This WeekThis week at praxis...Making Spirits BrightHere is what we are reading and discussing the week of January 14, 2001On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. When the wine gave out, the mother of Jesus said to him, "They have no wine." And Jesus said to her, "Woman, what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come." His mother said to the servants, "Do whatever he tells you." Now standing there were six stone water jars for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons. Jesus said to them, "Fill the jars with water." And they filled them up to the brim. He said to them, "Now draw some out, and take it to the chief steward." So they took it. When the steward tasted the water that had become wine, and did not know where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew), the steward called the bridegroom and said to him, "Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the good wine until now." Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him. ---John 2:1-11
To the believer, peyote constitutes a sacrament, not a drug. Peyote has absolutely no recreational aspects for the church participants. You must come to peyote as to truth, in an attitude of worship... The more you work with the mind, the more you realize you can't know it. The more you seek to touch your spirit, the more you realize that you must enter some altered state of consciousness to burst free of the conventional limitations of flesh and rationality. This is what the Peyote Church is about. ----Carl A. Hammerschlag, M.D, "The Church Of Father Peyote"
Ganja is used for religious purposes for Rastafarians. Its use is written in
the Bible in Psalms 104:14, "He causeth the grass for the cattle,
Although the historic and ecumenical Christian practice has been to use wine,
the use of unfermented grape juice by The United Methodist Church and its
predecessors since the late nineteenth century expresses pastoral concern for
recovering alcoholics, enables the participation of children and youth, and
supports the church's witness of abstinence. ----The United Methodist Book of
Worship, 1992
Most United Methodists are aware that one of our practices is the use of unfermented juice of the grape for Holy Communion. While some other Protestant bodies share this practice, the possibility of the practice goes back to the late 19th century and a Methodist dentist named Thomas Bramwell Welch. (See www.welchs.com/company/company_history.html.) Apparently Welch had scruples about the use of wine and had heard of Louis Pasteur's process of pasteurization of milk. Welch was successful in applying the process to grape juice, and he began to use it in his church, where he was a Communion steward. His son, Dr. Charles Welch, was an enterprising Methodist layman (a dentist, like his father) from southern New Jersey. He marketed the pasteurized grape juice to temperance-minded evangelical Protestants as authentic biblical "wine." As word spread and as the temperance movement grew among evangelical Protestant churches, Welch left dentistry and produced Welch's Grape Juice commercially. ----Daniel Benedict, Changing Wine into Grape Juice: Thomas and Charles Welch and the Transition to Unfermented Fruit of the Vine, www.gbod.org/worship/articles/wine.htmlQuestions:
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