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With the covid-19 pandemic already in force in some parts of the world, many stakes have cancelled traditional church meetings and have gone to videoconference sacrament meetings. I (I strongly recommend Sam Brown’s recent post on the theological responsibility we have to take precautions not for our own selves, but for the most vulnerable among us.) And as the pandemic continues to spread, I suspect that in the coming weeks we will see more and more of this.

Broadcast church meetings are not especially new. General conference and regional broadcasts are familiar, and even for weekly sacrament meetings, the church has sometimes used broadcasts in very remote areas where travel is difficult during certain seasons. But as online streaming technology has become more and more available, and as the covid-19 pandemic continues to spread, I suspect we are going to see videoconference sacrament meetings on a larger scale and perhaps for a more extended period than most of us have ever seen before. That makes me wonder about whether and how the sacrament could be administered remotely. Where members remain physically in their own homes and gather online to participate in a sacrament meeting, could a priest bless sacramental emblems prepared by members in their own homes over a streamed video?

Current Practice

Now, I already know that that’s not the current practice. As far as I know, the church has never authorized it. The normal practice during a streamed sacrament meeting, as reported to me by members living in quarantined areas now, is to have a pause in the streamed broadcast during which priesthood holders in each home individually administer the sacramental emblems.

That practice probably works just fine for most members who have a priest, elder, or high priest in their home. But it does not include single women, widows, single mothers and their children, or men who are not ordained to the office of a priests or to an office in the Melchizedek priesthood. In the past, such members unable to attend a sacrament meeting have normally received the sacrament from priesthood holders who come to their home. But in a pandemic situation, it may be unwise to have one or two priesthood holders going from home to home to administer the sacrament, because they could become a vector for the pathogen. This is especially true if they are disproportionately visiting older folks who are more vulnerable.

And even aside from that, it’s undeniable that while homebound folks can receive the sacramental emblems in this way, they are to some extent missing out on the communion that the ward experiences when we eat and drink the sacramental emblems together as a group. Partaking of the sacrament together as a congregation is an important element of the sacrament (see Moroni 6:6). It’s not insignificant that when Paul tells the church “now ye are the body of Christ” (1 Corinthians 12:27), he does so after discussing the Lord’s Supper in the previous chapter.

Physical Presence vs. Virtual Presence

The fact that meeting together as a church is an important element of the sacrament might actually be an argument against blessing it over a live stream. Meeting together, the argument goes, means being in each other’s presence. But there are other kinds of presence than physical presence. And there are other ways of meeting together than being in the same physical location.

With streaming and videoconferencing technology we can be present with each other in real ways without being physically in the same location. The church already recognizes this through, for example, the way we can gather and not only passively participate in listening to General Conference sermons, but also actively participate in prayers, singing congregational hymns, and the sustaining of Church Officers via broadcast. The church also encourages the use of videoconferencing to decrease the burden on families of leadership meetings and councils. Our high council, for example, usually meets twice per month. Once in person, and once in a videoconference.

Textually, the words of the sacrament prayers don’t seem to foreclose the possibility of blessing the sacrament remotely. The text of the prayers requires the priest administering the sacrament to ask God to “bless and sanctify this bread” (Moroni 4:3; D&C 20:77) and “this wine [or water]” (Moroni 5:4; D&C 20:79). “This” could be read narrowly to mean only that which is physically present in front of the priest, but I think it is broad enough that it could also reasonably mean the bread or water that is prepared for that particular streamed sacrament meeting in the homes of “all those who partake of it” as part of that streamed meeting. Surely the power of God to bless the sacramental emblems is not more limited than the power of technology.

While it is true that physical touch is an essential element of certain ordinances, like baptism and the laying on of hands, the priests do not lay hands on the sacramental elements while saying the prayer. The sacrament is also different from these other ordinances that require touch because unlike with these other ordinances, where the priesthood holder is directly addressing the person being blessed, the priesthood holder in the sacrament is addressing God and is acting as voice for the entire congregation in a prayer for God to bless and sanctify the sacramental emblems.

[Update: As J. Stapely points out in the comments below, there is even historical precedent for blessings to be given long-distance, by letter, without the physical laying on of hands.]

What About Breaking the Bread?

Probably the strongest argument against the blessing the sacrament remotely is founded in 3 Nephi 18. In that chapter, Jesus says that after the church ordains a priest to administer the sacrament, Jesus will give him “power that he shall break bread and bless it, and give it unto the people of my church” (v. 5). This verse suggests that breaking the bread is part of administering the sacrament. More than one sacrament sermon has noted the symbolic resonance of the broken bread with Jesus’ broken body.

But there are also good reasons to think that while the symbolism of broken bread is important, breaking the bread is not an essential element of administering the sacrament in our sacrament liturgy. For one thing, Jesus’s statement in 3 Nephi 18:5 that someone would be ordained to break bread and bless it goes on to also say “and give it unto the people of my church,” but the church’s current practice is to have to have deacons give the sacramental emblems to the church, not the priest who blesses it, even though deacons explicitly do not have authority to administer the sacrament (D&C 20:58; see also Sam’s post on this). The authority to administer the sacrament, as the church thinks of it today, therefore, clearly does not mean the authority, to do all three of the things listed in Jesus’s statement.

Jesus’s statement was not to the modern church, but to the early Nephite church, and it is not clear that it was meant to be prescriptive to the modern church. The modern church’s sacrament liturgy is based directly on Moroni’s liturgy (compare Moroni 4 & 5 with D&C 20:76-79), not on 3 Nephi 18 (see my old series on this). The Nephite sacrament liturgy appears to have changed or developed over the three centuries between 3 Nephi 18 and Moroni, and though Moroni’s liturgy is clearly based on 3 Nephi 18, it is not identical to the liturgy Jesus used when he first introduced the sacrament. (I am not, by the way, suggesting that Moroni’s liturgy was a corruption of Jesus’ liturgy or the product of apostasy. I am suggesting that church leaders, exercising their legitimate authority, developed and adapted the liturgy to meet the changing needs of the church). And although Moroni’s liturgy does describe details such as the priest “kneel[ing]” (Moroni 4:2), and “tak[ing] the cup” (Moroni 5:1), Moroni’s liturgy does not explicitly require the priest to break the bread.

And even if Moroni’s liturgy arguably implicitly requires the priest to break the bread, that is not dispositive, because though our current practice is directly based on Moroni’s liturgy, we do not follow Moroni’s liturgy to the letter. Indeed, as J. Stapely has noted, the church generally did not use the prayers from Moroni’s liturgy until well into the Utah period. And even now, though we emphasize the use of the prayers from Moroni’s liturgy (with the exception of saying “water” where Moroni’s prayer says “wine”) we do not generally follow the non-prayer elements of Moroni’s liturgy. Moroni’s liturgy says that the priest is to kneel “with the church” while saying the blessing on the bread (Moroni 4:2; D&C 20:76) , but our modern practice is for the priest to kneel alone, and to have the church remain seated. Similarly, while Moroni’s liturgy says that the priest is to “take the cup” in his hands while saying the blessing on the wine (Moroni 5:1; D&C 20:78), our practice today is to leave the sacrament cups in the trays sitting on the table. (Again, I’m not suggesting that our modern practice is apostate or corrupt, I’m suggesting that church leaders have exercised their legitimate authority to adapt the liturgy, and that therefore the original forms, though they are important for historical understanding, are not prescriptively dispositive.)

Scriptural Basis and Precedent For Adaptation

And though the symbolism of broken bread may be theologically significant, there is precedent for adapting the sacrament liturgy, in response to concerns about contamination or contagion, in ways that remove symbolic elements that are theologically significant. Just as broken bread may be a symbol of Jesus’s broken body, wine, made from crushing grapes to spill the juice within, can be seen as an important symbol of Jesus’s spilt blood. And it may be seen as an important parallel with olive oil, used in healing and anointing ordinances in the church, which is similarly made by crushing olives, and may thus be seen as an important symbol of the healing power of Jesus’s blood. And likewise, the common cup, which the church used until the early 20th century, is a theologically powerful symbol of the unity of the church.

Nevertheless, despite these powerful theological symbols, very early in the church’s history–only months after the church was organized, in fact–fear of poisoned or contaminated wine led to a revelation that permitted the use of any food or drink for the sacramental emblems: “it mattereth not what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink when ye partake of the sacrament, if it so be that ye do it with an eye single to my glory—remembering unto the Father my body which was laid down for you, and my blood which was shed for the remission of your sins” (D&C 27:2).

It is this principle of authorized adaptation of the sacramental emblems–so long as they are eaten with an eye single to Christ’s glory–that the church relies on today to explain its decision in the early 20th century to discontinue the use of wine altogether in favor of water. And that’s not the only adaptation, either. Around that same time, in response to fears of contagion during the 1917 Influenza epidemic, the church abandoned the use of the common cup and moved to the individual sacrament cups that are familiar today. In recent years, the church in some places has further adapted the sacrament for members with severe gluten intolerance, allergies, or sensitivities in several ways, including by allowing such members to prepare their own gluten-free substitute to be placed alongside the bread on the tray in a plastic bag to avoid cross-contamination, rather than requiring the priests to break it along with the bread.

I was interested and a little surprised (though perhaps I should not have bee surprised, given the scriptural authorization for adaptation) to learn that one other church in the restoration movement has expressly authorized the blessing of the sacrament remotely over video streaming, as long as it is in real-time.

Conclusion

Whether the church will or should authorize priests to bless the sacrament remotely over a live video stream is obviously above my pay grade, but it does not appear to be scripturally or doctrinally impossible. It may make sense for church leaders to consider, at least in extenuating circumstances where meeting by videoconference becomes widespread for an extended period of time, and personal visits become inadvisable, whether to authorize members to prepare sacramental emblems in their own home, to be blessed by an authorized priesthood holder via a live-streamed sacrament meeting.