The First United Methodist Church of Napa, CA

January 14, 2007

Human Relations Day and the 2^nd Sunday after the Epiphany

Scripture Readings:

Epistle Lesson – 1 Corinthians 12: 1-11¹

¹Now concerning spiritual gifts, brothers and sisters, I do not want you to be uninformed. ²You know that when you were pagans, you were enticed and led astray to idols that could not speak. ³Therefore I want you to understand that no one speaking by the Spirit of God ever says “Let Jesus be cursed!” and no one can say “Jesus is Lord” except by the Holy Spirit.

⁴Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; ⁵and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; ⁶and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. ⁷To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. ⁸To one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, ⁹to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, ¹⁰to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the discernment of spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. ¹¹All these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses.

Gospel Lesson – John 2: 1-11²

¹On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. ²Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. ³When the wine gave out, the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine.” ⁴And Jesus said to her, “Woman, what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come.” ⁵His mother said to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.” ⁶Now standing there were six stone water jars for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons. ⁷Jesus said to them, “Fill the jars with water.” And they filled them up to the brim. ⁸He said to them, “Now draw some out, and take it to the chief steward.” So they took it. ⁹When the steward 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 steward called the bridegroom ¹⁰and said to him, “Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the good wine until now.” ¹¹Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.

“The Emptiness Inside Holds Whatever We Want It to Hold.”

There’s a story that involved that great ninth-century Zen Master, Huang-po. Supposedly, he was traveling with another monk as the two of them came to a river. Without breaking stride, the one monk walked across the surface of the water to the other side, then turned and beckoned to Huang-po to do the same. Huang-po was to have reported saying, “If I’d known he was that kind of a guy, I’d have broken his legs before we reached the water’s edge.”³

If we persist in understanding miracles as “magic,” and don’t understand the reason that they’re being told, we’ll not only have completely missed the point, we’ll have had our whole sense of the nature of reality manipulated. We could find ourselves brainwashed – or, worse: programmed into following whatever charismatic leader that comes along who may be performing such “magic.⁴” To follow on such a path as that would not make us good disciples of the one who is “the way, the truth, and the life.”⁵ For me at least, then, some other understanding of today’s gospel lesson is needed – if I don’t want Jesus to be “that kind of a guy.”

If we’re to understand this “sign” from John’s Gospel, then, we need to look into it more deeply. Can we get beyond the “magic” of the event so that it can teach us something about what Jesus came to reveal? A sign is never meant to be important in itself, it’s what it’s pointing toward that we need to see.

John’s story is really about spiritual transformation, and Jesus is the agent of that transformation. So I wonder about what the stone jars might signify. Biblical archeology indicates that some were capable of holding as much as thirty gallons of liquid, and there are six of them here. That’s a whole lot of wine! I wonder how many people were at this party. Do you suppose they’d already drunk an amount equal to what was now offered as a result of Jesus’ “miracle?” One thing I can believe about Jesus: he wanted the party to go on! I take it that Jesus would affirm the message of Deuteronomy 30: 19 which essentially says that every single day we have a choice between life and death, blessings and curses. We’re told to choose life so that we, and everyone who comes after us, may experience it as well.⁶ It’s what John’s community came to believe about this Jesus as they understood him to say, “I came that [you] may have life, and have it abundantly.”⁷ Where in the world do you suppose we’ve screwed up on that one?

Mary’s delightful words to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you,” remind me of a conversation that I had with my three-year-old granddaughter, Samantha. As I sat on the floor with her, playing dominoes, she noticed an ugly bruise on my arm. She looked very sympathetic, even kissed the bruise and then asked me, in complete innocence, “Did you show this to Daddy? He can make it better.” It was delightful. It’s like she still hadn’t a clue that her daddy is also my son, and that I’d “kissed” his hurts away in much the same way many, many years ago. I was also deeply touched by Samantha’s confidence in her father’s desire and ability to make any hurt better – and sometimes even go away.

There’s a need here – “We’re out of wine!” – and a mother turns in simple confidence to her son as somebody she’s learned from experience who could and would make it better. Her trust never falters, even in the face of her son’s apparent indifference toward her. In John’s Greek it literally reads, “Woman, what to me and to you?” The original in Aramaic would be the same. Our translation has it read, “What concern is that to you and to me?” Another translation might be, “How does this concern of yours involve me?” And yet it also could mean, “What is it that works together between me and you?” I kind of like that one, because in that we find the true key to community life – whether it’s between a mother and her son, between two neighbors, two hundred, or two thousand. Community begins with the asking of just this question and the recognition that it implies: “What is it that works together for the benefit of us both?”

The usual way that we move through the world – walk down the street, drive our car, enter a crowded room – is to take just a slightly hostile, even belligerent, attitude expressed in a phrase like, “What’s your problem got to do with me?” But if we were to let that question rise up into our conscious awareness and really begin to think about it, we might just come to realize that what works together for us both, could work in our relationships with others, too. Isn’t this what we’ve discovered in life-long friendships, with creative business associates, even in love? Isn’t this, finally, what it must mean to be fully human?

The Reverend William Sloane Coffin said in a sermon from New York City’s Riverside Church many, many years ago, “Jesus changed water into wine; and ever since then we in the Church have gotten very good at changing the wine back into water.” With all of its allusions to the messianic banquet and the marriage feast that has no end, the theological point of this little story is that Jesus is doing a new thing – transforming something very common and very old into something extraordinary and something very new.

We can change, you know. And to go through a spiritual transformation is to be truly reborn. The boundaries of our personalities might seem unchanged, and the remains of a “crushed grape” residue of unfinished business might still be there, but the depths of our old former selves aren’t there anymore, and we have a completely new awareness about life. It’s like when the people from his own hometown first experienced Jesus and said, “Where did this man get all this? … Isn’t this the carpenter, the son of Mary? We know all of his brothers and sisters!” And they were offended.⁸ The sign of transformation, though, was for them all.

Today’s gospel message is simply that Jesus brings something new into our lives. It happens to all of us. Most of the time our lives have become victims of routine. To cope with all of the pressures on us we find ways to filter out a lot that comes our way. We can become desensitized, stubborn, even boring – like water in stone jars. Jesus brings us a new way of seeing and interacting with the world. If we will listen to him, watch him, and then follow him, he can take the water in our stone jars and turn it into the best wine in the Napa Valley. He can transform our lives, making the ordinary extraordinary. The Chinese philosopher, Lao-tse has put the challenge to us this way: “We shape the clay pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want.”

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