiastical institutions. In this, it is helpful to be reminded of Paul's fury at the wealthy Corinthians' separating themselves from the hungry, and it is eye-opening to then ask how that applies to in-person services today.
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Two years after I first walked through St. Mary's red doors, I graduated from Union Theological Seminary with my Master of Divinity and began working for the Episcopal Church, first as a communications assistant to then-recently-elected Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori and afterward at the Episcopal Church Foundation as a program officer for leadership development. Both positions afforded me opportunities to see the Episcopal Church from a birds-eye view, oftentimes quite literally in that they involved regular flights across the country for meetings with diocesan offices.
In 2016 my colleague, the Rev. Ronald Byrd and I made a visit to a diocesan office in the Midwest and were shown a diocesan map that I'll never forget. The map was divided into colored zip codes and within the various zip codes I could see little crosses representing the locations of currently existing Episcopal congregations. A few zip codes were shaded pink to represent the wealthiest neighborhoods in the city, whereas others were shaded yellow to represent the poorest. It will surprise no one who has been around mainline Christianity for a while when I note that the pink zip codes had a cluster of Episcopal congregations and the yellow zip codes had very few, if any at all.
I was being shown this map because the diocesan staff member I was meeting with saw this as a major problem, and she was working hard to plant and sustain Episcopal communities of faith in those zip codes which hadn't been of particular concern to prior generations. Nevertheless, when one asks how it could possibly be that the Episcopal Church has remained more than 95% white and wealthy amidst the changing demographics of the United States, we should bear these maps charting socioeconomic segregation in mind.
In this Midwestern city, and many others across the United States, dioceses engaged in concerted church planting campaigns shortly after the end of World War II, of which my then-employer the Episcopal Church Foundation (ECF) took a leading role. Both where diocesan leaders chose to locate those new churches and which of those churches still remain standing reflect a long-standing prioritization of wealth and whiteness that still characterizes our denomination. However, this is not just the story of the Episcopal Church but rather part of a broader patterns of segregation that was true of the country as a whole, patterns that have meant Martin Luther King's observation that "Sunday is the most segregated time in America" still remains true.
Richard Rothstein's book The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America is a key text for understanding just how much effort has gone into segregating communities by wealth and color in the United States, patterns that make the status-specific dining practices of the Roman Empire look benign in comparison. The book traces how racial disparities in homeownership were created through red lining, reverse redlining, restrictive covenants, and other factors, all of which have contributed to the generational wealth gap between whites and people of color that we see today.
Rothstein goes into detail about the role of racially restrictive covenants. Community associations - which frequently included neighborhood churches - embedded racial exclusion clauses into home deeds on the grounds that home values dropped when people of color moved into neighborhoods. The mainline churches nestled in these communities frequently had a significant organizing role in these covenants. He cites one example in which a Roman Catholic priest in a wealthy Chicago suburb was an outspoken, driving force behind the creation of its racially restrictive covenant, and describes how a single racially restrictive covenant was executed by religious institutions on Chicago's Near North Side, including the Moody Bible Institute, the Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the Board of Foreign Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church.19
As it happens, the same Midwestern city that I visited a few years ago now has such a racial covenant tracking project, and there is a doctoral dissertation waiting to be written by one day overlaying the map of where Episcopal congregations are currently sited and the emerging map of which neighborhoods had racial covenants.
I mention this history because mainline Protestants and Catholics need to have a more developed understanding about why it is that so many congregations do not represent a coming together across socioeconomic divisions, a fact that in the United States inevitably requires examining issues of both economic inequality and race. The fact that my own denomination of the Episcopal Church is more than 95% white and wealthy is the result of systemic structural decisions - including an outright preference for building in segregated spaces - as much as it is of cultural insensitivity. This is a banal but insidious story of structural decisions, including decisions about where we chose to plant congregations and which congregations we have chosen to sustain amidst institutional decline.
Systematically, then, in many parts of the country, Christians have separated themselves out from the lives of the poor in favor of status-specific Eucharists. The notion of the Eucharist as a place where people come together across these socioeconomic divides remains elusive in many, though not all, parts of the Church. Further, in some parts of the Church, an insidious culture of racist elitism has developed for which separation from poverty and the poor is very much the point.
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In light of Paul's description of the Lord's Supper as a time for coming together across socioeconomic divides, I've long wondered how one 'discerns the body' at, say, a Eucharist service aboard a cruise ship, or at a summer resort chapel aimed at resort attendees but not at the people who work the low-wage jobs that support those spaces. I've also wondered about how one 'discerned the body' at the Eucharist held during the 2015 Consortium of Endowed Episcopal Parishes conference on Amelia Island Plantation Resort, with its theme of "Connections Matter" and in which registrants had to enter the estimated amount of their church's endowments to register.
How are these not examples of the same status-specific dining that Paul railed against? Paul's bitter sarcasm comes to mind when one considers such fascination with maintaining caste divisions: "Indeed, there have to be discriminations among you, for only so will it become clear who among you are distinguished."20 Few question the validity of the Eucharists that take place at such inaccessible services -- instances in which caste division and separation from the poor are part of the point -- so why bring these socioeconomic criteria up at all?
The first historical reference to the Lord's Supper in 1 Corinthians 11:17-34 suggests that there are socioeconomic implications to this gathering that have long been downplayed if not ignored. Paul angrily chastises the wealthy for separating themselves out from those who have nothing to eat and insists that this is contrary to the spirit and purpose of the tradition he has received. Paul continues to hope for a Lord's Supper and Christian community that cuts across caste divisions.
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1 https://stmarysharlem.org/history/
2 https://www.nytimes.com/1996/05/31/nyregion/old-friends-new-foes-president-preacher-one-60-s-activist-runs-columbia-one.html
3 My Cousin Bobby, Jonathan Demmy, 5:40 mark
4 https://www.nyclu.org/en/publications/stop-and-frisk-de-blasio-era-2019
5 Wilkerson, Isabel. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. Page 18
6 Attwater, Donald - The Penguin Dictionary of Saints - On Paul - Page 258
7 Diarmaid McCullough, Page 102
8 Malina, Bruce. Social Science Commentary on the Letters of Paul, 109-111
9 NRSV commentary on 1 Corinthians 11:19
10 Galations 3:28
11 Wilkerson, Isabel. Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. Page 24
12 Pliny the Younger, Letters II, 6, LCL 109-13
13 Theissen, Gerd (1982) The Social Setting of Pauline Christianity: Essays on Corinth, ed. and trans. John H. Schütz. Philadelphia: Fortress Press. / Quoted in Vernon K. Robbins (1996) The Tapestry of Early Christian Discourse: Rhetoric, Society and Ideology, London: Routledge: 115-118
14 Rhee, Wealth and Poverty in Early Christianity, Loc 80
15 Rhee, Helen. Loving the Poor, Saving the Rich: Wealth, Poverty, and Early Christian Formation, pages 5 and 11
16 1 Corinthians 11:20-22
17 1 Corinthians 11:23
18 1 Corinthians 12:21-24
19 Rothstein, Richard. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. 2012. See chapter on IRS Support and Compliant Regulations.
20 NRSV commentary on 1 Corinthians 11:19
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