Saturday, October 20, 2012

Fence

We sit on the fence
Where our fatal games
Have been played
Games that still call
With their lies of
Completion,
Inclusion,
Satisfaction;
One word arises above
Authority

There are no tricks
No slight of hand
No magical words;
Acceptance,
Trust,
Faith
Are the postures needed
To wield the sword
Authority.

Falling we do well
Practiced and precise.
Abiding in the squalor of
Guilt
We
Trust the lie of
Self deprecation
More than the truth of
Grace.

His seeking of us when
We are at our worst,
The lifting of our heads
When we believe we deserve
A blow from
His righteous hand,
His gentle yet insistent voice
Calling us to a deeper truth;
Deeper than the mire of
Ourselves,
Alone,
On the fence.

Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Wine

Again, I am confessing I am not a very good Baptist boy.  I'm just saying.

One of the outcomes of helping my friend Syd with this year's grape/wine harvest is an appreciation for the care and work it takes for grape juice to be transformed into drinkable wine. As I mentioned in a previous post, my wife and I helped with the harvest and crush a couple weeks ago.  A week ago last Friday we helped with squeezing out the skins, seed and occasional stem from the crush. It was remarkable to taste the very new wine at various stages of the press, there is a difference from that which flows easily and that which comes from pressing hard the solids of the crush. When we were finished that evening there was about 50 gallons of Barbera and 35 gallons of Zinfandel.  Unfortunately Syd's Sirah was not ready and he told me Sunday at church he'd had to toss it as it had gone bad before he had the time to press it. As before, it was interesting to reflect on the work, the process little changed from wine making in the days Jesus physically walked the earth.

Syd mentioned his awe at how much was produced, how his five rows of each variety gave such abundance. The God-spoken soil is so full of life.

Of course this past Sunday was the first Sunday of the month and like most Baptist churches we celebrated Communion. I'm not writing out of criticism of our process - the tiny bit of unleavened cracker or the miniscule plastic cup of grape juice - it is what it is and we are reminded adequately of the tremendous price paid by our Elder Brother for us to have access to Abba's heart.

What did strike me was the contents of the tiny plastic cup. As we partook of the elements our choir sang a song inviting us to come taste the bread, come taste the wine. My thought was, especially after my recent work with my friend Syd, "This is not wine. Are we missing something here?"

I know well the symbolism we're taught with the bread representing Jesus' body and the "wine" representing His shed blood, but I wonder if we've missed something else as well. Wine is grape juiced transformed from something innocuous into something different, stronger. Perhaps in our false sense of religious propriety we've  missed the symbolism of transformation that real wine might represent.

We are not called to be sweet and innocuous but rather something strong and powerful for the Kingdom; Jesus' words, "You are salt, you are light", come to mind. I am wondering if we have missed a powerful reminder of Jesus' transformational power by substituting grape juice for a taste of powerful wine. His very presence, as He said to His disciples in the upper room that night, "I am in you, you are in Me", is a deeply significant and transformative reality that we desperately need to be reminded of. Yes, that monthly tiny plastic cup does represent His shed blood but it also needs to remind us of His transformative power as well.

I'm just saying.

Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Water Hose

A couple Saturdays ago I, along with other friends and family, helped my friends Syd and Jennifer with their grape harvest. After harvesting, dumping them into large white bins and weighing them, we loaded our trucks with the grapes and hauled the ten white bins to a crusher.

It took Syd and I over an hour to feed all the grapes into the crusher while his brother and a friend washed and sanitized the empty bins preparing them for the fermentation of the crushed grapes. When we were done we had seven bins full of heavy mashed grapes. Both Syd and I were wet and sticky with the juice of the crush but there was something elemental and satisfying about the process.

Our methods are more modern but the product is an old one, thousands of years of men and women have gone before us doing much the same as we had. It felt good to step, however briefly, into that long line of winemakers.

Cleaning the mechanized crusher required copious amounts of water and by the time we were done with the clean-up all four of us had squishy wet shoes but none of us seemed to mind. In addition, it was a warm day - mid 90's - so throughout the process we four would periodically drink cool water from the gushing hose used for cleaning the bins.

Driving the 40 minutes back to Syd's I reflected on some of this. I noticed a child-like stirring in my heart. Few things will make you feel more like a child on a hot summer's day like a gushing hose of cool water; playing in it and drinking from it. That is what we'd done, four grown men played with a water hose. My soaked shoes become symbols of long-ago childhood recaptured for a brief time.

I was reminded of Jesus' words about not losing the child-like heart we all have. Life, with its cynical twists and turns, will steal it quickly and we will think ourselves wise to let it be stolen; a mistaken notion of maturity. We want to turn His words about childlikeness into metaphor or symbol but we err in doing this. There are times we simply must return to the child in all of us. This is not childishness without the benefit of lessons learned with maturity. Rather it is childlike awe, joy, playfulness, trust.

That gushing hose on that Saturday afternoon returned me to some of those needed qualities. Maybe more of us need to put our Bibles down and go play in the yard with a water hose more often.