January 17, 2010 - Epiphany 2

Jesus Changes Us!
John 2:1-11
Epiphany 2 – January 17, 2010

I don't know how many of you have seen this wine commercial. I'm not even what kind of wine it is, but it has a woman & a man outside. The woman is drinking a glass of wine, w/ the bottle on the table & somehow, the bottle gets knocked over, along with her glass, and it spills everywhere – and the woman breaks into song, this dramatic operatic style, singing about how there's no more wine, what will they do! Oh, the tragedy! The day is ruined.

But wait! Here comes her husband or boyfriend to the rescue! Seeing the situation, he reaches over & pulls out another bottle of wine and sings, “we have more!” and together they sing, “Life can go on!”

Well, even though I sometimes break out into operatic singing myself, I always think it's kind of annoying as commercials go. It's a bit over the top. I mean really, life wouldn't go on if you ran out of wine?

And yet, here we come this morning to the gospel of John, and we hear the tale of Jesus at a wedding. So far in this gospel, John has told us that in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, and then John the baptizer comes briefly on the scene, pointing out Jesus as the one who is more powerful than he is. Then Jesus himself shows up, calling his first few disciples. That's all in chapter one.

Chapter two opens with Jesus and his disciples and his mother, all guests at a wedding. And then the wine runs out! It really runs out! There are no bottles hidden out of sight in reserve, just in case. Mary comes to Jesus and says, “They have no wine.” What will they do?! There's no more wine! And again, there's a part of me that wants to say, “Really Mary? They ran out of wine, and that's the situation that you're gonna ask Jesus to deal with?” I get that they're at a wedding & all. I know that back in Jesus' day, weddings were feasts that went on for days, a celebration of joy & new relationships – just like they are today. I know that in that culture, hospitality was an even bigger deal than it is today, a real source for honor or shame, depending on how things went – that your standing in the town could rise or fall based on how good a caterer you got, or how well you planned for the amount of food & drink you would need for your guests. But it seems kind of a small matter to get Jesus' attention over, you know? No one will die if they don't get another glass of wine.

But even if the specifics seem a little funny to me, I can relate to the underlying concern, the anxiety that sits below the surface:

“We're running out, Jesus. There's not enough for everybody. It's almost gone & when it's gone, when will we get it again? Where will we get more?”

These questions of scarcity, of making sure we will have enough, nag at us. They've been on our minds for weeks and months and now stretching into years, as we have faced this struggling economy. Some of us have lost jobs & had a long wait to find a new one. Or maybe you're still out of work. You may just be waiting for the other shoe to drop as things get tighter & tighter where you are. As unemployment went up, and salaries stayed the same or went down, while we watched our retirement accounts shrinking, we've all been worrying about the same things. Will there be enough? It looks like we're running out – and where will we get more? What will we do? This is much more serious than spilling a bottle of wine. We're worried about our families, our homes, our futures – the big stuff. And like Mary, we come to Jesus, saying, “there's no more,” expecting him to do something about it.

Well, at first, Jesus resists his mama's plea for help; it's not quite his time yet. But she persists. “Do whatever he tells you,” she says to the servants.

Now here's the thing. At that, Jesus looks around, and where everybody else sees the no-more-wine-ness of the party, the not-enough-ness, Jesus looks around and sees 6 empty stone jars, and a bunch of servants. And Jesus says, “Go fill 'em up with water.” And the servants do.

Imagine that scene! Think about how much water that is! Each jar holds something between 20 & 30 gallons, & there's 6 jars, so that means they have to haul between 120 and 180 gallons of water to fill up those jars – fill 'em up to the brim, as it says. This is hard work! There's no faucet nearby, no hose that they can just turn on & wait while the jars fill – this is active, heavy, go-to-the-well-&-put-the-bucket-down-&-haul-it-up-over-&-over again kind of work. And when that's all done, he tells them to take it to the man in charge, the chief steward, & see what he has to say. And lo & behold, it's the best wine he's ever had! Somehow, Jesus managed to change the water into wine! And not just a little bit of wine; I did the math; it's something like 600 to 900 bottles of wine. I've never seen that much wine in one place! Do you get what happened here? Jesus takes this no-more situation & turns it to an abundance we can't even imagine, not just in quantity, but quality!

But what strikes me in reading this story this time around, is that Jesus didn't do it all by himself. It takes his mother telling him about the situation, and the emptiness of the jars, and the willingness of the servants to do a lot of grunt work before he can do what needs to be done.

And what an example that is for our lives & our world. I've been thinking a lot this week about the situation in Haiti. That was a country in dire circumstances long before this earthquake ever hit. Before the earthquake, 80% of the people there lived below the poverty line. They have struggled with not just the worry, but the reality of not-enough and there-is-no-more for way longer than this recession has been going on around the world. This past week's earthquake only served to make a desperate situation even worse. For many, what little they had has been turned to rubble, rubble that their country doesn't even have the equipment or infrastructure or government stability to dig out from, let alone start recovering from.

And I know many of us, looking on from a distance, have felt helpless this past week. I have one friend who said he couldn't watch any more scenes of people trapped – that it made him just want to go to Haiti with a pickax or a shovel or a saw or something, anything that could make a difference. And so we, with people around the world, have lifted the people of Haiti up in prayer, saying, “Lord, they have nothing.” No food, no water, no hope.

But Jesus looks around, and what he sees are empty jars waiting to be filled. And he says, “It's not true that they have nothing. They have me, and through me, they have you. Are you willing to do whatever I tell you? Will you look with me & see the empty jars of their need? Will you work with me to bring them food, bring them water, bring them hope? Are you ready to do the heavy lifting, to put your bucket down into the well that is my life, my Spirit, and draw up living water?

The deeper miracle here is not so much that Jesus changes water into wine, although that's certainly impressive. The miracle is that Jesus sees the needs of the world around him and he reaches out to meet those needs, whether it's helping out with the hospitality committee or saving lives hit by hunger and poverty and natural disasters.

But Jesus isn't a one-man team. He doesn't do it all alone. Jesus sees servants standing by, and he recruits them. He puts them to work to accomplish great things, to be signs of God's Rule breaking into our world.

And we can see it happening all around us. It's amazing, how even when we feel like we don't have enough for ourselves, when we see people who truly have nothing, people who are in desperate need, people respond.

We see it on a national & global scale when these big natural disasters occur, with Asian tsunami, with Hurricane Katrina, most recently with this earthquake in Haiti – people who just the day before felt like they didn't have enough realize that they have more than enough to share! I have seen it on a more local scale, right here in this church, with this year's Giving Tree, with our gifts to the Christmas-at-Sea program, with the baby shower, with donations to the food pantry.

And that too, is a miracle – not just that Jesus can change water into wine, but that Jesus can change us too, change us to see not just the no-more-ness of a situation, but the empty jars ready to be filled, and the well full of water that never runs dry, and the opportunity to be co-workers with him in the miracles he does in the world every day – the miracle of hospitality and hard work and hope; the miracle of generous hearts and helping hands; the miracle of God's work happening through our hands.

Amen!