January 18, 2004
Isaiah 62:1-5 + 1 Corinthians 12:4-11 + John 2:1-11
Today as always, the Gospel proclaimed reveals something about God, about Christ Jesus, and about us. Since I have been with you, I have been trying to teach you to look into the first reading for clues about how to understand the Gospel text. Doing that again today, we can hardly miss the message that Israel’s God was not content to participate in a relationship based only upon Creator and Creature. There’s was a God who invited creatures to become partners in a covenant. It was a covenant different from all others. It was not political for the sake of peace. It was not a treaty for commerce. It was not even a covenant of friendship. It was to be the covenant of a spouse – the two should become one. This was to be a covenant expressed in the language of love: “I will be yours; you will be mine.” “What is mine is yours, and what is yours will be mine.”
With that background, the details of John’s Wedding Feast Story are not so important. The place, the number of jugs, the guest list, wine quality, or the placement of the text in John’s Gospel is not the primary issue nor the first message we share today. If we were making a movie or painting a picture perhaps those details would be important, but not here and not now. Cana sets the scene for us to imagine God’s great passion for humankind. It tells us about a God who wishes to be with us like a husband with a wife or like a wife for her husband. In as much as Jesus Christ is the flesh and blood revelation of that God, he comes to us as a bridegroom. What we celebrate here is truly a wedding feast, not one from the past, but one for today. The bride and the groom of John’s Gospel have no names,
for this is not about them, it’s about us. This Good News we proclaim this day and every year after the Baptism of the Lord is that God has come to us like a spouse
to be with us and to take us as His own forever.
But this Gospel also reveals something about us. Our wine has run out. We are a people without a future, without hope, without joy until we invite Jesus Christ to be our guest and until we follow the instructions of his mother: “Do whatever he asks you.” For those who will, there will be a feast that lasts forever. For those who will, there will be no future without joy and without abundance. The days in which we live give more than convincing evidence that our wine is out. War, violence, poverty, consumerism, selfishness, infidelity, treating the gift of human life as though it were a disposable mass of tissue, abandoning our elders when they can no longer produce for us or entertain us, un-parented children violent, disrespectful, and helpless, half-empty churches, and the richest nation on earth cutting assistance to the poor and leaving millions without health care while it fires million dollar missals in the desert all says one thing: our wine has run out.
This is not a nice, cozy, romantic story about saving the day at Cana for a nice young couple. This is about a God looking for a partner for life: about a God who wants to reveal his endless mercy and abundant gifts in a most extravagant way. This gospel proclaimed in this place raises the question about who may be God’s partner; who might be able to extend God’s generous gifts by their own generosity and stewardship, who might put into action God’s forgiveness waiting to be given,
God’s mercy, and patience, waiting to be shared? Who will do that and when? Who will enter into this covenant with God and finally treat God’s gift of life for what it is, the first sacrament of God’s presence in this world?
Saying “Yes” to God who proposes a covenant like marriage to us means saying “No” to some other thing and lesser gods. Taking communion in this church is our entry into that covenant. It is no private matter between God and us. We do not step forward because we’re at the end of the pew, we are afraid what others might think, or because we feel good about it. We say “Amen” to this covenant of grace in the most public way possible, and we become one with our God in the most intimate way possible so that God’s presence in this world will be real, as real as we are. Today we know that our wine has run out, and that until Jesus Christ into our lives, we are left with the cheap wine or just jars or water.