Drawing From the Source

John 2:1-11, Psalm 36:5-10

Sunday, January 14, 2007

The Rev. Ann R. Palmerton

Second Sunday in Ordinary Time

        Today’s gospel lesson tells the story of Jesus turning water into wine at a wedding celebration.  Vividly, Jesus enacts what God offers to each and every one of us; an abundant Source of Life beyond our expectations.  Jesus’ miracle reveals his hidden glory and points to God as the Source for our lives.

As you might imagine, Jesus’ miracle of turning water into wine has produced a number of minister jokes.  So I have one to share.  It doesn’t exactly take us in the direction of the sermon, but it is just too good to pass up!  A minister is pulled over by a state trooper for doing 90 in a 65 mile an hour stretch on the freeway.  The trooper smells alcohol on the minister’s breath and sees an empty wine bottle on the floor.  The trooper asks, “Have you been drinking?”  The minister replies, “Just water.”  To which the trooper says, “Then why do I smell wine?”  The minister looks down at the bottle, looks surprised, and says, “Good Lord, he’s done it again!”  (A Time to Laugh: The Religion of Humor, Donald Capps, p.183.)

Even beyond minister jokes, the story about Jesus turning water into wine at the wedding in Cana is loaded with Middle Eastern style humor.  For instance, notice how much hyperbole is in the sheer amount of wine that the miracle produces.  Scripture says six large stone jars are filled with water to the brim with twenty or thirty gallons each.  Do the math; 120-180 gallons of water become vintage wine.  Some commentators estimate 600 to 900 bottles.  What an astonishing, outrageous amount for any wedding; doubly so for a wedding that is already half over in a rural, impoverished peasant community.  The gospel’s extravagance invites us to think this is enough wine for a whole city … for a whole world.  

And then there’s the edgy humor in Jesus’ interaction with his mother. She tells him there is no wine left.  He responds, “Woman, what concern is that to you and to me?  My hour has not yet come” (John 2:4).  I think of my own life and our 15 year old son.  If I asked Martin to shovel the walk and he said, “Woman, what concern is that to you and to me?  My hour has not yet come,” I might respond, “Your hour is closer than you think!”

The relationship between mothers and sons can be so wonderful!  In our story, though, Jesus puts distance between himself and his mother as if to remind her, remind us all, that the events of his life are in divine hands.  Not even his mother has a privileged claim on him.  His hour has not yet come.  The time for the full disclosure of his glory through death and resurrection has not come yet.  That said Jesus ends up addressing the problem.  The party has dried up.  The guests need a new source for wine.  His mother knows the power of the Son.  She trusts in his ability to act.  She tells the servants, “Do whatever he tells you” (John 2:5). 

Jesus tells the servants to fill the jars with water.   They carry 180 gallons of water from the well to the jars.  When the jars are filled to the brim, nearly overflowing, Jesus tells them to “draw some out;” which literally means, draw some out of the well.  They go back to the well itself and draw some out.  The steward identifies the liquid as fine wine.  The contents of the whole well have been changed.  The hundreds of gallons in the jars and the well itself have been transformed.

Wine can now flow freely at the wedding at Cana.  The sudden appearance of such high quality wine perplexes the steward.  He summons the bridegroom.  The good wine must be due to his unprecedented hospitality.  The steward tries to reshape the miracle to fit his categories for seeing.  By way of contrast, the disciples taste the miraculous abundance of fine wine and see a sign of God’s presence with them.  Jesus is the one who brings God to them.  They allow their categories for the way things are to be reshaped by this experience of new wine and they believe in Jesus as the revealer of God.

This story of the wedding at Cana is the first of seven “signs” in John’s gospel.  It functions powerfully as fulfillment of the Old Testament understanding that an abundance of good wine heralds the joyous arrival of God’s new age.  The prophet Amos writes,

…the mountains shall drip sweet wine, and all the hills shall flow with it.  I will restore the fortunes of my people Israel, and they shall rebuild the ruined cities and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and drink their wine… (Amos 9:13-14).

How appropriate that Jesus’ first sign symbolically fulfills long held hopes, and points to God’s promised salvation in a man from Nazareth.

Later in the gospel Jesus’ last and final “sign” occurs when he raises his friend Lazarus from death, foreshadowing Jesus’ own death and resurrection.  The gospel says,

Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book.  But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name (John 20:30). 

Signs connect us with the Source of our spiritual lives and invite us to receive the extraordinary gifts God offers.

Here at Broad Street, we may have seen a glimpse of a modern day wedding at Cana.  I’m not talking about hundreds of gallons of wine in our kitchen downstairs!  I’m talking about our stewardship campaign, which seems nothing short of miraculous. 

This fall we heard about the church’s deep financial need.  Our Session came to understand the problem as more than a lack of cash, but as an issue of personal stewardship.  We were challenged to examine that area of our lives, to look again at what we have been given, and at what God is calling us to give back in faith.  Our Session led us in this effort, and we pledged at significantly higher levels than ever before. Could it be that what happened here is a modern day drawing from the Source?  It is as if together we poured water into jars, lots and lots of water, and when we reached in to draw out a taste, the water had turned into wine.  Many pledges have come together to make this fine new wine - the balanced budget that Session approved just last week for our church.  Scripture says the disciples believed in Jesus after experiencing the sign at Cana.  May it be that our experience with stewardship this fall has strengthened our faith as well.

Tomorrow marks the day when we honor the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, who himself drew time and time again from the Source, from the well of the Christian biblical tradition.  Each year we are moved by recitations from his powerful messages.  His “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” and his “I Have a Dream” speech from 1963 focus our attention and inspire our ongoing dreams for racial equality in America.  It is easy to forget that by 1967 Dr. King’s prophetic vision had widened to include an anti-war stance focused against what he called the “giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism.”

When he preached against the Vietnam War, Dr. King risked denunciation by national media and alienation from his own Southern Christian Leadership Conference.  I commend two of Dr. King’s speeches about the Vietnam War to you, “The Casualties of the War in Vietnam” and “Beyond Vietnam.”  Forty years later they remain powerful and pertinent speeches for our own day.  We must keep dreaming of a world different than the one near at hand, and keep making connections between racism and materialism and militarism. 

We must rely on God, we must draw from the Source, to fuel and sustain these powerful dreams of equality and peace.  The way to the Promised Land involves time wandering in the desert.  Like the Hebrews after the Exodus, we find ourselves walking in circles in arid, dry lands.  The desert world of 2007 is a complicated place.  Cynicism, fear of terrorism and the threat of scarcity run rampant.  Our faith needs fuel as we journey toward the dream.  Dr. King’s strong faith in God and his sense of God’s claim on his life were the results of study, of suffering and of long term nurture in the black church.  Yet even he had profound times of spiritual struggle.

In the book Parting the Waters, author Taylor Branch describes one of Dr. King’s desert moments when he sat alone in his kitchen.  He writes,

King buried his face in his hands at the kitchen table.  He admitted to himself that he was afraid, that he had nothing left, that the people would falter if they looked to him for strength.  Then he said as much out loud.  He spoke the name of no deity, but his doubts spilled out as a prayer, ending, “I’ve come to the point where I can’t face it alone.”  As he spoke these words, the fears suddenly began to melt away.  He became intensely aware of what he called an “inner voice” telling him to do what he thought was right.  Such simplicity worked miracles, bringing a shudder of relief and the courage to face anything.  It was for King the first transcendent religious experience of his life … For King , the moment awakened and confirmed his belief that the essence of religion was not a grand metaphysical idea but something personal, grounded in experience – something that opened up mysteriously beyond the predicaments of human beings in their frailest and noblest moments.   (Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters, 1988.)

Dr. King later wrote about his commitment to speaking the truth as he knew it.

… during the early days of my ministry, I read the Apostle Paul, saying, “Be ye not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of minds.”  I decided then that I was going to tell the truth as God revealed it to me.  No matter how many people disagreed with me, I decided that I was going to tell the truth. (Martin Luther King, Jr., Autobiography, Chapter 31: Beyond Vietnam).

These days we find ourselves and our country confronted with what Dr. King called the “fierce urgency of now.”  More than ever, we must draw from the Source, we must turn to our Bible’s prophetic tradition so that we, too, can dream, so that we can be open to the intrusion of God into our settled worlds.  Being rooted and grounded in God generates a restless uneasiness with the way things are.  Drawing from the Source enables us to see larger realities and possible futures.  Drawing from the Source may enable us to hear the voice of God, who plants and builds what we cannot even imagine.  There is a Source outside of our controlled management of reality that must be heeded, a Source to be drawn from, a Source that is real and personal, like Jesus turning water into wine.  Amen.

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