A Sermon preached by the Rev. Michael Anderson Bullock
[Isaiah 62:1-5; 1 Corinthians 12:1-11; John 2:1-11]
The old priest was driving along rather mindlessly. He often took drives as a mobile form of contemplative prayer, using it as an opportunity to decompress, clear his head, and simply enjoy the surrounding countryside. So it was with a wrenching awakening that the flashing lights of a trailing police car brought him back to reality. He was being pulled over. Deferentially, the priest pulled his car to the side of the road, turned on the car’s flashers, adjusted his clerical collar in the rearview mirror, and patiently awaited the officer’s approach.
Rolling down his driver’s side window and with the best of his polished pastoral skills, the old priest preemptively greeted the policeman with a benign smile and warmly said, “Good day, officer. How may I help you?” Peering through the open window and quickly scanning the rest of the car’s interior, the policeman politely responded, “Father, do you know the reason I pulled you over?”
Striking a pose somewhere between innocence and wonderment, the old priest confessed to his ignorance. “Father, you were going 55 in a 30 mile an hour zone!” Pausing a moment to come to his point, the policeman said, “Moreover, you were also swerving in your lane.” Spying a cup of clear liquid sitting in the console’s cupholder, the cop adopted a more punctuated tone, “Father, have-you-been-drinking?”
Quickly coming to a seated attention, the old priest immediately denied the possibility, saying that the contents of the cup were nothing more potent than water. Relaxing his shoulders and giving a compassionate sigh, the cop dropped his professional voice to address a fellow, uniformed servant. “Father”, he almost begged, “if that cup holds water, why do I smell alcohol?”
Without missing a beat, the old priest brightened up and chirped, “O, Lord have mercy. He’s done it again!”
On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. When the wine gave out, the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine.” [John 2:1-3]
You know the rest of this gospel story: How, to some ears, Jesus’ response to his mother sounds disrespectful; yet he, nonetheless, follows Mary’s implicit expectations and creates 150 gallons of wine from six water jars. As such, there are two ways this scene could be entitled: “Mother knows best” or “Jesus, the life of the party”. The fact that after three days of celebrating the wedding (which was par for the course in that Galilean culture), the reception ran dry. To alleviate the burden of such a social gaff, Jesus unobtrusively provided such an overwhelming amount of wine (and vintage wine, at that!) that my dear and long-departed, blue-stockinged, Northern Irish, tea-tootling Methodists would swoon into a tizzy. Yet, this act of outrageous abundance – what St. John identifies as “the first of his signs”) propelled Jesus’ disciples to believe in him and to continue to follow him.
In “the Sunday Morning Lectionary Study Group” (which meets on zoom every Sunday morning at 8:15 to discuss the day’s scriptures), I have posed to the group that we take a disciplined approach to the lessons that we will soon hear in worship as if we were detectives. As in the iconic mode of the 1950’s television series Dragnet, with its top detective, Joe Friday, we strive first to address the scriptures and identify the facts before coming to a proclaimed conclusion about what the passage means. As Detective Joe Friday (aka, Jack Webb) would say, “just the facts, ma’am, just the facts”. Rather than immediately jumping into the alluring temptation to claim the meaning of the lesson, we seek to help one another take a careful look at what the reading actually says beyond its surface appearance or our own expectations. This means we seek to see and honor the clues within the passage that invite us into the life of the story, itself.
A primary example of such scriptural “clues” (St. John refers to them as “signs”), emerges in the very first verse of today’s reading: namely, “On the third day…” – as in “On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee.” Like fingerprints on a glass, John’s first “clue” points to an event that occurred on “the third day”. Which “third day”?, the curious might ask. The wedding celebration’s “third day”, of course. Any contemporary father-of-the-bride offers a sigh of relief in that our culture doesn’t party as hard as our biblical ancestors did. Yet, to the curious and careful scriptural detective, the echoes of another “third day” are heard, a “third day” on which more than a celebratory wedding will occur. And for the skeptical (or slow) among us, St. John makes it explicitly clear that Jesus’ turning the water into wine is the “first of his signs” – that is, the first of his “clues” that point to who he is and what he is about.
For those of you who are curious, two things. First, God bless your curiosity, and with grace may you continue to develop it. Honoring and tending the curiosity about the God-life is what I believe we are about at St. Philip’s; and I also believe it is one of our strengths.
Second, and in terms of the “clues” (that is, the “signs” in the Fourth Gospel), John reports seven “signs” (seven “clues”), all meant to manifest the identity and purpose of Jesus as God’s Son and our Savior.1 – Seven, itself, being the numerological indication of a transcendent completeness and truth, a “sign” of an unbreakable wholeness in our midst.
Many modern biblical scholars view these “signs” as literary devices, metaphors, items that are not to be taken literally and certainly not superstitiously. By our own cultural experience, many of us are skeptical (if not downright dismissive) of what is posed as “miracle” -- all the more reason to be serious (and not superficial) in our scriptural investigations. Yet, for me, in the face of this wedding story, a disturbing question unavoidably pops to the surface that eludes simple assessment. For me, whenever this “wedding in Cana of Galilee” story is read or told, this sobering question comes to mind: What happens to us and our lives when the wine runs out?
I suspect that this question reverberates (at least implicitly) in all those places where desolation, despair, and destruction reign. For instance, I can’t imagine the horrors and chaos of war in places like Gaza, Sudan, Haiti – to name just a few among many. Closer to home, I tremble at the plight of those victims of the Los Angeles wildfires. With more than 25 deaths and over 12,000 structures burned to ash, and the fires still not contained, what is the response to the experience of the wine running out in all those people’s lives?
These situations always bring home to me the need I have to pray that line in the Lord’s Prayer with these particular words: “Save us from the time of trial, and deliver us from evil.”2
What happens when the wine runs out? What happens when life is broken?
There are no answers that solve such a “problem”. There is no inoculation, no preventive medicine, no prophylactic to prevent our lives from experiencing the “wine” running out, the wine of our lives, the juice of our life running out. Nonetheless, from the ashes of the Los Angeles wildfires a sign, a demonstration emerges that with God’s people there is new wine, more wine, vintage wine. One such sign, I am moved to say, comes from the witness of our sisters and brothers of St Mark’s Episcopal Church, Altadena, California.
On January 11th, the Rev. Carri Patterson Grindon, Rector of St. Mark’s, communicated to her parish flock that their 100-year-old church and its school had burned to the ground in the fire. Along with 37 other parishioners whose homes were destroyed, everything that was a visible and outward sign of St. Mark’s was gone – except there was more to the church than the quick eye could detect.
Also on January 11th, Los Angeles Bishop John Harvey Taylor held an ordination service at the Diocesan cathedral, at which four priests were ordained. Amidst rational and compassionate offers to reschedule the liturgy, the Bishop went forward, saying that it is in such times as these that the church needs more priests – both ordained and lay. This is to say that the church and the world need more individuals who are willing and able to represent God to the people and the people to God – more people who know God’s wine never runs out.
When a member of a parish presents an individual for ordination to the priesthood, it is customary for the parish to carry the parish’s banner in the liturgy’s procession. But St. Mark’s no longer had a banner. Like every other outward sign of their reality, it was destroyed by fire. But that fact did not hinder – much less overwhelm -- the presenting members of St. Mark’s, Altadena – many of whom were present at the ordination even though they, too, had lost their homes. Quick on their feet and perhaps mindful that in spite of all appearances, the wine had not run out, a mother and her two kids went into action. With poster board, markers, pvc pipe, and duct tape, they recreated St. Mark’s banner, which was triumphantly processed in the ordination liturgy.
The wine ran out, but there was new wine available.
In this day’s epistle, St. Paul identifies the reality of the new and overly abundant wine. He writes:
Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of services but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.3 [my emphasis]
Jesus is the God-life manifested fully in human terms. When we keep his life with us and between us, God’s life – the Holy Spirit – flows in and among us. The wine, the life – shed for you and for me and for all of us – flows – especially in the “times of trial”.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
1. The Seven Signs of John's Gospel: The Wedding at Cana (John 2:1-12); Cure of the Official's Son (John 4:46-54); Cure on a Sabbath (John 5:1-47); Multiplication of Loaves (John 6:1-14); Walking on Water (John 6:16-24); Cure of a Man Born Blind (John 9:1-41); Raising of Lazarus (John 11:1-44)
2. Book of Common Prayer. “The Lord’s Prayer”, Contemporary version, p. 364
3. 1 Corinthians 12:4-6
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