I don’t know why this amuses me so much but it does. I just imagine that there’s a little siren that goes off and a recording of Alexander Scourby reading Proverbs 23:21 if you try sticking a wine bottle in there
Tag Archives: communion
“This Do In Remembrance”
“Bread”
We give a lot of attention to the “wine” being Welches grape juice but did you ever really stop and think about what is eaten as “bread” in the Lord’s supper? Even as unleavened bread goes, most of that stuff is pretty gross. And teeny.
Not Having Communion “Too Often”
In many Christian traditions, the Eucharist is celebrated at least weekly. Fundamentalists, on the other hand, celebrate the Lord’s table with about the same frequency that they change their oil.
The basic idea behind these long spaces of time is the notion that having the Lord’s Supper too often will remove the specialness of it and cause Christians to treat it with the same flippancy as everything else they do during a normal church service. It is unclear whether the frequent repetition of other activities such as offerings, sermons, or telling your children you love them also makes them mundane and unappreciated.
There is some variance between different fundy churches in this matter. The frequency can vary between monthly, quarterly, bi-annually, and “Whenever the Pastor feels the Spirit move and gets a hankering for matzah and Welch’s.” Who needs all that self-examination and remembrance anyway?
If you believe that saying grace over every meal (including the bag of popcorn you consume while watching The Sound of Music) is always meaningful but also think that having Communion once a week will trivialize its practice — you might be a fundamentalist.
Little Cups of Grape Juice
When the time rolls around for the Lord’s Supper, fundamentalist pull out the little plastic cups and the big bottle of Welch’s grape juice (making extra sure not to use the sparkling grape juice with the foil over the cap since this is most assuredly the appearance of evil)
Now everybody in fundamentalists circles knows that Christians since the Apostles have all celebrated the Lord’s supper with grape juice. How they did this without refrigeration is a bit of mystery. It would seem that although our Lord turned water into wine, His followers spent a lot of their time miraculously turning wine back into water. Those Jews who were used to drinking fermented wine for Passover must have been in for quite a shock.
Moving forward in history, we can clearly see that all those tales about Luther and Calvin drinking beer and wine are just nonsense. It’s doubtless the devil’s lie to get the demon rum into our churches. Believing in a good American prohibitionist like Billy Sunday is better than following the examples of those beer-swilling foreigners any day.
Fundamentalists, lift those little cups high and be thankful that you are free from leaven of wine, if not the leaven of the Pharisees. All hail Welch’s.