Meditations: Baptism by Beer

There are times that I read to engage. I will read a theology or praxis book to keep me sharp as a pastor. But there are also times that I read to escape. I’ll grab a novel, a memoir or history book so I can get my imagination as far away from the office as I can. This week I needed to disengage, so I picked up Stephen Mansfield’s book In Search of God and Guinness. I stumbled upon the book and became curious when I learned that Arthur Guinness was a deeply Christian man and that the Guinness Brewery was deeply interested in providing outrageous good care for its employees. The original Guinness company operated in a manner that runs antithetical to the examples of corporate greed that dominate our news. I bought the book and sat it on my shelf where it sat for about a month… until I found myself needing help not thinking about work.

The Search for God and Guinness looked innocuous enough. I work at a Baptist church in the North East. Let’s just say that Ben Franklin’s famous quote “Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy” hasn’t found its way into any of my tribe’s sermons. I didn’t think I’d find anything in this book that would get me thinking about church work.

I was wrong.

An early chapter of the book provides a history of beer. I was surprised to read that St. Gregory noted in medieval times that it was common for children to be baptized with beer. The quality of the water simply could not be trusted.

And so the church adapted and used what it had available. Beer. What’s amazing to me is that the church was improving how it administered a sacred rite that was commanded by none other than God-incarnate, Jesus Christ. They weren’t tinkering with the instructions of one of the early church fathers or even a pope. They ad libbed a commandment of Jesus, with beer.

Now it is true that Christianity’s attitudes toward beer were more positive then than they are now. Beer was viewed as a staple item. It was even believed to have medicinal properties. Baptizing a child with a Coors would mean something different today than it would in Gregory’s time. Our culture associates alcohol with excess, whereas in the middle ages, beer was consider an healthy alternative to hard liquor.

Even with all this, we are left with a powerful example of the church changing methodology to meet the needs of its community, even when it meant getting dangerously close to tampering with the sacred.

Jesus had an alcohol story of his own that he used to communicate the need to be willing to adapt when it came to expressing one’s faith. Jesus told his audience that “nobody pours new wine into old wineskins.  If he does, the new wine will burst the skins, the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, new wine must be poured into new wineskins.”

In Jesus’ day, wine was stored in pouches of goat leather instead of bottles. New wine would be poured into the leather bag where it would ferment and expand. The leather pouch would be stretched to its limit. After time, the old wine would be consumed and the bag would become unusable for wine. If a wine maker poured new wine into an already stretched leather pouch, the bag would burst and the wine would be wasted.

The Gospel is the new wine. In fact, it never stops fermenting. It continues to ferment and expand and grow richer as time passes. And the leather bags of our traditions will always find themselves stressed and stressed.

Until Jesus returns, we will struggle to tell the difference between new wine and marinated leather.