Sermon ~ 19 January

John 2:1-11: On the third day a wedding took place at Cana in Galilee. Jesus’ mother was there, and Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. When the wine was gone, Jesus’ mother said to him, ‘They have no more wine.’
‘Woman, why do you involve me?’ Jesus replied. ‘My hour has not yet come.’
His mother said to the servants, ‘Do whatever he tells you.’

Nearby stood six stone water jars, the kind used by the Jews for ceremonial washing, each holding from twenty to thirty gallons. Jesus said to the servants, ‘Fill the jars with water’; so they filled them to the brim. Then he told them, ‘Now draw some out and take it to the master of the banquet.’

They did so, and the master of the banquet tasted the water that had been turned into wine. He did not realize where it had come from, though the servants who had drawn the water knew. Then he called the bridegroom aside and said, ‘Everyone brings out the choice wine first and then the cheaper wine after the guests have had too much to drink; but you have saved the best till now.’

What Jesus did here in Cana of Galilee was the first of the signs through which he revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.

Just in case you missed it, a census of the world population of ants was recently conducted by the University of Hong Kong. Conservatively calculated from population studies throughout the world, they estimated a minimum of 20 quadrillion ants living on the earth today. That’s 2.5 million ants per human being. There are 16,000 different named species of ant, but scientists guess that an equal number of species exists that haven’t been described yet. 

Every ant comes from an egg laid by the queen of the colony, who lays her body weight in eggs every day. A mature queen, protected and fed by her swarm of worker ants, can lay one to two thousand eggs per day, a number that varies according to the species. A queen lives 20 to 30 years–an astounding lifespan considering how tiny she is–scientists don’t know exactly how she can live that long when the average lifespan of a worker ant is about a year. We can conservatively calculate that she’ll lay 365,000 eggs per year, or 7.3 million eggs over her lifespan. Near the end of her life, she switches to laying eggs that will become future queens and the males that will fertilize them–when the weather and the time is right, a swarm of new queens emerges in an outpouring of fecundity. They mate, find a home for their new colony, and begin laying eggs.

Ants live on every continent except Antarctica, where the workers of the colonies act as engineers of the ecosystem. Over their lifetimes they hunt and are hunted, they spread seeds, churn up soil, speed decomposition, among other ecological jobs. According to one scientist, without the contribution of ants most ecosystems in the world would collapse.

I’m sure there were plenty of ants present at the wedding in Cana in Galilee. (How’s that for a good transition?)

Mary tells the servants at the wedding in Cana in Galilee, “Do whatever Jesus tells you.” The servants then comply with Jesus’ strange instruction which seems to have nothing to do with the problem at hand: a catastrophic shortage of wine. They fill 6 giant stone jars with water to the brim–120 to 180 gallons altogether. Jesus tells them to dip out a cup and bring it to the master of the feast. What I wonder is, at what point does the water become wine? When they dip the cup in, do they know immediately that this is no longer water? Or before that, do the splashes on their arms as they pour in their buckets of water have a particular color and bouquet? 

The servants might not have known who Jesus was at first. It’s Mary who gets their attention and tells them, “Do whatever he tells you to do.” This is me speculating here, but I hear unsaid in her instruction: “…no matter how strange.” I wonder what led to her faith that Jesus could do something about the shortage of wine. Apocryphal stories abound of the miracles the young Jesus did, like the time he healed a viper bite or created living birds out of clay. We can’t give these stories much credence, but I can only assume a few of them are true, otherwise Mary might not have instructed the servants as she did.

So the servants, encouraged by Mary’s faith, obey Jesus’ command, and this, really, is the heart of this miracle. The obedience of the servants to Jesus’ word leads to the blessing of everyone at the feast–the wine flows freely again and the celebration continues with joy and abundance. I hope after the wedding was done there was enough wine left over for the servants to enjoy some too. And I think there probably was–it seems like that’s how Jesus works. When he fed the five thousand, he didn’t just feed them enough to keep them from starving–he fed them until they were full, and whole baskets of scraps were left over. So you can imagine the servants after the guests are gone, putting their feet up, dipping cups of excellent wine out of the leftover barrels, telling the story again to one another, marveling and puzzling it out.

I like that at first it’s just the servants who know the truth about the wine’s provenance. It’s the humble servants, that lowly caste of the oppressed (similar to, say, shepherds), who have an inside view–no, they participate in the machinations of Jesus’ first miracle. Humble as they are, Jesus asks them to go in on this miraculous work with him. And because they’re willing to obey Jesus’ word, they are the first to get an inkling of who this stranger is. Their obedience brings them to knowledge and faith. But they don’t keep it to themselves; the text says because of the miracle, “his disciples believed in him.” It is, I’m sure, the servants who tell the disciples the whole story, and the truth about Jesus begins to dawn on them all.

I don’t know about you, but, as well as it turned out for the wedding guests, I don’t really like the concept of obedience. It feels old fashioned and stuffy-churchy. It sounds like not doing what I want to do–following some code of rules that takes the joy out of life. We humans want to follow our own wills–we don’t want to subsume our will into that of some invisible force.

But what I think this story is teaching us is that following our own wills, doing what we think is best leads not to fulfillment as we thought but to a shriveled shadow of the good that is possible. The servants could have said, “No way, you’re crazy, man,” and it would have led to a dried up wedding feast, shame for the hosts, an inauspicious beginning to a marriage.

Obedience, instead, leads to fullness of life, abundant life, blessing for all. We hear this in our Old Testament passages for today. In the Psalms: “With you is the fountain of life; in your light do we see light.” And Isaiah echoes the joyful sensuality of Song of Solomon: “You shall be a crown of beauty in the hand of the Lord…As the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall your God rejoice over you.”

Wine, for the Israelites, was a symbol of joy and God’s blessing. It was also a symbol of God’s ultimate restoration. To quote from Amos: “Behold the days are coming, declares the Lord, when…the mountains will drip sweet wine, and all the hills shall flow with it. I will restore the fortunes of my people Israel, and they shall plant vineyards and drink their wine, and they shall make gardens and eat their fruit. I will plant them on their land, and they will never again be uprooted.” 

The reason the six giant stone water jars were standing nearby was for purification rituals to fulfil the law. How like Jesus, that table-turner, that they would become full of wine instead! The old rituals of cleansing have become null and void–Jesus shows that he has come to transcend the ancient rigidity of law and judgement. Still hopelessly in need of cleansing, we receive it instead from Christ’s work, Christ’s blood, filling those jars to the brim and overflowing, plenty for all.

This miracle, the text says, “showed Jesus’ glory,” gave a glimpse at the true character of Christ. Those stone jars dripping with sweet wine, like the mountains in Amos’ prophecy, reveal for us the wild generosity of God, the open-handed hospitality of our Savior, the call to a full, radiant life that is a lively echo of the beauty of God’s divine glory. This is no withered, musty code-of-conduct sort of life. God is not, as we feared, an accountant, weighing our deeds on some heavenly balance scale, demanding our cringing, abject submission to crusty, joyless rules. Rather, melding ourselves with God’s abundant, radiant glory, participating as the servants did in the fulfilment, the enactment, of God’s beautiful work on earth, that is the obedience God desires. Because this divine glory-made-flesh, this abundant mercy will have the last word on our lives and, indeed, our whole creation.

We can rest in this even as we labor to fill our jars.

I’m not going to tell you what you should do to obey God. You probably know already the thing that God is asking of you. So like Mary said to the servants at the wedding, I would say to you, to myself, “Do whatever he tells you.”

If you don’t know what God asks of you, you could start with the big commandment in the Bible, to love God. And what does this look like but acting in love toward those around us, both near and far, human and nonhuman.

Or you could start with our reading for today from 1 Corinthians, about the gifts that everyone brings the church, which I promise I didn’t manipulate to get you to write your name on the sign up lists. Think about what you’re good at, and ask how you can use those gifts for God’s kingdom and glory, in which everyone is enriched. What has God equipped you to do? That’s what you should be doing.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Jimmy Carter these days. He did so much for humanity not because he was better than you or me but because he used the gifts that had been given him–an international platform, the respect for the presidency–and used them not for his glory but to enact love for humanity, and so demonstrate his love for God. We can do the same as he did, by just asking what we’ve been given, and then seeking to give those gifts back to God.

We, Jimmy Carter and you and I, are all just ants, after all–I say “just” and yet we have a part to play in the abundant, overflowing ecosystem that is God’s work, so beautiful and fecund that it is overwhelming, and unknowable. Unlike the ants, we have to discover our work, our part to play, but if we don’t do it, don’t turn our clod of dirt, nobody else will, and the feast may dry up, and the glory that lies hidden may be unrevealed, the blessing that we all crave may be unbestowed. 

So step forward. “Do whatever he tells you.” Go for it and don’t look back. Don’t worry about what you don’t understand, this stranger Jesus, with his incomprehensible ways. Don’t turn back to the comfortable warmth of your own will, that dry, joyless feast, but go deeper and deeper into the wild unknowns of God’s richness, beauty, and fecundity, and the farther you go, the more you’ll understand, privy to the source of the overspilling glory that will one day inundate ourselves, our neighbors, our earth. Fill your jars, turn your clod of dirt, be a partner to the wondrous blessing that overwhelms, to the joy of all.
– Christy Wetzig