“Neither do men put new wine into old bottles: else the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish: but they put new wine into new bottles, and both are preserved.” The water or wine of the Sacrament represents the redeeming blood of Jesus Christ. It is a symbol of the pure love and grace that He pours into our hearts each week that we renew our Sacramental covenants. As part of the Sacrament, we are to offer up a broken heart and a contrite spirit. If we hold onto our broken hearts, then the new wine of the Sacrament will run out through the cracks in our hearts. We must offer up our old bottles so that we can be given in exchange new, unbroken bottles, so that the wine does not run out. As long as our hearts remain whole and unbroken, we can keep that pure love of Christ inside and not have it spill out and get wasted. Our appetites, desires, and passions come from the Lord and are a part of this pure love that He pours into us. As long as we keep them inside the new and unbroken bottle, then they will not be wasted. But when we seek to satisfy our appetites and desires in a way that is inconsistent with God’s laws, then we introduce holes into our heart and the wine will run out. Lust, anger, greed, sloth, envy, doubt, fear, despair - all of these are bottomless pits. We see in Genesis how vengeance goes from sevenfold to seventyfold, for example. These bottomless holes will take all of our love and our passion and our desire until we are completely drained dry and they will still not be satisfied. If we give into laziness, we put a little crack in our heart and some that wine starts to spill out. The laziness will argue that we really oughtn’t to do anything else now because we aren’t at full strength. And so the crack widens, and now the wine is really spilling out fast. This gives us all the more reason to double down on our laziness. The same could be said for any of the others. There is desire in both love and lust. The difference is that love knits hearts together, multiplying passion as the hearts expand and grow, but lust merely slashes holes in hearts and causes them to shrivel up as all of the passion and excitement is drained out. Hearts that are whole and filled with the pure love of Christ can hope against hope and hold onto that which is good even when all seems dark. But hearts that have been blasted apart by despair and depression are unable to hold onto even the merest droplet of joy or beauty even if God is constantly showering them with his grace because their hearts are so shredded that it all runs out as fast as it pours in. To sacrifice our broken hearts at the Sacrament table should not be a dreaded or fearful but a joyous occasion. It does us no good to continue to pour new wine into old and broken bottles where all of the wine will just run out before we have a chance to savor any of it. I hope that we can all take seriously this gift and mercy of exchanging our old bottles for new so that the Love of God can abide in us and not run out.
