“WHEN THE
WINE RUNS OUT”
|
|
A sermon preached Readings: Amos
9:11-15, John 2:1-11 |
|
|
|
“And The mother of
Jesus said to him, ‘They have no wine’” (Jn 2:3)
When Liz and I got
married,
we invited 150 people to the ceremony and to a buffet afterwards.
By the time we got to the reception everyone was very hungry
and they piled their plates high with excellent food –
well at least the first 130 did so –
but the caterers had miscalculated, and the last 20 found there was no food
left.
It was necessary to call people back to share out what they had taken before
they ate it –
luckily everyone saw the funny side of things, and all was well.
Today’s Gospel relates
a similar sort of tale –
Jesus and his friends arrive at a wedding party –
in his day weddings lasted for nearly a week, and this one is in full
swing.
It is perhaps a family affair,
certainly Jesus’s mother seems involved in arranging things.
But there is a crisis – the wine has run out.
We don’t know why -
maybe the sudden arrival of Jesus and his followers actually creates the
problem –
anyway, the wine is gone,
and Jesus mother turns to him and says what shall we do?
In the house there are great water
jars –
six jars able to hold 30 gallons each – that’s 180 gallons in all.
They are used for water for ritual cleansing
and also for washing feet as guests arrive.
Jesus tells the servants to fill all the jars with water –
he then turns the water to wine, which is served.
And it isn’t any old wine –
people take a sip and turn to Mary and say
“Hey this is fine stuff – what is it – Ch. Musar Lebanese Cabernet?
It’s certainly a lot better than that Capernaum plonk you were serving earlier”
Did
it actually happen?
We don’t know, and I suspect we would disagree –
·
I am sure some of you here would say it
all happened just as the Bible says –
the chemistry turned plain H2O into a complex compound of carbon,
hydrogen and oxygen including ethyl alcohol and various complex esters.
(cf.
Grayston, Gospel, of St John, Epworth, 1990)
·
Or maybe the water stayed water,
but it tasted like wine to those who drank it –
a miracle of a different sort?
·
Or maybe an even subtler more jokey
miracle –
the guests realize their host’s embarrassment
and toast each other in water and say
“What an excellent vintage – the best wine saved till last eh?”
and the party goes on…
·
Others of us may be less sure
whether historically the event really happened at all –
but we see it as a parable –
a profound fiction, which symbolises deep truths about God.
This
is a common debate –
and we could have the same discussion about 100 miracle stories in the
Gospels.
But
the main thing we can as always search for together is the underlying
symbolism. –
Whatever happened,
John had a reason for putting this story here at the beginning of Jesus’
ministry –
it is to highlight the power of Jesus to transform lives and situations
and offer a foretaste of heavenly banquet -
just when the wine seems to have run out.
And we all know there
are those points in life
when figuratively the wine runs out -
when everything goes wrong and dies on us.
The wine may run out
when the money runs out,
when our health runs out,
when we give up on our dreams
or even when we achieve our aims in life and still feel unfulfilled.
The
wine may run out in a dramatic way –
so we can but imagine Harold Shipman at 5.30 am in his cell,
deciding that the party was over,
nothing left to live for,
nothing left to celebrate.
We
all know stories,
and some of us have experienced in our lives,
the ultimate sense of collapse and failure -
Of
course many never go to the extremes
of divorce or suicide or breakdown,
but they still aren’t really living, they’re just existing.
They drift from one day to the next.
Life is hollow and empty.
They
are weary with well-doing,
“tired of living and scared of dying”,
get
sick and tired of being sick and tired,
The
wine runs out. -
If you’ve been there, or are there, this Gospel story is for you.
What is true of the individual can also
be true of society at large.
Some
of you may have come across Richard Heinberg’s book
entitled “The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of the Industrial Societies”.
His
thesis is simply this –
we have built a modern industrial society on fossil fuels which are running
out,
and we now face a real possibility of increasing wars in the Middle East and
beyond
as fuel guzzling rich Western economies continue to struggle to feed their
habit.
The
wine is running out.
And
people talk about our modern industrial society
suffering from “compassion fatigue”
which is glib corporate speak for something very ugly –
a selfish and debilitating loss of love and generosity.
And
if the suicide of Harold Shipman
says a lot about the personal tragedy of one individual and his victims,
it also says quite a bit about the apparent lack of spiritual direction in a society
that hasn’t anything positive left to offer people like Shipman.
It
is as though in the face of his evil,
we are defeated as a society and have nothing to offer except to lock him away
for ever.
However
heinous the crime,
it is a bleak society which has nothing to offer the sinner except vengeance
and punishment.
And
in all this,
we know the world needs forgiveness and peace and love and unity –
and as Churches we cannot even unite among ourselves.
Father
forgive us that as Churches
we so often pile up competing ritual water jars,
when you just want the Church to be throwing a party for humanity.
When the wine runs out - of course it happens in
every generation.
Our
OT lesson was taken from Amos 9.
2750
years ago, Amos looked at his broken and faithless society,
and saw what we see today –
a society marked by religious ritualism yoked to callous evil.
And
Amos has a dream -
a dream of the day when God’s rule would be finally restored.
He
has this wonderful image of the very rivers of Zion flowing with wine.
Tomorrow
is Martin Luther King Day,
and we have sung a song based on his great speech –
the dream that the division and hatred of the world
could yet be transformed by the love of God.
And
do we have that sort of passionate vision
for our world and our Church?
This
is the start of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity –
and this year’s theme is “Peace” –
and Jesus’ words “My peace I give unto you”.
The
graphic for this year’s week of prayer shows
a cross with behind it a rainbow –
Reminding
us of that other great message of hope to a sinful and broken world –
God’s
rainbow promise to Noah
that the sun would ultimately always shine through the rain.
·
After the floods the rainbow will appear
·
Though I walk through the valley of the
shadow my cup overflows
·
“Though vine nor fig tree neither, their
wonted fruit should bear,
… Yet God the same abiding, his praise shall tune my voice,
For while in him confiding, I cannot but rejoice”
(Wm
Cowper)….
·
Though the vine is barren and the wine
has run out,
the party is only just beginning
·
Indeed, one day the very rivers will run
with wine..
That is the Gospel dream -
Of course it’s an impossible dream –
·
turning sinners into saints,
·
uniting a divided Church,
·
healing a broken world –
Quite beyond us
–
As impossible as…
…. turning water into wine??
But then, maybe the age of miracles is
not past!
Don’t
forget that all Jesus needed
was for people to go to the well
and bring back 180 gallons of water to fill the jars –
even miracles need hard work –
And
that’s why in every generation Mary says:
“So
you want a miracle? – well do as he bids you”
·
Fill the jars with water
·
Offer what ordinary stuff you’ve got
And then don’t then underestimate
what the Lord can do with your offering -
He who could
transform,
spit and dirt
into new sight,
troubled sea
into a pathway,
common water
into wedding wine
Who
is to say what he could not do with the
“shallow
murky polluted stagnant sour..waters of my life?”
(Tom
Lane)
Well,
let us offer Christ our water jar –
for it is the stuff of miracles!
And
then perhaps here on earth we might see
just a glimpse of great party to come –
Rich
and poor,
young and old,
straight and gay,
Methodist and Presbyterian,
Catholic and Protestant,
Moslem and Christian,
English and French,
Taiwanese and Malaysian,
South Korean and North Korean,
Sinner and Saint -
“Let every soul be Jesu’s guest –
you need not one be left behind,
for God has bidden all mankind”
(Charles Wesley).
This is the feast of heaven –
Which Christ would have us begin on
earth.
I leave you with this last thought.
In the 4th Century,
a man calculated the amount of water turned into wine at Cana –
180 gallons -
and presented his estimate to St. Jerome.
He asked the great Saint a question –
”Did the guests at Cana drink all that wine?”
Jerome quite wisely responded,
”No, they did not drink it all - we are drinking it still.”
So may it ever be!