What Happened to the Wine – Dr. Rev Carol Kerr – 02.07.2010

Jesus’ first miracle at the wedding in Cana | John 2

The wedding in Cana is the first miracle the Jesus performs in the gospel of John. Jesus performed many miracles, the gospel of Luke and Mark and Matthew pick different ones to be the first, but John picks turning water into wine as the first . Why not healing? Why not walking on water? Why not turning five loves and five fishes to feed thousands. Surely these are more sublime miracles. But, John, the most sublime of the gospels picks Jesus turning water into wine at a big party, a wedding bash, the first century equivalent of a kegger.

But when you think about it, the wedding at Cana marks two things. The beginning of a life together. It also marks the love between the couple. This sermon is going to be on these 2 things the story life of the couple that got married and what happened to them and my thoughts about love.

To do this I am going to recap a wonderful story Rev. Thomas Troeger wrote about the couple. It is a narrative imagining what would happen to the couple over the years that they were together. Along side of this story I am going to share some thoughts about love. The nature of love, the love we have for each other, and the love of God.

To start with, though, you have to think that after the wedding there was some wine left over. John tells us “There were six stone water jars…each holding twenty or thirty gallons.” If three jars held twenty gallons, three time twenty is sixty (3 x 20 = 60). And if three jars held thirty, three times thirty is ninety (3 x 30 = 90). And sixty gallons plus ninety gallons equals one hundred fifty gallons (60 + 90 = 150). 150 gallons of wine! That is a lot of wine to drink. Especially since they had already polished off the initial supply. Surely one twenty gallon jar would have sufficed. But no. Jesus is extravagant, wildly extravagant. It is not unreasonable to believe some wine was left.

This is where the story about the couple begins. Troeger imagines that when the celebration was over and the couple had left for their honeymoon and the guests had departed, that some friend or family member of the couple, poured the wine that remained into smaller containers and corked them, and the couple returned, presented them with several crates of the splendid wine. “Here, this is the wine that rabbi from Nazareth supplied. I thought you might like to have it for special occasions”

Leaving the story at this point, I would like to mention that so far I have done three sermons on the keys to happiness series, one on positive faith, one on gratitude, one on using your gifts for God. But, many people would say the greatest way to be happy is to love. Certainly we all long to love and to be loved. Our popular culture capitalizes on this in songs and poems and greeting cards. The Beatles summarize the idea in Srgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, by saying “Love is all you need….”

The Saints would agree with the Beetles, but take it further. Love is more than the gratification of our hearts desire. If you follow out the path of love it expands in ever widening rings until you love the your neighbor, the town, the state, the nation, the whole world, and the splendor of the universe. We become conformed to the love that made the universe. We cannot separate from this love. Rather we become love and leave our limited selves behind. Then somewhere along the line we become aware that our task on earth is to communicate and carry the rays of this love. As long as we do that no matter our lives are long or short, we shall have realized the purpose of our existence.

Back to the story of the couple who got married at the wedding in Cana and were given the left over wine from the rabbi of Nazareth. Troeger pictures the couple delighted, smiling to think that on the meager budget of newlyweds they can enjoy such a heavenly vintage with their low cost suppers. In the way of eager young couples they do not plan very well at first so that at the end of two or three years, they realize, extravagant as Jesus was, they will some day run out. So they begin to save the wine for special occasions, bringing it out on their anniversary, on the birth and dedication of a child, at family reunions, on high holy days that feature feasting and drinking. And every time they taste the wine, they relive their wedding day, and they recall how at the first sip of Jesus’ wine they had looked at each other with eyes that shone with a love whose intensity caught even them by surprise.

More thoughts on love, St Augustine one of the very first and certainly the most influential Christian theologians of all time says that the way to God is through the path of love. Sin is what gets in the way of love. But, if a person is sinless but yet is not in love with the world and loving to the world, he is no closer to God than a common murderer and cheat. Augustine writes love poetry, only not to any woman, but to God. He writes; Too late I have loved you, O Beauty so ancient and so new. Too late have I lovd you! You have called to me and have cried out, and have shattered my deafness. You have blazed forth with light, and have shone upon me, and you have put my blindness to flight! You have sent forth fragrance, and I have drawn in my breath, and I pant after you . I have tasted you, and I hunger and thirst after you. You have touched me and I have burned for you peace.

Let’s return to the story: And so the years pass until they are an old couple, keenly aware that “all flesh is grass,” springing up in youth, then quickly fading. I picture the old couple on a chilly night. She is in front of the fire, trying to warm her feet and hands for they are always cold now. He pauses coming into the room where she sits on a bench pulled right up to the grate. He studies her in the light of the fire: the shape of her forehead, the deep creases in her face….

Let me stop here and comment on all those wrinkles. There is an art to loving. St. Therese of Lisiex wrote in her journals that she had one very simple goal. Her one goal was to learn to love everything that came her way. Learn to love everything? Yes. Love the guy who is slow starting up at the stop light. Love, your neighbor whose trash bag broke and stuff blew onto your lawn, love your children who don’t seem to love each other, love your coworker who plays a bad radio station all day. I told you some think it naïve, and overly sentimental. But, the truth of the matter is, that the great love of the Saints is built up of all these small loves. It is one great continuum. As Robert Ellsberg writes: “Each moment accepted and lived in the spirit of love is an occasion for heroism and a step along the path to happiness and holiness”. That is the kind of love exemplified by the couple in our story, elderly now, but in love with every little wrinkle on each other’s faces. – in love with all the flaws.

The story continues: All of a sudden, with a prompting he cannot explain, he blurts out: “Honey?” At first she does not hear him so he calls again, “Honey?” She slowly looks up, and he says, “Honey, what if we finish the wine tonight. The rabbi’s wine. There’s just one little bottle left. It might warm you up some.” “Sure, sure,” she says, “that would be good.” So he goes and gets the wine and brings it back to the fire with the only clean chalice he can find. He sets it down and uncorks the wine speculating: “I wonder if it will still be good, after all these years.” “Always has been,” she says. “the rabbi’s wine has never gone bad, it’s as amazing as the way he provided it.” The husband pours the first serving and hands his wife the chalice. She sips and hands ti to him. They look at each other and not their agreement: the wine is as rich as the day they were married.

Speaking about love, family life can be tough sometimes. Certainly, sometimes the family is a place of natural love and support, the one place where we are valued and find unconditional acceptance. At other times it can be suffocating. It can be a vipers nest. Even the “happiest” families can erupt into disputes and simmering resentments and rivalries. Sometimes it is a challenge to love within a family. But, many of do, we forgive and forget, over and over again. Why? Well because we love each other.

Living in a family is our fist experience of living with other people, as we Chrisitians like to say, living in community. For Christianity living in community is very important. The community of a biological family to start with, but then the community of the church, the church family.

Often you hear people say, I am spiritual, but I don’t like institutionalized religion. I think to myself, well o.k. but where are you going to learn to love in community? Can we love God unless we love each other? Can we love each other, if we never get together? So, I always wonder how do people who do not go to the institutionalized church get together with other God lovers? At a soccer match, at work, Hannaford’s? I just don’t see it happening. Dorothy Day concludes at the end of her book, the Long Loneliness, “We cannot love God unless we love each other. We know Him in the breaking of bread and we know each other in the breaking of bread, and we are not alone anymore.”

To continue the story: They drank very slowly, and as they drink they start to tell stories. She says: “I remember when Sarah was born. You would have thought nobody had ever been a father before, the way you carried on, calling in the whole neighborhood, they consumed an entire crate of this wine, as if it were our wedding all over again.” “Well, you did just about the same, when Benjamin and Rebecca brought home our first grandchild.” The wife laughs a hearty laugh, “Yeah, I did didn’t I? Oh, those were such good times, good enough to want them never to stop.”

He pours some more wine, and they each take a sip. And he stirs the fire, and they sit absorbed in the flame. She sees him out of the corner of her eye and notices he is trying to hold back tears. She knows what he is thinking: He is remembering when the third child died. Been terribly sick. Tried everything. But he died anyway. All she could pray for weeks on end was “My God, my God why have you forsaken us?” They were both so distraught, and God didn’t seem to answer, they didn’t know what to do but blame the other one.

One evening he came home and she had supper ready, and they set things out on the table without saying a single word, going through motions that had become rituals of habit, the only thing holding them together day by day now. When they sat down they realized she had not gotten water from the well and he had not brought home any wine from market. So he got up and found one of the bottles of wine from their wedding. Might as well open it now. No sense saving it for special occasions anymore. So he opened it and poured some wine for each of them. And when the wine touched their lips they tasted grace in their hearts, and they broke down and sobbed together. The grief of their loss never went away – how could it- but the strength to carry the grief together that was what the wine of Jesus gave them.

We know that we are surrounded at all times by forces that remain invisible to our unassisted eyes: Ultraviolet rays from the sun, electromagnetic waves, radio signals or television images, the conversations that bounce between cellular phones. If there was some method that we could make these invisible rays visible, we would find ourselves swimming ins a sea of light, color, sound. A dimension of reality that we are usually totally unaware of would be dancing all around us. Love is like that. We are immersed in a sea of love. We are connected to everything by the invisible beams of love. An ocean of love, living in love, loving Love itself, love with a capital “L.” That is happiness. The Beatles were right, “All you need is love…” Only I dare say, Srgt Peppers Lonely Hearts club band was not the way to find the love. Rather, drinking the wine of Rabbi Jesus will do.

The story ends: And now sitting in front of the fire, he turns to look at her, and hearing him move she turns toward him and they look at each other, and she takes his hand saying, ‘yes, Honey, I know, I know.” He is silent, then holds the bottle upside down over the chalice. There are a few last drops. He hands the chalice to her: “Here you finish it.” She takes the smallest sip and hands it back to him pointing out there is still the tiniest bit at the bottom. He puts the brim to his lips and throws back his head holding the chalice straight over him, then slowly brings it down and holds it between them. “That’s it,” he says with a voice that sounds both satisfied and sad. “All gone. None to pass on to the children or the grandchildren now. Just the story of our wedding at Cana, and the rabbi who blessed us with wine. Just the story. But no wine.”

“Not to worry” responds his wife. “Not to worry. As long as people come to his table, there will be more.”

This is the end of the story of the couple whose wedding it was that Jesus performed his first miracle in the gospel of John. It is also the end of my thoughts about love. But it is not the end of the wine. Jesus is extravagant with that wine. He made something like 150 gallons for that wedding. But, he didn’t stop there. He makes wine for the whole world, as we share together at the Lord’s Supper. Now it is our turn to eat the bread and drink the wine that Jesus made for us.