Sermon – January 17, 2010: Party
Sermon for Sunday, January 17, 2010 The First Baptist Church of Lewisburg
Party
Psalm 36: 5-10; First Corinthians 12: 1-11; John 2: 1-11
It is difficult to comprehend both feasting and fasting in our culture. It is too easy for
us to eat; one of the things you can still get for a dollar is a sandwich, off the dollar menus at
fast-food places. There are, no doubt, people of limited means stretching supplies of dried
beans and bags of rice, and eating a subsistence diet, but not many do that. Almost
everyone has food that is not only keeping body and soul together, but which is fun–either
because there’s plenty of it, or because it’s in that category of “junk food” which we all know
isn’t nourishing but which pleases the palate or makes one feel full.
We fast for medical reasons, and a few people as spiritual discipline, but since it
usually is a fast from the excessive and pleasure-seeking eating we usually do, it doesn’t
have the same character as the fasts of Bible times. When Jesus went into the desert to
fast he wasn’t switching from thousands of calories a day to none; he was switching from
some bread and vegetables and the occasional fish to nothing. It didn’t feel like a break
from a life of repletion, it felt like stepping away from just enough to experience the
discipline of living by the grace of God.
If our lives of plentiful food make it hard for us to get the sense of fasts in Bible times,
they make it harder to get a sense of feasts. Life for the palate, for all but the wealthy few,
was a daily routine of modest dining punctuated, at rare intervals, by intoxicating excess–
by really shifting gears from a life of eating to stay alive to, for at least a day or so, living to
eat. Things you ate annually or semiannually you had a chance to enjoy, and the workaday
life was interrupted not just with unusual varieties and amounts of food but the time to savor
it.
The closest thing to this from near my lifetime was the custom, in my grandfather’s
day, for Polish weddings to require a few days to celebrate. It was true up home, and I
would imagine would have worked the same way wherever there was a large Eastern
European population, like over in the coal region. People took off work and packed a few
things and went, and attended the Mass, and then ate and drank and danced and danced
and drank and ate for a couple of days, until they’d done about as much as they could, then
they’d go back to their daily routines. Months would go by, and maybe years, depending
on what stage of life they were in and who their circle was, and then it would happen all over
again. Something relatively rare and really special, a looked-forward to and longremembered
party, is the kind of thing I’m trying to convey.
The mythological notion of a good afterlife, in several pagan cultures, was that of a
perpetual feast, so wondrous and rare was the pleasure of such occasions, and Jesus, in his
parables, sometimes likens end-time events to a great banquet. Jesus’ first public
presence of note, and first miracle, and therefore first sign to be witnessed and believed by
his disciples, is set at a wedding feast in the gospel of John. This has as much literary and
symbolic significance as it does narrative use, and the first clue we have that this may be a
story about Jesus’ true meaning is the way it begins. It begins with the words “after three
days,” which strikes a sympathetic chord in the ear of the disciple hearing the gospel, who of
course remembers that the true identity and full importance of Jesus was revealed on the
third day, when resurrection was revealed to the first disciples.
There is a little family business in the story. We’re told that Jesus’ mother was at the
feast, and then that Jesus and his disciples also had been invited and were there. It’s the
mother of Jesus who notes that the big wedding party has run out of wine, and Jesus
immediately understands this as a big hint that maybe he should do something about it.
The other gospel tradition, represented by Matthew, Mark, and Luke, has Mary at
the beginning of the story in Matthew and Luke, and briefly at Jesus’ twelfth year in Luke,
and Mary reappears at the end. The relation between an adult Jesus and his mother is not
reported by those gospels. It’s in John’s gospel where there’s a back-and-forth between
Jesus and his mom, and we get the impression that it’s not entirely easy either to be
mother or son. This wouldn’t make a bad text to preach for Mother’s Day, about maternal
hopes and expectations and pride and pressure, and about filial piety and dutiful
performance and resentment, all of it enmeshed in long habits of love and dependence.
When Jesus hears his mother’s remark about the lack of wine as a request for him to
help, he says, “Oh woman, what have you to do with me? My hour has not yet come.”
Jesus’ speaking about when his “hour” is supposed to come, Jesus’ treating the question
of more wine for the feast as complicating his destiny, tells us as disciples that the stage is
being set for Jesus’ being revealed for who he really is. It’s not the timing that Jesus
himself might have chosen, but it’s the right time just the same. It becomes the opportunity
for Jesus to perform a miracle and provide a sign for his disciples to see and believe.
Six large jars filled with water for Jewish rituals of purification are there, and anyone
who wants to read what happens next symbolically has every right to do so. The logic of
John’s gospel is, at least, a recurring revealing of Jesus as the One Sent by God, and part
of that is a series of what the gospel’s author tells us are the signs Jesus does for that
purpose. The changing of water into wine is the first of those signs. The story concludes
with telling us who the intended beneficiaries of the sign are: Jesus’ disciples.
So what do we, as Jesus’ disciples, conclude from the miracle of water being made
into wine? The obvious thing is that Jesus is special, that he has creative and transformative
power which is more than human. If we are disciples, we see it as confirmation of his special
connection with God.
There’s a larger message, and it has been hard for Baptists to get. Some large part
of the Baptist world is so embarrassed by the direction of the miracle–many Baptists would
be more comfortable with Jesus turning wine into water–that they don’t even begin to
appreciate the significance of Jesus arriving on the scene, as it were, at a party. They don’t
grasp what it means to have a Lord and Savior whose first divinely-empowered act in the
world is to give everyone really delightful wine with which to celebrate a marriage, and by
which to continue to escape, however briefly, the demands and duties of everyday.
The Bible is against drunkenness, and I’m not sure it understands the problem of
self-destructive, compulsive drinking the same way we have come to regard it. There’s no
question of that here. The ancient Mediterranean world had recourse to wine, usually mixed
with water, as a common beverage, and important element of life. The image of shalom of
everyone enjoying the produce of his or her own vine and fig tree reminds us of the central
importance of the grape. That’s not to say that wine was the equivalent of water, as an
everyday beverage, though in the absence of knowledge about waterborne illness it
served to make water safer to drink. Wine was both common and special, the way it
remains for cultures who drink it, table wines and wines for special occasions.
This is a special occasion. The wine steward, tasting the miraculously provided wine,
announces that it is an unusually special occasion. The latter wine is better than the first.
What Jesus makes possible is a greater pleasure, a greater enjoyment of recreation and
socializing and celebrating, than has existed before.
There is, in Christianity, such a thing as self-denial for self-discipline. Most religious
traditions, in fact, have elements of anti-materialism and rejection of physical pleasures.
Some of the letters in the New Testament criticize self-indulgence, and counsel restraint.
The record of the gospels, however, is that Jesus’ religion is not chiefly marked by forgoing
the pleasures that the world affords. In the other tradition he contrasts himself with John the
Baptist, who modeled a self-denying approach to holiness, and says that he could be
charged with being a glutton and a drunkard. In John’s gospel he makes his big entrance at
a party, producing more wine.
We are accustomed to equating pleasures with sin. That old line about everything
one enjoying being illegal, immoral, or fattening, always sounds right to people at first. The
darkest side of human nature, however, is not in the pleasures of the flesh as such. Our
psalm today sees wickedness more in terms of lying and plotting mischief, and doing evil,
crimes more social in their effects than self-indulgence. This is not to encourage overeating
or drinking too much, and not to ignore the fact that there are people who must not drink
alcohol. I’m just saying that John’s Jesus gives his blessing to those parties and pleasures
which, like the wedding banquet, are socially sanctioned. It’s good to live it up, at least
some of the time, and Jesus is to be identified with that as much or more as with abstaining.
The psalm says that by God’s light we see light. The gospel of John portrays
Jesus as the Light of the World, who enables us to be children of light. Christ has come,
and living as God’s children is made possible for us. To begin the story of Jesus’ arrival at
a party is a way to remind ourselves that Jesus’ achievement is a reason to celebrate. To
accept a Savior who increases the hospitality of a social occasion and enhances the
pleasure of those around him is to recognize the God of love in the varieties of generosity
and kindness familiar to us.
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