Would I serve communion to an ICE officer?

Would I serve communion to an ICE officer? It's a question I've been thinking about watching the violence in LA and the way that the Trump administration has stoked this violence. And I feel like as a pastor, if I had an ICE officer in my congregation, I would be embarrassed.

Not embarrassed of them, but of myself. It would be proof of a failure of pastoring and teaching and discipleship if somebody were in my congregation and they felt like it was okay for them to treat immigrants in such an awful way. That means clearly I have not done my job as someone who is supposed to teach people to imitate Christ.

Our church practices an open communion table, meaning anyone can come and receive the elements of the Eucharist without any sort of restriction. We've had people tell us that they have been turned away from communion because of their sexuality, their gender identity, because they've been divorced, because they didn't agree with a particular creed or belief. We don't do that. Our table has no fences.

But I also know other pastors and theologians who have a problem with the open communion table. They would see something inherently violent or wrong if an immigrant and an ICE officer were at the same communion table. They believe there has to be some sort of fencing of the table to prevent that sort of theological travesty.

I think about Jesus and Zacchaeus. Jesus invites himself into Zacchaeus the tax collector's home. Zacchaeus was not an ICE officer, but he was using the force of the empire to extract money from the population. Jesus is willing to dine with this person. But there's a change. Zacchaeus transforms at the end and engages in reparation work—he gives away half his possessions and repays those he's cheated four times over.

So I think there's something there: communion, dining with the divine at the eucharistic table, should be open. But it should also be transformative. If an ICE officer were to come to the communion table, there would need to be an understanding that whatever violent actions you had done before have to come to an end. You cannot treat immigrants that way. It is unbiblical and unscriptural and flies in the face of the expectations of God and Jesus and how they tell us to treat the immigrant and the stranger.

I don't know how to square that circle—how you have a communion table without fences, without strings attached, while also making sure that it is transformative. Maybe the tension itself is the point. Maybe communion is meant to be uncomfortable, to create these impossible situations that force us to wrestle with what faithfulness looks like in practice.

What I do know is this: the biblical mandate to welcome the stranger isn't negotiable. From Genesis to Revelation, God's position on how we treat immigrants is remarkably consistent. And if someone can participate in violence against immigrants and then come to the Lord's table unchanged, then something is deeply wrong—not with them alone, but with how we're practicing our faith.

The communion table isn't a border to be patrolled. But it's also not a place where violence can be blessed with bread and wine. It has to be a place of transformation, or it becomes meaningless. That's the tension I'm sitting with, and I think that's the tension we all need to sit with.