Weddings
Isaiah 62:1-5; John 2:1-11
Epiphany 2C
January 20, 2013
Epiphany 2C
January 20, 2013
Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA
It took three tries
to write this sermon. That’s not usually
the way I work. Usually I know where I’m
starting and roughly where I expect to end up.
Then I start writing and pretty soon the sermon takes over. Usually, but not always, the sermon ends up about
where I thought it would.
It didn’t work that
way this time. I had a couple of false
starts. They were okay, but just not
quite right. That’s the way it is
sometimes. Sometimes we need a chance to
return to our starting point and try a slightly different route.
There is an irony
there, since both of our texts have to do with new beginnings.
Part of the problem
was that I couldn’t decide whether to preach Isaiah or John or both of
them. I started with Isaiah. This comes from what scholars call III
Isaiah, written after the return of the Judean exiles from Babylon to
Jerusalem. They were disappointed,
discouraged and tired. Things were not
what they had expected, not what the stories that they had heard at their
grandparents knees had led them to expect.
Jerusalem was supposed to be home.
It was supposed to be the land of promise. It was supposed to be like the psalmist sang:
In
the city belonging to our God,
the
Lord is great and so worthy of
praise!
His
holy mountain is a beautiful summit,
But it wasn’t
anything like that. Jerusalem was a
mess. The walls were broken down, the
gate destroyed altogether. The Temple
was a pile of broken stones and cinders.
And the people of the land were not in a mood to leave their own work, to
labor at resurrecting a nostalgic memory.
The exiles’ work yielded little result.
As I said, they were disappointed, discouraged and tired.
Into their
disappointment and discouragement, III Isaiah poured the promise that a better
time was coming. Jerusalem would become
a place from which justice and glory would shine. It would have the respect of kings. It would be renamed by God with a new
name. It would be called “My Delight Is
in Her.” The land would be called,
“Married.” They would know joy once
again, a new joy, the joy of a divine wedding:
With
the joy of a bridegroom
because
of his bride,
so
your God will rejoice because of you.
III Isaiah’s people
got good news for their disappointed, discouraged and tired hearts. It is good stuff.
But John’s gospel is
good stuff, too. John’s people were in a
little different position. In a way they
were exiles, too, but their displacement wasn’t physical. I believe they were Jews living in a Jewish
community, but they had suffered a rupture in their relationship with the wider
Jewish community. We don’t know the
details, but I’m guessing it had something to do with Jesus. Their allegiance to Jesus had come with a
high cost. Maybe they were wondering if
it was worth it.
So John told them
the story of a wedding, which is okay, I guess.
Weddings are fun. Most of them,
anyway. There are two people who are
eager to be married. The wedding
celebrates their love and transforms two single people into a married
couple. But, of course, that’s not
really the story that Jesus tells. We
don’t even know who the couple is. What John
focuses on is the wine.
More closely what
John focuses on is a social disaster: the guests drank more wine than had been
planned on. Jesus was asked to
intervene. By his mother, no less. At first he refused, but then he did the
thing with the water.
Now, of course, we
Methodists have some struggle with this.
I’ve heard some Methodist folks say that people used to cut their wine
with water in those days, so it was really watered down, not really wine at
all. You could drink it all night long
and not get drunk. Because, I mean,
Jesus wouldn’t have made real wine.
Well, the trouble
with that theory is what the headwaiter said.
He commented that the good wine had been kept until last, contrary to
the usual way things were done. Usually,
the good wine was served first and then “when the guests are drinking freely” the
cheap stuff. Why? Because “when the guests are drinking freely”
they stop noticing the quality of the wine.
This would not be the case if the wine was greatly watered down.
And, to make matters
worse for our scandalized Methodists, is the fact that Jesus created a lot
of wine. There were six barrels holding
twenty to thirty gallons apiece. That
makes between one hundred twenty and one hundred eighty gallons of
wine. That’s a lot of wine for a
wedding!
But there are some
other interesting things about this story.
There’s something about time, for one thing. There are several time references to “the
next day” in the first chapter of John. There
are three of them, to be precise. Then
our lesson for the day begins with the words “on the third day.” So this wedding takes place on the “seventh”
day.
Since the gospel
itself begins with a creation story, I think this week of events leading up to
the wedding at Cana is in some sense parallel to the week of creation in
Genesis 1. The wedding then takes place
on the seventh day, the Sabbath. The
Sabbath is the joyful chance to rest and be restored from the week’s work. The Sabbath is observed, by the way, with
ceremonies that involve cups of wine.
Then we pay close
attention to the conversation between Jesus and his mother. Mary simply says to Jesus, “They don’t have
any wine.” She doesn’t ask Jesus
directly, she just states the fact and expects him to figure out the rest. Jesus objects that his time has not yet
come. When Jesus turns the water into
wine we must regard this as a preview of Jesus’ time that has not yet
come. It is a bit of his glory, the
first time that it is seen. So the
disciples noticed at the end of the story.
So, John speaks to
his discouraged people and what he tells them is that they have a new
beginning, a new creation, really. When
that creation is complete it will be a new Sabbath. It will be like a wedding. It will be like wine that never runs
out! Of course for Methodists, this may
not be good news, unless we take it as a figure of speech.
So there it is. Discouraged people, separated by centuries, but
have a great deal in common. There are
two groups of people each needing a new beginning, a renewing, a fresh
start. And they each get just what they
need.
There is Isaiah’s
people and there is John’s people. And
then there is us. Some of us are doing
fine. We are encouraged and
well-rested.
But not all of
us. Some of us, the rest of us, maybe, are
discouraged, disappointed, and tired. Some
of us need a fresh start. Some of us
need a new creation. These texts taken
together tell us that this God with whom we have to do, the God of Isaiah and
of Jesus, is a God of new beginnings and fresh starts. That’s good news, and some of us could sure
use it.
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