Liquid Offerings

What we do in Meeting for Worship is hard to describe in words, once you have said the obvious “sitting in silence.”  A metaphor may be better than further factual description:

Imagine we are all wineglasses, or perhaps just plain cups.  We gather like glasses set on a table, clinking together softly as we settle.

We come into the Meetinghouse full of ourselves:

Some prefer to be filled with fresh fruit juice – and some of these are filled with lemonade from a tree in their backyard, while others hold exotic drinks from faraway places, like mango or pineapple.

Some prefer fermented beverages – wines differing in color and subtle aftertaste, some as rough as this year’s new vintage and others aged to mellow perfection.  Some fizz with bubbly energy; others are still and soothing.

Some may be filled with fortified drinks more intoxicating than wine – flammable as fuming brandy on the verge of ignition, or powerful as 17-year Scotch.

Whatever liquid we hold, our purpose in Worship is to offer it to God.  We worship by emptying ourselves of ourselves.  We pour out ourselves as for millennia men have made offerings of oil or wine or blood poured onto holy stones or altars. 

Imagine there is an altar in the center of the Meetinghouse. (Lucky are we God has given up acceptance of such offerings by a bolt of lightning that consumes the altar.)  On the altar is a bowl into which we pour ourselves, as much or as little as we are willing to part with.

Most often, we pour out only a little, holding onto our favorite familiar flavor.  It was not easy to squeeze fruit into juice, or ferment grapes into wine, and we lack faith we will be refilled.

Under a sudden foolish holy impulse, you may tip yourself over and pour yourself all out. You settle back upright – a bit tipsy perhaps – and wait in a state of emptiness.

If your offering is small and you leave only a little space unfilled, God will re-fill you to whatever measure you allow.  If you are truly empty, you will be filled wholly with God’s pure essence, a drink like none you have ever known.

We worship together, and pour ourselves into the same bowl.  If we were all alike – filled with zinfandel, say – we would recognize the liquid in the bowl and know its taste.  But we are not alike, and the bowl holds a mixture humans might not find good to drink.

But our collective offering is always pleasing to God’s taste.  The bowl is soon empty again, ready for another offering from us.

            -Eric E. Sabelman

              14 January, 2012 (not spoken in Meeting because the tenor of ministry revolved around Martin Luther King)