Baptismal Covenant: Will you “continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers?” (Acts 2:42)
Once there was a fellowship of vintners who discovered the secret to making a really good red wine. This wine, grown from a certain kind of grape on the slope of a certain hillside, was so good it was said to transport the person drinking it to heaven.
The winemakers were a little community. They knew that the wine was made through collaboration; not one of them would be able to pull it off alone. They knew winemaking was an art and had to be practiced. A really good wine could not come from a recipe in a book. (They did write a book, however, knowing there were some aspects of their process that would be lost if not recorded.) The wine itself was slightly different with each batch and yet still perfect.
People who wanted to learn to make the really good red wine had to apprentice with the winemakers. They learned not so much how to make the wine as what their place was in the community of vintners. The community changed over time. The grapes, as it turned out, could grow anywhere, and so other communities sprang up.
Sometimes when people became masters of the craft they would strike out on their own, thinking they could make the really good red wine all by themselves. Their wine was not very nuanced. Sometimes people would sneak in and copy the book, using it alone to try to make the really good red wine. Their wine was rarely very transporting.
Each time we renew our baptismal covenant, we make the promise, quoted at the beginning of this article, to participate in Christian community. We vow to continue in the apostles’ teaching, to listen and learn together, to partake in Holy Communion, and to pray.
Over time I’ve come to appreciate the importance of this promise. Like the vintners, we cannot make the wine of spiritual understanding alone. The community helps us with its myriad skills and aptitudes. Our comprehension is tempered by the wisdom of others. With our priest, spiritual descendant of the apostles, we listen to the stories of our tradition and work to grasp and apply them. Our community gives us strength and the support to accomplish our ministry, which is shaped and honed through practice.
Central is the sacrament of communion, through which we understand ourselves as the Body of Christ. Christian community includes all comers – it’s one of the few places in our lives where we can learn from and love people who are very different, relying on them to help us to grow. Coming to the table of Christ, we experience again and again the grace of our complete, radical belonging.
More central still is our collective prayer. In prayer we dance with God, invoking, praising, imploring, confessing to and thanking God, the reason that we exist at all, in community and otherwise. Without prayer, who would we be.
Thank you for being my community of winemakers. My prayers go with each one of you in all your ministries.
