Something Worth Partying About
Many years ago in my first parish, I started a sermon by telling the congregation how much I had struggled with the text and how hard it was for me to finally write the sermon I was about to give. After the service, a lovely elderly woman, dripping in both Southern charm and Southern steel—as well as in a good many southern diamonds—said to me, “Honey, don’t tell us how hard it was for you to write a sermon; that’s what we pay you to do. Just preach it, sweetheart, and we will let you know whether or not it works.” I got the message and until today, I have never again said those words.
But this has been a hard sermon to write. This well known passage about Jesus’ attendance at a wedding in Cana and particularly about his changing a lot of water, about 150 gallons, into a whole lot of wine is much more complicated than simply squaring a miracle with modern consciousness. It is filled with allegory, making the argument, not missed on those hearing it, that Jesus had come to bring a whole new way of being faithful in the world and that the old way was to be replaced with the new way. For years you have heard from this pulpit that the community of John was deeply conflicted, some Jews arguing for the emergence of the Christian church, while their kin and friends argued for remaining faithful to their Jewish traditions. Unmistakably, John’s overriding agenda was to argue that Jesus was the only way. In our multi-cultural understanding of how religions and versions of truth get inculcated into the lives of people in various cultures appropriately makes us uncomfortable with that sort of absolutism. John, particularly, then must be read contextually and carefully.
But for that point to be the fullness of the sermon is to miss something wonderfully joyful about Jesus. This is a great story of Jesus who thoroughly enjoyed being with people. Who can say about the historicity of this particular event; even more, who needs to say it? But don’t you suppose that in the course of his life as a social and familial person Jesus attended such weddings? Of course, he did. Despite the fantastical miracle, Jesus’ presence and participation suggests something to me about the wonderful way in which he was human.
I even recognize the dynamic with his mother. Mary assumed that Jesus could fix anything. Mothers are often a lot like that with regard to their sons. I once heard mine telling some friends that the only thing wrong with me was that I drove a little too fast. She was wrong, of course, but that was her story and she has stuck to it for about 60 years. I don’t believe that she thinks I can turn water to wine, though my sister argues that she does. But that’s another issue.
In our wedding liturgy we claim that Jesus “adorned this manner of life (marriage) by his presence and first miracle at a wedding in Cana of Galilee.” Although some argue that his simple presence was not necessarily an endorsement of marriage, I think he probably did endorse marriage for its order, for its potential joy. There was quite an outcry last year when Harvard professor Karen King gave an address suggesting that Jesus may have been married, basing her comment on a papyrus fragment in Coptic that, translated, contains the words, “Jesus said to them, my wife…” I couldn’t get too worked up about it. For a man in his era not to be married was quite unusual, and our scripture is silent about the question—as it is about the marital status of most of those mentioned. It is likely to remain a mystery and certainly not one that I plan to spend much time pondering.
What we do know is that Jesus encountered ordinary moments and made them extraordinary. It is perfectly ordinary for two people to be attracted to one another and to desire to be joined in a way that is ritualized and set apart. What sanctifies a marriage is the presence of God in the relationship, which is signified by love, fidelity and commitment between the two people. Of course, Jesus adorned this way of life, not as the only way but as a holy way. God meets us in the midst of our lives, transforming what seems utterly pedestrian into something that is truly eternal: the love between two people who are committed to one another. For that reason, to deny two people who are committed to one another and who are willing to make all manner of extravagant promises to one another, before God and others, the right to do so just makes no sense to me.
Love transforms us; it takes us as self-centered survivors and shows us generosity and consideration that we did not know ourselves capable of. In all its manifestations, marital and otherwise, love is the occasion of celebration and joy! There can’t be enough barrels of wine to celebrate!
That all of it occurs in the context of a banquet is not a surprise. The notion of a banquet is frequently found in the telling of the history of our salvation, our final destination often imagined as the banquet of heaven. Remember these soaring words from the prophet Isaiah: “On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-matured wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-matured wines strained clear.” It thrills me to think that God imagines such specific abundance for us, for all of us.
Each week when we gather at this table to partake of the Eucharistic Feast, we are in fact reenacting another feast, this one at the end of Jesus’ ministry, the Lord’s Supper. Written many years after Jesus’ death, this story of the wedding feast at Cana no doubt had Eucharistic overtones for John’s hearers. Like us, they were created to need such sacramental moments. Not only the principal act of Christian worship, for many of us the Eucharist is our deepest connection to God. We can’t explain why it is; at least no one I know can do so adequately. But somehow part of the reason is its sumptuous offering, not just the bread and wine but the life they represent. What more sumptuous offering can there be than that of one’s life? Though we do not believe that anything literally happens to the wine and bread, we know beyond a doubt that something about this simple act contains in it the power, as all sacraments do, to transform the everyday into the sacred. Somehow remembering in whatever way we can Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection brings God present in a way unlike anything else.
Like all the stories in the bible this wedding story is bigger than history. It represents to us the fact that God is alive and at work in the world, transforming us and bringing us ever closer to God. Just like the water in the barrels, we are not the same when we leave the Eucharist each week. Sometimes we are aware of the change; sometimes we are not; but we are always changed by it. Inch by inch this faithful act changes us into the likeness of Christ. This story promises that into the midst of all that is, both joyful and broken, God comes—and not once but again and again. We bring who we are to the table, no pretense, no persona, coming just as we are. We don’t always get solutions or answers to our problems, but we always get God; and in the end, that is more than enough.
In the name of God: Amen.