Second Sunday After Epiphany (2007): "The Water and the Wine; the Crucifixion and the Resurrection"

Second Sunday After Epiphany (2007): "The Water and the Wine; the Crucifixion and the Resurrection"
Isaiah 62:1-5;
Psalm 36:5-10; 1 Corinthians 12:1-11;
John 2:1-11
Preached on January 14th, 2007.

You would think that when Jesus calls his disciples, disciples that were going to go out into the whole world in all its strangeness, you would think that Jesus would take his disciples aside, and teach them to do something. After all, these disciples were about to embark on a dangerous, strenuous, and very difficult project. They were about to travel to the ends of the earth bearing the good news. So you would think that Jesus would offer them some kind of training.

You would think that Jesus would bring them to a school where they could learn what to do, and how they might work to bring the good news to the world. Or maybe Jesus ought to take his disciples on a retreat, and give them some kind of spiritual experience, maybe the kind the disciples could teach to others.

But where does Jesus bring his disciples? Within a matter of days of calling his disciples, Jesus doesn’t bring them to school, and he doesn’t take them on retreat. Jesus doesn’t seem to take the time to teach the disciples what they can do, nor about their part in bringing the good news to the world. The first thing that Jesus does with his disciples is go to a wedding.

It sounds like a pretty good party, actually, at least up to a point. A wedding without wine, at that time, was a pretty boring event, not because the party needs alcohol to be fun, but because the end of the wine means the end of the celebration. And Jesus brings his disciples to a party where the wine runs out way before the party really should be over.

***

Jean Vanier tells a story about a l’Arche community (where people with significant disabilities live along people without disabilities) that was founded in Kerala, India.

“Ramesh, a young Hindu man with intellectual and psychological difficulties, was one of the first men welcomed,” writes Vanier. Ramesh went to his brother’s place for a couple of days. “When [Ramesh] left his brother’s house, he said to [his brother], and to the neighbour’s and friends: “Today is my wedding day. Come!”

People just smiled at him.

[Ramesh] got on the bus and when he arrived back in the community, he told the community leader: “Today is my wedding day!”

[Ramesh] went to the workshop for awhile, but was feeling a little bit tired. He went to his bedroom to lie down, had a heart attack and died.”

Ramesh’s wedding day was the day of his death.

I think Ramesh knew something about what his death was; Ramesh knew that to die is not just an end, but it is a lot like being at the wedding feast at Cana. In Ramesh’s death, his wine ran out; but Ramesh knew, somehow, that the wine runs out at the beginning of the real party, not at the end.

***

In The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky makes the connections between the wedding at Cana, death, and new life.

In the story Dostoyevsky tells, when Father Zossima dies, the story of the wedding at Cana is read over his body. During the reading, Zossima’s young disciple, Aloysha, falls into a reverie where he finds himself at the wedding at Cana, and where he meets the dead Zossima among the rejoicing guests. Zossima, the dead monk, is there at the wedding, his eyes are bright and very much alive. When Aloysha awakens from his dream, he goes out into the night and has a sudden ecstasy. Aloysha experiences, in a passing moment, the unity of heaven and earth.

Dostoyevsky sees the wedding at Cana as the bridge from one life to another, of death as the time when the wine runs out, and life as the time when the new wine arrives.

***

I would like for us to take very seriously this particular moment: the moment when the wine runs out. I think many of us know what it is like for the wine to run out. Despite our greatest efforts, sometimes our marriages can fall apart. Despite how hard we try, we fail in our most significant relationships. And no matter how hard we try, there is nothing that we will be able to do about our eventual death. Eventually the wine runs out, and it feels like the party is over.

I think we are at this moment in the church. Mainline denominations, like ours, are dying. Some have even said that we are already dead, that the wine has run out, and the party that once was the Anglican Church is over.

I think they’re right. It’s as simple as looking at attendance numbers and at the average age of our worshippers. We are getting older and we are becoming fewer. We are just about as dead as Ramesh and Zossima. Our wine is running out.

It might very well be the best thing that happens to us, though we are presented with a choice, of sorts. Where do we turn at this point?

It is, in a sense, as simple as our mission statement: it is time to claim the power of Christ, to look to the one who is worthy of our faith. Because when the wine runs out, it is Christ who can take what is mundane, what is already available in abundance, something as commonly available to us as water is, and turn this water into the best wine you’ve ever tasted.

Because just as Ramesh knew, it is when the wine runes out that the part really gets started. It is when we encounter death as Aloysha did, and then see our dead friends with fire in their eyes at the wedding feast at Cana, that we begin to understand why the wine must run out: so that we can turn to the source of the real wine, so that we can look to the one who really kicks the party into gear.

The wine runs out so we can know where our strength comes from, so we can know that our strength comes from Christ.

***

Now I would do a major disservice to John, and to the gospel, if I left us here, because John isn’t all that fond of the faith that arises from signs. Sign faith is not the fullness of faith. And that’s what Jesus is getting at when he says in our passage that his hour has not yet come.

The sign of the water into wine is but a figure of the real sign, the sign that brings us into the fullness of faith. Just as we can see that we die in desperate times of our lives, and in the desperate times of our church, and even as we look towards our deaths, just as we see that the wine can run out, we see the figure and the shadow of the greatest of all signs: what Jesus points to is not the water, but his death; and as Jesus takes the water and turns that water into wine, he points not to the wine, but to his resurrection. This is the sign, not the minor miracles of new life in our daily lives, but the sign that we look to in the fullness of faith, the sign of the cross and the sign of the resurrection.

And if we are to be saved as a people, as a church, and as persons, it is by this Christ, it is by his power, the power of the one who turned water into wine, the power of the one who was raised from the dead, and the one who raises us to new life in him, the power of the crucified one, the risen one.