From the Ordinary to the Extraordinary

John 2:1-11
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 called to the wedding. The wine supply waned and the mother of Jesus said to him, "They have no wine."
Jesus said to her, "What is that to me and you, woman? My hour has not yet come."
His mother said to the servants, "Whatever he tells you to do, do it."
Now there were stone jars of water standing there for the Jewish rite of purification, each holding two or three measures. Jesus said to them, "Fill the jars with water." They filled them up to capacity. He said to them, "Now draw some out and take it to the master of the feast." So they took it.
When the master of the feast 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 master of the feast called out to the groom and said to him, "Everybody lays out the good wine first and when the crowd becomes drunk pulls out the lesser wine. But you have held back the good wine until now!"
This, the first of the signs, Jesus did in Cana of Galilee and revealed his glory. So his disciples believed in him.

So there was this wedding. Not such an unusual event in the grand scheme of things. People are getting married all the time. In our day we talk about love and the attraction between two people as the cause of it. In Jesus' day there were other factors – family bonds, economic realities, arranged marriages – but marriages were still a natural part of life. So it's not so surprising that we should find Jesus and Mary and the disciples at a wedding. Which is where they were – at a wedding in Cana of Galilee.

Mary was the main invitee, but Jesus and his disciples had gotten the call, too. It would have been a grand affair, lasting several days. Families would go all out to provide a major feast. There would be music and dancing and wine. That's where the problem arose. The wine ran out.

Mary is the first to be aware of the problem and she goes to her son, Jesus, and says, “They have no wine.” She doesn't ask him to do anything about it, but there must have something in her tone of voice...something Jesus recognized. Both of them knew that Jesus had an extraordinary mission, that he was no ordinary person, that he would eventually be revealed as the one John the Baptist knew as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. So for this extraordinary person to do something miraculous to keep an ordinary wedding feast going? That seems very doable.

But Jesus resists what his mother implies. “Woman,” he says, (which sounds harsh to our ears, but it was probably a term of affection. Remember that John reports that when Jesus was dying on the cross he looked at his mother and the disciple that he loved and he said to her, “Woman, behold your son.” It was a sign then of his continuing care for her.) “Woman,” he says, “What is it to you and me if the wine has run out. My hour has not yet come.”

My hour has not yet come. Jesus will talk a lot about his hour coming. When the cross is looming before him, when he washes the disciples’ feet, when it all comes to a head in Jerusalem – then he will say, the hour has come. Now, at a wedding in a backwater Galilean town, the time is not right.

Here Mary seems to do a very strange thing. She seems to ignore Jesus completely. She turns to the servants who are standing nearby and says, “Do whatever he says to do.” Is she saying that she knows, better than Jesus, what hour it is? Is she pulling rank on him? I don't think so. I think she is responding to Jesus' concern by taking the attention off of him.

The incarnation is all about God revealing the divine presence in human form. The miraculous thing about the baby in the manger is not that new life comes into the world but that a particular new life comes into the world. The god who made the cosmos submits to being found among the creatures God has made. The god who formed a people from slavery and made them a nation and took their name, the God of Israel, had now been born as one of them.

The story of the gospels, the story of Jesus, is all about how that revelation takes place. Jesus has come to be revealed in glory. Jesus has come to show us that God walks among us. Jesus has come so that, as he tells Nicodemus only one chapter later in John's gospel, whosoever believes in him may have life everlasting. But the revelations come quietly. Nicodemus comes under the cover of darkness to see Jesus. A chapter later, Jesus is revealing his true nature to a woman by a well in a foreign land. Here, in this story, no one at the party knows what Jesus is doing except a select few. For most of them, the only thing they know is that the party is going on and that the wine is very good.

Of course, the wine is very good. What Jesus tells the servants to do is to fill up six huge water jars that were used for the Jewish rites of purification. Those rites were on the minds of those who went to the river Jordan to see John the Baptist. It was baptismal water, in a sense, that Jesus was using to do this miraculous thing.

Jesus says to the servants, “Take some water out and take it to the steward of the party.” They do this and the steward of the party is amazed. He goes to the bridegroom and says, “Dude,”...(it's in the NRSV, I believe)...”Dude, everybody else serves the best wine first and then, when people get drunk, they pull out the bad stuff. You got it the wrong way around! This is great wine!”

He's confused, you see. He thinks the bridegroom has pulled off this unusual feat of great wine. We don't know how the bridegroom responds but he probably thinks the steward has been partaking a little too freely himself. The only ones who know that a miracle has occurred are the servants, the disciples and Jesus' mother. As the next verse says, it is a sign. The first of Jesus' signs that reveal his glory. It is not a full revelation. It's not known in its completeness yet. But it’s coming. Soon everyone will know that wherever there is fullness, goodness, and life, Christ is there.

So what is this story about? What does it mean for us? It would be easy to think that this is a story about the wine. After all, it is the wine that is the miracle here, right? But the wine is only important if we're hung up on wine to begin with. And we are.

We live in an alcohol-confused culture and alcohol has the power to fascinate us more than Jesus. We’d like to get a message here to either justify our view of alcohol or to challenge it. You know how deeply we are impacted by alcohol. Our media and culture celebrate alcohol abuse. On college campuses it’s a major issue, even at a place like UVA where I served, alcohol haunts every gathering. Binge drinking there and here puts people in the hospital every weekend. Alcohol abuse contributes to car accidents, violence and rape. Many if not most of us have faced the effects of alcoholism in our own families and perhaps in our own lives. You know we need some guidance here.

It’s because of the dangers of alcohol abuse that Methodists historically have advocated temperance or abstinence. Temperanceville gets its name, according to Kirk Mariner, from folks who established the town in the middle of the temperance movement pledging never to sell whiskey there. Seems to me things might have changed up there. It was easy for Methodists to get blinded by their anti-alcohol stance, too, and not be able to see Jesus for the booze, but they were erring on the right side. They knew how dangerous it was.

But this passage is not an object lesson for us on whether or not we ought to have a drink at a wedding. This passage takes it as a given, in the days when water was a more dangerous drink, that people would be drinking wine. It’s not a question.

What the passage is meant to be pointing us towards is Jesus. It’s meant to be telling us about the most important capacity that Jesus has – his ability to take the ordinary stuff of this world and to turn it into something extraordinary. It’s meant to be reminding us that the world is still a miraculous place and it is so because God is still present in it turning water into wine.

Now you think that sounds like an unusual occurrence – water turning into wine – but I tell you that I don’t think it’s that unusual at all. I think most of us have had the experience of something transforming before our eyes. I remember a night camping with Suzanne by the Rio Grande. When we went into our tent the land around our tent was dry, dusty desert with a few tall cottonwood trees lining the river, which, for being a river called the Great River, really didn’t look like much more than a muddy stream. The campsite was not much to look at but in the middle of the night a sandstorm kicked up and at one point I poked my head out of the tent and looked up to see a river of sand rushing over my head. It was like nothing I’d ever seen before or since. Talk about transformation!

Or perhaps you’ve had the experience of coming to church on a Sunday morning, recognizing the same familiar faces, sitting in the same familiar pew. It’s just the way it’s always been but then somehow its not. Maybe it’s a Bible passage you’ve never heard, I mean really heard, before. Maybe it’s a song from the choir. Maybe it’s the way the light strikes the communion table. Maybe it’s a word the preacher says (it can happen!). But suddenly it’s not just any other Sunday and it’s not the same familiar place. And you find yourself moved to the altar rail or moved to tears. Talk about transformation!

Or maybe it’s a baby. They’re born every day. Go up to the 2nd floor of Shore Memorial and you’ll see the newborns and their moms. But when it’s your child or your grandchild and you take that infant and he seizes the initiative from you. She takes you with her uncomprehending eyes. That’s not just a baby you’re holding. Talk about transformation!

No, I think water is changing into wine every day. I don’t think we human beings have lost our capacity to see that the world is a miraculous place. I don’t think we are unable to behold transformation. I think we hunger for it and long for it. I think those moments happen far less often than we want them to. But I don’t think we’re beyond wonder.

What I think we have lost is the language to talk about it with. There are lots of people out there who are more than ready to admit that there is something miraculous, something mind-blowing, something transcendent about the world, but they are not sure what name to give to this experience. Standing in front of a redwood tree or on the Atlantic shore of Cobb Island most of us will admit to feeling something; but what it is it?

Science gropes its way toward new language to explain the wonder of the cosmos, and we learn so, so much as it does, but it will never be able to access the question of purpose – of why. Most Americans will admit to feeling a strong pull toward spirituality but they resist putting any more labels than that on it. Or we invent our own new labels to fit the things we value. Some of us even believe that the whole of our earthly lives is some experiment begun by an alien race -- Somewhat like the worlds created by Slarty Bartfast in Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe. (Now that’s a book that will make you think.)

But what is it that gives a name to this feeling within us? What is it that tells us who we are in the universe? Three hundred odd years of secular thinking have not managed to purge us of our sense of the holy, but they have left us absolutely confused. Transcendence is now a lot like Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s definition of obscenity, “I know it when I see it,” but don’t ask me to define it any more than that.

But really we Christians shouldn’t be settling for that should we? We know what lies behind the feelings we get in the face of awe and wonder – it’s the love at the heart of the universe. It’s Jesus. We know what has the power to lift us from our sin and to set us on a new course – it’s Jesus. We know what to call that undeserved, surprising, overwhelming love that is there at our birth, that waits for us to respond, that moves us to respond and the propels us into eternal life – it is grace, God’s prevenient grace that we know in Jesus.

But somehow that’s not what seekers and those who are looking for God hear when we talk about Jesus. I’ve been doing some reading this week about the emerging church, partly for this Wednesday night course that we’re doing and partly because it is a fascinating new Christian movement. The emerging church is not a theology – it is a new way of being church that emphasizes belonging before believing. It is Christ-centered, no doubt, but it is welcoming people to join new communities where Christ can be approached through many different forms – through music and art and meditation and silence and community service. One group in Pittsburgh even has a Bible Fight Club on Friday nights where the goal is not a literal fight, but total involvement – everyone who comes must participate and it ends with every one sharing one thing that someone else said that made them think.

But another thing that I’m finding out about this movement is that it uses technology in some very creative ways. There are hundreds and hundreds of blogs out there, which are kind of like online public diaries, some by Christians and others by seekers, all asking what it is about this ancient language of the church and claims about Jesus that make sense. One blog I read this week, called Black Pheobe, challenged Christians to speak to this new age. “Please note,” the writer, who is a young woman, said, “please note, Christians, that Modernism and Post-Modernism are over. We are now in the Digital Age. Please develop a new quack theology to drool over, or, even better, just go back to your First Love and focus on Jesus. P.s. In the meantime, Faith, Hope, Love, and a whole lotta humor.”[i]

I hear in this something that comes through from so many young people. “We want to believe in something redemptive, something that will lift us up out of the dead ends that the world and our lives have come to. We want to hear more about life and less about what divides us. And we suspect that if Christianity has the answer, it’s in Jesus.”

What’s going to change the world? Jesus. And how will the world know that it is being transformed? If people like you and me begin to form communities that look different from the world around us. If we can see a child being baptized with water and recognize that God is claiming that child for a purpose that will go through her life and beyond. If we can help a person find food and clothing and work and comfort and dignity and recognize that Christ has called us to meet him in the poor and that our salvation is tied up in serving these whom the world calls the least. If we can gather around a table where bread is broken and wine is poured and look into one another’s faces and see that Christ is present just as he promised. If we can raise the cross, even in the face of suffering and death, and see in it the way that Christ has overcome the world. If we can look at each new sunrise as the promise of Christ’s coming again. If we can do all these things, brothers and sisters, and share this life with the world around us, then this language that we use every Sunday morning will not be an ordinary thing…but something extraordinary.

There were some folks who left that wedding in Cana never knowing that they had been present at the first of Jesus’ signs. They may have commented to a friend on the quality of the wine, but Jesus’ name never passed their lips. But there were others on that day, some servants and some disciples, who left that wedding with a whole new perspective on life. There was more than wine on their minds. They were beginning to see the transformation of the entire universe and, perhaps as importantly, the transformation of their lives. And behind it all was Jesus.

Where is it happening for you? What’s the ordinary thing that you want to give over to Christ to become something new? What’s the extraordinary thing that Jesus is doing in your life and in this world? Thanks be to God.

[i] “Personally, I am Panmillenialist,” 12/27/2006, Black Pheobe blog, http://www.blackphoebe.com/msjen/archives/fun_stuff/.