Liam Byrnes

Over the last few years, I’ve thought more and more about wine. Growing up in the UK, wine was either brought out for special occasions and namelessly served, or cheap, mass produced wine which was abused by those seeking to self-medicate.

Only since living in South Africa have I been introduced to truly appreciating wine; it’s characteristics, the nuances between grape varietals, the process and care taken to produce this most ancient of agricultural products. South Africa’s wine is so varied¹ and affordable² as to lend itself to an education in the breadth of wine varietals and regions.

Reading the bible, it is hard to get away from wine. It is both a historical artifact of the ancient world, and as with most agricultural processes in scripture, a deeply symbolic and meaningful image.

The symbolism of wine

A few years ago, I was partaking in a eucharist celebration when a friend who was leading the process spoke about the significance and symbolism of the wine making process (rather than just grape juice) as it relates to us remembering Jesus.

Consider this;

• Grapes are grown in specific conditions and require just the right amount of cultivation to produce wine.
• They are then tenderly picked and mostly by hand at the end of a sucessful growing period.
• They are then crushed in order that their inner character can be spilt.
• They then spend time in the tomb underground, maturing, taking on their new and true quality. Also becoming enhanced and empowered by the fermentation process.
• At just the right time they are pulled up from the under ground aging processs and enjoyed around a table, drawing together different people into a common family and enabling an uninhibited sharing.

This is not an intellectualised ode to alcoholism, but rather paying attention to the way in which wine operates in society and the power it has which speaks to something of the character of the power of God;

• It is the produce an seemingly natural item.
• It is processed through the counter-intuitive process of crushing, descending and then distributing a gift that draws people together.

Wine in the Scriptural God Story

Of course it is hard to deny the significance of wine within scripture, it is by far the most spoken about agricultural product (in fact over 1000 references in scripture), and it is chosen by Jesus as a particular way to remember him, and I’ve written before here about some of the possible siginficnance of that.

Wine connects us to our original task in Eden as those that bear the image of God; to take creation and to enhance and draw beauty from our stewardship of it. We are connected to the created order. Just as a musical instrument crafted from the wood from a tree, wine making enhances the creation in a way that it can be offered back to God in the midst of the joy of His people.

We don’t just stand over creation as it’s stewards, we also draw the material of our life from creation. We are in fact, soil with God’s breath in us. The creation account speaks clearly of this, the name adam, literally meaning earth, ground, soil or clay.

Wine in the scriptures speaks of celebration, of abundance, of the success of God’s kingdom people. It speaks of surplas, more than just neccesity.

Wine takes time, it takes a people who own land (another great theme of the scriptures) that have enough to sustain them and so venture to create this luxury good. When Jacob blesses Judah, he speaks of it in terms of huge vines, large enough to tie a donkey to!³ God’s promises to provide for His people, when the spies go to see a promised land they see huge grapes. It is a picture also of a future peaceable land where every person will sit under his own vine ⁴.

There are a number of encouragements towards wine for general health ⁵ in scripture as well as the slightly awkward first miracle of Jesus ⁶ which produces excellent wine to help finish off a party caught in shame at having too little on hand. Whilst certainly there are messianic and symbolic reasons for this particular miracle, the plain fact of it cannot be denied. Jesus is the wine maker, for a party already well under way in terms of it’s wine consumption.

It is also spoken of as something which mocks us if we over-indulge⁷. Reminding us that in this inbetween time, if the only key we know is celebration and we are not recognising the reality of suffering we will surely be undone.

Another scriptural writer reminds us that the Lord’s love is better than wine. This, another friend once remarked, is not said to create a contrast, as if wine were bad and love were good. It is said to say, this is the very pinnacle of human engenuity and creation production, and yet God’s love is better!

Receiving creation as gift as a remedy to abuse

A few years ago when my friend (who himself was friends with many a wine farmer) said that you will never find a wine farmer who abuses alcohol⁸, because, he said, they know the labour of it, they know the preciousness of it. Abusing alcohol comes from a mindlessness towards it. Indeed, often those abusing alcohol are seeking to be mindless because of what it is that is tormenting their minds. Instead, wine makers and wine farmers are attentive to the wine, to the land that created it and the effort and tenuous nature of the agrarian life in general.

Part two next week will take further the enjoying God’s gift in creation, thinking about how grape vines image our lives as christians and our cultural immaturity in our relationship to wine.

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Isaac Aho has written a few things on here before, you can see those here and here. Isaac just finished completing a research project on the practise of the eucharist. The eucharist is practised in as many different ways as there have been christian traditions because Jesus’ words were unequivocle, “Do this to remember me”. I thought I’d ask Isaac what he was learning about this Christian practise;

Q: Isaac, You’ve just finished a season of reflecting, practising and then reflecting on eucharist. What drew you originally to look at this ancient christian practise?

Before doing our DTS¹ in 2010, our family had a desire to make christian discipleship something more than a program or bible study; something accessible for all people in every day life.

As we looked at and began to focus on the table as a place of growth it led us to study and see how much Jesus taught, discipled and gathered around food. This brought us to the last supper and saw how He chose bread and wine as the center of how we were to remember Him.

Q: As you look at this christian worship practise through christian history, what stands out as an element that has been lost in modern practise and one element you feel like has been retained (of course this is all broadly speaking)?

If I look at the trajectory of the practice of communion. I believe it has gone from a long, unhurried, intentional meal eaten with an awareness of Jesus as host. To a sometimes hurried part of a larger service that is experienced with either boredom or sometimes dread by the participants. It has moved from a meal to a small wafer and thin juice served in a plastic cup.

Athanasius says “The only alternative to an ascent toward God is a rapid descent into the nothingness which is humanity’s only natural possession apart from God.”

It seems to me the sacrament is moving in the direction of “nothingness”. The Eucharistic custom of bread and wine began to be practiced separate from the Agapa meal or “love feast” sometime in the second century. It soon came to symbolize the meal as the Agapa meal faded from practice. We now have a symbol of a symbol of a symbol as we drink a small sip of grape juice from a plastic cup in a hurried procession. (I am of course talking about the worst of evangelical practice not the church catholic) I can imagine the end will be clicking a wine and bread icon in a virtual community of an iPhone app. This would fit in the description of hell in C.S Lewis book The Great Divorce

Q: What do you think is the root through which this practise might be revived in the church and what fruit might that produce?

I would say the trajectory needs to be changed. Move toward what is real, present and more substantial. Share real bread baked by someone you know. Drink from an actual cup the best wine you have available. Become present in the moment to the worship community around you. Explore and practice your own love feast. Become familiar with the story that you have entered. Heaven and earth have been joined together. The bread and wine are a witness and an actual representation of this coming together. If this is an unfamiliar thought this video could help explore the significance of the bread and wine.

It is symbol in some sense as the wine reminds us of the new covenant. Do you know what this is? If not you can watch the trailer here.

It is also so much more than symbol as God himself has become One with time, space and matter. Every moment, place and thing is inhabited by the Holy.

Q: What is it specifically about the form of worship that made it meaningful enough that Jesus chooses it as the way he is asking to be ‘remembered’?

I can of course say something about this but cannot say everything. I feel it is in the seemingly ordinary elements that the extraordinary is hidden. Julie Canlis says

“Christian spirituality is always relational, always embodied, and always frighteningly ordinary.

You cannot participate in communion without the actual practice or “praxis” of all three.

Q: Sometimes eucharist or communion can be spoken about in way that encourage every mealtime to be considered sacred, the danger of this though seems to be that can be when everything is sacred then arguably nothing ‘feels’ sacred or set apart? On the flipside a highly liturgical, infrequent or set apart practise does not seem to be what jesus is gesturing towards?

I wrestled with this a lot through my reading and study. As I practiced communion around a table with friends I worried that I may be contributing to a flippant or shallow understanding of communion. It was actually your last blog that helped me resolve some of the tension. I think we can in every moment or practice be asking Holy Spirit “What kind of a sacred moment is this” It could be a time for a lighthearted meal with friends. It also could be in a stained glass cathedral in a highly liturgical service. Each are equally holy and sacred. One is just a different kind of holy appropriate for that moment. While I want to make Agape meals and love feast a part of everyday life. I have a growing respect for the parts of the body that have been a bulwark against our “slide into nothingness” through holding fast to tradition and orthodoxy.

Q: How does participating in eucharist form our christian approach to food and the environment more generally?

Seeing God himself as inhabiting creation has to change how we view and steward the earth. I believe Communion properly understood should motivate us to know where our food comes from. Is it produced in a humane and sustainable way? Paul rebuked the church of Corinth for eating without an awareness or love for those participating in the meal. In a globalized economy this could mean people I might never know or see could be participants at my table. I believe we should make an effort to know who these people are and how we are affecting them.

It takes a community to produce the elements of bread and wine. Plant, water, harvest…and should not be taken meaningfully alone. It’s hopefully taken around a table, seeing each other,

Partnership with God- think of manna, fish, we do our part God does His.

Thanks Isaac, if you have any follow up questions please ask them in the comments below!

Recently I got the chance to lead musical worship at a much larger church than I normally attend and was introduced to something called ‘in-ears’. These are basically fancy headphones that cut out most sound and instead give you the option to create your own mix of your own instrument and the others in the band. It was much more disconcerting than I’d imagined.

You see, I was grew up learning to play the guitar by strumming with all the teenage forearm delivered enthusiasm you’d expect in a side church room to a youth group. No amplification, just me and my guitar and the voices of the folks I was growing up in Christ with. With no amplification you could hear my poorly timed strumming, a guy called Jim’s off key voice, and the girl who fancied herself as a pop star and experimented with harmonies. The point was, we could hear one another.

Once a year we would whisk ourselves off to a huge national youth conference and have the times of our lives. Our poor singing and off beat strumming was replaced with excellent musicianship and the ethereal experience of singing alongside 1000’s of people. There was lights and occasionally even a little fake smoke.
And I loved it.

It is no exaggeration to say that attending that conference and the impact it had on my meagre but sincere youth group through the year was life changing. After every year we would buy an accompanying songbook of the new songs introduced that year, head home to our small side room of our church with the youth group and sing our hearts out. Close our eyes, and If we couldn’t quite ascend to the heights of John’s vision in Revelation, we imagined ourselves back in that big conference tent and our hearts were strangely warmed. We escaped.

More recently a well-known international mega church had their worship band tour through our city. Lots of excitement enused, living in the southern tip of africa that has a perpetual inferiority complex to the rest of the west, people were clambering over one another for tickets. I didn’t go, but the reports were abundant. Much what you would expect, light were low and the bright ones were focussed on the visiting worshippers. They played well-practised swelling tunes and lead prayer that the church in the city would be unified. The only challenge was, the church in the city couldn’t see each other, they were in darkness, literally.

Although we are involved in a church planting ministry that predominantly seeks to plant simple house churches amongst the neglected parts of the earth, I don’t ever want to take cheap (and honestly easily come by) shots at large church ministries and the attractional mega church movement. Partly because, I’m a recipient of God’s ministry through the conference I attended that ran down these same tracks. I honestly can’t imagine where I’d be without those existential, emotionally charged experiences from my teenage years. All that being said, I’ve often been very attentive to the words or theology of particular songs but until recently fairly unreflective of the mode or environment of worship itself. It turns out that not just the content of worship is formative, but the very layout and context of worship. This was wisdom cathedral builders and stained glass window artists were well aware of, but it has been forsaken.

I’ve wondered if certain worship environments are helpful or harmful depending on the phase of life or ‘felt-need’ in a certain season. In most peoples teenage years there is an incessant and haunting self-obsession. Teenagers are constantly aware of what they are doing and saying, how they are being portrayed. They are terrified someone (normally their parents) or something (an activity that has fallen out of fashion within the last 30mins) will embarrass them. In psycholgical language they are hyper-vigilant. When you are in a hyper-vigilant, hyper-self-aware state, the greatest gift you could receive is the self-forgetfulness that comes with the existential crowd worship times. It is, I’m suggesting often why young christian people love large worship gatherings, why unbelieving people love rock concerts and why business executives often love transcendent meditation. The greatest gift is to escape. To escape the busyness, the painful self-awareness, the sense of not being enough.

As I grew a little older in Christian faith I didn’t discount these large and transcendent experiences but I started to realise that they didn’t fulfill all of the needs of the Christian life. When things are difficult the conference is still months down the road. Who is there? Well out of tune Jim and the harmony girl from the youth group. Suddenly their additions to worship times and your life in community more generally, although quirky, becomes the very ministry of God to you. In 1 Corinthians 14:26¹ the writer is giving us a normative reflection of worship in the early church. One has a song, a word, a prophecy, a psalm, a teaching. Each one delivered by someone with a name, a past, maybe even someone who you have unforgiveness in your heart towards. But they are there, and you know them and see their face. They are not the stranger in the dark at your side as you gaze as the well-lit group ahead covered by wafts of smoke.

Later in life, my motivations are not so much to escape but to inhabit. Inhabit the community with the off-key singers and the embarrassing parent, because every spiritual quest to escape requires us to wake up. And we wake up alongside people with names, people with quirks and part of the journey of discipleship is to realise that those people are God’s gifts in our lives. They are the peole with the songs, the psalms, the prophecies and the lessons. Admittedly the songs aren’t well performed and the lessons might not be as well polished as the platform speakers, but they are our people. In my youth I often believed I had to ascend to heaven by shutting my eyes extra tight to see God, but now I am realised the good news that, as is popularly repeated from the message translation, “God has moved into the neighbourhood” (John 1) and He is living inside off-tune Jim and all his quirky friends.

Much of this escapism can be traced back to a cult that threatened the message of christianity from it’s early days. The cult of gnosticism, believing God to be perfect and pure and recognising that our bodies and creation itself often wasn’t. Gnostics believed only the pure part of us, our soul, could dwell with God. It’s a familiar story, change a few key words and it was the gospel many of us were told. This is our ‘great escape’ gospel. Does this sound familiar, “put off your flesh” “saving souls”, “going to heaven” – all biblically rooted things to be sure, but they became the gnostic impulses that were distilled from a God-story that is in fact very earthy and embodied.

A God created matter and called it good, A God became flesh and dwelled amongst us, He resurrected in a new body, He ascended in that body, and He is coming back to establish his new kingdom on this earth remade. His plan has always been to inhabit, to dwell, not for us to escape.

Normally in evangelical circles we think of mission as something that we do for God, or at best with God that helps communicate the message of God’s forgiveness of sins. While I don’t disagree with that description, it is not as rich and as all encompassing as the biblical narrative frames it. In the first description, mission doesn’t make much sense any time before the cross, and arguably before pentecost. But God has been on mission all through His story and although we won’t get far without being saved from sin and death, God’s story, focuses on what we are saved for more than what we are saved from.

Often we think of mission as something we do to obey God and win the lost, evangelism and church planting. But the bible shows us that in fact God was engaged in mission long before we came on the scene, He has a plan and a purpose for creation and He chooses to include us, He chooses to ask us to come along and co-create with Him.

Chris Wright¹ helps us see the larger scope

“God’s purpose is to bring a broken creation, spoiled at every level, that is at the level of individual human hearts through culture and societies, nations and brokeness at an international level, right through to the brokenness of creation itself. To bring a world like that, that we see in Genesis Ch 1-11, to a world that is being renewed, restored and purged of evil in the new creation at the end of Revelation.”

In this scope, God is doing things in His world, through His people to the end of the redeeming of everything that God has created.

So being involved in God’s mission is not just the realm of evangelists and church planters. Skye Jethani says the three things that characterised Eden were beauty, order and abundance. Certainly those things take place first as right relationship with God and others, but once we are included in the very life of Christ the outflow of our lives that contribute to the re-newing, re-ordering, re-generating of all of creation is activity that is on mission with God too.

This means that the value of making art, of working for rightness and justice in a work place, and creating jobs are not just useful to God to the extent to which you can witness in those places, but they themselves are part of God’s work through His people to renew the world.

Is God interested in your co-worker at work or co-student at art class hearing about God’s invitation to new life with Him? Certainly, but He is also working through your work to the extent to which you are contributing to the increase of beauty, order and abundance of society and creation.

That’s good news for followers of Jesus who feel left out if they are not involved in the erroneously named ‘full-time ministry’.

Last month I wrote about the intense harmfulness of pride, this originally was one whole post, but far too long – so this post needs the one before, so you can read part one here.

Although it is self-affirming, it doesn’t do much good to simply diagnose the problem without an attempt at offering some part of a solution. So here is my best attempt at how we might begin to confront pride in ourselves. ¹

Can you imagine being immediately grateful for a confrontation?

4 years ago, our church community invited a lady to speak to us who was a qualified life coach. She came to teach our church community how to ask questions that would help us grow. While there were many good tools shared in that week, it was a story she told that made the biggest impact on me. She described a co-worker who naturally rubbed her the wrong way in most interactions. She described it such a way that made it easy for everyone listening to put themselves in her shoes and imagine their own ‘grace-grower’! She then spoke about how she began to develop a consistent point to pray for this person and at the same time was developing a very strong desire to be transformed by any means possible into the likeness of Christ.

Can you guess what happened next?

This same co-worker approached this lady and confronted her about a pattern of behaviour she had noticed. The co-worker did not communicate it perfectly and there may have been plenty of justification for push back. But she was so motivated towards transformation that she was able to sincerely thank this co-worker for the confrontation as her first response.

Now many of us can imagine saying the right thing as a response, through gritted teeth and then later bad mouthing the person to some others in a way that reassures us that we were in the right. But that was not the testimony of this lady, she literally had a sincere overflow of gratitude for the confrontation that she was able to respond to. In that moment I was struck with my absolute inability to do that.

I was imagining the very equivalent person in my life and thinking, “sure, I could muster enough self control to say the right thing”. But the idea that I could have a sincere response of gratitude that overlooked the way a confrontation came to me was as foreign as the idea of being able to laugh upon being stabbed. Many of us in the christian life have cultivated enough self-control to do the right thing, but what does it take to feel the right thing? I intended to find out.

In the following months I considered during times with God, how much value did I really hold in becoming like Jesus. Did I really value it above all else, like the many songs I had sung, enthusiastically described? Or was I secretly committed to be just nice enough to get by with my pride in tact. I realised that deep down I was committed to how people perceived me more than about who God knew me to be.

Although I didn’t have a marked story within those months to illustrate the growth I began to experience, I felt assured that this season shifted something in the foundations of my inner life. The power of pride was in some way broken down and that made many of the following decisions easier and more felt than before.

Now of course my intention is not to present a somehow finished work in this, but simply to encourage us that we can take steps forward, steps which make responses of spontaneous holiness possible. Would I struggle over someone harshly confronting me? Im sure I would, but instead of confronting them back in self-protection, I feel more assured that I might be able to take on the ‘meat’ of their confrontation and leave the bones to the Lord to deal with.

The good news is that we are wrong

Often the good news of God has been compressed into simple phrases like “God loves for you” and while I believe that, the gospel also offers and maybe even begins by providing a way to say “I was wrong”. In fact to be renewed, reformed and resurrected into the kingdom of God, somewhere we have to have a deep revelation that “I was wrong”. This is the good news, that we get to be wrong and it doesn’t have to annihilate us.

We have to realise we are wrong about God; God in Jesus is nothing like the God we would have imagined. The trajectory of our imaginations outside of God would have never given us the story we were given. It would have never revealed the ‘right’ in a way we could have anticipated, and so we are left with an invitation, an invitation to say “I was wrong…”.

Of course, just like the prodigal son returns to the Father to say ‘I was wrong’, the Father bounds over with an embrace. That is the good news, that (if I can risk sentimentalising the process a little) that the Father squeezes the wrongness from us in an embrace and welcomes us into a vocation that will even further transform us².

Our ability to recognise we were wrong and the humility and request for forgiveness that flows from this is essential to the gospel impacting our lives, and it is not just a one-time thing. For those of us that follow Jesus it actually is like a circadian rhythm in our stories that follows a pattern of being wrong, revealing our wrongness³, being forgiven , being renewed. This is the pattern of the person who is truly changing, truly reforming, truly transforming, again and again.

Saying we are wrong helps us receive God’s forgiveness

There is something else that I’ve observed; that our relationship to God is characterised by the same things that characterise our human relationships. I have observed enough to believe it to be true, that those who refuse or feel unable to forgive others are unable to forgive themselves. This is a big problem because the same place that forgiveness flows out towards others is the same place that God’s forgiveness and release flows in. God’s forgiveness is the very foundation for our knowing and experiencing God in all other ways. I have painfully observed that as people allow their inner lives to become increasingly filled with small unforgivenesses they find it increasingly hard to relate to, experience and participate in God’s life. Alot is at stake in this pride and forgiveness dynamic.

So to return to a biblical image of our lives, we are made to be like clay in the potters hands. God’s intention is not just to let us in the door of salvation, but to transform us over a life of salvation. Pride and unforgiveness do not contribute to God’s intended human flourishing, its made us like hard clay. Hard clay can not be loving moulded but has to be smashed into softness on the potter’s wheel or more terrifyingly set aside altogether. God intended us to be able to say “I was wrong” in order be transformed for God’s sake, for our sake and for the sake of the World.

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