Second Sunday after Epiphany
1 Corinthians 12:1-11 and John 2:1-11
January 19, 2025
Rev. Amy P. McCullough, PhD
My brother and sister-in-law held their wedding in early June at a ranch in Montana, my sister-in-law’s home state. They planned a late afternoon, outdoor ceremony, with the Rocky Mountains as a backdrop. Like many couples, they worked hard: invitations, caterers, music, decorations, a tent for the meal and dancing. The guests arrived. The families were assembled to enter. Just as the wedding was about to begin, a thunder storm rolled across the sky, unleashing a torrent of rain, wind, and hail. Golf-sized balls of hail. The wind gusts grew so strong the tent started swaying, necessitating an emergency repair of its stakes. Eventually the storm blew through, the skies lightened, and the wedding began. But there was a moment when it felt as if disaster reigned. It appeared all the planning, all the work, all the expectations would be lost to the ferocious storm.
Weddings bring together families, friends, and individuals from various eras of our lives, creating for a moment this unique community. Weddings take planning and hold within them the impulse to splurge. Weddings stir up the deepest of emotions. Our attention might get diverted to the table linens, flower arrangements, the programs or the D.J., but underneath something deeper is happening. This is the person with whom I pledge to share my life, couples say to one another. This is my child, whom I’ve loved, worried about, worked to provide for, and whom I now watch make this commitment. Piled into the space are hopes, dreams, and histories. Added along are trust, and risk and love. No wonder we want a celebration big enough to hold it all.
Jesus was at a wedding. In biblical times, a wedding was a seven-day affair, held at the groom’s family home. Seven days of feasting, reminiscing, and dancing. The Son of God is immersed in an earthly event; enjoying the activities of toasting a new couple, eating dinner next to his mother, catching up with old friends. While he was there, the wine ran out. Having the wedding’s refreshment disappear meant the hosts could not provide proper hospitality. It was an embarrassment; a moment when all the planning, preparations, all the work appear to be at risk of being wiped away. The wine jars are emptied. Jesus’s mother notices it first. “Oh my goodness,” we hear her say to Jesus. “There is no wine. Can you do something?”
At first, it seems Jesus is reluctant to do anything. But whether it is the nudge of his mother, or the stirrings of his heart, or his own desire to keep the party going, eventually he acts. Jesus finds some empty vessels, usually intended for hand washing, has the servants fill them and then taste. Water has been made into wine. Not just any wine, but the very best wine. Not just a little wine, but gallons upon gallons of wine, enough for this wedding and all the ones that come after it. 180 gallons of wine in total, which translates to 900+ bottles. This is a miracle of hospitality, moment of extravagant abundance. The wedding has been rescued from disaster. The party can continue.
Jesus has come to a wedding and what are we to make of it? A wedding is a place where our hopes, dreams, and deepest desire are stirred, where our love, our past, and our future all come together, surrounded by others in God’s great human family. In scripture, a wedding stands in as a metaphor for the place where heaven meets earth. A wedding symbolizes that future moment when all of our hopes for God’s fullest presence are realized, a time when our love is overrun by God’s love, and the extravagant grace of God’s best intentions rushes through to redeem us all. Jesus comes to a wedding, writes John, and we should hear; Jesus enters a moment when God’s possibility meets our human struggles. When Isaac marries Rebekah, the promise of God’s future is renewed for another generation. When Hosea laments his irresponsible wife, the unfaithfulness piercing his heart represents our addiction to wandering ways. A wedding is a time when God’s dreams for us meet our promise to live as God’s people, at the altar where holy promise overtakes our costly mistakes. Jesus came to a wedding. Jesus steps up to repair the damage. Jesus keeps the celebration moving, the great dance between God’s grace and our longings.
So when the wine runs out, the problem is not just the lack of refreshment. It is not just the embarrassment of failing to provide for one’s guests. It is a dangerous moment when a crack appears along the faithful path, when we wonder if all our planning, all of our hoping, all of our work to bring God’s good kingdom is at risk of being blown away like the storm running through that Montana afternoon. What if we cannot sustain the good life God has promised? What if God’s just kin-dom, God’s life of mercy and joy and peace has also been emptied? What if dreaming God’s dream is but a fool’s errand?
Jesus comes to a wedding. Jesus enters the earthliness of life’s celebrations. When the wine runs out, Jesus refills the jars with the very best of refreshment. John’s gospel gives us this miracle as a sign of Christ’s glory, hoping we might see anew God’s deepest reality, dwelling here amongst us, a party of peace buried within our struggle. Jesus turns water into wine. Hopefully we make a connection to the moments in our lives when the wine ran out of us, so to speak, when our spirits were empty, our hospitality faltered, when the rupture happened between our faith and the world’s stark realities. The human-supply line is depleted, but God steps in with better refreshment, with a drink that renews the celebration. As Samuel Wells says, “this is a story about how our inadequacy is transformed by God’s generosity.”
We need this transformation, for we dwell in a time when the inadequacy of our planning, the limits of our efforts, the real failures of our commitments to one another have been uncovered. Anywhere you look there is profound human suffering. The abundance of Jesus’s miracle refilling seems almost offensive next to the hunger of Gaza, Yemen, or Baltimore’s food deserts. The notion of a party seems outrageous next to the drone strikes in Ukraine and Russia, the rebuilding needed in Syria, the fearsome living without a safety net in our country. But what if the abundance revealed in Jesus is given as a message of encouragement; a symbol of the hope to which we have been called? What if the overflowing jars tell us, gently, God’s grace is ever-abundant? To reassure us the wine of God’s good tomorrow can flow in us and through us to water the parched lives all around us?
In his acceptance speech upon winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, Martin Luther King Jr. noted the irony of accepting a prize for peace while his African American brothers and sisters were being brutalized, discriminated against, and imprisoned by poverty. As he began his speech, he spoke of houses being burned and protestors being set up by water hoses and attack dogs. This award, he said, is given for all that we are striving for, rather than for what we have accomplished. It is a symbol of encouragement toward that vision of a world where peoples of the earth have learned to live together without violence, armed only with love. And then he said,
“I accept this award today with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of [hu]mankind. I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history. I still believe that we shall overcome!
I refuse to accept the view that [hu]mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality.
I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word . . . . This is why right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant. I believe that even amid today’s mortar bursts and whining bullets, there is still hope for a brighter tomorrow.”
King’s vision is born from the grace present in Jesus’s sign at a wedding in Cana. It is the marriage of heaven and earth to which God continually calls us. This is our final destination, when God’s grace overwhelms the world, healing every hurt, binding up our wounds, and weaving us together in love. Jesus went to a wedding, and there, amid a potential disaster, he acted: to fill what is emptied, to respond to what is needed, to keep the celebration of God’s life going. May we witness the sign. May we be witnesses of his abundance. May it be so. Amen.