Devotionals

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God at a Wine Tasting

A wine tasting may seem like a strange place to meet God and some may even balk at the very idea. But He is a God of strange places: gardens and gutters, palaces and prisons, mountains and mangers. Jesus’ first miracle and his greatest sacrament both involved wine tasting. In fact, wine at communion is the very epitome of the mystical nourishment we all long for. There is something primal and elemental in bread and wine that makes it a fertile place to meet God. But the mystical path is one of ill repute among many evangelicals. The cry of “Sola Scriptura!!” has drowned out the primitive, “Sola Cristus!!”. Many would rather hear the Name than see the Face. The theoretical has quietly replaced the experiential, to our shame. One must understand wine tasting to comprehend how God can be met there. It is not about drinking and even less about getting buzzed on the juice. Paul taught that communion was not about the feasting and drinking, but something more substantial. (1 Cor. 11:20-26) The first step in a wine tasting is the pour. Like prayer, it is a simple emptying and filling of the glass. For some, this is as far as they go with God. They know how to talk, but not how to listen. But to taste wine or God, we must do more than pour. We must roll the wine around in our mouth; reflect on it, detecting its essential ingredients. We must pull from many senses, sight for color, smell for fragrance, taste for savor, and imagination to see what none of the others can – the essence. Many of us meditate on God with far less sense than God has given us. Protestant theology has trampled the fruits of nature, poetry, imagination, tradition, mysticism, and even reason under the feet of scriptural theology. The Mystery that is our God has been reduced to a select choice of cross-references. It’s like we are tasting with a cold; our necessary faculties muted and disabled by the weight of sickness. But some have learned to taste and see the goodness of the wine and our God. A few have endured painful healing to open new wineskins that theology has aged into cracked and parched vessels. The rush of rose and river, allegory and analogy, incense and invocation, myth and Mystery, have burst forth to fill the sickly vines with new fruit. Yet even this is not enough. Wine tasters traditionally spit out the wine once they have pondered it and then rinse with water to remove its traces. But there is so much more!! To see God clearly is glorious, but oh to hold Him! To enter into that mystical oneness that the poets and prophets have long tried to share with feeble words and cries! To know our God, we must drink deeply. We must not stop at mere tasting; we must take the draught to the full and let His Heart become ours. We must let His nourishment permeate our very cores. We must cast aside the code of the tasters and theocrats and imbibe the Mystery whole. We must become drunk on the Spirit and sing merrily in our hearts. (Eph 5:18-19)

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