1-20-19 Readings & Sermon

A reading from Isaiah.

For Zion's sake I will not keep silent, and for Jerusalem's sake I will not rest until her vindication shines out like the dawn and her salvation like a burning torch.

The nation shall see your vindication and all the kings your glory.

And you shall be called by a new name that the mouth of the Lord will give.

You shall be crown of beauty in the land, hand of the Lord, and a royal diadem in the hand of your God.

You shall no more be termed forsaken, and your land shall no more be termed desolate.

But you shall be called, my delight is in her, and your land married.

For the Lord delights in you, and your land shall be married.

For as a young man marries a young woman, you shall be, so shall your builder marry you.

And as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, you shall your God rejoice over you.

The word of the Lord.

A reading from uh excuse me, readings from the first Sunday after Epiphany, we shall read responsibly by the happy verse.

Your love, O Lord, reaches to the heavens.

Your righteousness is like the strong mountains, your justice like the great deep.

How priceless is your love, O God.

They feast upon the abundance of your house.

For with you is the well of life.

Continue your loving kindness to those who know you.

A reading from 1 Corinthians.

Now, concerning spiritual gifts, brothers and sisters, I do not want you to be uninformed.

You know that when you were pagans, you were enticed and led astray to idols that could not speak.

Therefore, I want you to understand that no one speaking by the Spirit of God ever says, Let Jesus be cursed.

And no one can say, Jesus is Lord, except by the Holy Spirit.

Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit, and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord, and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them and everyone.

To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.

To one is given the spirit of the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same spirit, and by another faith by the same spirit, and to other gifts of healing by the one spirit, and to another the working of miracles, and to another prophecy, and to another the discernment of spirits, and to other various kinds of tongues, and to another the interpretation of tongues.

All these are activated by the same spirit, who allots to each individually just as the Spirit chooses the word of the Lord.

The holy gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, according to John.

On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of 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 to me?

My hour has 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 up 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 good 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.

The gospel of the Lord.

Welcome again to the third Sunday of Epiphany.

And just as a reminder, not to bore you, but Epiphanies are not moments where we discover the next best home brew or way you can barrel age some regular commodity and make it taste different.

Epiphanies are moments that essentially are irreversible.

They change the lens with which we see and interact with the world, and they change them for the better.

That is, we start to see the light of God in places we had not seen it before, and we'll always see from here on out.

So reminder, our first epiphany was a bunch of magicians finding the Christ child through astrology.

And last week we talked about the epiphany of Jesus being baptized and how that changed the trajectory of his own life.

And of course, as we hear about these epiphanies, we're invited into our own.

Today, today the epiphany happens at a wedding.

And curiously enough, there's really only two weddings described in the Bible.

I don't know if you know this.

The first one is sort of a tragedy.

It's the one that describes how it is that Jacob married a woman he did not love named Leah.

The way that worked is Leah's dad wanted to marry Leah off ahead of her sister, who Jacob loved Rachel, so he wrapped her in a veil.

And Jacob did not think to open the veil, and the next day, what do you know, he'd married Leah.

This is the reason why we now unveil people at the wedding to make sure we're marrying the right one.

Really, the story, it's there in the Bible.

That's what it says.

This is the other wedding.

This is the other one.

And you don't even really get to hear about the ceremony.

There's no stepping on a glass.

Of course, that didn't happen until after the first century.

Um, we don't get to hear any descriptions except there's supposed to be a lot of wine.

Now I want you to know, having grown up in the evangelical church, I was taught that wine was bad because it could lead to dancing.

So um, when we heard this story, we knew that this wasn't really wine.

It was like purifying the dirty water because you couldn't drink that.

That is fooie.

I just want to let you know this is wine because please notice the steward says something about being drunk.

Did you see that?

And and water won't do that to you unless it's really full of microbes.

Um okay, so it's supposed to be a huge celebration, and then there's this really interesting interchange between Jesus and his mother.

Mother says, they have no wine.

Jesus says, Oi, they, mama, I'm not ready to do a miracle, and then here goes mom.

Do whatever he tells you.

That kind of passive-aggressive mothering is uh the sort I grew up with as well, and it's pretty delightful.

I still remember one time uh I was about 20, I don't know why I was discussing what I was bringing back to college with my mom, but I guess I did.

And I somehow it came out I was bringing one towel.

My mother insisted I bring four towels.

I said, No, thank you very much.

I will just do the one.

A few minutes later, my mom says, Oh, fine, just bring your one towel.

I was leaving at three in the morning.

She knew that.

I got up at three in the morning.

I drove eight hours.

When I got there, I found four towels in the car.

That is because my mother at one in the morning set her alarm so that she could surreptitiously cram three additional towels in an inconspicuous place in my car.

Mary acts like that.

Now it's quite interesting, isn't it, that she basically, by asking her son to do a favor in public, gets Jesus to do something that according to the scriptures, he otherwise would not have done.

And it sort of reminds me, you know, particularly when I was a teenager, about daring each other to do stuff.

You ever dare somebody to do something or get dared to do something?

Usually we dare each other to do things that are really stupid, and I just want to be very clear about that.

I dare you to eat that cupcake that's been on the floor since yesterday.

Oh, you dare me?

Then I will.

What a waste of our adolescence and friendships to do such foolish things.

Maybe the story reminds us that as good friends, we should dare one another to do things that profit the community.

I dare you to serve breakfast at Lord of the Streets one day this year.

What if we did that?

That's a good takeaway.

If you get nothing else, dare people, not to do dumb things, but to do big-hearted things.

That's the lesson of Mary.

And Jesus takes him up, maybe because she dares him in front of all of his friends.

So, see, that's a good way to do it, right?

Dare people in front of their friends to do right.

Um, that's not all I want to talk about there today.

I want to talk about this wedding and this interesting thing that happens.

So, you know, back then, as opposed to now, I should say this happens sometimes.

I've done a few destination weddings.

Anybody ever done one of these?

Where you fly somewhere like Bar Harbor in Maine and you spend not just the day there, you spend three or four days there, right?

So the celebration stretches out.

It really is a great way to do a wedding if you've got the time.

That's how people did it in the ancient times.

Weddings lasted several days.

And so you needed, well, a lot of wine.

And it's here they are at this wedding and the wine's given out, which sort of means at the time the party is over.

And it's not just a little bit of a downer, it's that this is the potential to humiliate the new couple and their family.

It would be like you guys having a dinner party at your home for a hundred people and putting out one bowl of mixed nuts.

It would be the most tragic of dinner parties for that reason.

People might come and be very polite to you, as good southerners can do, but I bet you they would bless your heart.

And I think that is exactly what's going to happen here.

And Mary says, Jesus, we can't have hearts blessed.

We've got to turn, we're gonna do something.

And Jesus does something very interesting, and I'm gonna tell you, I don't think you can completely understand this unless you know about cooties.

So this is lost on the current generation I found out in chapel on Thursday.

Cooties, what are they?

Um, I think there's something like girl germs.

Do you remember this?

Now you know that um there's this arcane ritual for making sure you don't get the cooties, but once you get them, how do you get rid of the cooties?

There's really no getting rid of them.

Instead, there's just the circle, circle, dot, dot.

Now I got my cooti shot.

Do you know about this?

There's cooti preventatives out there, but there are really no good cooti cures.

And once again, once you have them, well, you could spread them quite easily.

I mean, cooties are a communicable disease.

And so are Jewish purification rituals.

And keep in mind, the water is for that.

You might be thinking, no, Mike, that's for washing your hands.

Well, yes and no.

Really, that purification rite is for getting rid of any cooties.

Because cudified people could not, in fact, stand before the Lord and offer sacrifices.

And even worse, cudified people were threats of cudification.

How did you get cooties?

There were many, many ways.

You could touch a dead body, you could be a woman, you could touch a woman, you could be near a woman, um, a woman's shadow could fall upon you, or so could one of the Goyim, one of the Gentiles.

Their shadow could fall upon you, and you might just be cudified, which meant you had better wash off the cooties.

So there's these jars for washing off the cooties, they're ritual jars.

Did you hear?

They hold like 20 to 30 gallons of water.

They actually hold 50 gallons.

They're like 50-gallon drums.

Why would you only put 20 or 30 gallons in so you can get in them?

And wash off the cooties.

It's the cooti wash.

This is what you do.

Now, there are so many cooties out there that people did the cooti wash up to five times a day, sometimes even more.

From a public health standpoint.

Many people have done the cooti wash.

Let's be honest.

You get into the cooti water to wash your cooties off, it's likely you'll get extra ones.

But they didn't think of it that way.

This was ritual washing.

And Jesus says, fill up the cooti bins with some water.

Now, they got water from wells, and let me tell you, to fill a 50-gallon drum with some water required many, many trips to the well.

And Jesus says something really interesting to the people that probably made them think he was one of the biggest reasons the wine had given out.

Draw some of that cootie wash water and take it to the steward.

The modern equivalent would be if Jesus had turned toilet water into wine, and every time he flushed, more wine came out.

Now, you don't know that.

And here comes a ladle of formerly cootie water.

I mean, the servants have to be cracking up about this, that Jesus is pulling some kind of prank at a wedding.

And then, interestingly enough, the steward drinks this and says, boy, like you have saved the best wine.

I mean, what were they thinking?

Mike, that's irreverent, but it's true.

It's true.

And I want to tell you, I think that might actually be the epiphany that we're offered today.

And um, you know, I didn't talk about this a lot, but again, this is one of the two times that we get to hear a marriage story, and actually we won't hear this story again for three more years.

So I want to talk about marriage just a little bit, if that's okay.

Um, if it's not, I'm going to do it anyway.

Um the wine gave out, and then all they had left were some empty jars for doing some cooti or ritual washing.

I tell every couple who comes to me, and I'm positive this is right, that if all we have in our relationship or our feelings, that wine gives out in about two years.

And if you've got nothing left, you've got two choices.

You're not gonna make it or you're gonna live parallel lives in the same house.

And I think there's an epiphany here about what love really does.

And I want to talk about it with a couple, but I think it just as well applies between a parent and a child, or a child and a parent, or siblings, or true friends, is that something interesting really happens that can get us past those two years of just feelings alone.

And that is we cease to love one another in spite of our flaws, and we start to love one another because of them.

There are things about my spouse that I decided early on I would just put up with because they were annoying.

Now, she did not have to do this with me, of course.

I had nothing that you had to put up with.

And I knew this was part of the deal.

Nobody's perfect, so you just put up with.

And you know, um, she probably knew that too.

Uh what's been nice though is to see that some of those nuisance things, when I stopped and considered what they meant, were no longer things I wanted to wash away, but became things that I could celebrate in our relationship.

My spouse really likes to have a clean house.

And I really like to clean.

And there are times when she puts things down.

Some people might call that cluttering.

I've always been really confused by this behavior.

Wanting the clean house, with putting things places.

Surely that's a clue I'm supposed to pick them up.

No, instead actually it reveals a value.

We can pick those things up later, but instead of spending the time immediately to pick up at the end of the workday, the invitation is to spend time together.

And so that little habit that I used to find so cudified.

Actually, I saw in that the opportunity to drink some very fine wine and to see that my wife more than anything wants time with me.

When I drink from the water, it's fine wine.

But when I judge the water, it's just something else I wish I could wash away.

I've got my own foibles.

Uh much worse than that.

And of course, you know, there's this decision in marriage, and we know this mathematically, that there is really no amount of things working out that proves something.

You know how many times it takes to prove a rule to the infinite, and how many counterexamples does it take to disprove a rule.

Just one.

Just one.

I'll tell you for me, I can choose to look at my own habits that I know must be obnoxious and be afraid that my spouse wants me to wash those away.

Or I can trust that her love for me is sometimes bigger than my own, that she loves me not in spite of my ticks and habits, but she actually loves me because of them.

And when I do that, I get to drink some fine wine.

We get to celebrate it together.

This kind of love, I think, is not limited to spousal love, but I will tell you, having grown into that love with my spouse certainly allows me to imagine having it for other people.

I'm just going to be very honest with you.

There are people in my life, some of whom I'm related to, that I've always wondered what it is they're thinking.

I would really like to know why they did that terrible thing.

If I could know why, then I could correct them.

There are people in my life who I don't actually approach with wonder at how they've chosen something different from myself.

I've approached them with purification water so that I can engineer their cleansing and change them to become disciples of me.

The world would be a better place.

My world would be anyway.

And I wonder if this isn't an invitation, actually, instead of saying, golly, you know, Mary, what an annoying way to get in to engage Jesus, to say, what an effective way to engage Jesus.

And Mary, I love you for that.

I wonder if this isn't an invitation for us when we find ourselves wondering what somebody's thinking so we can correct them to step back and say, What if just wondered what they were thinking?

What if I just wondered?

What they were thinking so that I could love them.

When I wonder what they're thinking so that I can correct them, at best I'm loving me, but not even really.

Am I so threatened by somebody's difference?

So threatened that I have to change it.

I wonder if this isn't our opportunity to thinking about epiphanies.

We get to hear this bit, I think, about spiritual gifts.

And I don't know if you've done this before, but I grew up in congregations and in youth groups, etc., where we took very detailed spiritual gift inventories.

Anybody ever done that?

Spiritual gift inventory?

It was so we could know what our spiritual gift was and then we could use it.

I was really disappointed to see that criticism is not listed because I'm extremely gifted at that.

And uh, neither is condemnation or judgment or um sarcasm.

I think Paul must have left these now on accident.

I did these inventories as a kid, you know, and I've always thought about these things as works of power, like healing people, like saying, get up on your hospital bed, and um, you know, discerning spirits, knowing when I was hearing the voice of an angel or the devil.

And then as I've grown up, I've become increasingly kind of afraid of those manifestations, to be honest with you, because I don't really know how that works.

And I was sitting here today, this didn't happen to me at 8:30.

This is the great thing about scripture.

Almost every time you hear it, if you're willing to open yourself, you might hear it in a different way.

And I heard a couple of things differently just now.

And one is that these gifts don't belong to you or me.

They don't.

They belong to the spirit.

So if you think you have a spiritual gift, you're wrong.

God has gifts and God gives them to you, and they belong to God.

And uh the other thing that's interesting is that uh they exist to build up the body.

And the spirit chooses.

And how interesting in my marriage when I think I function one way.

You know, again, one of the gifts of marriage, I'm headed up to 15 now, is to see actually that these gifts take turns.

There is something about complementarity in my life.

Now, sure.

Usually my wife's favorite recipe when she cooks is five guys.

She is able to execute that recipe, however.

She is.

She's able to do that, along with many, many other things.

Discernment of the spirits.

Sometimes that gift surprises me where my wife says, you know, Mike, that's just a bad idea.

Let's call it discernment of the spirits.

Sometimes, you know, I'm able to give the gift of healing to my wife because I'm able to sit there and just hold her.

If that's not the gift of healing, I tell you, you're missing out.

You're missing out on one of the most powerful gifts of healing, which is holding somebody.

When they're willing, of course.

Various kinds of tongues and the interpretation of tongues.

You know, one of those things that's happened as we've been married, sometimes we have to ask, are you telling me how you feel, or are you telling me what you've decided already?

Isn't that a gift of marriage to be able to ask that question to somebody?

Is that how you feel?

Do you just want to express how you feel?

Or have you found your will and you're asking me to support it?

I don't know about speaking in tongues to my wife.

I don't know.

But I do know that there are words to be spoken in various moods if I'm willing to follow God's guidance and the leadership of the Spirit.

I hope you understand what I'm saying.

And because I've come to learn this with my spouse, I think these kinds of gifts of the Spirit are hopefully more available from me than to the rest of the world.

We often live with this confused understanding that commodities are scarce.

We only have so much oil or wheat or whatever you want to say, and often that's true of commodities, but love being not a commodity actually seems to be the reverse.

The more we practice it, the more we actually have to share.

The more we love, the more we can.

Surely if you have been in love with a parent or a sibling or a spouse or a child, you have found your love grow.

And I wonder if you haven't found your openness to expressing spiritual gifts.

After all, once again, what is more spiritual than sitting with someone in the throes of grief or loss or anxiety in being with them?

I would rather have that than Benny Hinn pull me out of my hospital bed any day of the week.

Now, if Benny Hen can do it, great.

But I hope you know what I'm saying.

Sometimes we think these gifts are about metaphysical miracles, and instead we short sell that God might have spiritual miracles in mind just as well.

Spiritual miracles, sorry, that are metaphysical, somebody who's willing to go with us into our grief and sit with us, that's a miracle because it doesn't happen very often.

And hopefully, don't you see that we choose to practice that with our spouses and our kids and our parents so that we can then go out and give those spiritual gifts to the world, alongside all of the other ones that we've grown up hearing about.

Now, this is a little bit strange, I'm going to tell you.

It is.

Um.

But because we only get to do this once every three years, hear this story about marriage, and because um marriage, I think, is a lot of work.

I'm gonna be honest with you.

It's much harder than I was told as a teenager it would be.

It doesn't just take care of itself, we take care of it.

I'm gonna give us the opportunity today to reaffirm our vows.

Now, your spouse or partner may not be here, just imagine they are.

You may not have a spouse or partner, that's okay.

But I am going to invite you, if you choose to do this, to just sort of stand where you are so that we can reaffirm the vows we made to one another however long ago it was.