A More Excellent Way

Grace Church

Epiphany 4, 2010

January 31, 2010

I know that for most of us, our primary exposure to scripture comes on Sunday morning. A few of us might read the text more closely, study the bible either individually or in groups. Some of us are relatively familiar with the texts from Sunday School, but I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that most people who attend Episcopal Churches have at best a superficial knowledge of scripture. Now don’t get me wrong; I’m not criticizing you. If anything, I’m criticizing the church, and its lay clerical leadership, for not taking the education of children and adults seriously enough.

What that superficial knowledge of scripture leads to is a pretty fuzzy, incomplete, and misleading understanding of who Jesus was. Most of us have a picture of him in our minds as a nice guy, good teacher, who didn’t ruffle many feathers, or if he did, it was only because they needed to be. That image of Jesus as a nice guy may be so deeply engrained in us that when we hear stories like the gospel that was just read, we either miss the conflict entirely, or totally misinterpret it.

As I said last week, Luke dramatically alters this story of Jesus’ return to his hometown, moving it to the very beginning of his ministry, telling the reader what Jesus said, and shifting the focus away, at least slightly from the reception he receives there. Perhaps the most striking element in Luke’s story is that it seems as if Jesus goads the crowd into taking action against him. There’s an odd and abrupt shift of sentiment. Luke reports that all spoke well of him and were amazed at his gracious words.. Then the crowd asked, “Is not this Joseph’s son?”

It’s after that question that Jesus seems to provoke them. First he quotes the proverb, “Doctor, heal yourself;” and says that they will want him to do the sort of healings in Nazareth that he has done elsewhere. Instead of answering those objections directly, Jesus cites the two examples from Hebrew Scripture, the great prophets Elijah and Elisha, and their healing of two gentiles.

The meaning of this exchange is obscure. Does Jesus want to incite the crowd’s anger? Or is something else going? Is his challenge to them a response to the question, “Is not this Joseph’s son?” If we think back to what I said last week about the Isaiah text quoted by Jesus. It serves in Luke as what we could Jesus’ mission statement and his identity as Messiah is measured by the extent to which he preached good news to the poor, gave sight to the blind, etc. So, he is basically laying out his future ministry to his listeners, identifying himself as the Messiah, and declaring the year of the Lord’s favor. And the response from the crowd was not recognition that he is the Messiah, but recognition that he is one of their own, Joseph’s son. They are given everything they need to see him as the Messiah, but all they can see is the one who grew up among them.

Sometimes it is hard to see what’s in front of our eyes, and sometimes it’s hard to accept the message coming to us—whether that message is good news or bad. In fact, it’s often the case that the best news is the hardest to hear. Jesus came to Nazareth, proclaimed the year of the Lord’s favor, proclaiming, in other words, the coming of God’s reign. His listeners didn’t understand what he was talking about, but when he put it into words they could understand, they recoiled and resisted. When he mentioned Hebrew prophets healing gentiles, their ears closed up and they attacked him.

Accepting the new can be dangerous and scary. We don’t know what might happen down the road. We can’t see clearly into the future. For most of us, we’re pretty comfortable with doing things the way we’ve been doing them. They seem to work pretty well, after all.

But closer examination reveals that isn’t the case. I mentioned last Sunday some of the discussion the vestry had on our retreat two weeks ago. We talked about our vision for the future, and we also did some hard work laying out some of Grace’s strengths and weaknesses. Inevitably, as is always the case in such conversations, talk turned to the way things used to be. Long-time members can remember when our congregation was much larger, when we had a youth group of fifty members and a Sunday School that filled the education wing. Often, such reminiscences can turn into discussions of how we might get back to that time.

Well, the reality is that the world, Madison, and the church have changed dramatically. To make the point, I will use a very different example than Grace Church. A few years ago, I did some consulting work with a parish in the county seat of a largely rural county in South Carolina. Their congregation had declined significantly since the sixties, and they were hoping to turn things around. The mantra I heard repeatedly was “We’ve got to attract young families.” The county’s population was declining, because the textile mills that had provided employment had closed and there was around 20% unemployment. I did some demographic research and learned that something like a third of the children under age 18 lived in single-parent households. In other words, the chances of attracting two-parent families with stable employment were pretty low. If they wanted to be the church and grow, they were going to need to do some creative, and hard, thinking.

We at Grace need to do some hard thinking too. It’s easy for many of us to think back to the “good old days” of the fifties through the eighties when the church thrived. But those days are long gone. As I said, the world, Madison, and the church have changed. Many of these changes are gigantic—like the lessening role of religion in America and in Madison, increased ethnic diversity—I could cite dozens of things. Some of them may seem relatively insignificant, like the growing importance of Sunday as the only day when families can spend time together. We can do little or nothing about many of them, but taken together they mean that to expect the church to look like what it did thirty or forty years is not only unrealistic, it would lead to its complete irrelevance, and probably its death.

But still, we hold on to that vision of the past. It collides with the present and impedes our future. That is true for an individual parish like Grace. It’s also true for our denomination as a whole, and indeed for mainline Christianity. So what do we do? How do we capture a vision of the future, that brings what is best of our tradition forward and brings the life-giving message of the gospel into a new world?

Well, that’s the question. It may seem innocuous, but in fact, different answers to that question, different ways of approaching it, can lead to intense conflict. In a very profound way, conflict over that question is what has driven conflict within the Episcopal Church and the Anglican communion for a very long time and it threatens to tear our denomination and our global communion apart. But there can be, and often is, equally intense conflict on the local level. When facing such conflict, it’s important to remember that in spite of our differences, there are deep and lasting bonds that tie us together.

That’s what Paul is talking about in I Corinthians. The past few words we have read his famous analogy of the Christian community as the body of Christ, in which each member is of equal importance. He didn’t write that in a vacuum. In fact, the community of Corinth to which he was writing was embroiled in nasty conflict internally, but also externally, with Paul himself. He writes in order to hold that community together, and in order to preserve his relationship with it. That’s the context for today’s reading, the so-called love chapter.

He has just been saying that there is a variety of gifts, but the same spirit, varieties of services, but the same Lord, varieties of activities, but the same God. He uses the metaphor of the body to stress the organic relationship of all members in the community, the necessity of all, the importance of all. When he comes to the end of that discussion, he transitions from it by saying, “But let me show you a more excellent way.” And with that, he begins “Though I speak with the tongue of mortals and angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or clanging cymbal.” Paul was talking about relationships within the body of Christ. Love is that which binds us together; indeed love creates the body of Christ.

But love is also the path showing our way into the future. We live in a culture in which it seems impossible to disagree and remain in relationship. Our political discourse is impoverished, little more than shrill rhetoric aimed at scoring points, whether that conflict is over healthcare or the Edgewater development. In the Episcopal Church it seems easier to walk away than to remain in conversation with those with whom we disagree. And for many, when there is conflict in a parish, we find it easier to leave than to stay and struggle. Yet, if we are to be the body of Christ, if we are to offer God’s Christ’s reconciling love to the world, there is no more excellent way, than to show that love in all that we do as God’s people in the world, as God’s people in this world.

That’s a whole lot of wine

Second Sunday of Epiphany

January 17, 2010

Grace Episcopal Church

This morning our hearts are of full of sadness and concern for the people of Haiti. We have seen the images on TV, read the accounts in the paper. Some of our members of Grace have been to Port-au-Prince and Jeanette, which is the location for our diocese’s Haiti Project. We have hosted Haitians in our homes as we have been hosted in theirs. Some count Haitians among their friends; some are almost like family members. Those of us who have been there are full of memories, wondering what it’s like now. But all of us, whether or not we are personally affected through friendship or travel, have seen the pictures and have some sense of the devastation. We feel helpless in the face of this destruction; the dollars we give seem a drop in the bucket compared to the vastness of the tragedy.

And inevitably, our minds turn to questions of why. Why now? Why Haiti? As human beings we want suffering of this magnitude to make sense, we want to try to fit into categories and systems we might understand. We want to manage it, intellectually, emotionally, spiritually.

But this isn’t the first time for such horrendous tragedy. There was of course 9-11 which now seems like a distant memory; there was the tsunami in Indonesia and South Asia in 2004; there was hurricane Katrina in 2005. Each of them seemed more horrific than the last. Each one brought misery as well as miraculous human efforts. Each one brought questions of why.

We want to know what it all means. We want to put it in a theological framework that we can make sense of; we want to say it was God’s punishment, or God’s will; or perhaps we want to say suffering of this magnitude proves God doesn’t exist. These are hard questions and demand coherent answers, but it may be the answers don’t come.

We are in the season of Epiphany, that time when we celebrate the presence of God among us, the presence of God’s glory. It may be hard for us to think about God’s glory; indeed it may be difficult for us even to think about the presence of God in a world that experiences such tragedy and human misery. Yet our Christian faith lives in the paradox between what is and what will be; what we see with our eyes and what we know by faith. Epiphany is a time to reflect not only on the reality of God’s glory and God’s presence in the world, but also on that paradox. There is no better place to explore that paradox than in today’s gospel reading.

OK. Let’s do the math. 6 jars for purification, each holding between 20-30 gallons of water. That’s between 120 and 180 gallons of water. That’s how much wine Jesus made. And in case you can’t get a clear sense of just how much wine that is, let’s do some more math. A bottle of wine is 750 milliliters; that’s roughly five bottles of wine in a gallon. So we’re talking between 600 and 900 bottles of wine, between 50 and 75 cases. That’s a lot of wine. That must have been quite a party. Now remember, Jesus made the wine because they had run out. In other words, like any good party, the wine had been f lowing for quite some time, and either the guests were drank more than was expected or the hosts had not planned very well.

600 to 900 bottles of wine. Given that the wine had been flowing, assuming the guests were a little tipsy already, what was Jesus thinking? After all, how much wine does it take for your average person to get, well, pretty drunk? That must have been quite a party!

Before we explore the meaning of all this, there’s a little more math in the story that I would like to talk about. John 2 begins, “On the third day …” Now when you hear that phrase, what pops into your mind? Of course, the resurrection. And I have no doubt that the gospel writer is making an allusion to the resurrection. But there’s more to it than that. If we go back to Chapter 1, we see something very interesting. The gospel of John begins “In the beginning was the Word” so quite literally, it begins at creation. But very quickly it moves down to the present day of Jesus. After the gospel begins describing the ministry of John the Baptizer, three times it begins an episode with the phrase “the next day.” So if you add those three, actually four, days to the three days mentioned in John 2:1, you get seven days—seven days from “In the beginning was the word,” to the wedding at Cana.

In other words, for the Gospel of John everything converges on this point, on a wedding, in Cana of Galilee—it is the point to which all creation has been moving, the moment at which the disciples, and we, see the glory of God. It is also, to hearken back to Genesis, the completion, the fulfillment of creation. On the seventh day, God finished the work that he had done… God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it. On the third day, there was a wedding at Cana.

All of this—creation, redemption, resurrection, all of it converges on this point, on this story. But to note that is only to deepen the mystery. Why wine? Why so much wine? How does that reveal Christ’s glory? As we search for an answer to that question, our first impulse, temptation, really, is to place the emphasis on the power involved in turning water into wine. But that is not what the story emphasizes. The change takes place off stage. Jesus is expressly not involved in the miracle. He simply tells the servants to put water in the jars, and to take some for the steward to taste. There is no magic involved, no Hollywood special effects.

So the important part of the story is not that Jesus turned water into wine. The important part of the story is the amount of wine, the occasion itself, a wedding party. And if we think about the gospel writer’s chronological references, it all becomes much clearer. A wedding banquet set “on the third day” or “on the seventh day.” This is no simple miracle. In this story we learn about Jesus Christ, and we learn about what it means ultimately to follow Christ. It is a foretaste of that eternal Sabbath, the messianic banquet of which the Jews of Jesus’ day hoped, and which Jesus proclaimed in his own language as the Kingdom of God.

Our meals participate in and provide a foretaste of that messianic banquet. The Eucharistic celebration, in which we partake of bread and wine bring us into the presence of Christ and promise of that great feast to which all people are invited and in which we will all share. But it’s not just the Eucharist. One of our great obligations as the body of Christ is to offer hospitality, to welcome others in, and to offer them food and drink. The gospels agree that a major part of Jesus’ ministry took place at meals. But he didn’t just preach or teach at them; he used them to demonstrate the inclusiveness of his message. He welcomed everybody to the table, and he was constantly criticized for doing so, for eating with tax collectors and sinners.

There’s a sense of that in the story of the wedding at Cana. Jesus is a guest, what business it of his or of his mother to make a beer run? Yet here he acts as host, ensuring that there will be plenty of wine to go around, that a good time will be had by all. Cana reminds us that we are not the hosts here; Jesus is; Jesus has sent out the invitations, but Jesus is also throwing the party. And like Cana, we need to remember that we aren’t in control of what happens here, Jesus is. As we come to the table, we open ourselves to the possibility that we might be transformed by our encounter with Christ, just as the water was turned into wine.

Ordinary water, ordinary jars, a run-of-the-mill wedding celebration. In the middle of these Jesus turns everything upside-down. Can you imagine what the servants, or the steward might have thought when they saw that the water had been turned into wine? Suddenly, the ordinary has become spectacular. Jesus turned water into wine, and revealed his glory.

That surprise, that unexpected, transformation of the mundane is at the heart of Epiphany. In John 1, the gospel writer tells us that the Word became flesh and lived among us—now we see, as the disciples did, we see the glory of his presence. Jesus was an ordinary human being, like us, but he was also God. The water was transformed into wine. Epiphany reminds us, demands of us, that we be ready to encounter the glory of Christ in the world around us.

Epiphany also demands that we help others see that glory as well. In the Gospel of John, Jesus repeatedly offers his listeners a way into a fuller life; often it is called abundant life. We usually think that he is referring to eternity, to life after death. But the miracle at Cana shows us that the full life Jesus offers us is here around us; in the enjoyment of the creation God has given us, in the celebration of life’s transitions, in a good party.

Just as ordinary water in ordinary jars become extraordinary wine, our presence here, our faith proclaims the hope, the danger, that we might be transformed into something quite new. When we encounter Christ, whether it be at the table here, or in the face of another person, we run the risk that everything will change. We might not like that. Just as we are made a little bit uncomfortable by the math of the wedding at Cana, there’s nothing moderate, or respectable, or seemly about the amount of wine at Cana, we can’t control what might happen to ourselves, to our church, or to the world, when we open ourselves to encountering Christ. All bets are off. So let’s party on!