Tickets to the Eucharist
In 2023, the Washington National Cathedral caused a social media uproar when it announced that it was selling tickets for its Christmas Eve Eucharist. Though the decision was quickly retracted, the initial sale ended up stoking a passionate—and for me, highly interesting—debate about the moral and theological question of whether a church should ever charge people for the Eucharist, or for any sacrament, really.
There were voices on both sides. Many sympathized with the fact that Christmas services are massive productions requiring major investments of labor and resources. The seven-dollar tickets, some argued, represented a bargain given the quality of the musical performances. Others noted that the cathedral itself is a vast complex that sustained damage in the 2011 Virginia earthquake, and therefore saw this as an innovative approach to raising funds.
For the vast majority, however, selling tickets was an affront—a degradation of the sanctity of the Eucharist—even if it was difficult to articulate exactly why. The Rev. Anthony Jones summed up the opinion of many (including myself) when he said: “A community of faith reducing public worship to just another option of paid Christmas entertainment? If a congregation can’t do church without selling tickets, something is wrong.”1
While the cathedral’s decision to sell tickets was highly unusual, variations of this theme often arise during presentations I give on faith and money. Recently, a clergy person asked why churches can’t charge membership fees the way other institutions do—like gyms, for example. He described how visitors engaged in “church shopping” regularly ask him how much membership costs. He also expressed envy regarding the transparency with which many synagogues charge membership dues. To his experiences I’ll add my own of a Zen meditation center that charges a sliding scale membership fee according to income bracket. Surely these represent fair and transparent approaches to funding congregations.
To put a fine point on the question: When people are accustomed to—and willing to—pay a ticket price for a well-produced event, what’s the harm in charging a nominal fee for a Christmas Eucharist? And when so many pay membership dues to gyms or subscribe to services, what’s wrong with charging a fee for Christian community?
As is almost always the case in such matters, the biggest challenge to such a model can be summed up in one word: Jesus.
In some of the earliest texts prohibiting financial transactions around the sacraments, Christian leaders cite Jesus’ insistence to his disciples that they “Cure the sick; raise the dead; cleanse those with a skin disease; cast out demons” free of charge, for “You received without payment; give without payment” (Matthew 10:8).
It also falsely teaches that God’s grace can be commodified and that the church is its broker.
The sacraments, in particular, have traditionally been separated from buying and selling on the marketplace on the grounds that God’s grace is offered freely, and so the Church must offer these without charge. Practically, this means that there is to be no financial barrier to the sacraments—no ticket, membership fee, or paywall—from the smallest country parish with a part-time minister and wobbly choir to the most elaborate Christmas Eve Eucharist in Washington, DC. To do otherwise, the argument goes, is to engage in simony: the buying and selling of sacred things.
And yet the itch to charge for sacraments persists. In this blog post, therefore, I want to return to the time before the sale of indulgences kicked off the Protestant Reformation, to review some of those earliest prohibitions on selling the sacred. I believe they set a salutary limit on the kinds of entrepreneurialism the Church can engage in—limits that are especially needed in a marketplace society in which everything is up for sale.
One of the most important homilies preached about the buying and selling of sacred things was written by Pope Gregory in the late sixth century.2 In a text that weaves together multiple New Testament passages—including both Matthew 10:8 and Jesus’ cleansing of the temple in the Gospel of John—Gregory recalled how Jesus used a whip of cords to drive out those buying and selling doves.3 Since the dove symbolized the Holy Spirit, Gregory argued, the Church must likewise drive out financial transactions surrounding the sacraments, which were freely given and therefore must be freely offered. Of particular concern for him was the buying and selling of ordinations to the priesthood.
Even though this homily is among the first full-throated critiques of simony, his argument drew on earlier foundations.
The first recorded Christian confrontation with this issue appears in the Acts of the Apostles. There we hear of the entrepreneurial magician Simon Magus, who was so impressed by the apostles conferring the Holy Spirit through the laying on of hands that he offered to purchase this power from them (Acts 8:18–24). Saint Peter replies: “May your silver perish with you, because you thought you could obtain God’s gift with money! You have no part or share in this, for your heart is not right before God” (Acts 8:20).
Though Simon repents, his treatment of grace as a commodity would give its name to this persistent tendency in Christian history. Simony, therefore, refers to the purchase and sale of spiritual things.4
As the Church grew in wealth and power over the next few centuries, simony proliferated.5 Evidence of this can be seen in the earliest conciliar documents. Canon 48 of the Council of Elvira (c. 309 CE) prohibited placing coins in the baptismal shell “so that the priest does not seem to sell for money what he has received freely.”6 Likewise, Canon 2 of the Council of Chalcedon (451 CE) condemned bishops who ordained for money as putting “to sale a grace which cannot be sold.”7 Yet the recurrence of these prohibitions points to the ubiquity of such sales.
Seeing that the Church had become, in his words, “a marketplace” and “a den of thieves,” Gregory’s homily in 590 denounced this peculiar form of ecclesiastical entrepreneurialism. Even more striking, however, is Gregory’s claim that simony is not merely a sin but a heresy. In describing the “simoniacal heresy,” Gregory suggests that the transactions represent false teaching—for they suggest that God’s grace can be commodified and that the Church’s role is to act as a broker of divine favor.
Returning to the question of what’s the harm, really, of selling a ticket to the Eucharist – this begins to point toward an answer. When the church sells tickets to a Eucharist, charges membership fees for access to the sacraments, or requires payment for reconciliation, it not only violates Jesus’ teaching that his disciples must give freely what has been received as grace by God. It also falsely teaches that God’s grace can be commodified and that the church is its broker.
Stepping away from early church history, I think there are other, cultural reasons to oppose the sale of tickets to the Eucharist.
Right now Americans are living through an extraordinary moment in which it seems that everything—from the office of the presidency to a special Easter blessing from the White House Faith advisor—is up for sale. In What Money Can’t Buy, the Harvard political philosopher Michael Sandel argues that since the 1980s, the United States has transformed from having a market economy into becoming a market society: “The most fateful change that unfolded during the past three decades was not an increase in greed. It was the expansion of markets, and of market values, into spheres of life where they don’t belong.”8
In this context, even well-intentioned people may begin to see the sacraments as what economists call “underpriced commodities”—goods and services being given away too cheaply. Underpriced commodities have a tendency to create markets around them, something which helps explain the persistence of simony across the centuries. (I am especially intrigued by the “gray areas” where churches appear to follow the letter but not the spirit of this prohibition. For example, a friend who once worked in a cathedral bookstore told me that while the clergy prohibited the sale of holy water, visitors were required to purchase a special bottle from the bookstore in order to take the holy water home.)
Against this view stands Jesus’ insistence—born of his beautifully anti-entrepreneurial spirit—that God’s grace is so holy that it cannot be bought or sold but must be given freely. Any gift to the church must therefore be a free-will offering, not a charge rendered for sacramental services.
When the temptation arises to sell tickets to a Eucharist, or establish a membership fee for church, this is an opportunity to invite people to see the world in a very different way. Sometimes the most radical thing we can do is to hold fast to a very ancient conviction: that there are some things so sacred that they can only be offered freely.
1 David Paulsen, “Washington National Cathedral Cancels Fees to Attend Some Christmas Services After Uproar,” Episcopal News Service, November 28, 2023, https://episcopalnewsservice.org/2023/11/28/washington-national-cathedral-cancels-fees-to-attend-some-christmas-services-after-uproar/
2 E. A. Livingstone, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Kindle edition), s.v. “Gregory the Great.”
3 Gregory the Great, Forty Gospel Homilies (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2009), 123–24, https://www.perlego.com/book/1162699/forty-gospel-homilies-pdf: “But granting the efficacy of the preaching and the power of the miracles, let us hear what our Redeemer added: ‘You have received freely, give freely.’ He foresaw that some, having received this gift of the Spirit, would turn it to business use, and would debase the miraculous signs, yielding to avarice. Thus Simon the magician, being very eager to produce miracles by the imposition of hands, wished to receive the gift of the Holy Spirit for money. He could then commit a greater sin by selling what he had purchased through wickedness. Thus too our Redeemer made a scourge of cords, and drove the crowds from the temple, and overturned the seats of those who were selling doves. To sell doves means to grant the imposition of hands, by which the Spirit is received, not for the merit of the recipient’s life but for a price.”
4 E. A. Livingstone, ed., The Concise Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Kindle ed.), s.v. “Simony,” 521: “The term, which is derived from Simon Magus (see Acts of the Apostles 8:18–24), denotes the purchase or sale of spiritual things. The canons of the early Church show that simony became frequent after the age of the persecutions; there has been repeated legislation against it, especially in connection with ecclesiastical preferment.”
5 Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Simony,” last modified February 6, 2022, https://www.britannica.com/topic/simony, accessed November 22, 2023: “Simony, in the form of buying holy orders, or church offices, was virtually unknown in the first three centuries of the Christian church, but it became familiar when the church had positions of wealth and influence to bestow.”
6 Council of Elvira, Canon 48, in Canons of the Council of Elvira: “The custom of placing coins in the baptismal shell by those being baptized must be corrected so that the priest does not seem to sell for money what he has received freely. Nor shall their feet be washed by priests or clerics.”
7 Council of Chalcedon, Canon 2, in Canons of the Council of Chalcedon, https://earlychurchtexts.com/public/chalcedon_canons.htm: “If any Bishop should ordain for money, and put to sale a grace which cannot be sold, and for money ordain a bishop, or chorepiscopus, or presbyters, or deacons, or any other of those who are counted among the clergy; or if through lust of gain he should nominate for money a steward, or advocate, or prosmonarius, or any one whatever who is on the roll of the Church, let him who is convicted of this forfeit his own rank; and let him who is ordained be nothing profited by the purchased ordination or promotion; but let him be removed from the dignity or charge he has obtained for money. And if any one should be found negotiating such shameful and unlawful transactions, let him also, if he is a clergyman, be deposed from his rank, and if he is a layman or monk, let him be anathematized.”
8 Michael J. Sandel, What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Kindle ed.), 7.
