sermon-jan-17-2010-mp3 (To hear an audio version of the sermon click onto this link.)

 

 

Several years ago, my father presented my brother and sisters and me with a very special Christmas present. He had gathered up forty years of photographs and old home movie clips, and put them together on a video cassette – a sort of travel log of the MacColl family with voice-over narration.  The high point of the twenty minute film for me was a segment recording my brother’s wedding in 1972. What made that event so special were the simple and ordinary things like the funny expressions on my sister’s face as she walked down the aisle as one of the bridesmaids. Or the scene of my father dancing with my then- five year old sister. Or the part that shows me mugging for the camera as I’m eating a huge piece of wedding cake.

 

Weddings have a special place in our lives. They have a special place for the church too. Weddings, along with funerals, may be one of the few places today where people acknowledge that the church has some role to play in their lives.

 

Why is this? If we look at our gospel story, John’s account of Jesus changing water into wine at a wedding in Cana, we get an idea. The first thing that we notice is that this is not just a story about changing water into wine. According to John, this is supposed to be Jesus’ first public miracle. Why would so much be made out of such an ordinary event? No one is sick; no one is dying; there is no critical need here.  And why does Jesus transform so much water into so much wine – enough wine for the entire village to drink in a year of weddings?

 

Clearly, there is more going on here than meets the eye. I think what is going on is that Jesus’ first miracle is a statement about the new life which Jesus has introduced. We call this the Kingdom of God. Jesus is demonstrating that, in the Kingdom of God, God is continually present in the ordinary tangible, visible things in life, like a wedding celebration.  Last Sunday we saw how, at Jesus’ baptism, the Holy Spirit descended on Jesus in bodily form, as a dove. Throughout the Bible and throughout history God comes to us in this way – in bodily form. And much of the time the Holy Spirit comes looking nothing at all like God or Christ, or the Spirit.

 

One of my favorite preachers, John Vannorsdall, puts it this way. “The form of God becomes stained glass windows portraying androgynous saints in long robes and the memorial names of our forbearers. The Spirit takes the sound of a bell, the reeds, the trumpets of the organ. God comes in the smell of a church shut up for a week, the sight of long robes, in the hope that the choir will be able to complete the anthem. The form is hard candy dropped on the bare floor on a Christmas Eve. God comes as scripture read and preached with all its grace and thunder. Almighty God, and the Son of God, manifest in the sights and sounds of a congregation at prayer and at play. This is the dove we see, the vine into which we are grafted. In such ordinary things God comes to claim and to shape our lives.”

 

In our gospel, John seems to be emphasizing the presence of God in ordinary events when the identity of the person who is responsible for saving the day at the wedding banquet and producing this vast quantity of fine wine – Jesus – is kept secret. The wine steward compliments the bridegroom when he says, “everyone serves the good wine first. But you have kept the good wine until now.” It seems that only Jesus’ disciples who were at the wedding understood that he was the one responsible for the miracle of changing the water into wine.

 

What does this mean? It means that, despite that fact that Jesus goes around the countryside performing powerful miracles of healing and transformation, the majority of people don’t understand who he is or what he’s about. They don’t understand because, for many of these people, the miracles don’t bring about faith in Jesus. They don’t bring about a powerful desire for people to want to get to know him and associate with him. They’re just amazing acts of power.  But it is only the people who move beyond the miracle to a faith and trust in Jesus, who really understand what the miracle is about.

 

The wedding going on in this gospel story is not just the marriage of a bride and groom. It’s the “wedding” of Jesus and his disciples. It’s the creation of a community of faith, a community of people who are committed to trusting that Jesus’ life and love is the only true way to live. It’s a community of people who have begun to taste the “new wine” of life lived out in faith. But if we think about this “new wine” experience that takes place in a community of faithful people, what would be the signs that we, here at Good Shepherd, had taken this story to heart and had trusted in the promise of new life that we experience through our relationship with Christ?

 

I think there are two signs. In our gospel, Jesus comes into a situation where the wine has run out and the wedding party is in danger of closing down. And he turns the whole thing around. How many times in our lives have we faced such a situation – where we have said to ourselves or to others, “the wine has run out?” In difficult relationships with colleagues at work? In our marriages when things got rough? In our families, when we have tried to confront our siblings or parents with behavior that we perceive is unhealthy or unhelpful? In church communities, where there never seems to be enough money or leadership to do what we feel God is calling us to do?

 

The problem is that, when this happens, we tend to get anxious, frustrated and fearful. We also tend to look for someone to come in and rescue us – some expert, some new program, some financial windfall.  But when we do this we forget that God has already given us everything we need to face our fears. God has given us the gift of faith in the power of Jesus Christ to change water into wine, to change death into life, to bring the new out of the old.  God has given us the Holy Spirit in baptism to empower us and to strengthen us. God has given us all the leaders we need…..all the ideas we need….all the money we need. The question is can we trust the gift? Because if we aren’t people of faith than we will eventually run out of energy, run out of love and run out of everything.

 

The second sign of what it means to be a community of faith is to realize that this gift of faith has a cost attached to it.  Speaking of wine at weddings, have you ever tasted a really fine wine?  I once had this opportunity. A priest friend in Chicago was a bit of a wine connoisseur. He received as a gift from a wealthy psychiatrist, a case of what many people believe was the finest vintage of red wine of the last century – Chateau Lafitte Rothschild ’64. One night my friend decided to open the case and share his bounty with a group of dinner guests. Once I tasted the wine, I realized I was experiencing something I would never forget. But, after drinking a glass of the wine I began to wonder how my friend could be so generous as to share something so wonderful with me and his guests.

 

This is true of anything really sublime and precious isn’t it? When we experience something so special we begin to wonder if we are worthy enough to receive it. We ask ourselves, “what have I done to deserve to sample one of the greatest vintages of all time? We could ask the same question about our life as part of a Christian community. What have any of us done to deserve being part of this life of faith and trust – a  life of living in communion with Jesus Christ, the one whose love redeems and saves us; the one who offers us the “new wine” of love and fellowship in him that can never be replaced or improved on? Like anything really sublime, we can’t ultimately do anything to deserve it; it’s given to us as a gift. But, there is a cost isn’t there? The cost is that our lives are so changed and transformed by that gift that we feel compelled to share the gift with others.

 

One of the great challenges that we face right now – not only here at Good Shepherd, but throughout mainline American Christianity, is that church life has become dominated by our consumer culture. Rather than coming to a Christian community to receive the gift of faith and it’s life-transforming effects, people increasingly are seeking some program, some entertaining worship experience, some attractive fellowship event. Rather than asking what they can do to share this sublime “new wine” with others and gratefully accepting that there is a cost associated with the gift, people want to know what more the Church can do to meet their needs.

 

Before you leave here today, look around you and take a deep drink of the “new wine” that is poured out on each of us each time we step through the front door.  I don’t mean the communion wine. I mean the “new wine” of the new life given to us in Jesus Christ.  It’s not just in the chalice on the altar….it’s all around us. It’s in the everyday, ordinary things and events where God’s grace and love is poured out on those who have faith to taste it.  Amen