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?