Sermon — January 16, 2022
The Rev. Greg Johnston
When time seemed to slow down in March 2020, some people’s kitchens slowed down too. All around the world, people with too much time on their hands tossed out their sliced bread in favor of sourdough starter. And it was the perfect solution to a very specific set of problems, helping limit the frequency of their grocery trips, giving them something to fill their time, and creating a new, socially-distant hobby of posting excitedly on Facebook when you found a store that actually had flour in stock. (Seriously, I bake bread sometimes. It was, like, six weeks before I could find flour at the grocery store. The guy at the corner store was selling it in little plastic containers.)
When these new converts would talk about how slow sourdough is but how much it was worth it, homebrewers laughed. Brewing beer and baking bread are both the responsibility of slow-working yeast, but on wildly different timelines. A good sourdough loaf takes an hour or two of mixing and kneading and a few days of fermentation. A batch of beer takes six or eight hours of mashing and six weeks to ferment and bottle; a whole quarantine’s worth of time before you can take a drink.
But when homebrewers talk about how slow beer is to make, home vintners roll their eyes. A six-week-old wine sounds like the punchline to a joke. If you want to make your own wine at home, as some of my retired relatives have done, you’ll be waiting something more like six months, at least; at the time that beer has begun to lose its carbonation and hoppy aroma, wine’s only just starting to age.
And that’s wine made from a kit. They ship you the juice. It’s nothing like real wine made from grapes growing on vines planted a generation ago in the hopes that one day the sun and the rain and the soil would all be distilled down intp the flavor and the color and the aroma of this grape, that the produce of an acre of vineyards would be painstakingly harvested and crushed into juice, strained and fermented and aged until its very terroir was captured in this Trader Joe’s box of Two-Buck Chuck. Or maybe even something nicer.
Sourdough is slow food. Beer is sluggish. Wine is positively glacial.
So you can imagine everyone’s surprise when Jesus shows up to a wedding, to which he seems by John’s account to have been invited in part as a courtesy to his mother, and, in a single instant, with a single phrase, turns 150 gallons of water into wine.
Cheers!
This story of the wedding at Cana is perfectly clear on the literal level. There’s no interesting alternative translation or important bit of historical context to understand what Jesus is doing. He’s turning a whole lot of water into a whole lot of wine, and the scope for scholarly debate has mostly revolved around exactly how big those containers really were.
It’s less clear what it’s supposed to mean. And so preachers throughout the centuries have each put their own spin on it, in ways that usually reflect the things they were already thinking about.
The fifth-century bishop Maximus of the city of Turin in Italy, for example, takes the story as an object lesson in the interrelated divine and human natures of Christ (a fifth-century concern if there ever was one): “as a man,” he writes, “he was present at the wedding, and as God he changed the water into wine.” (Sermon 23) (A classic example, by the way, of early Western Christology, which often verged on dividing Jesus’ divinity and humanity from one another.)
Later preachers, too, allegorized the story to fit their own concerns. Philip Melanchthon, who began the process of turning Martin Luther’s thought into a Lutheran theological system, interprets the story with a typical Lutheran concern for Law and Gospel, telling the story of the transformation from the plain and joyless water of the Law to the sweet, intoxicating wine of the gospel. (Commentary on John 2:1)
My favorite leader of the first generation of reformers, Martin Bucer of Strassburg, says there’s no allegory here. It’s a plain historical account, showing that Jesus asks only for our faith in his power. Jesus and Mary don’t reject marriage or celebration or even drinking a bit of wine at a wedding when the crowd’s already tipsy. And Bucer’s point could seem frivolous, were it not for the story of his own life. Like many of those first Protestant reformers, he had been raised in and taken his own vows of celibacy in a medieval Catholic church in which the everyday life of married Christians was seen as inferior to the celibate life of priests, monks, and nuns. For Bucer, by this point happily married to a former nun, Jesus’ mere presence at a wedding—Jesus’ mere affirmation that marriage could be an equally-holy calling to celibacy—was a profound spiritual comfort.
Personally, I get stuck less on the interrelationship between Christ’s humanity and divinity or between the Law and the Gospel or between marriage and celibacy and more on the surprising details of this story.
I notice first the super-abundance of it all: six water-jars’ worth of wine, each twenty or thirty gallons in volume. (John 2:6) Say 150 gallons of wine, which is about 750 of our standard bottles. Even at a huge wedding—say, three hundred adult guests—this comes out to two and a half bottles of wine per person; and that’s after they’ve drunk everything the happy couple had provided. Their cups runneth over indeed.
I notice, too, the timing. Jesus doesn’t show up to the wedding pulling a little red wagon carrying sixty-two cases of wine. He waits, until the worst moment of the night, when the guests are grumbling and the party’s winding down, and then, reluctantly, he does what his mother says, and makes some water into wine. (“Some,” I say.) And he does it in a way that goes almost unnoticed. The head waiter tastes the wine and sends for the groom, puzzled, and commends him: “Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the good wine until now.” (John 2:10) The waiter compliments the puzzled groom, and Jesus’ place in the story remains unseen.
I notice, finally, that the miracle is not one of transformation, but of revelation and sensation. Jesus tells the servants to fill the jars with water, but he utters no magic spell, no secret incantation or even prayer to turn water into wine. It’s only when the steward tastes the water that it seems to be anything but water, that it seems indeed to be wine, and good wine in fact. And it’s only the steward who ever tastes the wine, and “Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory.” (2:11) I’m left wondering whether the water ever became wine at all; or whether, in the presence of Christ, the simplest, plainest water became sweeter than the finest wine could be; whether its own glory was revealed by basking in his light.
It seems sometimes, and in some ways, that we’re living at the tail end of a wedding party in which the wine has run out. We’re tired, and we’re grumbling; the party’s over, and we need to go to bed. And at the same time, Jesus is transforming the tepid water all around us into wine, and we don’t even know. Or perhaps he is revealing that what we thought was water was wine all along, and we don’t understand. We don’t see his Holy Spirit in the beautiful moments we have with one another and with God. We call over the bridegroom and thank him for his generosity, while Jesus stands hidden to the side. In every blessing, in every moment of sweetness, in every drop of metaphorical wine, the power of God’s love is being revealed all around us, right before our very eyes. And those blessings are not just the dregs of a party past, but new wine, gallons and gallons of it, all around us, even now
God, give us eyes to see, and noses to smell, and mouths to taste the good things you are doing all around us; give us the grace to see your place in our lives, and to thank you for it; give us the hearts to love one another and share the abundance of your gifts with one another, as you have poured them out on us; that your glory may be revealed in us and all the world; through Jesus Christ, the King of Glory. Amen.