Sour grapes

The evangelical church has perfected the art of being anti-traditional. Old hymns are shoved aside for the latest from Nashville. Denominational allegiances are discarded with ease. History to many evangelicals reaches back only to the first Billy Graham crusade. One tradition, however, is alive and well in the evangelical church.

I just completed a small survey of evangelical churches. I spoke with 10 pastors and asked them two simple questions: (1) Does your church use wine or grape juice when receiving communion? and (2) Why?

I spoke with pastors on both coasts and in between, old churches and new churches, Baptists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and independents. The final score? 8-1/2 to 1-1/2. Grape juice in a landslide. The lone church to serve wine exclusively was, as you might have guessed, the Episcopal church. The halves represent one church that serves both. The rest were of the juice party. The results did not surprise me.

Neither did the reasons. Each pastor spoke of fear. The two principal fears were that others would be offended by wine, and that some would be tempted by wine. The other frequent response was, "I don't know. We've always done it that way," or some variation on the same theme.

What utterly amazed me was that of the eight pastors who serve only grape juice, seven of them want to serve wine. Only one pastor agreed with his church's position. The pastors bemoaned the lingering neo-platonism in the church, the tendency to find evil in the physical, in things rather than in our hearts. Each said he knew from the Bible that it was wine and not grape juice which Jesus drank in instituting his Supper.

My Episcopalian friend, the sole winebibber, reminded me that wine did not come to the Lord's table empty of meaning. In the Old Testament wine was a symbol of blessing, of rest. Priests were forbidden to drink wine because their work was never through. The Great High Priest, however, was about to complete the work. The drinking of the wine, in pointing to Christ's shed blood, points also forward to the consummation of his kingdom, the blessed rest we will receive at the marriage feast of the Lamb.

To water down the wine is to water down the joy. To water down the joy is to water down the full significance of Christ's work.

My happy teetotaler friend explained that the Supper is symbolic. He is right. The Lord's Supper is the Word made visible. The argument is made that the value of a symbol lies in the response it elicits in the heart. The Lord's Supper works to elicit attitudes of wonder, repentance, and thanksgiving.

Assuming an existing antipathy to wine by many in the evangelical church, using wine might more likely elicit anger, fear, disgust, or confusion. The eyes and heart of the believer might focus not on Christ and his blood, but on alcohol.

Jesus, however, is the one who assigns the symbols: bread for body, wine for blood. That they are symbols does not mean that we have the freedom to change them. Jesus, in instituting the Supper, not only symbolized but sacralized. That is to say, he conferred on the bread and wine sacred, or holy, significance.

The issue of the supper comes back to the broader issue of wine. The solution is not to change Christ's instructions, but to change our view of wine. We need accept neither the culture's view nor the evangelical subculture's view. What we need is Jesus' view. We, in seeking to purify what he has called pure, instead only profane.