Sermon
Epiphany 2
January 20, 2013

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

    Teachers and preachers and priests are often, probably far too often, looked upon and expected to be “answer men” or “answer women.” That is, they might be looked upon to have all the answers to each and every religious, spiritual, theological question; and I must confess that sometimes I lay that expectation on myself, feeling that I should have things figured out. I catch myself reading the text of the lessons for the coming Sunday and looking out for any puzzling parts. feeling a need to zero in of at least one of them and come up with a handy answer to whatever apparent contradiction, whatever challenge to reason or whatever mystifying pronouncement the text might contain.

    Well I am here this morning to come clean. I don’t have all the answers. I am wanderer and a wonderer just like you. I am a pilgrim on a journey along a way that raises far more questions than it answers and beckons us forward into an unknown that must be explored before it can be – if indeed it ever can be – understood. A journey that only covers the ground that has already been covered is not a journey, but a nostalgic indulgence. Memory and the revisiting old haunts can be useful, but only if, as T. S. Eliot put its:

    We shall not cease from exploration
    And the end of all our exploring
    Will be to arrive where we started
    And know the place for the first time.

    By which I mean that if revisiting old haunts and ways is to carry meaning, it must be with new eyes, expecting new revelations, expecting to deepen what was once experienced or learned.

    All that is to say two things: First, that you and I are on a journey together, and any journey worthy of Jesus its pioneer, will take us to places we have never been before and the ways of thinking and doing that are new and, at first, strange and challenging. And second: that in wrestling once again with this familiar story about Jesus’s first miracle of changing water in to wine I come away with as many questions as I have answers and with as much – or more –  wonder than I had before.

The best we can do on this occasion may be to enter into the story with our questions and see where our wonder and puzzlement this time lead us. Once again it is time to allow ourselves to be guests – guests of the Gospel, ready to feast upon the Word of God; and guests at a special moment in an obscure village in and obscure part of the Roman Empire of which, like it or not, we, as must imagine ourselves to be if we are to enter with our imaginations into the story.

    As preacher William Hethcock puts it:

“So all of us villagers show up.  Mary, the widow of Joseph, has come.  And  out of courtesy to her, they "also" invite her son Jesus, who is newly engaged in some kind of itinerant rabbinical teaching thing that requires his students to be invited as well.  Jesus' disciples make a scruffy bunch, and at the rate they consume wine, there may not be enough.  In fact, I see the waiters murmuring something to the host.  My prediction is truer than I had thought.  They are indeed out of wine.  We'll all be home sooner and soberer than we expected or hoped." [From author’s personal copy of a sermon submitted to Homily Service.  Never preached.  Serving the Word, Epiphany 2C, John 2:1-11]

Or so it appeared; but not so. It isn’t going to turn out that way. Jesus will take the water in six enormous water jars, each of them probably holding thirty or so gallons, and turn it into excellent wine. You do the math – and get ready to pass the aspirin the morning after.

But there is something else happens just before the transmutation of the wine:

When the wine gave out, the mother of Jesus said to him, "They have no wine." And Jesus said to her, "Woman, what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come." His mother said to the servants, "Do whatever he tells you."







Do whatever he tells you.

It is Mary who sets things in motion. It is she who perceives the shortage and appeals to Jesus. And Jesus at first appears to be reluctant to go along.

Pastor Carol Hess, who has written about this particular moment early in Jesus’s public career and I agree: there are some problems here. “Just as the mother of Jesus saw her son as one who could – and should – meet need, so do many followers of Jesus. We see a world in need, and we believe in one who claimed to bring abundant life to those in need. In a world where for so many there no clean water – let alone fine wine – where is the abundance of God? In a world where children play in bomb craters the size of thirty gallon wine jugs, why the divine reluctance? In a world where desperate mothers must say to their small children, “We have no food,” why has the hour not yet come? No matter how we rationalize divine activity, we want to tug at Jesus’ sleeve and say: “they have no wine.”[Carol Lakey Hess, Feasting on the Word, Year C, Volume 4, Westminster John Knox Press, 2009. p 262.]
 
I cannot unriddle that riddle. I cannot explain the ways of God in such a way that all is made plain and God’s generous, gracious abundance is reconciled with a world of deprivation and suffering. But, as W. H. Auden has said about similar questions of how it all fits together:

    I can at least confine
    Your vanity and mine
    To stating timidly. . . [W. H. Auden, “Law like love,” lines 51-53]

 . . . that there is an important clue in what happens in the face of Jesus’s apparent reluctance to help out. Mary issues a very clear command. “Do whatever he tells you.” And those to whom she speaks, do as they have been told.

    It doesn’t answer all the questions this text raises; and it certainly doesn’t even begin to make all streams and wells run clean and clear; it doesn’t begin to stop all the bombs or put food on all the empty tables, but it does provide simple clear instructions for you and me.

Do whatever he tells you. Apart from all the theologizing and interpreting and questioning and doubting there is something we can do that will at least make a start. We can do whatever Jesus tells us to do. Whether or not there should be popes and prelates and archbishops and priests; whether or not there should be creeds and canons, there is that clear opportunity for us to purify at least some of the water in the world, pray and work for the peace that will stop all the bombs, work for the just distribution of the world’s resources. In short we can do what Jesus tells us: ‘“. . . you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength." And "You shall love your neighbor as yourself."’

    How much wine might flow, how much laughter might there be, how much justice and mercy might flow down like a might river if we and all who claim Jesus as our Lord would do this which he has clearly told us to do?

There was a synchronicity about this sermonizing. Our Adult Forum had scheduled a viewing of Emilio Estavez's movie The Way, which I had never seen. As it happened the movie a cinematic version of some of this sermon's themes, particularly the notion of "the journey." The 8:00 congregation heard this sermon; but at 10:00, our young people presented a fun and lovely enactment of the arrival of the magi. I'm posting this here so the 10:00'ers, should they want to, can read what the earlier congregation heard. I also hope the twenty+ people who saw the movie together will have a look as well. Much better than the sermon, however, is the movie. It is beautiful in every way. (Near the end, there is the dramatic, to say the least, swinging of an incense pot, and as a part of the kings' arrival, incense made a RARE appearance at Trinity -- another lovely synchronicity.) As for the sermon, it was big fun for me to get to read aloud bits from two most favorite poems.

Happy Epiphany Season!

Sermon: The Epiphany

January 6, 2013

Trinity Parish

    In his very long Christmas poem For the Time Being: A Christmas Oratorio, W. H. Auden ends with a section that includes these words:

    Well, so that is that. Now we must dismantle the tree,
    Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes --
    Some have got broken -- and carrying them up to the attic.
    The holly and the mistletoe must be taken down and burnt,
    And the children got ready for school. There are enough
    Left-overs to do, warmed-up, for the rest of the week --
    Not that we have much appetite, having drunk such a lot,
    Stayed up so late, attempted -- quite unsuccessfully --
    To love all of our relatives, and in general
    Grossly overestimated our powers.

    After all the glow and glisten of Christmas, Auden astutely observes that despite our having once again drawn near to the stable in Bethlehem, it is entirely possible that nothing has changed. And it is sadly true, it is indeed possible.
    That is why, I think, that after 12 days of Christmas, we celebrate the arrival of the magi, the wise men, the three kings (even in the Gospel doesn’t exactly call them kings or say if there were two, three or twenty!) The Church intends to help us celebrate Christmas as something much more than annual ritual, more civic and social than religious. The Church draws us into the season of Epiphany, the season after Christmas that offers to show us not just what happened, but what it means. For the next few weeks we will see the baby born in a manger now grown up and setting out on his mission to bring about the reign of God on earth. “Thy kingdom come on earth,” says the prayer; and I think he meant it. I think he still means it.
    What does it mean that the first major event to which our attention is directed is the arrival of these foreigners from lands far a way and strange to Jesus’s people? What does it mean for us?
    I am struck by the willingness of these magi, these astrologers, to travel so far to see something they can only have hoped might be true. They had read the signs, they had heard the accounts of others, and they set out on long, long journey. T. S. Eliot in poem The Journey of the Magi says:

    A cold coming we had of it,
    Just the worst time of the year
    For a journey, and such a long journey:
    The ways deep and the weather sharp,
    The very dead of winter.'
    And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
    Lying down in the melting snow.
    There were times we regretted
    The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
    And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
    Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
    And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
    And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
    And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
    And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
    A hard time we had of it.

    But they came – surly camels, winter weather and all.
    And there is a model for each of us. The life of a Christian is a life of journey – journey toward Bethlehem, journey toward Jerusalem, journey toward an empty tomb on Easter morning and an upper room full of the wind and rush and fire of the Holy Spirit of the Living God.
    Of course I am not talking about literal pilgrimages to those exotic places; I am talking about the inner journey, the journey of self-discovery, of discovering one’s neighbors, and the discovery of God’s own self within those two; and while that inner journey includes the exaltation of arriving at the manger and the empty tomb, it also includes the abject desolation of the cross and the tomb. This is about your life and mine, our relationship with God through Jesus is a journey. There is, if we will allow it to be so, consolation, support, encouragement and many other good things that all of us need along the way. There are those things to be found in Christian communities. I wish more of us turned to the church for them; but there is also challenge, and there is a call to repent, that is, a call to be willing continually to change more and more into the persons God made us to be. None of us is there yet. You’ve heard me before many times sum all this up by saying, “There are many resting places along the spiritual journey, but there are no stopping places.”
    The Epiphany, this arrival of weary travelers, is a model for us. I picture them arriving with an entire entourage, tent setter-uppers, porters, cooks and camel drivers. Your entourage for the spiritual journey is here, it is the people here who are on the spiritual path along with you.
    The second thing we learn about the meaning of this birth of a child in a manger is that he is a child for the whole world. That means he is not the property of the Church any more than he was the property of Mary and Joseph. Their job was to make him known to the world; indeed, in the case of Mary, to be the means by which he entered into the world. That is why she is a model for us all. She is the God-bearer, and we are likewise called to be the ones who continue to bear him into the world around us. Jesus does not belong to Mary and Joseph, but one can surely picture them as countless artists have already done: standing aside, presenting him, looking with wonder and love as who he is offered to the whole world – even to strange and mysterious astrologers who knew little or nothing of the beliefs, practices and customs of this child’s particular people. Just like Mary and Joseph, our job is to open the door so that the world can come and see.
    We are on a journey. We are on a journey together; and insofar as we have to some degree arrived – or at least gone on ahead – our job is to clear the way, make the path open and available to all who are seeking to know the Truth, the truth about the love of God for all creation.
    This child will go up to be the Way, Truth and Life – or as King Alfred of England has said, ““To see Thee is the end and the beginning; Thou carriest me and thou goest    before: Thou art the journey and the journey’s end.”