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Epiphany 2

18 January 2004

Isaiah 62:1-5
I Corinthians 12:1-11
Psalm 36:5-10
John 2:1-11

The morning after the wedding, Joseph woke with a terrible hangover. Too much wine the night before gave him a headache the likes he had not had before. 'Mary,' he groaned, 'I need a drink of water; I desperately need a drink of water.' 'We're out of water,' said Mary. 'We'll have to go to the well and get some.' 'Please do,' said Joseph; and then the pathetic plea, 'And oh, don't send the boy.'

At every wedding, the bride and groom are the centre of attention - unless the bride's mother upstages the bride. At this point in the sermon you might bring out a few well-chosen wedding stories, to draw attention to the sub-themes operating on such occasions - those stories which will be told at the 25th wedding anniversary.

John, the narrator, gives us access to one of the sub themes played out at this wedding. Few were aware of it; most knew nothing, some knew a bit, none fully understood the sub plot woven into this ordinary event.

The first three verses give us all we need to know:

(a) a wedding, (b) at Cana - a specific location of this generous intervention into particular people's lives (God stuff is not in universal, general principles, but in specific particularities), (c) Mother of Jesus a guest (never called Mary in this Gospel), (d) Jesus is a guest, (e) the disciples are guests, (f) Jesus' mother delivers the line of focal tension - 'They have no wine!' Four ways to go:

1.  The liberal line of sophisticated rationality and conventional, sane reasoning, reducing the story to the explainable thus avoiding embarrassment that we might entertain such a primitive story.
2. The symbolism/allegorical route.The water jars for purification used to make wine - rejecting Jewish purification rituals, thus rejecting Judaism, leaving Christianity with no religious rivals. Christians have successfully played that line for centuries. Or, the mother of Jesus represents the Church - the new Eve or the new Israel seeking good news. Here each part of the story stands for something outside the story itself, and the story itself dissolves before our eyes.
3. The fundamentalist route, defending the story in its literalism, which ends up as flat and one-dimensional and monochromatic as the liberal line. The fundamentalists claim too much, even more than the story. None of the characters claim much. The MC knows he is sampling good wine, but doesn't know where it came from. The servants know where it came from but don't taste it. The guests didn't even know there was a crisis, and the groom has only a passing inkling. And nowhere are we told Jesus turned water into wine. The disciples know something, but not a lot. They do know they are on the edge of a beginning of Creation proportions.
4. There is another way of framing a truth than liberal diminishing, allegory, or the fundamentalist excesses of claiming too much. Treat the text as drama; suspend belief mechanisms for 20 minutes; enjoy the drama, and let its truth work on us. Seek beyond the obvious, beyond the possible, shattering the boundaries of the conventional world; read life between lines where most seldom read.

The clues in the text encourage us to view life from a different angle:

A Vs.11 - the first of Jesus' signs - first as in Genesis 1 and John 1, first as in a beginning, not as in a sequence - different Greek word for that. Here there is a new creative happening on a par with God's move in creation. John/Jesus is inviting us into re-creating the world, re-shaping its life, re-configuring how we see the world.

B Vs.4 'My hour has not yet come.' What hour is this? A little code word used by John to alert us to the greater story engaging us. The greater story? Jesus' time of exercising God's excessive love of humankind - crucifixion and the counterplan of resurrection, and then God's receiving back the crucified one. As we entertain this drama, we are pushing at the edges of the crucifixion, resurrection, ascension hours.

These clues indicate that the drama is now theologically defined, and all who enter this theatre begin to slant life in theological ways. For those who view life from this odd angle of vision realize that every time there is loss, there is God-promised hopeful gain; every time there is deprivation, there is God-created restitution; every time there is depletion, there is God-given abundance.

So in our meetings, our Church, our work, our families; in our rebuffs, redundancies, retirements, griefs, apathies, depressions we will hesitate before we agree too quickly with those who say there is not enough, it can't be done, we have no future. The drama in our book questions the mindset and systems of scarcity, immobility and inevitability.

PRAYER

 

God, you came as one bearing signs of freshness, indicators for direction change,

cues for new communion among people.
Can the sign be replicated?
Can the indicator repeat?
Can the cue be re-cued among us? For the first sign brought joy to potential barrenness, and relief to possible embarrassment,
and amazement to half-believing followers. God, replicate your signs again in our midst, for our lives are running short of freshness, and direction, and cues for sweet communion. And our neighbourhood is low on joy, and high in shame, and lacking in wonder and amazement. We call it normal,
but we know the losses, the bitterness, the flat, wonderless leveling of life. God, we too look for new wine - a new sign, that grace and generosity is loose in our midst,
and we too would be candidates for servanthood, under discipline to carry out the Jesus requests of filling and distributing the newness on offer,
so that our neighbourhood may discover the joy, the freedoms,
the wonder of accompanying the re-creator of life. In the name of Jesus the party-goer,

AMEN.