Love First At The Table

By Reverend TJ

Yesterday we posted this invitation to several community pages:

🎶 Where the streets have no name... but everyone has a seat at the table.

🍞🍷 Are you ready to experience communion in a whole new way?

Join us for U2charist—a unique, community-wide communion service set entirely to the powerful, inspiring music of U2! Whether you're a lifelong believer, looking for a welcoming space, or just really love U2, there is a place for you here. This is an open table with absolutely no requirements or expectations.

📅 When: August 2nd at 2:00 PM

📍 Where: The Reformed Church (106 North Chestnut, Scottdale, PA)

🎟️ Cost: Entirely free! (No offering will be taken. If you'd like to bring something, we are collecting non-perishable food items for our food pantry box!)

🕊️ A special note to our Catholic brothers and sisters: We would love nothing more than to have you join us. We completely respect your church's traditions regarding communion—please feel warmly invited to simply come, enjoy the music, pray, and be fully present in community with us, even if you choose not to commune.

Your presence is a gift! Bring yourself, bring a friend, and let's find God in the music we love. We can't wait to see you there!

Feathers got ruffled as they so often do in the echo chamber of misery that is social media. It was mostly over the note to our Catholic siblings and the open table together. People didn't understand what we actually meant and felt like we singled out one denomination as they don't understand the history or theology behind the invitation.

Furthermore, some heard the open invitation as blasphemous, and thought you have to profess belief first to come to the table — which, for the record, is true in a lot of Protestant traditions too, not just Catholic ones.

Our Catholic sisters and brothers go a step further-- if you do not believe in the Catholic church and you were to attend a Catholic church you would receive a blessing instead of communion.

This isn't a judgement of the practice, it is just is a difference in theology going back 500 years to the reformation movement. Knowing this key differences between the Catholic and Protestant traditions is what led to the special note to our Catholic siblings. Let's go deeper into what this upcoming service is and a little more on our histories.

We Didn't Invent This

Quick sidebar on the U2 themed service itself, because it's a fun fact and I don't want to lose it: U2charists aren't new. Churches everywhere — Episcopal, Lutheran, Methodist — have been doing this for almost twenty years. It fits our summer series on finding God in secular music perfectly, because if God shows up outside a hymnal, it's in a chord progression that wrecks you before you know why. And U2 and Universal Music Group have given blanket permission for churches to use their music this way, as long as whatever gets collected goes toward global AIDS relief and extreme poverty. Tells you something about the band, whatever genre Spotify files them under. We won't take an offering — just food pantry donations — but I figured I would explain that detail to you all.

The Harder Part: An Open Table History

Someone commenting on the social media post said Catholics aren't allowed to partake — like it was our rule. It's not. It's the Catholic Church's rule, not ours. Here's what's actually true: our denomination teaches that anyone who believes may partake. Catholics are taught not to partake in Protestant communion, but that boundary belongs to their tradition, not to us.

For Catholics, the bread and cup are the literal body and blood of Jesus, transformed in the service itself. For Protestants, there's no single answer — we've never agreed on this one. Some traditions hold that Jesus is truly present in and around the elements. Others hold that communion is a remembrance, a symbol pointing back to what Christ did, not a transformation happening in the moment.

This isn't a small disagreement, and it isn't new. In 1529, Martin Luther and the Swiss reformer Huldrych Zwingli sat down at Marburg Castle to see if they could unite the Protestant movement, and they agreed on almost everything — except this. Luther believed Christ's body was truly present in the bread. Zwingli believed it was a memorial. The story goes that Luther, refusing to budge, wrote the words "this is my body" on the table between them in chalk, and every time Zwingli tried to argue it away, Luther just pointed at the word is. They left Marburg without agreement, and four hundred years later, we still haven't reached one. That single word split the Reformation before it even finished happening.

(Funny sidebar, Martin Luther was quite the debator and often insulted people. If you want to be insulted by him here is a generator with some of his quotes for fun.)

So what's a sacrament? It's a physical, visible act the Church treats as a channel of God's grace — something you see or taste or feel, carrying something you can't. The Catholic Church has seven of them: baptism, Eucharist, confirmation, reconciliation, anointing of the sick, holy orders, matrimony. Our church has two — baptism and communion.

That difference exists because there's a varied belief across traditions.

Why I Practice This the Way I Do

Even in my interview for ordination, I pushed on the boundary at the table of communion, the way I've seen others push on it too. I said: I will practice a truly open table of communion, always, because the disciples didn't understand what it meant yet either — and even Judas, who betrayed Jesus, was served. Jesus didn't deny anyone. Why would I?

This is rooted in something that happened to me as a kid. I didn't grow up inside one church — my family had Catholics and Protestants of different traditions, so we were never forced to pick one. My favorite church was my aunt and uncle's African-American congregation on Kepple Hill in Vandergrift, lively, soulful, and fun. For a while we went to a Lutheran church, and usually I'd go to children's church, but one day I asked to stay with my parents. The pastor there wouldn't give me communion during the service because I wasn't confirmed yet. A practice very common within my own denomination today.

As a child, I was heartbroken. I didn't understand the polity of a church — a lot of adults don't even understand the varying polities of their own church, let alone someone else's — so I thought it was God rejecting me. I refused to go to church again. I never stopped loving God, though. I just didn't love the church, and it took years of exploring before I came back to seeking one out — and even then, I never set out to be a pastor. My first career path is in speech-language pathology. I never asked God for this. God asked this of me.

So I practice an open table because I will never be a barrier between someone seeking God and God's table. I'll take whatever judgment upon my soul that comes for welcoming someone as a guest at the Lord's table.

The Table as a Home, Not a Gate

I think of it like setting a table in my own home. It would be rude to have people over and only serve some of them. I believe Jesus was unconditionally loving, extravagantly welcoming, radically inclusive. If that's not your view of Jesus, that's okay — you're free, by the free will God blessed you with, to discern your own spiritual path.

This service is an opportunity to worship across our differences, under one God. You don't have to partake. You can say "thank you, but not today" and still stay for the music, still pray, still be present with us. We can disagree and be loved by God anyway.

(If you are curious about the order of worship here is a sample of one done at an Irish Festival in Ohio)

Love First, Always. — Rev. TJ