May God give you of the dew of heaven,
and of the fatness of the earth,
and plenty of grain and wine.
It really came as a surprise to me when I first stumbled across a passage in the Bible that suggested that wine is a blessing from God. I hadn’t thought that much about what a blessing actually means other than that it somehow connects us to God and his benevolence toward us. People say they are blessed with good health and good friends or with children and a successful career. Whether they think that God might be involved in all of this is perhaps another matter altogether.
Growing up in the Lutheran Church, the pastor, with quite dramatic posture and voice, would always say a blessing over the congregation: “The Lord bless you and keep you: the Lord make his face shine upon you, and be gracious to you; the Lord lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace.” While saying the prayer, he would raise his hands slowly and make the sign of the cross over the congregation. This dramatic moment at the end of the service felt like a good omen to me. It was comforting to know that God would be with me, protect me, be gracious to me, and give me peace. I loved those words spoken over us every Sunday, and I had no clue that they were taken from the Old Testament. God’s blessing, I figured, was a sort of immaterial, comforting, and reassuring knowledge that God was there. Little did I know.
In Genesis, the first book of the Bible, blessings are important, and they are directly linked to God’s action in this world. As God calls people and sends them forth, he blesses them so they can be a blessing to others. God’s blessing is not a general “we wish you well in God’s name” but a dynamic gift that we must not hoard, store, and stack away but share with the world.
Wine is a special gift from God and part of God’s mission in this world. That’s why Jesus’ first miracle was turning water into wine. God’s blessing was upon this man, and through him God’s mission would continue.
What then is wine for? In its most profound sense, wine is a gift from God and a tangible blessing. It’s a material sign of God’s benevolence that is to soften the hard places within us and make us more receptive toward God and (for)giving toward one another. Few have ventured forth to reflect on this mysterious quality of wine as a blessing. Perhaps it blurs too much the boundaries between heaven and earth, the sacred and the secular, the material and immaterial, the severe and the joyful. Wine as a blessing invites us to live with these tensions and not dissolve them too easily until we learn to inhabit both worlds with grace and joy.
May you be blessed as you explore what it means that wine is a gift and blessing from God. And as you share this mysterious gift with those God places into your path, may a convivial spirit draw you closer to him from whom all true blessings flow.