If archeologists ever find the Holy Grail, my guess is it will be about the size of a shot glass.
     The Grail legend has many versions ... older ones than the Monty Python version most of our readers are familiar with. But they all agree the cup was supposed to have been used Christ at the Last Supper and by Joseph of Arimathea who caught some of Christ's blood in it as He was being crucified.
     The legend became an allegory for the Church, which contains Christ in the same way a cup contains wine. The search for the Grail is really the perilous journey of discovering our true identity in Him.
     It's a shame that so many miss it by expecting a Big Gulp.
     Psalm 23 tells us the secret of joy is to have an overflowing cup. If your "cup runneth over," it means you are satisfied and content, you have been given even more than you need, and you are spilling some of the extra over the side. It means the container has become a conduit.
     The overflow could be money, time, labor or skill – whatever you have. As an added mystery, emptying yourself somehow keeps the cup full, to overflow again.
     But most of us have this light bulb that goes off in our head that tells us, "If you could just make your cup larger, you could have even more."
     This thinking is influenced by subtle things in our culture, like the choices for cup size at Starbucks: large, grande and venti. No small or even "regular" sizes for Gen-Xers to guzzle their caffeine from.
     So people try to enlarge their cup, and weird things start happening:
     –Queen Elizabeth admitted she's $6.9 million in the red, partly because of gambling debts.
     –AT&T announced it is borrowing $8 billion – the biggest loan ever given to a company since the invention of cash – not to pay its bills, but to use for a corporate "makeover" designed to pump up its profile on Wall Street.
     Christians certainly aren't immune:
     –Henry Lyons was in charge of a major Baptist denomination, but still had a "felt need" to swindle millions from its coffers.
     –Televangelists, of course, make a lavish living telling followers how to expand their cup, with God's blessing. In fact, they say it's a sin to have a small cup.
     –A local megachurch moved to the suburbs and raised money to build a $56-million building.
     John the Baptist wouldn't have understood all that. He said Christ must increase, "and I must decrease."
     Neither would the widow Jesus commended for throwing her "mite" into the temple treasury, knowing it was her last two coins. She wasn't "sowing her seed" so she could get a 100-fold blessing. She was doing the only thing that is spiritually sane – pouring herself out, despite (or perhaps because of) the smallness of her cup.
     Studies show that the poorest people consistently give more to charity on a percentage basis than the rich. Could it be because their small cup overflows more easily?
     The spontaneous, even "hilarious" giving described in the New Testament requires an absence of self-consciousness. The power of the small cup, like Schroedinger's cat or an electron in high energy physics, disappears when you try to understand it, pin it down or quantify it. In the realm of the Holy Spirit, you can know how much you have, but it's at the cost of being able to pour it out. If you pour yourself out, you can't be conscious of doing it, for to do so increases the size of your cup, and the overflow – absorbed into your new self-awareness – ceases.
     The Jews have a number of curious customs that should be enlightening for Christians. For instance, the Passover lamb could not be killed with the anticipation of its being eaten, although eating the lamb was commanded by God as well as the sacrifice. Similarly, you could not use the Hanukkah lamp for reading or any other activity. Its light was to be contemplated solely to remind you that "a great miracle happened here." In these instances, anything that put your eyes on yourself polluted the mitzvah, or commandment.
     The church, once again, has bought into modern culture's version of all this, making what sociologists call the "person category" so large and strong that individuals think they are cups of immense proportions, indestructible, who answer to no one and respond to no tie of loyalty or community. This produces moral entrepreneurs like Bill Clinton, or media ministers like Jerry Falwell who transform phariseeism from being a sin into an essential requirement of the faith – all without a sense of shame.
     In other words, it produces big, shiny cups that have a healthy self-image, but are filled with dead men's bones.
     God's provision always seems to be supplied in a container that looks inadequate for the job. Like treasure in earthen vessels or overflowing oil from the Shunnamite widow's household pot, it's always unexpected.
     Here and there are evidences that this mystery still has adherents.
     Even while that megachurch dedicated its $56-million building in the suburbs, a black inner-city congregation in Houston sold its building, rented a small office for its staff and started meeting in cell groups in ghetto apartment complexes. They probably don't even realize what a radical step that was.
     They're too busy offering cups of cold water to their neighbors from their common, ordinary, styrofoam – but overflowing – Holy Grails.