Coffee: Bread and Wine

by Paul Smith


The reasons why I am fascinated with coffee can be looked at through the lens of the Holy Eucharist. I have always been intrigued by the Eucharist (I grew up in the Episcopal tradition), and it never ceases to challenge me, engage me, and encourage me. It represents that fulcrum from which I can move. Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again - as the liturgy affirms.

The importance of the physical in the Eucharist

The physicality of the Eucharist has struck me with growing profundity over the past few years. For most of Christendom the focus has been placed on the spiritual and heavenly side of the meal, which I have no intent on devaluing or supplanting. One could argue that the metaphysical aspects are the keystone of not only the Eucharist but of our affirmation as Christians. The bread is not simply bread and the wine is not simply wine; Christ was and is fully God, not simply another man.

Yet, the more I have ruminated over the importance of the Eucharist, I always come back to how earthly and, dare I say, animalistic it is. Jesus said, 'Eat this bread' and 'drink this wine' to remember me. Eating? And Drinking? Why not some transcendent practice that distinguishes us from the banalities of plants and animals? And the items are nothing more than bread and wine.

Now here is where I hope to affirm a dichotomy within the elements of the Eucharist. Bread is body and wine is blood. The body is the epitome of this earth and is destined to return to the earth. Blood represents a higher reality, an eternal and salvific one. Blood cleanses and saves.* The body dies. One element stresses the importance of our mortality (earth) and the other points to that in us which goes on past this finite life (heaven). Heaven and earth collide in the meal and elements of the Passover, the Last Supper, and, in turn, the Eucharist.**

It should be noted that both bread and wine require our hands. Jesus did not choose a piece of wheat and a grape. He wanted the elements of the His remembrance to be items that demanded human interaction. Wheat needs a baker and grapes needs a vintner. The Eucharist is both a gift to accept and a process to join.

My daily Eucharist

Roasting, preparing and learning about coffee is a place where I find the presence and the realities of the Eucharist come to life in my day-to-day activities. That which I find beautiful in the Eucharist, I find beautiful in coffee. It is a product of the earth, yet begs to be altered.

Coffee's current cultural relevance is similar to what wine was in the biblical times: a daily, ritualized communal act. Now, with the proliferation of the 'fast food'
mentality of consumption this is a fading reality. So when I mention coffee consumption, I am referring to a bit older and slower way of doing things. Sitting, sipping, with people. The traditional Ethiopian coffee ceremony, which has an entire process of roasting, grinding and brewing in a pot over an open flame displays that which I am referring to. It is typically an after dinner occasion, shared with family and friends, which allows for the continuation of conversation and the time for one to be thankful for what one has. The last of the three cups one drinks is aptly called blessing.

When coffee traveled from Ethiopia, it's birthplace, it was quickly adopted by Muslims in Southern Arabia and used during religious and social occasions. In fact, the name 'coffee' is derived from the Arabic name quahwa***, which is a reference to wine. Coffee's cultural legacy and etymological roots are tied to wine drinking (although coffee came on to the scene only in recent history).

Coffee, wine and tea have all been and continue to be be beverages that in different cultures conjure up notions of the supernatural and yet are composed completely of natural elements. They point to that which is high/holy and yet are firmly rooted in that which is lowly/earthly.

I could keep pontificating on these points, but I will resist. The heart of my interest is this: how can I take the daily and the tangible and use it as a reminder of the sanctity of this life? Bread and wine remain the elements Jesus desires us to use as the rememberence of His body and blood and of His redemptive hand in this world. The Eucharist, and in turn coffee, remind me that I am redeemed, yet my feet are still firmly planted on this earth.

Coffee is simply a reminder for me of the the Eucharist and, therefore, importance of what Jesus did, is doing, and will do.

Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.

***Paul Smith is responsible for this contribution. He is a coffee roaster and entrepreneur who lives in Winston-Salem, NC. Paul's thoughts are informed by impeccable coffee knowledge sculpted by his research and also time lived in Ethopia. His company is Just Ground Coffee.***

*Some might think this analogy strange or far-fetched. With the traditional Jewish understanding blood signified life (hence they removed it from animals that
they ate). As it says in Leviticus: "Because the life of every animal is [in] his blood." (17:14) After the first murder, The blood of Abel 'cried' to God. Blood
(and wine) turn up again and again signifying life, and more specifically that which is holy, mystical and eternal. Need I mention any NT references about the blood of Jesus?

**Do the elements of the Eucharist overturn the idea that has perpetually penetrated religion that: Earth=bad? Is there a new litmus test for that which is holy and that which is profane?

***Some assert that the name coffee comes from the name of a region in Ethiopia: Kaffa. While it has phonetic resemblence, there is little historical or etymological foundation for that claim.

trust

by kristin friedery

recently an older woman at my church invited me out for coffee. i accepted enthusiastically outwardly, but inwardly i was suspicious of her motives. i had just been nominated to be an elder and i had a feeling the two were related.

Sure enough, after a bit of small talk, the conversation eventually came around to the point that she didn’t trust that I was ready to be an elder in leadership at the church. When I asked her why she replied “because I don’t know you, of course!”

At first I was very offended by her remarks. If she didn’t know me, how dare she assume she can’t trust me? But the more I thought about it, the more it actually made sense. Why should I assume that people trust in me, even though they don’t know me? For that matter, why should the older population trust in the younger folks at my church, and vice versa?

The disconnect can come when people begin to worry about their personal agendas instead of God’s will. This older woman certainly cannot trust me to push her agenda to the rest of the leadership, but that isn’t the point. Our agenda’s shouldn’t exist. We should align ourselves so with God that our desire is solely for him to be glorified, regardless of church property issues, denominational disagreements, or how to implement Sunday school.

I have since been voted in and will be ordained as an elder at my PC(USA) church beginning in January 2009. It is my prayer and hope that I can live my life in accordance of God’s word and the principles of my church. I will strive to prove myself trustworthy as a leader working to discern God’s will in my church, but the burden isn’t only on my shoulders. My hope and prayer is also that this woman I had coffee with that one day will be able to place her trust in the fact that God is working through me and the other leaders of the church. This is my prayer not just for me and for

It is a difficult place for me to be, a 25 year old in leadership at a church that has been around for over 100 years. And I know it is difficult for someone 40 years my senior to place their trust in me. But the point is that our trust should be in God. Both of us. I will fail at times because I am human, but we have to trust that God will use those he has ordained for particular purposes. While I may not always be trustworthy, God is. He always has been and always will be.

cool and puffy

In Colossians, Paul says the following.

"These are a shadow of the things that were to come; the reality, however, is found in Christ. Do not let anyone who delights in false humility and the worship of angels disqualify you for the prize. Such a person goes into great detail about what he has seen, and his unspiritual mind puffs him up with idle notions. He has lost connection with the Head, from whom the whole body, supported and held together by its ligaments and sinews, grows as God causes it to grow."

I recently read an article in the New York Times about a wonderful church in New York City where the music is explosive and exciting, and the feel was described as something tolerable because it was minimal on the Jesus talk and a little more confidence building of its patrons.

Our generation has seen a lot of puffy peoples, the shadows Paul talks about cast down from the 20th century onto post-modernism. It seems (I infer because I was born in 1982) during the 1970's, during the rumbles which bubbled into Reagan and the Moral Majority, Christianity in America began to take an idle notion of great and puffy wisdom. The Church shot a middle finger at culture and said, "you are with us or against us." The stake of political loyalty and moral homogeny was driven into the ground and a flag of Christendom was flown from it.

Our generation is riding the momentum of its crash on a speedy slide right up into the alternative side of the pendulum. Francis Chan, a pastor in Simi Valley, CA, has worried that maybe he is not preaching Jesus' gospel because his church attendence is so large. He implies, if the Gospel is so alternative, and people will oppose it, why is he growing like gang busters? What an excellent question.

Somewhere between the offensive nature of false humility and the shallow winds of cultural submersion is the Truth. The Gospel is not offensive, but some people categorically refuse to accept the unjust, unfair implications of grace. They are not offended, they are simply calculated with reason and a complete dismissal of the spiritual. We cannot force them to accept the philosophy of Christ with relevance. Nor are we to puff up on podiums of religious dominion and resign ourselves to an offensive tone so toxic that the church fades into an irrelevant and ancient cultural staple.

life as I know it…

the truth is, i am beginning to see that i don't really know life. or at least, not life to the full as Jesus talks about. it seems to me that we have perverted the idea of Christian living in our capitalist, individualistic American society. i am not turning "anti-America" or whatever, i am just talking about things that i get caught up in and how i distract myself from truth.

as you may or may not know, i am a fairly independent person. i live by myself, i like to go to the movies by myself, i would rather spend an evening reading alone than going to a crowded bar, or something equally as overwhelmingly social. my second sentence as a child was "i do it myself" (right after "i want a bite"). i have always lived under the assumption that the best version of myself would be independent, self-sufficient, and every other synonym you can think of.

i am beginning to see that this goal of self-sufficiency is to my detriment. the Lord is smacking me in the face with conviction about this. the rebuke is coming from all sides. my eyes are being opened to the fact that the full life Jesus talks about over and over again cannot be achieved alone. we need a community of believers.

communion, community, body of Christ. i don't think it is a coincidence that Jesus talks about the bread and the wine in terms of His body and also the believers in terms of His body. not only are we to partake of the Lord's Supper, but we are also to partake of each other. no, i am not referring to cannibalism, but i am talking about being in tune with the church, the real church, the body of Christ.

so, what does real community look like?? i don't know. but let's find out together. (that's for any of you apple folks out there). i think that Acts (the book in the bible) is a great place to start. or any of the gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John). read the words Jesus speaks about community. read the words of the early believers who were living in community.

i am currently reading The Irresistible Revolution, which i think is a great resource. it gives a picture of what a community might look like. but i don't think all communities need to be so extreme, if you will. they will, by nature, be revolutionary though. i mean, really, really sharing life together is going to flip our worlds upside down.

think about it this way...we look at the individual as the strongest entity. we secretly (or outright) look down upon people who "need a helping hand." does that even make sense?? we might preach mottos like "strength in numbers" but yearn for a solitary hero to emerge and win the battle. the bible says that a cord of three strands is not easily broken. when we reinforce levees we want to double the steel, not just use one layer.

the kind of thinking that leads to “lone ranger” mentalities needs to cease. i am talking to myself here. i take pride (read: i am prideful) in doing things alone. i love telling people that i'll go out to dinner by myself or that i drove by myself across the country to move alone. i need to shed this disease of self-sufficiency and dive into the truth of community.

Jesus wants us to be together. He wants us to be together in loving, sharing, and supportive communities. this also doesn't just mean people who are like us. we don't want the body of Christ to be all thumbs or all ears or all wallets. GOD wants us to experience Him in different ways and He wants His people to come together because of His love for us.

this may seem old hat for some of you, but i am going through a revolution and i want my community to join. so let's share life and experience the fullness that Christ wants us to have.

***the article above is written by new contributor Kristin Friedery. She is a volunteer organizer in New Orleans, LA. This is Kristin's first piece for Peacemaker.***

sustainable church

painting the steeple green

You may have heard, the environment is an issue. The consequences of the Industrial Revolution are being realized in periodical spikes in environmental awareness. In the 1970's air and water pollution became recognized as deeply troubling issues, in the 1990's recycling and the O-zone became more and more talked about, and now its the sustainability of how we power things, namely electricity sources and automobile powering.

The upside is the church is becoming aware of the obvious link between Genesis 1 (God's call for man to care for his creation...not rule) and environmental issues. Some churches, such as Mars Hill in Grand Rapids, Michigan have put the environment in its core structure of action for awhile, but whats more encouraging is a person like Mike Huckabee, who was criticized by some conservative "good ole boys" over his claim that the environment is an essential issue to evangelicals; citing Genesis 1.

If Christian music is any sign though, the church should be hip to copying this in about 7 years. In recent years churches have become more like entertainment companies with marketing departments. The 1990's saw booms in both industries in secular society and it was only a matter of time before the church got in bed with them. As Steve Stockman, Presbyterian pastor and U2 biographer pointed out, the church saw the hot trash of shopping malls and brought it into the sanctuaries. The irony is the U2 pop-mart and Zoo TV era was a deliberate Screwtape style mockery of the evils lights and sounds had perpetrated on distracting the human soul from spirituality, which churches copy for the "sake of relevance."

Here are three philosophies churches have invited into their company...

1. Batteries...any sizable church with a sound system uses a disgusting number of batteries to power its wireless microphones. Whats worse, there is a widespread argument that rechargeable batteries have too unpredictable a decay, and therefore would "interrupt the show" if they died, so many churches will discard 1 battery, per microphone, per service.

2. Paper...churches with somewhere in the range of 1,000 members can easily spend $10,000 a year simply on paper. From the bulletins, to mailings, to invite cards...and the more colorful and glossy...the less recyclable.

3. Electricity...computers of employees left on all night, lights turned on in entire buildings so people "feel welcome", night time signs, exterior flood lights, sound systems, all drain huge amounts of energy and are all able to be scaled back.

SO be responsible, ask the session or a staff member at your church what the paper budget is, ask how many batteries they throw away, ask if the staff is responsible about power usage.

Even these guys agreed on it...

Terribly and Depressingly Shallow

There is something in us (and I don’t know how it got there- is it a part of our DNA? Has our culture influenced us? Is it human nature distorted by the fall of man?) that keeps our relationships and community life terribly and depressingly shallow. We’ve been conditioned to leave each other alone. We walk around on eggshells- avoiding conflict and hard conversations. We see it on TV. We see it in our friendships. I can’t think of a friendship that I have where there isn’t something that I notice about their character or personality or communication style or choices they make that hasn’t bugged me at some point or another. But, with that said, I could only tell you about a handful of times where I’ve had the courage to speak up and say something. Sometimes it’s been out of frustration. Sometimes I’ve said it as a joke. And sometimes, the time has been right and the moment opened up and I shared what was on my heart.

It wasn’t until I got married that I realized how different this is. For my wife and I, the most shocking and unanticipated aspect of marriage was how many expectations we carried in for each other. We actually expected and demanded that each other be different. “You can’t treat me that way.” “You have to be responsible and carry your load of the chores.” The hardest thing about it was that we were both right. We couldn’t get by anymore living the way we’d always lived, communicating the way we’d always talked, treating each other poorly, etc. I expected that she would be different. She demanded that I change. We talked about it. We talk about it. Our marriage wouldn’t work unless we worked these things out. And, the really hard part about marriage is that this process will continue for a lifetime.

But isn’t that the way it’s supposed to be in our church family, too? Don’t we live with expectations for each other? Haven’t we all made the commitment to become different people? Why don’t we talk about it, then?

One thing I’ve learned lately, as I’ve studied the scriptures and examined the early life of the church is that there was a gigantic emphasis put on preserving and maintaining unity. It’s scattered throughout Paul’s letters. It’s huge in Acts. But I’m not talking about a cheap perversion of unity where we all wear smiles and avoid each other (like we see in our churches), but the type of unity that comes when we face hard things together and step into each other’s worlds.

Without stepping in, without getting into messy conversations and saying things that are hard and uncomfortable, we will fail to become God’s people in our fullest potential. We need to recognize what holds us back. We need to invite God to give us wisdom and courage. We need to step in.

***The contributor responsible for this entry is Scott Schimmel. Scott's perspective on conflict is informed by his college experience, and subsequent work at the University of San Diego, an unique blend of Catholic and Protestant students.***

The Con

21st century American church often looks like a rip-off combination of fun fact session and a variety show. Church leaders seem to believe people desire to be entertained at church. Sermons look a lot more like Christian trivia, sharing obscure facts unknown to the average observer and not a bit relevant to the current state of things. Pastors come up with some vague novelty, gimmick, innovative, obscure topic and share "neat" pieces of info leaving people completely unchanged as human beings, but pleased because they can say, "gee, I did not know that ___insert fact here ____."

People leave their hour long church service with a pleasant look on the fact armed with the knowledge of what type of wood Jesus used was likely to use as a carpenter based on research of first century tree growth in Israel. Unfortunately they haven't the slightest understanding of how God interacts with them and their relationships, divorces, addictions, self-esteem issues, financial struggles, and world view.

The same goes for the art in church. So often churches make minuscule leaps of creativity by taking a pop-culture fad and tweaking it into some movie clips, series titles, dramas, and top 40 cover songs. People are impressed briefly, because so many people have images of priests, or televangelists and dull traditions tied with confusing doctrine and the trivia laced variety show contradicts their paradigm. This can't last though, because people are wising up to the concept of "cool church" and are seeing the same scandals, hypocrisies, and hurts happen in the auditoriums as they did in the cathedrals.

It must be frustrating for the person who hasn't read the Bible to reconcile these concepts with the knowledge they do possess of Jesus. Most people know Jesus as a peaceful man with a desire to impact the poorest in resources and heart. But poverty gets worse in America and globally and so does the state of the human heart, which could only defeat your hope that Jesus' church is going to do something.

Those people should keep looking, just not in the big buildings. Check out The Bible instead of the oxy-moronical, Christian self-help manuals published with exponential frequency. And his people, individuals who work in restaurants and volunteer at shelters. Most importantly remove yourself from the trivia, the debates over the beginning of time, and the political cat fights and observe your friends, the natural world, and the thought of what is not seen, because these things are much more fascinating than migratory patterns of the first century church!

!!!WARNING!!! you may have entered the marketplace

beware of institutions whose decisions are motivated by a continuing relevance of itself.


paul made tents because he said very explicitly he did not want to have people questioning the motivation of his faith. it seems entirely possible that the idea of selling doves in the marketplace probably was not started by greedy entrepreneurs, but people who could not reconcile service to God with their need for sustaining income. some of them probably said to themselves, "i want to serve God, but cannot sustain security if i neglect my 'responsibilities.'" could much of america be a giant marketplace, whose pastoral desks are in fact the modern dove cage?

so when does professional ministry cross the lines paul and jesus addressed?

when the motivations to sustain the institution takes time away from "going the ends of the earth" (jesus' words)

definitions must be subjective in this case to avoid legalistic outcomes, but there are lenses to look at the idea through...

perhaps jesus was more upset that people in the marketplace were trying to avoid trusting God by finding a sure fire way to make money and serve him. striking a convenient balance between the heavenly and earthly never seemed to be his game and it seems that having to request your profit from doing God's service would be a block to trusting him and a little off of what he told the rich young ruler (which you can think about it by checking out the video at the bottom of the page).

Hospital Beds

"There's nothing to do here, some just whine and complain, in bed in the hospital."
-Cold War Kids

The analogy of the Church being a Hospital is a tired one. It rarely conjures images of what a hospital is really like, not to mention if it did, why would people be attracted to Church? On the other hand, its a brilliant metaphor. It is actually a rather unfortunate one for the people who spit this cliche into meaningless jargon. If Church is a hospital, does that make pastors simply educated, better paid, cold and condescending members of a community? That seems an unfortunate comparison and in all honesty, a realistic assessment for a lot of people outside the church.

So does the metaphor then imply the church members are the sick? Are church members helpless and bored, whining and complaining and requiring the simplest tasks to be accomplished by the pastors? Also a realistic assessment to the outside observer, but not a flattering one to the members...who often use the analogy.

One of the reasons people don't like Hospitals is because they enter into a place where they are told something is wrong with them and there's an implication that the bearer of bad news is somehow equipped, as a more elite member of society, to help them.

All people are thirsty for affection and affirmation. Maybe Hospitals are a great analogy for modern churches. Maybe the modern church is a noisy place littered with sirens and incapable of real significant service because of deeply tangled bureaucracy, while people who can't help themselves are dismissed as lazy or selfish. And maybe Priests and Pastors are not doctors and members are not patients whose remission is far past and empowers them to diagnose the new walk-in appointments?

The solid connection might be the hospital bed. A place of care in the midst of sickness, where comfort is provided through the suffering and medication comes by way of someone outside ourselves. The difference between "us" and "them" is we volunteer to lay in the beds and the outsider's perception is based on whether we embrace our treatment. If it looks like torture, then who would volunteer for treatment? But if it looks like healing, people might just check themselves in. Embrace the bed, others will follow.