Water To Wine: Some of My Story

by Brian Zahnd

“When we are crushed like grapes, we cannot think of the wine we will become.” —Henri J.M. Nouwen [3]

my soul was disquieted within me.

I have climbed the highest mountains I have run through the fields Only to be with you But I still haven’t found What I’m looking for —U2, “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For”

I was wrestling with the uneasy feeling that the faith I had built my life around was somehow deficient. Not wrong, but lacking.

I was in Cana and the wine had run out. I needed Jesus to perform a miracle.

the Jesus I believed in warranted a better Christianity than what I was familiar with.

Like Bilbo Baggins, I felt “thin, sort of stretched, like butter that has been scraped over too much bread.”

was no longer satisfied with the “cutting edge” and “successful.”

I wanted vintage wine from old vines.

Now whenever I see the date “2004” on something, I think, “Oh, I remember that year! That was the year that everything changed for me!”

That’s how I feel about 2014

but I wouldn’t trade it for anything. Not for anything!

That was the year water began to turn to wine. But wine is not just a symbol of richness, it’s also a symbol of blood—and I was bleeding.

I once heard an Italian winemaker say that to produce good wine the grapes must struggle, they must suffer. The taste of good wine is the taste of struggle and suffering mellowed into beauty.

I want the vintage wine. The kind of faith marked by mystery, grace, and authenticity. The kind of Christianity that has the capacity to endlessly fascinate is not produced apart from struggle and suffering. It’s the pain of struggle and suffering that confers character and complexity to our faith.

Dallas Willard was my gateway to the good stuff. Directly or indirectly reading Willard led me to others: N.T. Wright, Walter Brueggemann, Eugene Peterson, Frederick Buechner, Stanley Hauerwas, John Howard Yoder, René Girard, Miroslav Volf, Karl Barth, Hans Urs von Balthasar, David Bentley Hart, Wendell Berry, Scot McKnight, Thomas Merton, Richard Rohr, and

We have become consumers of packaged spiritualities. This is idolatry.

Arrogant certitude was giving way to the ambiguity of authentic faith.

was taught to assert my will In the name of the Lord, to be sure

Ooh

Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. Me.

Our capitalism at work

Certitude is a poor substitute for authentic faith.

it’s popular because it’s easy. If

Ugh

No wrestling with doubt, no dark night of the soul, no costly agonizing over the matter, no testing yourself with hard questions. Just accept a secondhand assumption or a majority opinion or a popular sentiment as the final word and settle into certainty.

Its so easy. God forgive me

Where there are no doubts, no questions, no perplexities, there can be no growth.[7]

Real faith will cost you.

“Are you sure?” Real

No. What if i am meant to be a commokn spoon....or worse a pinky toe?

Real faith has room for doubt—understanding that the effort to believe is the very thing that makes doubt possible.

Real faith is not afraid of doubt, but the faux faith of certitude is afraid of its own shadow.

God refuses to prove

himself and perform circus tricks at our behest in order to obliterate doubt.

Without somehow destroying me in the process, how could God reveal himself in a way that would leave no room for doubt? If there were no room for...

To be true to the call of Christ and to save my true self I had to be willing to sacrifice success and risk failure. Would I dare?

2019=risk

“Now with the help of God I shall become myself!”

This was more than a little disorienting, not only for me, but for our church as well.

Over time I began to see the cross in a much deeper way—not as a mere factor in an atonement theory equation, but as the moment in time and space where God reclaimed creation.

I saw the

cross as the place where Jesus refoun...

Christianity looks like love absorbing sin and death, trusting God for resurrection.

Seen in the light of the Easter dawn, the cross is revealed to be the lost Tree of Life. In the middle of a world dominated by death, the Tree of Life is rediscovered in the form of a Roman cross. The cross is the act of radical forgiveness that gives sin, violence, and retribution a place to die in the body of Jesus.

God is love—co-suffering, all-forgiving, sin-absorbing, never-ending love.

At the cross a world of sin is absorbed by the love of God and recycled into grace and mercy.

At the cross Jesus reveals that life is about learning to love, even if you have to die to do it, because you know that beyond death is the love of the Father and resurrection of the dead. This is the cross. This is Christianity.

Meditation on the cross pointed me to something deeper, richer, fuller, and infinitely more costly.

But the cross is a costly portal. The price of admission is death. It means losing your false life to find your true life. The path to paradise is often the path of suffering.

Paradise is

found on the Easter side of G...

The Bible is not interested in giving (or even competing with) scientific explanations.

What Scripture gives us is inspired glimpses into the divine mystery.

the Bible is the Spirit-inspired sign that points us to the true Word of God—the Word made flesh, the greatest of all sacred mysteries.

Fundamentalism is to Christianity what paint-by-numbers is to art.

Christianity is a confession, not an explanation.