Humble Access - Part One

We do not presume to come to this thy Table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table. But thou art the same Lord, whose property is always to have mercy; Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood, that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body, and our souls washed through his most precious blood, and that we may evermore ever dwell in him, and he in us. Amen.

Anglicans have always loved this prayer. It is a part of our service of Holy Communion. We pray it together kneeling before the Table before we receive the Body and Blood of the Lord. I have heard it derided by some as groveling and unnecessary, but now that I am relearning liturgy as a Reformed Episcopalian, I don’t think I’d like to do without it again. It is part of Cranmer’s great gift to the English Catholic tradition. I taught on this prayer a couple of Tuesday evenings ago and thought I’d like to “tease out” just a few points in a series of entries here. Forgive me for spending this entry on just the first four words, but they are the ones that occasioned this teaching and are most emblematic of what I find most challenging and beautiful about Anglican spirituality.

“We do not presume….” That says an awful lot. I’m a product in many ways (some good, some not) of the Free Church tradition and life-long charis-mania. It has been so often glibly asserted that “the veil has been removed” and so we are free to barge in on God on the basis of his not being so angry anymore and us all being such good chums now. The ways we pray and worship now are all up to us. Forget that the witness of Scripture and Tradition show us that God is to be approached solely on his own terms rather than ours. The important part is that we all feel good about coming. Even in the prayer book tradition we Americans have certainly made coming more user-friendly. Less intimidating, more inclusive. Our approach has been streamlined into an admirable efficiency and welcome.

But the liturgy calls us to slow down before the approach. We’ve already confessed our sins and received absolution; this prayer isn’t about sinfulness, as we’ll see as we go along. We’ve been welcomed to the Table as those reconciled to God and one another. We’ve offered ourselves wholly and holy. The mood is no longer penitent but decidedly celebrative. But we stop and kneel at this prayer and recognize that even the redeemed are invited by grace not by right. It is not our Table, but God’s. It is not to receive, primarily, that we come, but to commune in worship. And we do not come flippantly. We do not come with that sense of entitlement with which Americans approach so much these days. We don’t come by our own invitation, by our own pattern, to our own tastes, on our own terms, with our own dialect. His presence is a royal and holy presence and yet we, in our frailty and humanity are invited to come. And we do come…but we do not presume.