Copyright: © 1999 Paul F. Bosch.
This document may be freely reproduced for non-commercial purposes with credit to the author and mention of the Lift Up Your Hearts web site http://www.worship.ca/ as the source.

Almost eighteen years ago, I moved from New England to Waterloo, Ontario, to serve as Campus Pastor at Waterloo's two universities. The Kitchener-Waterloo area, in southern Ontario, is the German-immigrant heartland of Canada, and the Lutheran heartland as well: there are a half-dozen Lutheran congregations here with well over a thousand members.

Having served in ministry in Central Pennsylvania, in upstate New York, and in Massachusetts, with their various and distinctive regional pieties, I was not prepared for what I discovered in Southern Ontario: Almost all Lutheran congregations here used wine exclusively at Communion -- never grape juice -- and almost always from a common cup. I was, and remain, both dumbfounded and delighted! Can the persistence of that (I am assuming largely German- immigrant) piety be duplicated anywhere else in North America?

Alas, probably not. Across the continent, on both sides of the border, one encounters grape juice, or individual communion glasses, or both, still too often in our Lutheran celebrations of Holy Communion.

So what's wrong with grape juice? And what's wrong with individual communion glasses? I'm glad you asked. First, let's consider those individual communion glasses. Then, the grape juice.

The cup, as a "sign" in Christian worship, is parallel to the loaf in almost every consideration. Like the common loaf, the common cup speaks more eloquently than individual glasses of our oneness in Christ. It could be argued that to speak of "individual communion glasses" represents an oxymoron: an intolerable contradiction in terms. The same might be said of "individual communion wafers."

Hence, whatever forms the peoples' piety might take in a given locality, it's essential that a common cup be utilized at the altar, for ceremonial purposes, if for no other reason. And indeed a common loaf!

(Here we encounter, yet once again in these essays, an Important Principle: In Holy Communion, as in all of Christian worship, concerns for comfort, or convenience, or efficiency, or practicality -- or even sanitation! -- are not among our first considerations, if we are to allow these "signs" to speak with fullest power. To be sure, such considerations will eventually occupy our attention. But first we must seek to hear what the "sign" itself is trying to say; to listen with scrupulous concentration to the silent witness of the naked "sign," in and of itself. When we do this, in a spirit of prayer and openness to the Spirit's gentle suasion, we will not fail to be rewarded with new and deepened insight.)

It is significant, further, that real wine be used, and not grape juice, or Gatorade, for example. The use of grape juice at Holy Communion in lieu of wine is a product of Victorian prudishness, and of the Nineteenth Century American temperance movement.

More suspect yet, the use of grape juice in Christian worship is a lamentable consequence of Nineteenth Century American entrepreneurial marketing inventiveness! Not for the first time, American Christians (but not, apparently, Ontario Lutherans!) were sold a bill of goods by the captains of (American) commerce and their minions, the Madison Avenue masters of market manipulation.

This is to say, grape juice would be impossible to produce, much less to market, were it not for the then-recently-discovered process of pasteurization: grapes left to themselves will ferment, and it is precisely the potency in the fermentation process that gives wine its power as a "sign" in Christian worship. Grape juice is dead; wine is alive.

Not incidentally, Luther would point out that, in the Eucharist, you are offered the same wine that can get you drunk, under other circumstances -- and indeed, the same loaf that might contain dirt from under the baker's fingernails!

Further still: Grape juice is altogether void of any of the sense of exuberant joy in celebration which we have come to associate with wine. Christians have used real wine in worship, among other reasons, for its associations with joy and festivity and celebration.

(A parable: Last year this time, my wife was diagnosed with terminal cancer. To fulfill a childhood dream of hers, our daughters arranged, for all five of us, a ten-day trip to Eastern Europe, during a pause in her chemotherapy, to search out the little town in Slovakia where her grandparents had been born. We found the place, and we met a dear little ancient couple who bore Kathy's grandmother's name. They invited us warmly into their home, and broke open a bottle of wine! to celebrate. It wasn't grape juice; it wasn't Gatorade; it wasn't even tea or coffee; it was a prized bottle of local wine.)

Again: Wine is "alive," in a sense that pasteurized grape juice simply cannot be.

What about alcoholics at Communion, you ask? Of course, almost every Christian assembly will include people who are alcoholic, or allergic to wine; equally, our assemblies will likely include persons allergic to the gluten or yeast in wheat bread.

My best advice: encourage worshipers to recall that the total Christ is present in either "sign": the so-called Doctrine of Concomitance. It will be sufficient, that is, for you to receive either bread or cup alone, when you cannot, for medical reasons, receive both. That is, you receive the bread, and then simply pass the cup by, returning to your place in the congregation. This solution seems to me to resolve the issue with more compassion and less embarrassment for all than to provide alternate food (such as rice bread, or grape juice) in alternate containers (such as individual glasses).

A final argument for the use of wine is the trans-cultural: it is wine, and not Gatorade, for example, that connects contemporary Christians with Christians of other times and other places, and indeed with our Jewish cousins in faith. This trans-cultural witness which wine provides is one of Christian worship's "non-negotiables," local pieties to the contrary notwithstanding. (Now, if you're in a parish where grape juice in individual glasses has become a cherished tradition, don't quote me and try to make changes tomorrow in parish piety.)

On second thought: Sure, quote me. But don't try to change people's piety overnight! That's bad manners.