You should not put new time into old wine skins.

Saturday, 7/8/17

Jesus said, “No one puts new wine in old wineskins, or else it would burst.” Please put up with my telling an old Korean story in which that happened.

In Yang Yang, where I spent eleven years the people brought their wares for market days on the fourth, ninth, fourteenth and nineteenth of every month. And., on one of those market days, my cook, Joanna, came up from the market with word that a family of hill people had brought in a tub of wild grapes they hoped to exchange for a little cooking oil.   

I handed Joanna money for buying the grapes, and the two of us took turns dancing on the tub of grapes. The juice, when we drained it off from the pulp, looked like blood mixed with mud, and there was enough of it to fill an urn big enough for you or me to hide in.

We taped a piece of cloth over its rim, then we wheeled the big urn out to a dark shed where we left it for the mixture to ferment.

Our curiosity got the better of us after three weeks, so we went out and took the cloth off the rim. The liquid in the urn was so dark that we bumped heads looking down into it. What we saw was an amazingly clear red liquid, and we bumped heads,  exclaiming, “It’s all good wine!”

We sent to the next town for two dozen bottles and corks, and we stood the bottles up beneath my cot. On the third night of that, the fermentation took charge, and it began firing the corks into my backside.