In Illinois, we’re now halfway through our sixth week under a stay-at-home order (and my family’s seventh week at home). And the stay-at-home order looks like it’s going to last at least another month here. That means at least 12 Sundays in Illinois without meeting together at church (and, even when the stay-at-home order ends, some people may make the eminently responsible and defensible decision to continue social distancing, and delay their return to church).
Ultimately, I don’t think putting church meetings on hold is optimal. (To be clear, it’s both necessary and good. It’s just not ideal.) We need human contact, and we need the spiritual benefits that come from gathering together. That said, it’s necessary, and on net, saving the lives and the health of our fellow Saints is both beneficial and will bless us and them.
Still, this extended time away from church means that some people—single women and families without priesthood holders in the home, for example—won’t have the ability to take the sacrament for three months or more.
The church has made a tentative stab at recognizing the position these women and families are in. On April 16, the church provided instructions for administering the church during the pandemic. The instructions provide that “In unusual circumstances when the sacrament is not available, members can be comforted by studying the sacrament prayers and recommitting to live the covenants members have made and praying for the day they will receive it in person, properly administered by the priesthood.”
Now, the church is wrong in its assumption that the unavailability of sacrament is an unusual circumstance; more than half of the women older than 18 in the church are unmarried. Some of those women are likely divorced, and may have sons living with them who can administer the sacrament. But a significant portion have no priesthood holders in their households and no access to the sacrament for the duration of the lockdown.
There are possible solutions to this, of course. The easiest would be to allow the remote blessing of the sacrament, an option that Jared has demonstrated is both doctrinally and historically plausible. But the church has explicitly decided not to go down the remote-blessing path. In its instructions for administering the church, it directed that “[t]he priesthood holder(s) administering the sacrament must be in the same location as those who receive it when they break the bread, say the prayers, and pass the emblems.”
Another option would be to ordain women to the priesthood. That would require a much larger policy change than simply allowing remote blessing, however, and it wouldn’t solve the current problem. In the same letter, the church says that ordination to the priesthood “require the physical laying on of hands by an authorized priesthood holder.” If women don’t have a priesthood holder who can bless the sacrament in their home, they also don’t have a priesthood holder who can physically ordain them.
Another option occurred to me this morning, though: what if we stopped requiring priesthood to bless the sacrament? It’s not entirely far-fetched. After all, less than a year ago President Nelson changed the church’s policy on witnessing baptisms and sealings. Before October 2019, witnesses had to be ordained to the priesthood. Now they just have to be baptized themselves to witness a baptism, have a current temple recommend to witness a proxy baptism, or be endowed to witness a sealing.
Of course, the priesthood requirement in those cases wasn’t scriptural; the only hurdle that had to be cleared was a historical one. (And, as J. Stapley points out, women served as witnesses of some ordinances well into the twentieth century, though, as Ardis Parshall points out, it’s not clear how widespread women as witnesses was.) Allowing non-priesthood holders to bless the sacrament would run into two hurdles: it faces the same historical hurdle, but it also runs into a scriptural hurdle: D&C 20:46 says the priest’s duty is to administer the sacrament, while verse 58 says neither deacons nor teachers have authority to administer it.
Even D&C 20 doesn’t represent an insuperable obstacle to nonpriesthood holders blessing the sacrament, though. I’m currently reading (slowly!) Ben Park’s excellent Kingdom of Nauvoo. And reading it serves as a reminder that Joseph Smith dictated what became D&C 132 to convince his wife Emma that his polygamy was divinely-mandated. Ben also underscores that Joseph and Hyrum used the revelation to convert others in Nauvoo (including the High Council, which under Hyrum had been devoted to rooting out sexual impropriety in Nauvoo) to polygamy.
Critically, while D&C 132:37-65 (or so) is all about polygamy, we’ve read those verses out of our doctrine and theology. We now read the “new and everlasting covenant” to mean specifically temple sealings, not polygamous marriage. (That’s the right thing to do, btw.)
I don’t know exactly how we read the priesthood requirement out of D&C 20:58. But it’s not harder than reading the central purpose of D&C 132 out of that chapter. And it’s critical that the church make some move to allow that vast number of women and families in the church who don’t have a priesthood holder in their homes to access the blessings of taking the sacrament while our chapels remain empty.
Image from page 64 of “The Relief Society magazine : organ of the Relief Society of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints” (1922). No known copyright restrictions.
