| Wine, wine, wine By Erik Alsgaard
UMCONNECTION STAFF 
Alsgaard | During Annual Conference, I heard a United Methodist bishop lie. During worship. In public. And it's not the first time I've heard such a lie. I myself have lied in worship. Other clergy have done it. Some laity have done it, too. All because there's this one sentence in our ritual of Holy Communion: 'Pour out your Holy Spirit on us gathered here, and on these gifts of bread and wine.' (emphasis added) These familiar words are used just about every time United Methodists gather to celebrate Holy Communion. At conference during the opening worship service, Bishop Felton Edwin May stood at the altar and intoned those words in front of God and everybody. You might say he lied. Oh, he didn't mean to, certainly. It's not his fault, really. It's just tradition; it's the way we've always done it, and that's the way it is. Well, pardon me, but it's wrong. We all know it's not wine in that cup. For the last 130 or so years, it hasn't been wine in the chalice. And as long as it's a United Methodist worship service these days, it's grape juice, even though we call it wine. For all this confusion, we can thank a Methodist from the 1870s. You've probably heard of him. Dr. Thomas Bramwell Welch, a physician and dentist by profession, successfully pasteurized Concord grape juice in 1879 and produced what he called an 'unfermented sacramental wine.' He did this for his fellow parishioners at the church he attended — a Methodist church — in Vineland, N.J. Only it wasn't really wine, was it Dr. Welch? It was grape juice. Welch's grape juice. Methodists in those days were notorious non-drinkers. Dr. Welch was the communion steward and he founded the fruit juice industry by accident after finding a way to make non-alcoholic grape juice taste good. Actually, his son was the one with the marketing genius to start the company and sell juice; Dr. Welch merely wanted people to partake of Communion without alcohol passing over their lips. Theologically speaking, grape juice (as Welch's provides to this day) is a sterilized, dead, nearly flavorless drink. Where is the symbolism, the promise of the resurrection in that? Wine, on the other hand, is fermented, is alive — as in new wine threatening to burst old wine skins. Now I understand the rationale about not serving alcohol. The church to this day affirms that people should abstain, and hooray for that. But the alcoholic content of a particular beverage is not my issue here, theology is; symbolism is. Wine sends an important, symbolic message of the resurrection: it is alive! Grape juice is just, well, dead. Right about here, someone will ask about alcoholics in our pews and using sacramental wine. When I was serving a local church, I counted alcoholics in the membership, and I suspect just about every church today can make that claim. So yes, I am sensitive to the notion that one sip of communion wine could push them off the wagon, though some debate even that. The solution: Offer both grape juice and wine, label them clearly so that all will know, and let the parishioners make their own choices. The couple of times I tried this is seemed to work well. It's time for we United Methodists to be honest about wine and grape juice, especially in light of 'This Holy Mystery: A United Methodist Understanding of Holy Communion,' adopted by General Conference in May. This 43-page document, available at www.gbod.org/worship, does a marvelous job of explaining the sacrament of Holy Communion — its practices and principles. But the document skips a beat on page 31 when it attempts to explain why we don't use wine. 'During the movement against beverage alcohol in the late nineteenth century, the predecessor bodies of The United Methodist Church turned to the use of unfermented grape juice. This continues to be the position of the denomination. (The term wine is used in this document because of its biblical and historical antecedents, although United Methodists customarily serve unfermented grape juice in Holy Communion.)' The term 'wine' is used but, wink wink, nudge nudge, we know it really isn't. Yikes. For a document that emphasizes symbolism just a few paragraphs later on the topic of using individual cups for taking Communion, stating, 'Unity can be effectively symbolized if each person's cup is filled from a pouring chalice,' (emphasis added) the use of the word wine is wrong. I say either we start using real wine in our Communion services (and that'll never happen), or we change the text and use 'grape juice.' Here's a heretical thought: Perhaps our denomination's troubles can be traced to this simple sacramental miscommunication. Maybe we're missing out on some of the Holy Spirit's blessing because we're asking it, through our prayers, to bless the wrong thing. Maybe, when we get the words right, the blessings will begin to flow again? Just like putting new wine into new wineskins. | 
Login/Register to leave comment