(Preached on Sunday, January 17, 2010)
Jesus ordered the servants, “Fill the pots with water.” And they filled them to the brim. “Now fill your pitchers and take them to the host,” Jesus said, and they did. -John 2:7-8
A few years ago at Christmas a woman carrying a brown paper grocery bag entered a church near Baltimore and asked to see the pastor. The church secretary sized her up as a transient looking for a hand-out. She informed the pastor, telling him of the apparent situation. He came out to talk with the woman, ready for the usual and oft-heard story so familiar to every pastor. But instead of asking for money or some other help, she said, “Someone who is grateful to God for a blessing asked me to give you this and to say ‘Merry Christmas.’” With those simple words she handed him the brown paper bag and promptly departed. When the pastor and the church secretary opened the bag and looked inside they found $10,000 in cash. Thinking the money might have been stolen, they notified the police who held the money for thirty days, and when it was unclaimed they returned it to the church.
Sometimes when we think we know what we are dealing with and have a handle on the situation something happens to totally surprise us. (By the way, if anyone sees someone approaching this church carrying a brown paper bag, be sure to show that person directly to the office!) We so easily succumb to the routines of our lives, to our assumption about how the world works, and to our stereotypes about people that it becomes difficult for anything new to “break in.” Because of previous experience and their assumptions and prejudices, two people thought they knew exactly what to expect from that unknown woman with the paper bag. Perhaps their surprise pried open their comfortable assumptions, and opened them to new possibilities in life. Perhaps God works through such surprises to interrupt our humdrum approach to life in order to point us to possibilities beyond our expectations and to free us to experience life more fully and abundantly.
Think of what happened at the wedding in Cana. We don’t even know whose wedding it was. It was simply a village wedding to which Jesus and his mother were invited as guests. Village weddings are often rather boisterous affairs. The gospel lesson itself gives us the hint that might have been the case on this occasion. The Greek word translated in our Bible that says they had been “drinking a while” means literally that they “are drunk.” Now that’s a scene we probably did not expect to find in the New Testament, but there it is. That’s what usually happened among the guests at a wedding party. There’s no reason to expect this one to be any different. In fact they had been drinking so much that the wine ran out! Then something unexpected took place.
With our modern minds we tend to label such stories and events as “miracles.” But the author of the gospel doesn’t call it a miracle; rather he calls such events “signs.” In other words it is something which points beyond itself to something or someone, to a deeper reality. To focus on the details of the “sign” is to miss the truth that is waiting to be revealed. What the “signs” are pointing to is the Spirit of God, which is at work behind all the miraculous, including the largest miracle – life itself.
Let’s take another look at this story. Jesus, his mother, and some of his earliest followers, are at a wedding: a most ordinary, common life occurrence. But before that, the author points out that this event takes place “on the third day.” For early followers of Jesus a key phrase, since Jesus rose “on the third day.” While this is a most ordinary event, a wedding, there is already a hint here that something very extraordinary is taking place. Sure enough, a major faux pas occurs: they run out of wine, every host or hostess’s worst nightmare. Jesus then gets involved in correcting the situation, at the insistence of his mother. He has the servants use some large stone jars to restore the supply of wine.
These are not just any old jars, though. These are the jars which held the water for ritual purification as guests entered the house. They are massive stone jars, each holding 20-30 gallons. The story says Jesus used 6 of them – providing 120 – 180 gallons of wine. Clearly an overabundance of wine! Clearly it is not the size of the jars that is important, but the nature of the jars: the fact that they represent what had become the defining practice within Judaism. Again, we see the Spirit of God working through Jesus, taking the old form of Judaism, into which is poured life (water), and turning that life into joyous life (wine). Through Jesus God is transforming the old world, doing something so radically new it is beyond our wildest imaginings. That is the miracle!
Tomorrow our nation pauses to remember the life of one who knew this truth well and who tried to help the rest of us know this truth and live by it. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., while a great man and prophet, was not viewed that way by many people during his lifetime. Many people looked at him, an African-American man, and assumed they knew what to expect, which was not much. And while he delivered far more than they expected, lifting and inspiring not only a people, but a nation, and a world, to believe that change could be brought about in a non-violent way through the power of love, in truth what he believed and did, his actions and his faith, are accessible to all of us as well. Just as Jesus exhibited extraordinary compassion and joy for life by responding to human need through ordinary means and actions, so did Dr. King, and so may you and I. Dr. King had come to understand that “love is the most durable power in the world” that it is “the highest good.” Therefore, “he who loves is a participant in the being of God. He who hates does not know God.” For Dr. King this was lived out in a “call for a world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class and nation…a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men.” “When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which lead to ultimate reality.”
There are people today, ordinary, everyday people, through whom the Spirit of God is working in ordinary ways to meet human need, to work for a better and more beautiful and more just world, to speak for those who have no voice, or better, to make sure the voiceless are heard, to stand with those who are stepped on and pushed out, to walk with those who are making their way to a better day. And their efforts, while powerful, are common and ordinary.
One such person is a teacher named John, who like most teachers, feels his successes are few and far between. But one day something significant happened during a parent-teacher conference. He had a student, a little girl, who had been struggling with her work. So John developed a special educational plan for this little girl and as a result she was showing a lot of progress. When her mother came in for the conference, she thanked John for the amazing difference he had made in her daughter’s life. John – instinctively remembering where his own gifts came from – responded humbly and simply, explaining the educational plan and lifting up the little girl’s own efforts. But the mother leaned across the desk at him, and raised her own voice as she interrupted him: “No, you don’t understand, Mr. Huey, God has sent you to us!” John and the mother looked at each other for a long moment, and for that moment he paused to see his work and his calling through new – or maybe renewed – eyes. Maybe no one will ever observe a day named for John Huey, but that little girl and her mother will remember how John used his God-given gifts for the sake of others, transforming struggle into progress and even triumph, and perhaps having a hand in changing the more ordinary water – in the extraordinary vessel of this little child – into new and wonderful wine.
The danger of giving any example is that some will miss being able to identify with it and instead wonder “Where is the new wine in my own life?” Well maybe you have been drinking the new wine for so long that you have forgotten what the old stuff was like. Maybe you have not missed out, but rather merely suffer from a long familiarity that has bred complacency. The longer a pastor lives among a congregation as friend and pastor, the more he or she comes to know the achievements and heartbreaks, the virtues and sins, the vulnerability or the resilience, the confusion or the pain, that the people of a congregation experience. My observations lead me to say this: My friends, in your ups and downs the touch of God has created some remarkable wine out of what could have become stagnant, polluted water. Some of you have known tragedies that could have made you sour or angry characters. But you are not. Some of you have achieved so much that you might have become stuffed up with self importance. But you are not at all like that. Some of you have been so bruised or injured by other people, that you could have become cynical and hard as nails. But you have not. Some could have ended up defeated types, afraid of new challenges, knocking the enthusiasm of others. But it is not so. Some might easily have collapsed into faithlessness, mocking the very idea of a loving God. But that is not how it is with you. All around us God is at work in ordinary human lives bringing about extraordinary compassion to meet human need, turning water into wine. My friends, let us not take each other for granted and miss out on the glory of the new wine that flows freely. And let us not take the wine of our personal, individual lives for granted but let us look for and embrace the wondrous signs that God in Christ Jesus is constantly at work in us.