Sermon for Jan. 16, 2022
John 2:1-11
On a first hearing, today’s Gospel reading
can sound like divine comedy, with that business between Jesus and Mary. It’s fun to imagine Mary as a pushy stage
mother, sending her kid out into the spotlight before he’s ready and telling
the musician to start playing his audition song anyway. But the theology of John’s Gospel doesn’t support
that. In John, Jesus is always cool,
always in control, whether he’s confronting his mother or confronting Pontius
Pilate. So, what do we make of Jesus telling
Mary that “my hour has not yet come” (2:4) but then going ahead and performing a
miracle anyway?
Well, Jesus never says he isn’t ready
to perform a miracle. He says, “My hour
has not yet come,” that the time is not at hand. That makes some sense if we remember where
this miracle of the good wine comes in the larger Gospel story, as John tells
it. Jesus is literally a few days into
his public ministry. So far, John the Baptist
has named him as the “Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world” (John
1:29). The next day, Jesus invites Andrew
and a couple of friends to “come and see” what he’s doing (1:39); and Andrew gets
his brother Peter, too. The next day,
Jesus calls Philip and Nathanael to follow along.
And on the next day, we come to this
morning’s story, with Jesus, Mary, and the handful of new recruits going to a
wedding. Given that setting, a public miracle
would’ve come out of nowhere; the wedding guests would’ve had no context for it. They might have honored Jesus as a magician, but
they wouldn’t have understood what the miracle meant.
So, the time may not have been ripe for a
public sign, but Jesus does see an opportunity to bless the wedding’s host by
opening the bar back up. And, more important,
he sees the opportunity to give a sign to his new friends, this handful of
followers who, in the past three days, have already named him as “Messiah”
(1:41) and “King of Israel” (1:49) and “Son of God” (1:49). It’s for them he’s working wonders
here. This first sign of Jesus bringing
God’s glory to earth is a private showing for those who’ll eventually share God’s
glory with others themselves.
Well, if you fast-forward to today, you’ll
find that we’re Andrew and Peter and Philip and Nathanael. We’re the ones who’ve noticed something special
in this Jesus guy and followed along to see some more. And what do we see in his first miracle? I think it’s the same thing we see in all his
works and in all his words, for that matter: that in Jesus, heaven and earth
connect – that in his reality, abundance displaces scarcity as the paradigm of
human life, that perfect love casts out fear.
Even though the wedding guests are already a few drinks into the
evening, hundreds of gallons of good wine still await them. The best is yet to come … and the best is right
there, beside you, just waiting to be tapped.
We find ourselves this morning in the Martin
Luther King Jr. holiday weekend. What do
we see when we look at Dr. King? I think
we see him based on the agendas we already bring with us. Fifty-four years after his assassination, Dr.
King becomes … whoever we need him to be. For those who seek the pragmatism of
progress, we remember his lesson that “we must learn to live together as brothers
or perish together as fools.”1 For those who
look toward the healing of our deep divisions, we remember his vision of the
day “when all of God’s children … will be able to join hands and sing…, ‘Free
at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, we are free at last.”2 And for those
on the short end of the disparities between Americans of color and Americans of
European descent, we remember that Dr. King’s dream was for concrete, daily justice
on a broad scale – justice in pay, and voting, and policing, and education. Dr. King was a contemporary prophet, the Amos
or Micah or Hosea of his day, arguing that until the plumb line of opportunity hangs
straight, our society doesn’t reflect the reign and rule of God. It’s easy for
someone in my social location to forget that Dr. King was shot not while
waxing poetic about freedom but while leading garbage collectors to march for
higher pay.
And for someone in my specific social
location, it’s easy to forget that Dr. King’s literary masterpiece, his “Letter
from Birmingham Jail,” was written to me.
That letter argues that the time for justice is now, not later; and it was
addressed to a group of white, middle-aged, middle-of-the-road pastors of mainline
denominations. If I’d been serving the
Episcopal church in Birmingham in 1963, I like to think I’d have been
out marching with Dr. King, following the drum major for justice. But I know myself better than that. I’d have been up here, arguing that we all
need to listen to each other and ask the Holy Spirit to lead us into all truth. I wouldn’t have been wrong in saying
that. But I wouldn’t have been right enough,
either. As Dr. King wrote in that letter
to the moderate white clergy in Birmingham, waiting is not a neutral act. Waiting is a tool of injustice. “Human progress never rolls in on wheels of
inevitability,” Dr. King wrote. “It
comes through the tireless efforts of [people] willing to be co-workers with
God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of
social stagnation. We must use time
creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.”3
Does that mean we all have to be out there
marching for the justice issue du jour?
I don’t think so because we aren’t all wired the same way. Some of us are marchers, and those who are should
march. But some of us are wired more for
personal relationship and the transformation it can bring. Some of us seek justice by teaching young adults
to be entrepreneurs. Some of us seek
justice by helping kids learn to read. Some
of us seek justice by welcoming refugees into our community. Some of us seek justice by feeding hungry
people alongside church folks from the other side of Troost. Some of us seek justice by mentoring moms who
have kids at Operation Breakthrough. Some
of us seek justice by providing food and building relationships with families Benjamin
Banneker Elementary.
Of course, we don’t always get to see broad
change from efforts like these, just as we don’t always get to see broad change
from marches in the streets. But you
know, this past week, we saw something that I’ll bet some of us never
expected. The Kansas City Missouri
School District is fully accredited again. I think that’s a remarkable thing, and I can
only imagine how it seems to those of you with much longer memories of the
school district than mine. Now, did that
accreditation come directly from any of the work I just named? No.
But ask yourself: Does it
improve the likelihood of educational success at Banneker Elementary School if
families there have an easier time putting food on the table and if they know someone
on the west side actually cares whether they can put food on the
table? That may be a small step, but it’s
a step toward justice.
To me, and maybe to God’s prophets, it’s
the intention guiding your action that matters, the goal you’re working to
achieve. God gave the prophet Amos a vision
of heaven on earth, a vision of God’s justice amid the inequity of ancient
Israel; and what Amos saw was that plumb line – the tool for gauging whether
our world aligns with God’s intentions for it.
I think God asks us to ask ourselves the same question: Does the world in which we live align with God’s
intention of opportunity for all, and are my actions helping to bring God’s
dream alive?
The thing about justice is that it can be scary for people like me. That’s why Dr. King wrote his letter to people like me – good people, kind people, frightened people. If you presently have opportunity, and someone else also seeks opportunity, it’s a normal but broken human response to figure the other person’s opportunity must come at your expense. But Jesus shows us something vastly different in our Gospel reading today. The glory of God is not a zero-sum game. The glory of God is revealed not simply by taking something from someone else; the glory of God is revealed in the abundance of blessing that we didn’t even realize was there to tap. But we do have to tap it. Those hundreds of gallons of good wine don’t do anybody any good if they just sit there in clay jars – or, worse, if we hoard them for ourselves. We are the stewards of God’s feast. The good wine of blessing has been given into our care. With whatever tools we have, with whatever gifts we’ve been given, with whatever wiring empowers us, we’ve got to tap God’s abundance because all those sitting at the banquet table deserve to drink the same thing – the good wine of opportunity.
1.
King,
Martin Luther Jr. Speech at St
Louis, March 22, 1964, reported in St Louis Post-Dispatch, March
23, 1964. Cited by Oxford Reference and available at: https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780191843730.001.0001/q-oro-ed5-00006293.
Accessed Jan. 13, 2022.
2.
King, Martin Luther Jr. “‘I Have a Dream Speech,’
in its Entirety.” National Public Radio.
Available at: https://www.npr.org/2010/01/18/122701268/i-have-a-dream-speech-in-its-entirety. Accessed Jan. 13, 2022.
3.
King,
Martin Luther, Jr. “Letter from a Birmingham
Jail.” April 16, 1963. African Studies
Center, University of Pennsylvania. Available at: https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html. Accessed Jan. 13, 2022.
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