At this point, I’ve blogged at least four times about the church’s requirement that people passing the sacrament have the Aaronic priesthood. The most recent time seems to have been a year ago, here (links to previous posts in the third paragraph).
Because I’ve written about it so extensively, I’m not going to spend a lot of time on the scriptural case here. In short, D&C 20, which lays out the requirements for passing the sacrament, explicitly says that teachers and deacons cannot administer the sacrament. So passing it and setting up the sacrament table cannot be administering the sacrament (or we’re acting against scripture), which means that there’s no scriptural basis for not allowing women and girls to pass the sacrament. As I said a year ago, creating this restriction was a policy choice, one that church leaders continue making every time they don’t change the policy.
And the thing is, either passing the sacrament is a big deal or it’s not a big deal. (Okay, it is a big deal: it’s the main way teenagers—teenage (and tween) boys, at least—get to participate in the weekly liturgical life of the church.)
If it’s not a big deal, then why not open it up to girls? It doesn’t take revelation, and it doesn’t even take explanation. The church just announced a change of policy when it decided that women and girls could be witnesses at baptisms. It didn’t, as far as I can remember, give any kind of justification. The church could easily do that here! Or it could explain that this is a long-standing tradition, but it’s trying to get more in line with scripture. That works too! Either way, if it’s not a big deal, it’s not a big deal to open it up.
And if it is a big deal (which it is)? Well, that means that the church is excluding at least half of its membership from the ability to participate in a big deal liturgical exercise, with absolutely zero scriptural or revelatory justification, just tradition. So if passing the sacrament is a big deal, it seems like it is incumbent on church leaders to change this as soon as humanly (because it doesn’t require divine intervention) possible.
And honestly, whether or not it’s a big deal, it’s a small change. Women already pass the sacrament when it’s passed to them. Sometimes they even stand up when there’s a large space between them and the next person in the pews! The church allows girls to take the sacrament from someone passing it and bring it into the nursing room. This doesn’t represent a big change; it represents an easy change.
And as I said a year ago, the ease of the change means that every day the church doesn’t reverse this policy is another day it’s choosing to exclude girls for no reason other than tradition.