Sermons

January 24, 2010
Water, Wine and a Wedding

Water, Wine and a Wedding
a sermon by the Rev. Mark Worth

READINGS:
1. From John 2:1-11 New Revised Standard Version
On the third day there was a wedding in Cana in Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. When the wine gave out, the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine.” And Jesus said to her, “Woman, what concern is that to you and me? My hour is not yet come.” His mother said to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.” Now standing there were six stone water jars for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons. Jesus said to them, “Fill the jars with water.” And they filled them to the brim. He said to them, “Now draw some out, and take it to the chief steward.” So they took it. When the steward tasted the water that had become wine, and did not know where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew), the steward called the bridegroom and said to him, “Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the best wine until now.” Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.

2. From the Rev. Debbie Blue, “Living the Word,” in The Christian Century, January 12, 2010
Weddings can be tense. Somebody is almost always worried that the food is going to run out. The mother may think she’s only nervous about the caterer, but maybe her fears symbolize a greater anxiety. Is there going to be enough? Is there going to be enough love ... for my children, for me, for starving babies and dying friends? ... We’re three sentences into the story of the wedding in Cana when Jesus’ mom says, “They have no wine.” It’s a pronouncement of doom.

3. From Bart D. Ehrman (New Testament scholar), Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contardictions in the Bible (and Why we Don’t Know About Them), HarperCollins, 2009
This is a miracle, and by the very nature of their craft, historians are unable to discuss miracles. ... Given the nature of things, there is better evidence for some historical events than others, and the only thing historians can do is establish levels of probability. ... There is no doubt in my mind that my basketball team, the Carolina Tar Heels, lost in the Final Four to the Kansas Jayhawks last month. I hate to admit it... but the evidence (videotapes, newspaper reporting, eyewitness testimony) is simply too strong. ... With many other historical events there is much less certainty. Did Lincoln write the Gettysburg address on an envelope? ... Did Alexander the Great drink himself to death after becoming upset when his male lover died? ... All that historians can do is show what probably happened in the past.
That is the problem inherent in miracles. Miracles, by our very definition of the term, are virtually impossible events. ... Historians can establish only what probably happened in the past, but miracles, by their very nature, are always the least probable explanation for what happened.

THE SERMON
My father, a Methodist minister, had a theory about Jesus turning water into wine at the wedding feast in Cana. It wasn’t wine at all, he said. Jesus turned the water into grape juice. I suppose my father thought that Jesus was a good Methodist, and so he wouldn’t drink wine. And Jesus’ mother, who no doubt was a member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, wouldn’t complain that the wedding party had run out of wine. Dad said that the Greeks used the same word for grape juice as they did for wine, so it could be either one.
When I heard that explanation – of course, I’m exaggerating about Jesus being a Methodist and his mother belonging to the WCTU – but when I head my dad explain that it was grape juice, and not wine at all, I was immediately certain that my dad’s interpretation was wrong.
Later, when I re-read the story, I noticed that the steward had exclaimed to the bridegroom, “Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the best wine until now.” And I was pretty sure you couldn’t get drunk on grape juice. My father was a good man, and he was right about a lot of things, but I’m pretty sure he was wrong about the grape juice.
Atheist Christopher Hitchens said that his favorite Bible stories were Jesus saying, “He who is without sin should cast the first stone,” and also the miracle of turning water into wine – “You can’t object to that,” said Hitchens.
So what might it have been like at that wedding party in Cana? We can be pretty certain that Jesus enjoyed friendly gatherings. Listen to Luke 7:33-34: “John the Baptist has come eating no bread and drinking no wine, and you say, ‘He has a demon.’ The Son of Man has come eating and drinking, and you say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.!’” Apparently Jesus had a reputation for enjoying himself among friends!
There were no marriage licenses in biblical times, no wedding ceremonies, no priest or rabbi or justice of the peace. Marriages were generally arranged by the parents and contracted when their children were young. The two families entered into a financial agreement and, when the couple had attained the agreed upon age, held a wedding party. The couple then moved in together and consummated the marriage. This makes me wonder a bit when those who oppose same-sex marriage say they want to protect traditional marriage, or protect biblical marriage. Biblical marriage was a party followed by shacking up together. Go back to the Old Testament and the man shacked up with as many women as he could afford. That’s really what “traditional marriage” means.

Water into wine ~
When Jesus was at the wedding party in Cana in Galilee, a story and locality mentioned in John’s Gospel, the wine ran out. And the mother of Jesus came to Jesus and said, “They have no wine.” Maybe she was thinking, “It must be time to go home.”
Notice that the text doesn’t say, “Mary, the mother of Jesus.” It just says, “The mother of Jesus.” We are in the anonymous Gospel attributed to someone named John. All of the Gospels were written anonymously, and probably not by eyewitnesses. The names “Matthew, Mark, Luke and John,” were added later. This particular Gospel has traditionally been attributed to John the Apostle, so I’ll refer to the author as John. And if we had only John’s Gospel, we wouldn’t know the name of the mother of Jesus. It seems that, since he never mentions her name, this “John” did not know what her name was. That’s one of the many reasons why I believe that the literate and polished Greek-speaking author of John’s Gospel, a book that demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of Greek philosophy, was not the same person as the probably illiterate Aramaic-speaking John who was a simple fisherman and a Disciple of Jesus. John the Apostle would have known Mary’s name.
So the mother of Jesus came to him and said, “They have no wine.” Either she’s anxious that there’s not enough – we often have that anxiety, “there’s not enough,” – or she’s ready to leave the party.
And then we may be put off by the tone of Jesus’ reply to his mother. If you read a Bible commentary about this passage, the commentator may tell you that Jesus wasn’t really being rude to his mother. But his reply (in the Revised Standard Version), “Woman, what have you to do with me?” or (in the Bible in Basic English) “Woman, this is not your business,” hardly seems respectful. I would love th hear his mother say, “Don’t talk back to me! I don’t care who you think you are!” The Rev. Debbie Blue, who is the pastor of a Lutheran church in St. Paul, Minnesota, writes, “as a mother I want to wring his neck and retort with: ‘What do I have to do with you? You’re kidding me, right? Where shall I start? With the DNA? The milk from my breasts that kept you alive? The thousand diaper changes?”
But Jesus’ mother doesn’t respond to her son’s disrespect. She just expects him to fix the problem. She says to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.” Jesus says to the servants, “Fill those stone jars with water.” The servants obey his instructions. Jesus never says any words over the water – nothing at all like, “abracadabra!” The servants brought it to the steward, and he tasted the water that had become wine. The steward, not knowing where the wine had come from, commented to the groom, “You have saved the best wine for last!”
From the very beginning, Christians have seen the allegory in this story, a lesson taught by the use of symbolism. This story was written about seventy years after Jesus’ death. Jesus was a Jew, and his first followers were an Aramaic-speaking sect within Judaism. But the Greek-speaking Christians who used this Gospel were largely gentile. And they had already adopted the practice of the Eucharist, in which the bread and wine symbolized the body and blood of their crucified Christ. Marriage was symbolic of the coming kingdom of God, a union between God and his people. Jesus was often portrayed as the bridegroom in early Christianity. When he said, “You have saved the best wine for last,” the steward said more than he intended. Jesus himself is the good wine. His appearance at the end of history (which the first Christians expected would come in their own time), meant that the last, not the first, is best. Don’t look backwards to some “golden age,” because the best wine has been saved for last. This is a story about the joy, generosity, and abundance that can be expected in the coming kingdom.
In other words, the story was not meant to be taken literally. And it was not taken literally until modern times. This business of interpreting everything in the Bible literally is not “that old-time religion.” It is a new idea in the past couple hundred years. The story of the water and wine, like so much else in the Bible, is symbolic. This supposed miracle, like all of Jesus’ miracles, is symbolic.

What is a miracle?
Hundreds of years before Jesus, the Buddha walked on water. Still, my favorite miracle-maker in the ancient world was the Greek mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras. We all learned about the Pythagorean theorem in high school. But did you know that he was the founder of a religious movement? His disciples believed that everything was related to mathematics and that numbers were the ultimate reality.
Pythagoras was the Son of God – more specifically, he was the son of the god Apollo. He was a divine figure, sent by the gods to benefit humankind. He had a golden arrow he could fly around the world on, a bit like a witch’s broomstick. He once interceded on behalf of a dog that was being beaten because he could hear the voice of a dead friend in the cries of the dog.
There once was a fierce bear that was terrifying a Greek community. Pythagoras went into the bear’s cave, and taught the bear mathematics, philosophy and religion. After a long time, Pythagoras and the bear came out of the cave, arm in arm, discussing mathematics. After that the bear never bothered the people in the village.
When we consider the many stories about Pythagoras, we come to understand a bit better what the ancients thought about miracles. If you were an important person, you had miracles attributed to you.
A miracle is an interruption of the laws of nature that we explain by divine intervention. If it is something we don’t understand, but like, we call it “a miracle.” If we don’t like it, we call it “an act of God.” The recent earthquake in Haiti seems to fall into the “act of God” category. Televangelist Pat Robertson said that the reason Haiti has so many problems is that when they were fighting for their independence against France, the Haitians made a pact with Satan. Robertson blamed the 9/11 attacks on the ACLU, blamed Hurricane Katrina on gays and abortion, blamed Ariel Sharon’s stroke on Israeli peace initiatives, and he now blames the earthquake on Haiti’s revolt against slavery.
“They were under the heel of the French, you know, Napoleon III or whatever. And they got together and swore a pact with the Devil,” Robertson said. “They said, ‘We will serve you if you will get us free from the French’ – a true story – and so the Devil said, ‘Okay, it’s a deal.’ And they kicked the French out, you know, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free, but ever since they have been cursed by one thing after the other, desperately poor.”
Robertson quotes the Devil as if he was there (although it would have been Napoleon Bonaparte, not his nephew, Napoleon III). And it’s interesting to me that the Devil is apparently against slavery, since he took the side of the Haitian slaves. Was God on the side of the slave-owners? And why would Haitians today have to pay for something they had nothing to do with, something that supposedly happened two hundred years ago?
Personally, I’m willing to go with the scientific view that the earthquake was the result of sliding tectonic plates, and the disaster was compounded by shoddy construction. But then, I wasn’t there 200 years ago with the Haitians, the Devil, and old Pat Robertson.
Aristotle rejected the idea that God could or would intervene to violate the order of the natural world. Baruch Spinoza said that miracles are merely natural events whose cause we are ignorant of. Philosopher James Keller says that if God would intervene to save you from a car crash, “then what was He doing in Auschwitz?”

The spiritual and the natural ~
Twentieth century Unitarian minister A. Powell Davies said, “It is not the supernatural that is spiritual – the supernatural is a flight from the spiritual – a flight into something projected as material – a flight of childish imagery. The spiritual remains with the natural, learns to live with reality, tries to understand it and itself as part of it. The natural, moreover, brings the opportunity for growth – growth of mind and growth of soul. But the supernatural represses growth. It keeps the mind always childish, the soul timid and fearful. It is in the natural that the soul can grow.”
I put myself in the camp of Aristotle, Spinoza, Keller and Davies – we are part of the natural world, and this world is spectacular, wonderful, and amazing enough for me. I don’t need imagined miracles. I can read the story of the Buddha walking on water, and Jesus turning water into wine, and understand them as they were most likely understood in ancient times, as parables that were meant to teach a lesson, as allegories that teach through symbolism. Look to tomorrow with great expectation! The best wine is still to come!
And so I do believe in certain kinds of miracles – the miracle of a newborn baby’s cry; the miracle of sunshine after the snowstorm; the miracle of a hard heart that grows soft; the miracle of an old bigot who learns to tolerate and even appreciate the differences among people.
I’m not talking about violations of the laws of nature. Nature itself is very spiritual to me. We don’t need violations of the laws of nature. We need to be the best people we can be, to love one another, within the natural world we have been given. If we can do that, it will be miracle enough.
Amen.