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By Deborah Gyapong
Canadian Catholic News
 CHRISTIANS "are hardly yet able to speak of a common table" when it comes to communion, Canadian Council of Churches (CCC) president James Christie told an audience of a few hundred people at the 49th International Eucharistic Congress in Quebec City, June 18.
Christie, a United Church minister with years of experience in ecumenism, said he was humbled to be invited to the Congress to offer a Protestant perspective.
Christie explained the difference between an altar and a table in communion. Most Protestants see it as "a working table" that provides a "foretaste" of the "heavenly banquet."
He said he believes the Holy Spirit is present like it had been during Pentecost, not by virtue of office and elements.
The CCC represents 22 churches and communities, he said, while some 25,000 different groups profess variations of Protestant theology. Christie said he spoke as a Protestant but not for all Protestants.
He said his church believes in two sacraments: communion and baptism and there is "no place for local variations" such as substituting white wine for red, or, as one parishioner suggested, using fruitcake instead of bread at Christmas time.
Christie told a story about two couples his church sponsored from Bosnia during the civil war. The wives were Christian, their husbands Muslim. Usually families would approach the communion table together, but the Christian wives always came alone.
One day, however, their husbands came forward to receive. "I hesitated. I looked them in the eyes and I gave them the bread."
Though the United Church proclaims an open table to all baptized Christians, he said he still does not know whether the Muslim men have become baptized. But he did know that they knew and loved Jesus.
"I knew the table was truly the Lord's and I was truly his servant at that time," he said.
He said he would rather be called to account for admitting those who were not qualified to receive than for excluding someone who was hungry for the Lord.
"The Lord's table ought always to be more open than our own," he said.
Cardinal Peter Turkson, Archbishop of Cape Coast and Ghana's first cardinal, provided the Catholic perspective. He told a story of a pregnant woman named Titi, who fled to Ivory Coast through dense jungle after her husband was kidnapped by Liberian rebels.
Her clothes in tatters, her body bruised and wounded, she finally arrived at an Ivorian village where she gave birth to a baby girl. She gave the baby a name which meant, "I have wrestled with death to give you life."
"What Titi did for her baby, Jesus did for us," he said.
He focused on the act of sacrifice in the Eucharist. He pointed out that the Last Supper was a prophetic gesture that signaled imminent events like those of the prophets Jeremiah, who broke the iron yoke, and Ezekiel, who faked the siege of Jerusalem.
Jesus resorted to similar gestures, the cardinal said. Jesus was not making a lot of pieces of bread to be distributed the way he multiplied the loaves and fishes.
When Jesus broke the bread in instituting the Eucharist, it was a "death dealing gesture, and act of killing," he said.
As a Jew, Jesus was familiar with the Old Testament prophecies he had come to fulfill, he said.
"Jesus' death represents total filial submission to the will of the Father," he said. His death "affirmed the Father's right to the obedience of mankind."
"For Jesus, God must be God," he said. "His will must prevail."
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Quebec Anglican Archbishop Bruce Stavert described the Anglican Church as both Catholic and Reformed, because it came into being during the Reformation.
In the beginning, it preserved Catholic tradition, creeds, seven sacraments and a view of holy orders, though it had a different ecclesiology because of differences over the papacy.
Originally the Church of England, it has expanded to 43 provinces, each with their own primates and authority, with the Archbishop of Canterbury first among equals.
Stavert said the Anglican Church had wide differences in theology and practice, what he described as "unity in diversity," though he acknowledged the present problems facing the Canterbury Communion concerning the same-sex unions and openly gay bishops in the United States.
The Anglican Communion faced similar problems previously over the remarriage after divorce and the ordination of women to the priesthood and to the episcopate, he said.
What Anglicans and Catholics share, he said was a theology of the Eucharist. He noted that the churches had reached a "substantive agreement" on the theology of the Eucharist in 1971.
"Anglican tradition has had a clear understanding of what real presence meant in the sacrament," he said.
Anglicans have been less concerned with explaining how the change from bread and wine to Christ's real presence take place, he said.
Greek Orthodox Metropolitan Sotirios Athanassoulas, Exarch of all of Canada for the Patriarchy of Constantinople, gave a presentation on the Eucharist and the Divine Liturgy that resembled closely the catechetical teachings Catholic theologians have offered at the Congress.
"The Orthodox Church has always believed the Eucharist is the real Body and Blood of Christ," he said.
He said the celebration of the Divine Liturgy and the breaking of bread were "the most fundamental institution in putting the Christian faith into practice."
The Divine Liturgy was responsible for the survival of the Christian faith during 400 years of Ottoman rule and under Communist regimes, he said.
"The Byzantine religious life embraced every aspect of secular life," he said. The family home has always been an icon of the Church, he said. It also involved service to the poor.
He also noted the Divine Liturgy has always been in the local language.
-- Courtesy of Canadian Catholic News. Please do not reprint without permission.
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