Was lost, now found
Nearly a century after vanishing from a Bethlehem church, a Communion chalice has been returned to the faithful
For years, Lei Barry’s family had a sweet Christmas Eve tradition. She and her husband and their six children would pass around a gold chalice filled with champagne at their Montgomery County home and everyone would take a sip to celebrate the birth of Christ.
Barry bought the chalice in an antique store in 1980 or so. It was engraved on the bottom with the name of a church — Trinity Church, Bethlehem, Pa. — and on the rim with a man’s name and life dates.
The children grew and moved out and the tradition of the champagne toast eventually ended. Barry, who lives in Montgomery Township, hadn’t thought much about the chalice until she decided to downsize and came across it as she sorted through things.
She tried some years ago to find the church named on the chalice, contacting a few with “Trinity” in the title but had no luck. She decided to try again, calling Trinity Episcopal Church because it was an older congregation and might, she thought, have added “Episcopal” to its name sometime in the past.
So it had. Barry ended up talking to the church archivist, Sara Klingner, who immediately asked if the name on the cup was Mitchell.
“Lo and behold, the name was Edward Coppee Mitchell,” Barry said.
Klingner isn’t psychic. She knew that a chalice bearing Mitchell’s name had disappeared from the church sacristy in 1927 — stolen, more than likely, along with the rest of a Communion set.
Mitchell was a prominent Philadelphia lawyer who had a summer home in Bethlehem, where his uncle, Henry Coppee, served as the first president of Lehigh University from 1866 to 1875.
After Mitchell’s death in 1887, his wife, Eliza, and her two daughters moved to Bethlehem and joined Trinity. Eliza had the chalice engraved in his honor and presented it to the church, where it was used for decades until it vanished.
“So here’s this chalice just floating around the country or who knows where,” Barry said. “I knew I had to return it.”
That happened in short order. Barry and her daughter, Susan Bires, were welcomed March 17 to Christ Church United Church of Christ in Bethlehem, where the Trinity congregation has been worshiping since its historic building on East Market Street was badly damaged by a water main break in December.
In a Communion service, the Rev. Pamela Payne accepted the chalice and consecrated it to its original use with a short prayer. Along with the other faithful, Barry and Bires received wine from it.
“It was a surprise, and a surprise that was delightful,” Payne said in a
“It was a surprise, and a surprise that was delightful. And it just felt extremely right for the moment.”
— The Rev. Pamela Payne
phone interview this week. “And it just felt extremely right for the moment.”
Indeed, the congregation badly needed a boost after the loss of its home church to the flood. It will likely be some time before members can resume services there. The church is salvageable, Payne said, but the assessment of the damage and repair costs continues.
“After having that kind of disaster and trauma happen, [the chalice] felt like a gift from God,” she said. “It reminds us that no gift that God gives is ever fully lost.”
Payne said Christ UCC’s invitation to use its building for worship has been another salve for Trinity’s bruised souls.
“We are so grateful to them for opening their doors to us,” she said. “It’s given us a place to land that’s very close to our own building.”
The reverend, of course, isn’t the only one to see a divine hand at work in the return of the chalice during a time of travail for the congregation. Barry, too, knows how to read signs from above.
“God,” she said, “had this all ordained.”