"An Epiphany of Abundance"
John 2:1-11
Jesus
and his mother and his disciples are attending a wedding. Anyone who’s
ever officiated or planned a wedding can tell you that things can go
wrong.
In those days a wedding was a great occasion, and most everybody in the
village, plus some people from neighboring villages, would have been
invited. Weddings were hosted by the groom’s family, and the
celebrations lasted for up to a week.
This celebration is in trouble, because on the third
day, they’re running out of wine. This is a crisis for the family
responsible for hospitality.
David Lose explains why this was such a disaster: “Wine isn’t merely a
social lubricant…it’s a sign of the harvest, of God’s abundance, of joy and
gladness and hospitality. And so, when they run short on wine they run
short on blessing. And that’s a tragedy.”[1]
Jesus’ mother goes to him and identifies the problem. But Jesus says,
“That’s really not our concern. And my hour has not come.” In the
theology of John’s Gospel, “the hour” is the hour when Jesus goes to the
cross.
His mother tells the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.”
There were six stone water-jars there, ready to be used in the Jewish
purification rituals. Each held about twenty or thirty
gallons. “Fill the jars with water,” Jesus says to the servants,
and they do. “Now draw some out,” he says, “and take it to the
chief steward.”
When the chief steward tasted the water that had turned into wine, he didn’t
know where it had come from, though the servants who had drawn the water knew.
He called the bridegroom and said, “Normally people serve the good
wine first, and then the cheap stuff when people have already had plenty to
drink. But you’ve kept the really good wine for now.”
John tells us that Jesus did this as the first of his “signs” and revealed his glory,
and his disciples believed in him. The
miracles Jesus performs in the Fourth Gospel are never called miracles—but
“signs.” These “signs” are about
revealing a deeper reality about Jesus.
In the first verses of his gospel—the prologue, which we
heard on Christmas Eve--John identifies the major themes of his message. We hear that the Word became flesh and lived
among us, full of grace and truth…. From his fullness we have all received,
grace upon grace. Turning water into wine is revealing abundant grace. And what
does abundant grace taste like? Like the really good wine, when you were
expecting the cheap stuff.
No matter how hard we may try to “spiritualize” today’s gospel lesson, we have
150 gallons of really good wine at a wedding party that had been experiencing scarcity.
Today’s gospel text is about the very nature of God… and about the very purpose
of being human. The nature of God is pure grace-- abundant… surprising
grace. Grace overflowing to the brim, in times and places we least expect
it.
Karoline Lewis has suggested that we
have so modified and codified abundance that it’s hard to recognize it
anymore. Some have monopolized
abundance…hoarded it…thinking that it is theirs to control, theirs to possess,
and theirs to take away. “Theirs to keep for themselves, because those without
it? Well, clearly they have not merited God’s attention, earned God’s graces.”[1]
The gospels teach us that abundance
is never about you or me and Jesus alone, as much as we might want it to be—but
about bringing us into life—true life, abundant life, for all. In God’s life of
abundance, abundance is not ours to grasp individually, but in beloved
community, in the world God so loves.
We need to pay attention to the details in this story. The water-jars
were there to be used for Jewish purification rituals-- When Jesus
turned the water into wine, it was a sign that God was doing a new thing.
And I wonder:
What if Jesus had stuck with his original feeling? It is not my problem,
it is not my time. What if all of his life
Jesus had said, "That’s not my problem and it is not my time"?
That’s unimaginable, isn’t it?
Closer to our own time, in the mid 1950s, Martin Luther King wrapped up his
course work for his Ph.D. and took his first call to a church. His
dissertation wasn’t done yet when Martin Luther King left graduate school and
took a job as a pastor of a church in Montgomery, Alabama.
Not long after he went to Montgomery, Rosa Parks refused to go to the back of
the bus. A meeting was held in the African-American community in
Montgomery, and they asked who was going to lead the boycott.
All the other pastors and all the other influential leaders of the
African-American community were smart enough to know that this looked like a
risky business. They decided to get the new
pastor in town to lead the boycott.
Rev. Martin Luther King had every reason in the world to say, "It is not
the right time for me. I have a young family. I have a dissertation to
finish writing. I have a congregation that doesn’t know me or trust me
yet. If I start out at the head of this enterprise, what will that
do to my relationship to my congregation? It just isn’t a good
time. I have all these reasons why. This isn’t the time for
me to do something like this.”
But, as we all know, this very human being was moved from “not my time” -- to
yes.
More than 60 years have
passed since the Montgomery bus boycott. Fifty-six years have
passed since the March on Washington when Dr. King gave his “I have a dream”
speech. More than 50 years have passed since he wrote his last book before he
was assassinated: “Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?”
Have we made progress since that
time? Undoubtedly. But we need to be honest with ourselves about
where we the people of the United States are and about our history.
Later in the Gospel of John, we hear Jesus saying, “You shall know the truth,
and the truth shall make you free.”[3]
I believe the gospel has the power to set us free-- as individuals, as a
community, as a society-- if we have ears to hear the good news… if we have
faith to trust in God’s power to transform us and bind us together in Beloved
Community… if we trust in the gospel’s truth to make us free.
Some of the stories we heard during Advent remind us that sometimes people have
a failure of imagination, like Zechariah, when the angel Gabriel told him
Elizabeth was going to have a baby: “How can this be?”
In our time and place, God calls us to be the people who come to know God, to
experience the grace and abundance of Jesus Christ, to embody that love
and live together in Beloved Community with all of God’s children.
Whenever we’re afraid we won’t have enough—enough
money or power or privilege or security-- whenever we think the party’s over
because things are changing, God will keep doing new things and surprising us
with new wine that is sweeter and tastier than ever before… and give us dreams
and visions to help us live more fully into the life of abundance and grace
into which God calls us. Can we imagine
it? Is anything impossible for God?
In a world threatened by ethnic, racial, and religious conflict, the
consequences of trying to defend the status quo or to keep most of the money
and resources and power in the hands of a a few… or of wallowing in
the valley of despair and fear and negativity are enormous. But the
rewards of inclusive justice and healing are too important not to try.
The prophets and the gospel call us to dream, to imagine an alternative reality
of Beloved Community for all God’s people. They challenge us to embody it
in our daily lives, trusting that God will provide abundant new wine and
better things than we ever tasted or seen or imagined and a life
overflowing with joy and blessing in God’s presence.
Thanks be to God!
Rev. Fran
Hayes, Pastor
Littlefield
Presbyterian Church
Dearborn,
Michigan
January
20, 2019
[1]
David Lose, “Epiphany 2B: What Grace Looks Like!” http://www.davidlose.net/2016/01/epiphany-2-b-what-grace-looks-like/
[2]
Wright, John for Everyone, Chapters 1-10 (Westminster John Knox Press,
2002), Kindle Edition, Loc 472.
[4]
Jim Wallis, America’s Original Sin: Racism, White Privilege, and the
Bridge to a New America. (Brazos Press, 2016), Kindle Edition, Location
388.
[1] Karoline
Lewis, at Working Preacher. https://www.workingpreacher.org/craft.aspx?m=4377&post=5276
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