| Note: No sermon is quite the same when you read it. You miss the inflections, the expression that you gain in the hearing. The words below are only a close approximation of the sermon, taken from handwritten notes. Nevertheless, the words (as best as can be deciphered!) are shared with you here. The Webmeister |
Second Sunday after the Epiphany Part of your job as a priest is to have to live in The Twilight Zone, the zone that borders what each of us considers "normal" reality. Last week I met someone at the Le Madeleine in Rice Village. We were talking about church business and out of the corner of my eye I caught the fact of a man staring at me. He passed by our table and our eyes locked again. I forgot about him and returned to my conversation and then about 15 minutes later he again came by my table but this time stopped. He was a thin, oddly dressed intense looking man. He asked me to pray for him and I stopped and felt I needed to honor him and the moment. He told me his name was Todd Lee and that he had been told by doctors that he was schizophrenic and he said he was aware "that people avoid me." I told him that I would indeed pray for him and got out a paper and pen to write his name down. He simply again said intently – "Pray for me, Todd Lee," and then he disappeared from my life out the door. He came from and returned to the Twilight Zone that so closely borders the realms we think so common and normal. Later that same day I found myself at lunch with several members of the Church staff right over here near the church at Pappas Barbecue. As we stood in line another man caught my eye with a lovely beaming smile on his face. At first I thought I knew him but then I knew I did not. I smiled back and bowed toward him in acknowledgement. Later during lunch when I looked around periodically I would see him smiling at me. And then he came past my table and said as he passed, "I love you Pastor." I responded automatically "I love you too," much as you would to a child. He walked to the door of the restaurant, turned and smiled and waved one last time and then he too passed out of my life – into the Twilight Zone. Both encounters left me wondering what had just happened. Neither person asked for money or special help. Was an angel speaking to me? Was God trying to speak to me through them? Was there something I was meant to hear and maybe pass on from one world to another? Now clearly if you put on a black shirt and while collar you are saying to people that you might just be someone willing to be approached by a man who is schizophrenic and painfully aware of his aloneness. Or perhaps a simple minded man so full of a sense of community and love that he wants to tell a stranger about it. But even if you don't wear a priest's uniform, you too know that your reality is being intersected every day by other realities. What are you supposed to hear? What is it in the mouth or gesture or even the silence of another person? What is it in all the million and one moments of our every day life that scream out "life is not just one damned thing after another!" Do we recognize the voice of God when a schizophrenic man speaks to us about loneliness? Do we hear all lonely people cut off from normal life? Do we hear God in the words of one man telling us he loves us? Do we hear all human desire to express love? What is it that is in the mouth or gesture or even silence of a person or the sudden moment of the trees swaying in the breeze above you or the flight of a bird that enters our lives and transforms them, that speaks of other worlds and other possibilities? What did the new wine taste like? The new wine transformed out of common every day water? I remember standing with the other tourists in the serenely simple Franciscan nave of the church that supposedly stood on the site of the wedding. We were in Cana of Galilee. The Franciscan keeper of the church was telling us in broken English the story that I will now tell you. Cana was a village quite near Nazareth. St. Jerome around 400 AD wrote that you could see one village from the other in the distance. Evidently there was a wedding feast in Cana in which Jesus' mother Mary had a special role. Something to do with arrangements. One Egyptian Coptic gospel claims Mary was a sister of the bridegroom's mother. The story is told so vividly that it would seem it was told by an eye witness. There is no mention of Joseph. The last we heard of him was in Luke's gospel when he and Mary and Jesus traveled to Jerusalem for the Passover. When the group from Nazareth left to go home Jesus was inadvertently left behind in the Temple. He was 12 years old. Now some 18 years later, Joseph was no doubt dead. Maybe the main reason Jesus stayed so long in Nazareth was that as the oldest male child he had to work to support the family and it was only when his younger brothers and sisters could care for themselves that he was free to pursue his own calling. In ancient Palestine a wedding was the high point of live. the life of the average person was full of poverty and constant hard work. This was a moment of joy that the entire village helped celebrate. John's story begins "On the third day, there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee." This was the third day after Jesus had been baptized and met the first disciples Andrew and John. A village wedding lasted several days. The ceremony itself took place late in the evening after the wedding feast. We do it the other way around. Then after the ceremony the young couple was led by well wishers to their new home by as circuitous a route as possible to all the villagers could congratulate them. By this time it was late at night and torches or lamps would have led the way and a "huppah" or canopy above the head of the bride and groom would have been carried by four friends. The newly married couple then kept an open house for a week. They wore crowns and dressed in their bridal robes to receive and entertain all guests. They were treated as royalty for the first and last time in their lives. This was the event Jesus came to join. But something went wrong. It may be that the arrival of Jesus, who no doubt was invited, was part of the problem, because he didn't come alone. He brought 5 disciples with him, 5 more mouths to feed and bodies to squeeze into the limited seating space. This is what Terry Waddell was agonizing about all last week before the 50th anniversary dinner. The problem? Well the wine ran out. I remember well the first Nigerian wedding reception I went to after the church service. I was seated by the master of ceremony at the head table. As I sat down in from of me on the table were 2 unopened bottles of wine and an unopened ½ gallon bottle of Bourbon and several bottles of beer. I thought to myself, "My God in heaven, am I expected to drink all this – I'm going to die." Of course I was not. The wedding guests would have been truly horrified if I had tried. The bottles of wine and bourbon and beer were symbols of abundance, of generous hospitality, not an invitation to pass out. Likewise for the people of the wedding feast in ancient Galilee, wine was an essential symbol of God's joy and blessing in the midst of an often hard and bitter life. Drunkenness was seen as a great disgrace, but the Rabbinic saying was, "without wine there is no joy." Moreover hospitality was seen as a sacred obligation. For the wine to give out was a symbolic and hospitality disaster. So Mary came to Jesus to ask for help. There would have been no all night Kwikee Mart to run to. All the Specs were closed. And indeed Jesus says to Mary basically, "Mother this is not our problem." But Mary clearly did not take offense and even seems to feel Jesus would do the right thing because she tells the people serving the food and wine to do whatever be told them. Near the door of the house, usually the house of the groom's parents, stood six large stone water jars that each held between 20 – 30 gallons of water. This water was reserved for purification ceremonies, the washing of the feet of guests and the washing of hands. Jesus first asked the servers to fill the jars up to the brim. Then he told them to dip out some and take it in a cup to the Master of Ceremony. The Master of Ceremony tasted the wine and was astounded. He looked to the bridegroom and said that most people served the good wine first and then when people's palates were dulled, they brought out the cheap stuff. But the bridegroom and his family had saved the best till the end. So it was at a simple peasant village wedding that Jesus showed the first of his signs of God's superabundant grace and water became "new wine." I wonder what that new wine of God tasted like? How often is God offering us new wine, new hope, new life, new beginnings, new transformations, even as we sit busy and distracted in the midst of our old lives, even as we sit preoccupied and worried about how we are going to make ends meet. For me the 50th anniversary was like that. I looked and saw people in whose lives God's new wine of transformation had been poured out, had been celebrated, but I thought the good stuff is still coming. God is always saving some special vintage for the end of the feast. And who are we to think the feast is ever over, that it's time to go home and call the party quits. With God what you see is not what you get. There is always something happening just out of the corner of your eye or the expectation of your experience. A cardboard tasting wafer, a sip of inexpensive port, that's what the price of admission will get you in just a moment when you come to the communion rail. What are they? The Body and Blood of Christ? The Body and Blood of God? It all depends on how you see life. Maybe God's calling to you, maybe your life is in need of new wine. Amen. The Reverend James T. Tucker January 14, 2007 *Past sermons may be found here. |
Home