The Rev. Eyleen Farmer
January 14, 2007
The Second Sunday after the Epiphany
This sermon is also available in audio
Those of you who know me at all know that I grew up in the Baptist Church. Being Baptists, we only had communion about once a quarter, or four times a year. Naturally we did not use real wine. It was Welch’s grape juice, and the bread was not the round host, much less a real loaf, but broken saltines. And we did not come forward to an altar rail to receive the sacrament.
Instead the elements were distributed by the deacons as we remained seated, passing the plate of crumbs and the tray of tiny cups down the rows. I could never wrap my mind around what we were doing on those Lord’s Supper Sundays. The preacher said it was important, but frankly, its significance was largely lost on me.
My dad, who was a scientist and didn’t believe in miracles, quipped after one of those communions that the miracle at Cana was not turning water into wine; but he did wonder how the Baptists had managed to get that wine back into grape juice! I thought it was a funny thing for him to say, and typical of my dad’s sense of humor.
But as I have reflected on his little joke, I now see that there is a disturbing truth hidden in it. For isn’t that what we do? We are all the time turning wine into grape juice, watering down the inherently miraculous, profaning the sacred, if you will, treating all that is beautiful and mysterious and holy as if it were no big deal.
Birth. Death. Stars. Trees. Friendship. Faith. A kiss. Even something as ordinary and as easily overlooked as grasshopper eyes. Did you know that a grasshopper has five eyes? A large, very complex eye, consisting of thousands of single lenses, is on each side of its head. With these eyes, the grasshopper can see to the front, the side, and the back. But there are three other, small eyes—one above the base of each antenna, and one midway between the two antennae. Biologists have not been able to determine what these other “extra” eyes are for. (from Sparta, Illinois, public school district web site)
Doesn’t that strike you as amazing? as evidence of a most stunning and unrestrained, a downright reckless creativity? It seems to me that we ought to be bowled over, stopped in our tracks, awe-struck every waking minute of our lives. If we were in our right minds we would be dazed with wonder every time we saw a bird in flight, or heard a finely wrought melody, or looked into the eyes of another human being. We would live out our days shouting hallelujahs to the high heavens.
And when we come to church we ought to be quaking in our boots in anticipation of what is about to happen. But more often than not, we walk through the door distracted and restless, anxious to get on to the next thing. “Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke?” asks Pulitzer Prize winning essayist Annie Dillard. “Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it?” she goes on...
The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats...to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return. (Teaching a Stone to Talk, pp. 58-59)
Dillard has figured out that we are dealing here with a God of uncalled-for generosity and unwarranted excess. A God who drenches the world with a dazzling array of wonders. Who bothers with the gratuitous intricacies of a single feather. A God deranged enough to become one of us. A creator who, as Dillard suggests, loves pizzazz. (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, p.137)
I read in the newspaper this week about a 25 year old pop star who sold her 6.9 million dollar house in Beverly Hills and bought a new one for 7.2 million because, she said, she wanted to be closer to the hot restaurants and clubs. This is only an exaggerated example of how we all fail to see what is right in front of us, and then, when we end up feeling empty, bored, and depressed, we try, try, try to fill ourselves up by buying something, going somewhere, switching jobs, changing partners.
There is no way to know for sure why Jesus turned that water into wine. The wedding festivities were already well under way. In fact, it was probably time for the sensible people to go on home. In any event, Jesus wasn’t healing anyone, and he wasn’t teaching anybody anything. He hadn’t yet started challenging the authorities, and he wasn’t issuing invitations to potential disciples.
Neither was he trying to impress the wedding guests—according to the text, they didn’t even know about this behind-the-scenes drama. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t trying to rescue the host who hadn’t planned well, and I doubt that Jesus was conducting an experiment just to see what he could do with all that water.
There are several ways to go with this story. There are the obvious eucharistic overtones, and there are some pretty interesting family dynamics between mother and son. One could explore the implications for ritual purity and impurity suggested by the stone jars.
But whatever else was going on, we can conclude with assurance that Jesus was revealing something important about what God is like. That’s why we call it an epiphany story. Jesus was pulling back the veil, if you will, to allow those around him a peek into the unfathomable extravagance of God. Another way to put it would be to say that the God who made the world and made us as a part of it, the God who became one of us to try to get through to us, the God who loves, woos, beckons, longs for us will stop at nothing to win our affection.
Six jars of the best wine at the end of the party! Somewhere between a hundred and twenty and a hundred and eighty gallons!
What if we were to live our lives—really live them—as if we believed in such an overflowing of grace? What would happen if we spent one day, or half a day, or even one hour, in the kind of rapture of gratitude that is called for? What if, when we knelt at the communion rail, we held out hands expecting to receive nothing less than the miracle of God’s love and forgiveness and generosity? What if we, as the poet Rumi suggests, were to drink all of our passion and be a disgrace?
Lest you imagine that I am able to do this, let me assure you that I struggle as much as anyone else to live in awareness of God’s outpouring of God’s self. I have to pay the bills and do the laundry and work on my relationships and get the oil changed just like you do. But this much I can say.
Today, at least today, I feel like I am standing beneath a waterfall. Only it’s not water tumbling over the rocks. It’s wine—wine splashing all around me.
And you are the wine.
This place, this congregation called Calvary Church, fills me to the brim—the talented staff with whom I am privileged to work, the wonderful youth, their parents and advisors who allow me into their lives, and the rest of you who, working together, do the best you can to make God’s love visible in this broken world.
“Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery,” writes Dillard.
(The least we can do is) wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, choir the proper praise. (Pilgrim, p. 9)
Alleluia, alleluia.
Copyright ©2007 Calvary Episcopal Church
Gospel Reading:
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." And Jesus said to her, "Woman, what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come." His mother said to the servants, "Do whatever he tells you." Now standing there were six stone water-jars for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons. Jesus said to them, "Fill the jars with water." And they filled them up to the brim. He said to them, "Now draw some out, and take it to the chief steward." So they took it. When the steward tasted the water that had become wine, and did not know where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew), the steward called the bridegroom and said to him, "Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the good wine until now." Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him. NRSV (New Revised Standard Version)