GOD'S PRESENCE IS LIKE A GREAT WINE
A sermon by Rev. Dr. Jack E. Skiles

January 17, 2010

John 2:1-11 and 1 Corinthians 12:1-11

There is no easy starting spot this morning other than to start where our hearts and minds and souls are lingering as we ponder the recent earthquake in Haiti, the result of the movement of overlapping tectonic plates in that region of our world. The quake has killed fifty thousand or more people and left two or three million people in even more appalling living conditions than they were in before the event. Haiti is the poorest nation in the western hemisphere.

I joined most of you in being appalled as Pat Robertson of the 700 Club concluded on his national television program that the quake occurred because the Haitian people had made a pact with the devil in order to escape colonial oppression from the French government over a hundred years ago. Darn those Haitians—making a political move to escape the oppression of colonlalism the way we in the United States did!

I was watching the Rachel Maddow show when she showed the clip of Pat Robertson declaring the Haitians' partnership with the Devil as what caused the earth to quake. Her next guest was the Haitian Ambassodor to the United States who sadly mistook the show's sarcasm toward Pat Robertson as a statement of all Americans' agreement with Robertson. Sarcasm in the face of tragedy is a poor partner, when shock and grief is so great.

It remains a challenge for you and for me—this reality that the world's exposure to Christianity mainly happens over cable television and radio and that there is scarcely a voice of religious moderation offering (sometimes quite excellent) religious alternatives other than the likes of us. Religious education of the masses has been conceded in the past thirty years to religious and socially conservative efforts that have hindered the development of a religious social consciousness of diversity. We need to challenge ourselves to let our voices be heard humbly and strongly over the radio and television markets, and to let a larger segment of our world know that there are alternative religious ways to view the movement of the earth rather than as an act of the devil. Vast numbers of people do not know the alternatives that are available to them and we must be about teaching the Good News of Jesus Christ, not the Bad News of Pat Robertson.

Let us ponder the Good News of Jesus in the face of the horrible tragedy working itself out in Haiti. Jesus said, “Fill the jars with water and take the jar over to the master of the banquet. And when the master of the banquet took a drink he was greatly astonished because the water had become wine," not just some cheap Gallo jug wine, but some of the finest wine ever tasted. People at the wedding banquet had been getting a bit testy because they knew the wine supply had been running low, but now there was more than could ever be drunk by that gathered crowd. It was a party!

I was not around, I hope it is obvious, during the years in this country called Prohibition. During those years alcohol consumption became illegal in the United States. What did they do with this text from John's Gospel? As a bit of trivia, you might find it interesting to know that prior to prohibition nearly all churches served wine at communion, even Baptist churches. The government ruled during prohibition that consumption of small amounts of wine for sacramental purposes was allowable, but many Protestant churches switched to grape juice during Prohibition and then simply did not change back to alcohol after that short period of social manipulation.

I hope this little history lesson is not the one thing you remember from today's sermon. What is worth remembering is that John's story from his second chapter, about Jesus bringing copious amounts of the greatest wine ever created to a wedding party, is how John understood the inbreaking of God, the Epiphany of God, the wonderful flowing presence of God in our world in the person of and in the community that follows the ways of Jesus.

Marcus Borg and others in the professional study of biblical literature are saying to us this morning: please do not read the details of this story with a literalistic mind set. Darn it. The story is not about Jesus actually turning water into wine. Wine making is a well established food and drink art form. John is talking metaphorically, in story form, in exaggerated tones perhaps. John is at the beginning of his story about Jesus. He is painting a word picture at the beginning that he intends to be that which everything else in the long story refers back to. John is using religious creative license to tell a marvelous truth about the intimacy that God knows with God's people, and how that intimacy produces an abundance of good things.

This picture of the wedding feast was first written for and preached to folks whose lives were very much like the Haitians who are this morning huddled in pain, living in fear, having little but the clothes on their backs, hungry and finding the world to be most inhospitable. John's target audience was the same as was Jesus'.

John and Jesus wanted the poorest of the poor, those benefiting least from the best the world order has to offer, those living in parts of the world accustomed to earthquakes, volcanos and political instability as those things you can most count on. John's Gospel message is this: God loves you intimately like the love between lovers on their wedding day. God loves you with an abundance that is to be compared with all the stinky water that is not safe to drink being turned into the most rich, most tasty wine that one has ever dreamed of being served.

As in Haiti, in the ancient world, water most often was not fit to drink and certainly not water that had been sitting around in stone jugs. Those jugs were for ceremonial washing, not drinking. Ceremonial water washing jugs would be at the door of every ancient home. When a week-long wedding party was planned you can bet that these huge jugs would be present. Probably the jugs of the size mentioned in today's Scripture reading would be communal property. In our world they would be included in things that you would rent for the party. They would move from event to event. In fact, the host of the party would not in a reasonable state of mind take a drink out of one those jugs of water. You would most likely get sick from it. But, we remember that this is not a story to literalize, but an invitation to join in the largesse, through the wonderfully symbolism of the items mentioned by John.

Remember Pat Robertson of the 700 Club? He has another place in this morning's story. The gospel writer John is many things, one of which is anti-Semitic. He says some horrible things about “The Jews” over and over again. He even goes so far as to call the Jews “children of the devil” (8:44) and says that like the Haitians, the Jews have made a pact with the Devil. One can be biblically sound and be suggestive of some great evil all at the same time.

So much of the anti-Semitism that gave rise to Hitler's Nazi party and the wholesale slaughter of some 6 million Jews during the Second World War found its biblical roots in John's labeling of “the Jews” as being in cahoots with the Devil. Each generation of us must re-teach the lessons learned when we fail to be critical readers of our holy literature.

It makes little difference that John was using rhetoric that would have easily been understood in the 1st century. John was fighting within a synagogue and felt very comfortable referring to those sitting on this side of the sanctuary as “the Jews” because those on the other side of the sanctuary were “the other Jews.” Christianity did not exist as such and so he was not drawing the sorts of distinctions that we make today between us and those Jews just east of here at Beth Shalom.

Anti-Semitism is an ugly and current blight within Christianity; we must always be quick to identify and confess it, and to give witness to how inappropriate it was and remains. Jesus was a very proud Jewish person and would be horrified if those who follow his way were continuing to pervert his way against his very race and religion. I don't think that Robertson is in cahoots with the devil by his willingness to continue to call others to judge a people such as Haitians and Jews as those who have made deals with devil; but Robertson's action and labeling are surely an evil that must be called out by each of us as a horrible distortion of the Prince of Peace.

Briefly, let's bother ourselves to be uncomfortable just a little bit more. This text this morning speaks loudly of God's abundance to the world. Jesus turns a lot of water into a lot of wine. Using the specifics of the story, the wedding party ends up with 120 gallons of the finest available.

As men and women of faith and abundance, how do we interpret this for our lives in the face of so many in our very own culture who are suffering true and oftentimes dire amounts of severe economic scarcity. Do we dare sit down to our tables at lunch and eat ourselves full while three million of our neighbors are in desperate need of a mere drink of water? And, of course, the issue is not just this day, but every day in a world that has 7.2 billion people, the vast majority of whom are desperately poor.

Our world has an amazing abundance of things and food and very good drinking water. You and I live in a nation and a culture that has an abundance of abundance. Too often having an abundance of stuff is easily defined as a blessing from God. It is what God intended and we say, “How blessed we are” as a way of suggesting that God wanted us to have everything we have, we deserve all that we have.

Imagine with me this beautiful picture of God's epiphany, God's inbreaking. Imagine the picture of Jesus showing up at a wedding and giving a blessing of the very institution of marriage and as a gift showering it with more wine that five wedding receptions could imbibe. Now see this picture of God's abundance being being drawn out to 3 million desperately hungry and thirsty Haitians whose very world has been rocked by despair. That is the group that Jesus and John were writing and teaching to, not our types.

Jesus and John were saying to the poorest of the poor: this is how much God values and loves you. This is how much this world has to offer you and those who in relationship with this God of abundance should be about sharing the abundance as God does, fully, completely, wantonly, wastefully and without counting the cost.

This is the Jesus who starts with a crowd of five or six thousand people who begin by confessing that the best they can come up with is five loaves and two fishes, and they end up discovering that if we with abundance share, we have not only enough, but we have enough with leftovers. We need to more seriously struggle with how we share our abundance. We who, as a nation, produce more food than we can eat, still have failed to adequately share.

Reinhold Niebuhr once made a similar point about love, in the context of the persistently selfish characteristic of human existence. Love, he urged, is the law of life, deeply embedded in human nature. The trouble is that we rarely encounter love at full strength, it is always compromised and curtailed by self interest.

We encountered God's abundant love fully in the person of Jesus, the Christ whose ways we seek to emulate on our best days. We are called to love selflessly even though it never comes easy for us. Perhaps it shouldn't be easy. But, the call of God is for God's love in us to pull us forward transformationally.

In the face of scarcity, living with the images of tragedy, let's allow the suffering ones to help us realize that this not God's intention. Things are not really as they should be and it is our job to move our world, our part of the world at least, one step closer to the image of the world that God is dreaming for it to become. A couple hundred people taking our jobs seriously can make one whale of difference.

I love that statement by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin that “Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.”

Let us live out the abundance of God's love through our lives.

Amen