How Sweet It Is

Twenty-five years ago, at the church I attended in Brooklyn, we had a part-time sexton named Herbie. Herbie was from Jamaica, and he had this extraordinary way of welcoming whatever life sent him with relish and gusto. His response to almost everything was an emphatic: “How sweet it is!”

I can still hear him saying it. There was something almost sacramental about Herbie’s delight in life. The Psalmist seems to know something about that sweetness, too, praising God for bringing forth from the earth:

“wine to gladden the human heart, oil to make the face shine, and bread to strengthen the human heart.”

Wine. Oil. Bread. Not simply what keeps us alive, but what makes life abundant.

And there is something wonderfully appropriate about hearing that here in Chautauqua County, where grapes have shaped our landscape and our history for two centuries. Concord grapes flourished along the Lake Erie shore, and in the nineteenth century Dr. Thomas Bramwell Welch developed a way of preserving grape juice without fermentation. What began as an alternative to wine for Holy Communion became part of the growing temperance movement and found a natural home in the religious culture surrounding Chautauqua.

The grape, in other words, became part of how this community wrestled with what it meant to live well together. And a grape is a small thing. But gather grapes together, tend them, press them, give them time—and sweetness emerges. Maybe that is an image for community, too.

This is Welcoming Week, and the New Neighbors Coalition is inviting us to consider a simple question: What does it mean to belong?

There is a difference between being allowed into a room and knowing that your presence matters. Welcome opens the door. Belonging makes room at the table.

And perhaps that is why the Psalmist gives us wine, oil, and bread. These are gifts meant to be shared. Grapes are gathered. Grain is harvested. Bread is broken. And in sharing them, strangers become neighbors. But something else happens, too. We discover that the person we thought we were welcoming has brought something to the feast—something our common life needed.

Herbie certainly did. He came from Jamaica to Brooklyn, and twenty-five years later, I still carry something he gave me: “How sweet it is.”

That is the sweetness of belonging: discovering that God has given us to one another. Wine to gladden our hearts. Oil to make our faces shine. Bread to strengthen us. A place at the table. A neighbor whose presence matters.

How sweet it is.

Faithfully, Luke