Isaiah 62: 1-5 &
John 2:1-11
Third Sunday after Epiphany/ 20th January 2013
Now,
that was a memorable wedding
reception. Cana in Galilee had never
seen such a sight, then or probably since.
And just when the party was really getting going, the wine ran out. As a guest, feeling the host’s embarrassment,
Jesus’ mother turns to him and says, “Do something.” She turns to the servants and says, “Do
whatever he tells you.” And so Jesus is
coerced – by his mother – into performing his first miracle. What does he do? He changes water into wine, of course.
Pay attention to what’s
going on here and how Jesus acts. John
tells us, “Now standing there were six stone water-jars for the Jewish rites of
purification” (John 2:6). These
water-jars once contained water, not for drinking but for purification, for
washing before a meal. The water-jars
are sitting there presumably empty because Jesus then tells the servants to
fill them again with water, to the brim.
And that’s what they do. Now the
term “water-jars” is misleading; they were really more like jugs, large enough
to hold roughly fifteen, twenty, even thirty gallons of water each, as the text
says. Jesus ordered the jugs to be
brought to the chief steward who then drew some of the water, now wine,
surprised and impressed. The steward
turns to the bridegroom and says, “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”
(John 2:10).
This
is not a small amount. Do the math. If
we’re talking fifteen-gallon jugs times six:
that’s 90 gallons of wine.
Thirty-gallon jugs times six:
that’s 180 gallons of the finest wine!
We
discover a few things here: Jesus blesses
the feast with his presence; he knows that weddings, that marriages matter.
Jesus offers the best (not the second-best!), he wants to make sure the
bridegroom and bride are seen as good hosts, extending hospitality to their
guests, and he wants the guests to have a good time. And we also learn from
this that Jesus loves to party and that he has exquisite taste!
Only
John’s Gospel includes the miracle in Cana, but John is not alone in showing
that Jesus lifts up wedding feasts as significant. One might try to make a case that these texts
demonstrate that marriage is sacred and holy, marriage between a bridegroom and
a bride, man and woman. One can try to use such texts to say something about
contemporary understandings of marriage, particularly when some states, such as
Maryland, and some denominations, such as the PC (USA), are modifying or trying
to modify how we define marriage. We
have to be honest, however, and acknowledge that sometimes there’s a little (or
a lot) of historical amnesia at work in our wrestling with scripture and
contemporary issues. There’s no such
thing as a traditional biblical view of marriage. We can be assured that the marriage of the bridegroom
and bride in Cana has little in common with our view of marriage today based on
love, mutuality, and equality between partners.
But that’s a sermon for another time.
Instead,
this morning I want to party – or at least draw our attention toward the
party. It’s striking that the miracle
occurs at the wedding feast, at the party.
It’s striking that in the other Gospels we hear less about the marriage
ceremony per se than we do about the reception. Like today, wedding receptions are something
to look forward to. A lot of time and
effort and expense go into them. Today
there’s so much focus on the reception, sometimes more than anything else;
sometimes wedding guests skip the ceremony, when it’s in a church, and just
show up at the reception. But that, too,
is a sermon for another time.
In
Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus said, “the kingdom of heaven is like a king who
prepared a wedding banquet for his son,” only to have people RSVP with lame
excuses why they couldn’t attend (Matthew 22:1-14, Luke 14:16-24). Wedding banquet etiquette matters: “When someone invites you to a wedding feast,
do not take the place of honor, for a person more distinguished than you may
have been invited” (Luke 14:8). And even
beyond the Gospels, the vision of the future we’re given in Revelation, the
goal and end and purpose of human history is described as a great wedding feast
between the Lamb of God, Jesus, and his bride, the church (Revelation 19) – the
Marriage Feast of the Lamb.
The
point here is that Jesus and then the early church lift up marriage feasts,
receptions, banquets as metaphors for the
kingdom of God. It’s an image of
what life is and can be and, indeed, shall be in the kingdom of God. There is a wedding, a bringing together of
man and woman to form something new – and the party follows. But it’s not just the wedding of man and woman
per se that warrants a party. It’s the bringing together that matters. It’s the pledge, the promise, the covenant
itself that means something to God. God wants to be wed to us, united with us,
joined with us, pledged to us, in covenant with us. And weddings warrant
celebration. This is exactly what we hear in Isaiah 62. Listen again to what Isaiah says to the nation
Israel, “You shall no more be termed Forsaken, and your land shall no more be
termed Desolate; but you shall be called My Delight Is Her, and your land
Married; for the LORD delights in you, and your land shall be married.” And then Isaiah envisions Israel’s future as
a marriage celebration, “For as a young man marries a young woman, so shall
your builder marry you, and as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall your God rejoice over you” (Is
62:5, emphasis added).
Jesus
carries on this metaphor of joy and rejoicing and celebrating when two are
joined together and form something new. God’s kingdom is about coming together,
bringing people together, forming bonds and unions, covenants, marriages. And if the people invited don’t want to come
to the banquet, then go out to the highways and byways, even the ditches along the
road, and invite everyone else to come!
Several weeks ago I
lifted up the root meaning of the word religion. It doesn’t really mean being holy or
following religious practices; it has little to do with belief. Religion, from the Latin religare means to make a connection. Our words ligament
and ligature come from the same
root. Religare. It’s all about connection – God connecting with humanity,
humanity connecting with God, human to human, person to person, connecting with
the depths of the self, connecting with creation, with the cosmos itself. As Einstein (1879-1955) showed, this entire
universe – at every level, from the micro to the macro, including the
properties of light – is all based on connections, relationships, making those
links and discovering how we’re all connected.
It’s really this simple and
profound at the same time. And the One who connects with us is Love itself
because that what Love does – Love connects.
And because it is Love it’s untiring, it never gives up on us, never
gives up searching, reaching, desiring us. And we never tire in needing to hear
it again and again, to know it, to feel it, to encounter this Love. Now we can easily exchange the word “connect”
with “marriage” and the meaning still holds.
In this sense, God has always been in the marriage business and it’s our
job to make sure that we don’t undo what God has joined together.
But there’s so much at
work in our hearts and in the world, in the brokenness of the world, which
works against this, which disconnects, which wants to break asunder the very
bonds that God has pledged to uphold. The
plight of the human condition is rooted in the fact that we’re often
disconnected from God, from others, from ourselves, from creation.
If God is in the
marriage business – wed to humanity, bringing together disparate groups and peoples
– it seems that it’s incumbent upon us to be wary of those forces in the world
trying to divorce us from God, from our neighbors, from our enemies, from
strangers, from ourselves; those entities that want to divide and conquer,
hammer wedges between people, often for political gain, demonize the other as
if the other is not a sister and brother equally endowed with the image of
God. It’s important to name these forces
and fears and lies and so weaken
their power over our lives.
On this weekend as we
honor the life and witness of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968), it’s
important for us to remember a time when there was not a happy marriage between
blacks and whites in the United States – both figuratively and literally. For too long it was assumed the humanity of a
Caucasian had nothing in common with an African-American. First, separate and not equal, then “separate
but equal,”[1] but just barely equal, yet
still separate in many ways. To bring
together. To integrate. To make one,
with differences to be sure, but still one, was the work and struggle of a
generation. And that work continues. We are still on the way toward realizing
Martin’s dream and some still don’t want to hear anything about no “mountain
top.”[2] Just because Americans voted for a president who is African-American doesn’t mean we’ve come to terms with racism
and our racist past, because we haven’t. Racism, both conscious and
unconscious, continues to wreck havoc upon us.
Many churches are still segregated on a Sunday morning and wary of
cultural and ethnic diversity of any kind.
There’s a place in Los
Angeles raising awareness around these issues.
The Museum of Tolerance, part of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, addresses
the hate and intolerance in Nazi Germany, but it also tries to get at the
deeper issues of prejudice in human society.
Before you enter the museum with your group you’re confronted with two
doors. Overhead are television screens
creating the feeling that you’re on the set of a game show, with a game show host
asking, “Which door will you choose?”
Door Number One or Door Number Two?
Which one will you enter through?
One door is marked:
PREJUDICED. The other door is
marked: UNPREJUDICED. Most people, being
in a group, will choose the door marked UNPREJUDICED. Who’s going to confess prejudice, even if it’s
true? So you reach for UNPREJUDICED door, only to find that it’s locked. It’s always locked. For the
way toward tolerance is through the door of prejudice.
Our prejudices, both the
conscious and the unconscious ones, continue to separate us from God, our
neighbors, and ourselves. Here, like in
most things, confession is good for the soul.
But this requires a certain amount of honesty and courage and grace to
acknowledge what’s there. Openness toward
others is an essential dimension to the life of faith, acceptance of the other,
whoever the other might be, is directly
related to our relationship with God. Because,
“…limited openness to the otherness of humans always translates into limited
encounter with the Ultimate Other – [namely,] God.” There’s no way around this: “limited openness to the otherness of humans always translates into limited encounter with the Ultimate Other – God.”[3]
But this Ultimate Other
never wants to remain completely other and cut off, divorced from us, but comes
to us again and again, most profoundly in Jesus Christ, who, in Christ, comes
to us and calls us and loves us into the Kingdom and draws us into community, into
relationship, to a feast, a banquet, a party of widely diverse and beautiful
people. We are all bound together, whether we like it or not, because God has
placed us in this world precisely in this way.[4] Bound together whether
we like it or not
– or,
until we come to like it –
or, better yet, love it,
or, better still, love
the other as our brother and sister,
who bears
the image of God!
This is what the church is called to
proclaim, embody, and celebrate. The
world needs to know that this is what
God is calling us toward, this is
what we embody, this is what we
celebrate. And, like Isaiah, we will not
be silent about it, we will not shut-up about it, we will not keep it to
ourselves, but shout it in the streets and from the rooftops, from spires and
steeples, a message that shimmers and shines like the dawn and offers the world
a new day. Now that’s worthy of a party,
isn’t it?
[1] This phrase was part of
the legal doctrine, supported by American Constitutional law, which justified
segregation. The phrase derived from a Louisiana law of 1890, although the
law actually used the phrase "equal but separate.”
[2] “I just want to do God's will. And He's
allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want
you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.” From
Martin Luther King’s “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech given at the Mason
Temple (Church of God in Christ Headquarters) in Memphis, TN, on April 3,
1968. On the next day, King was
assassinated, in Memphis.
[3] David G. Benner, Soulful Spirituality: Becoming Fully Alive and Deeply Human
(Brazos, 2011), 5.
[4] James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Orbis,
2012), “No two people in America have had more violent and loving encounters
than black and white people. …[Yet,] no gulf between blacks and whites is too
great to overcome, for our beauty is more enduring than our brutality. What God joined together, no one can tear
apart” (166).
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