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From January 14, 2007 Ever prepared a feast for your love? One man shares his plan. "It should be nearing evening as you set the table, first covering it with a gingham tablecloth, then arranging the two place settings--yours on the left, and one for Agnus, your lily of a sweetheart, on the right. Place two candles mid-table, taking care to leave sufficient space between them so as to be able to view Agnus...." Out comes the teak bowl our lover man has filled with crackers. Another bowl he has piled high with almonds. His cutting board features not one but four kinds of cheese--including brie--surrounded by a moat of sliced apple. A wicker basket hides warmed slices of French bread. Love loves to prepare. But you already know this, don't you? You know how love loves to anticipate the dual joys of giving and receiving, of pleasing and being pleased. Love can't resist the lavish gesture, the abundant offering, the tending to every little detail. That is love's way. Everything is set, Agnus' lover man decides as he steps back and fancies the spread he has set out. Well not quite. He has left the important decision of wine for last. Should he offer Agnus a full-bodied cabernet--so strong in flavor and bouquet? If so, from which winery? And which year? Decisions like these must not be treated casually. And then there is the important matter of how much wine to serve. Agnus' lover man does the calculating. He adds his weight to hers, and then puts a decimal point two places to the left. He and Agnus will enjoy a generosity of wine--surely this love feast is no time for rations or restraint. Neither is a wedding. And so being prepared is paramount. If you've ever been in on wedding planning, you know how involved it can be even for a modest late afternoon affair. But imagine the celebrating extending over the course of an entire week, which is how long the celebrating lasted in Jesus' time. Imagine what it would take to host a celebration for seven full days and nights. And then imagine not knowing just how many guests will join in or how long they might stay. As hard as you might try, there's just no way to predict that two cousins on your mother's side are going to show up with a dozen of their favorite cousins from the other side of the family. And then in their joy the neighbors happen to mention the wedding to relatives in the village down the road. They arrive as an entourage on the second day, hungry as bears, and stay until the very end. Word of mouth being what it was, the rules of hospitality what they were in Jesus' day, even the most experienced of hosts might prepare a feasting table that looked like a harvest of plenty one minute only to discover that it had been ravaged the next. Even if the Martha Stewart of Cana had done the calculating, wine that more than exceeded the need before the party began could easily give out at the midpoint of the festivities. Now I don't know about you but when I'm planning to entertain, I take no chances. Which is why even when it's just dinner for two the refrigerator's shelves are jammed for days afterwards. To run short--ever--can be a shameful, shameful thing for a host. Shameful now and all the more so in Jesus' day. Those of you who were taught the ins and outs of southern hospitality, even you might not be able to fathom the enormous responsibility a host had when it came to seeing to the needs of his guests. Or the shame of having miscalculated. This was no momentary shame. It was enduring and it fell upon the host and everyone in his extended family. "Remember?" People would whisper years, even decades later. "Remember when their celebration wine ran out?" In a culture that placed an exceedingly high value on shared memories, a wedding couple might never crawl out from under the shame of having held a "less than enough" wedding. Can't you just picture Mary's horror when she spies the empty wine barrels? She recognizes the impending disaster, the shame about to spill out everywhere. Knowing there is little she can do to avert this crisis, she does what most mothers would do: she turns to her son and insists he do something. And her son does do something--something you and I call a miracle. And it's a marvelous miracle, too, even if we don't know how Jesus managed it, this transformation of something entirely ordinary into something quite extraordinary. But what adds to the marvelousness of this miracle is where it falls in John's gospel. This isn't Jesus' seventeenth miracle. It's not even his seventh. This is Jesus' first miracle. It's also his very first public act of ministry. Firsts are often important milestones and because they never come again we like them to count for something special. Which is why, for example, when RJ Morgan was ordained here last February, he insisted on preaching to you the very next day. RJ wanted his first sermon as a minister to be shared with you, the very people who raised him up, affirmed his calling, and sent him off to seminary with your blessing and financial support. Firsts can speak volumes about what is special and why. Think about what it says about Jesus that his first miracle took place where it did. It didn't occur just outside the Temple in the holy city of Jerusalem--the spiritual center of his life and faith. He chose to perform his first miracle at the furthest edges of his homeland. And consider who Jesus served with that first miracle: not a rabbi with a huge reputation or a political powerhouse but some nameless couple and their undistinguished circle of family and friends. What does this choice say about Jesus and who is important to him? Think too about what it says about Jesus that the focus of his first miracle is the transformation of water into wine. You might expect that God's own son would zero in on some other kind of transformation, something really really holy like turning a sinner into a saint, for example. Or something profoundly healing, like turning blind eyes into sighted ones. Just what is this Jesus of ours up to? Just what kind of Savior is he? What are we to make of this man who would put his Messiah-gifts to work for the first time not at the Temple, not at the villa of the Roman prefect but at some week-long blow-out where everyone is letting it all hang out, where people are all caught up in too much of this good thing? For heaven's sake, the whole village has been dancing and drinking and laughing and staying up too late too many nights in a row and probably half of them are going to call in the following Monday to tell the boss not to expect them until Tuesday. This is where Jesus decides he'll unfurl his first miracle. Even if it isn't Jesus' first, it sure sounds like a formula for a scandal, this water into wine business. OK, so Jesus staves off the shame of running out. That's understandable. But does Jesus really need to be so over the top about it? Was it really necessary for him to produce as many as 180 gallons of wine, and fine wine at that? If this outrageous extravagance, this gratuitous abundance isn't a scandal, I don't know what is. It sounds so shameful, too. Why this Lord of ours, the Son of God and Savior of the World, the One Like None Other, doesn't just pour it on gallon after miraculous gallon. The water Jesus uses comes straight out of jars that served one purpose and one purpose only: holding water for the family's rites of purification, a requirement of their faith. Surely Jesus knows better. And still he proceeds. Imagine if the church on the other side of town baptized with champagne or if they didn't serve up cubes of bread for communion but platters of caviar. Wouldn't we be shocked by the intersection of the sacred and the profane? Wouldn't we be concerned by what might seem the blatant disregard for tradition and convention? Of course Jesus knows those stone jars are for dedicated use. He also knows something else--that when the law of religious convention bumps up against the law of love, love trumps every time. Remember the lover man getting everything ready for his beloved Agnus? Remember how he leaves nothing to chance? Not the food, not the mood, not the candles or cheese or the wine? He wants everything to speak of his love and he doesn't care what the neighbors think, he isn't bothered when his co-workers chide him later for having spent his entire paycheck on this one dinner. God's like that. God isn't afraid of setting the table for us and heaping it high with all manner of delightful and delectable things. Call this table springtime with its buds and birds and endless possibilities. Call this table the sky with its endless array of stars and its infinity of universes. Call this the ocean with its unfathomable plenty and fish garbed in more colors than we have names for. Call this table Christ. Recall that he held nothing back, that he poured all he had into life with us, even unto death. God's love for us is shameless in its abundance. Utterly
shameless. As his first miracle why did Jesus choose to turn water into wine? Maybe it's because he knew what so few of us truly know: this wasn't just any wedding, this celebration in Cana. It was and is and always will be ours--with him. So drink up, my friends! Drink up! The celebration has only just begun. Amen. © Rev. Karen Winkel I am indebted to Frank Graziano for his short story Wine: A Lesson in Self-Discovery which inspired the opening for this sermon. It appears in A Bell Ringing In the Empty Sky: The Best of The Sun, edited by Sy Safransky. |
"Never place a period where God has placed a comma." - Gracie Allen
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