Beyond the Bastion

 Luke 4:14-30

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I’m sure most of you folks remember that back in the early days of the Cooperative we were recipients of a grant from the national church that helped us to be a two-minister set-up.  Well, one of the ways we said thank you for that grant was that Timothy and I and several of our elders had to go annually to a Continuing Education event with other grant receiving ministries in the denomination to get educated on stuff.  A good bit of time at these events was dedicated to letting each ministry share its story.  In case you didn’t know, there was a bit of “Wow” once people heard what we were doing.  Four churches cooperating by sharing two ministers who rotated around, a joint youth program and a younger-ish adult program.  We had Discipleship programs running in two of the churches.  We worshipped together at least five times a year and had a common choir even.  Things were happening.

We were a “Wow” ministry in the PCC.  Jesus put words in the mouths of his hometown synagogue having them figuratively say to him, “Do here the things we heard you did at Capernaum.”  We were Capernaum.  Other Presbyteries would hear about what we were doing and contact our Clerk of Presbytery, John Gilbert, or Timothy, or myself to hear more.  John actually travelled to other Presbyteries to tell our story and again the response would be a general “Wow”.  For sustaining congregations in times when major congregational decline is the story of the day what we were doing and are continuing to do is a major “Wow.”  Pat yourselves on the back.  

Together we are strong.  We are entering into a third year of a pandemic and even with just one minister we have proven ourselves to be a viable structure for sustaining congregations in the ministry of our Lord during difficult times.  I don’t think it is a stretch to say that without this Coop our four congregations would not still be going.  Eight years ago the Holy Spirit showed up in your midst with an invitation to a new form of ministry and you said “yes.”  The Spirit of the Lord is still upon us and we continue on in unity and continue to grow in our love for one another even if we haven’t been able to worship together in person.  God is good.  God is faithful.  The Spirit of the Lord is upon us.  Jesus is in our midst.

Now let me change gears a bit here and I promise I won’t do to you what Jesus did to his hometown synagogue there in Nazareth.  The last thing I want is to get run out of town. Looking at Luke, I can’t help but feel that Jesus provoked his hometown synagogue into running him out of town.  He kind of reminds me of that precocious, smart-alecky kid who knows exactly what buttons to push to get everybody riled and he did it.  

Nazareth was his hometown, a tiny town; and he knew them well and they knew him well.  A little background, scholars think there were only 400 or so people in Nazareth at the time and given that families were way larger back then, that’s only like ten to fifteen households.  Familiarity reigned.  They all knew Jesus.  They all knew his back story.  They may have thought he was a little out there.  Who knows?  Yet, they respectfully still let him read in the synagogue and they welcomed his comments.  They were probably even quite proud that he had a ministry that was really picking up.  To be honest, they had probably even suspected that God was calling him to something big since as a boy he was able to teach even the Jerusalem rabbis.  And moreover, it seems they seemed to have respected that Joseph was for all shapes and purposes his father even when they may have known that maybe he wasn’t.   

Looking at the way the story goes here, Jesus really seems to push a button on them around the subject that what God was doing in, and through, and as him was meant for a wider audience than just Israel.  Why would this be a button?  Well, scholars suspect that the wee tiny town of Nazareth was a staunchly Jewish, strongly conservative town.  You know, there’s Mennonite and then there’s Old Order Mennonite. There’s Presbyterian and then there’s Double Predestination Westminster Confession Presbyterians, Calvinists whom John Calvin himself would condemn. (Sorry, that was for my preacher friends who read my sermons to get a chuckle.)  The people of Nazareth had a strong Jewish identity.

Having a strong Jewish identity in a Roman world was complicated.  Here’s some more history that might help.  Nazareth was about an hour’s walk from the large, still-under-construction Roman city of Sepphoris.  Sepphoris would have been full of your typical Roman temples to their randy gods, those naughty Roman bathhouses, and those bullying Roman soldiers.  It is likely that the men of Nazareth, even Jesus and his brothers, would have daily made that walk to Sepphoris to build houses for all those wealthy Roman citizens moving into the beautiful countryside of Galilean Israel.  The men of Nazareth who worked in Sepphoris would have likely been daily ridiculed particularly by the soldiers for being faithful, Law-keeping Jews who dressed oddly and kept to themselves.  

Well, precocious Jesus there in the hometown synagogue saying he wasn’t going to do in their midst what he did in Capernaum but rather God was sending him further on to the likes of those Roman invader types was a button.  And then, Jesus seems to imply that it was the fault of the people of Nazareth for not being faithful enough.  Elijah was sent to the widow of Zarephath because the Israelites at the time had given themselves over to the gods of the Canaanites.  Well, you can see where this is heading – the hillside at the edge of town where they could give him a start at a little tumble.  We can just see how the people of Nazareth had likely just had enough of their precocious, smart-alecky hometown boy who knew how to push buttons.  

All the hometown tension around Jesus made it difficult for them to consider that actually, maybe, they needed to expand their horizons a bit and look at what God was doing not just among and for the Jews, but for the whole world – even those rude Roman bullies.  Even though they were the community who had fostered and nurtured their people’s Messiah, they could not seem to see that their Messiah was also the Lord and Saviour of the world.  They didn’t seem to see that in raising Jesus they were already a part of what God was doing not only to deliver his people, but to also bring the Kingdom of God to the whole world.  Their faithfulness, very commendable as it was (after all they nurtured the Messiah) was not so much about what God was actually doing among them, but more so about their expectations about what God should do.  They couldn’t see how they were a part of something bigger that God was already doing in their midst through Joseph’s son Jesus and were instead holding out for God to do something they believed God should or ought to do – deliver them from Roman occupation – so that they could continue on in the way they believed they always had.

I’m not sure that makes any sense or not so let bring it a little closer to our hometowns.  In comparison to the people of Nazareth, you folks eight years ago were able to see what God was doing in your midst and sensed that he had more to do through you.  And so, you went with the Coop.  Oddly, even though people said “Wow” when they heard what we were doing, no cooperative ministries like ours have sprung up.  Even in our own Presbytery, where we are first hand knowledge, John Gilbert and I and a few other Presbytery reps spent a lot of time meeting with several groups of churches who were located close together and were situated so that it just made sense for them to form a cooperative ministry.  But they said no.  The prevailing reason seemed to be they just wanted to continue the way they were familiar with until it was no longer possible.  

Being the people of God requires being gratefully aware and amazed at what God has done and is doing through us each and our churches.  But, it also requires being ready and willing to transform and adapt to the new that comes about in the world in order to be a hopeful presence.  The temptation is always to hunker down in the security of what is familiar to us and to shy away from the discomfort of proclaiming good news to the poor, release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, letting the oppressed go free, and doing something about economic fairness in the world.  The tendency is that we hunker down into familiarity and shy away from God’s Mission in the world, in our communities.

The church can be and usually is a bastion of hope in the world.  Yet, we tend to focus too much on the bastion and not so much on the hope.  We must not forget that the Spirit of the Lord is upon us.  We must not be far-sighted, where we can’t see what God is doing in our midst all the while wishing he would do in our midst what we hear he is doing elsewhere.  God has been working through us fostering and nurturing the faithfulness out of which comes God’s mission, meaning that which God is doing to heal broken community, indeed, his whole creation.  

The Spirit of the Lord is upon us, but what’s he doing?  Well, for two years now we have been in and out of the main headquarters of our bastion, which is our buildings, our sanctuaries, this thing we now call in-person worship.  We have learned a few things in all this, I hope.  For one, we’ve learned that the church isn’t just the building, as if that hasn’t been said before.  We’ve learned that we can still keep in touch and love and support each other even when we are apart from the comfort and familiarity if not laziness that “going to church” and doing what we believe we’ve always done breeds.  The things that we have done to build our love and support for one another during these difficult two years is the nurturing ground of the mission that God is leading us into.  God brought us together eight years ago and has helped us to endure this pandemic.  It is safe to say that God’s not done with us yet.  The Spirit of the Lord is upon us.  Do I hear an “Amen”?

 

 

The Shortest Sermon Ever

 Luke 4:14-22

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Long-winded preachers…have you ever been held hostage by a preacher who just won’t get to the point and goes on and on and on about stuff she or he thinks is relevant, funny, or game-changing.  I have…and I’ve done it, too.  Sorry.  Sermon length is an interesting critter.  If a minister is long and dull in the pulpit, then she better be good at visiting.  If a minister is long but dynamic and engaging, that will be tolerated and surprisingly people will grow in faith and knowledge. In most of those churches that people are beating down the doors to go to, the sermons are typically 45 minutes or more and are called teaching rather that preaching.  Then there’s the short sermon, if a minister lives by that rule of “If it can’t be said in eight minutes, it isn’t worth saying”, people will love that minister, but the congregation will over time fall into maintenance mode and subscribe to the version of the faith called “Christianity Lite”.  

Well, a good compromise on sermon length that I’ve heard is “Have something to say and don’t take anymore that twenty minutes to say it.”  There are very few people and fewer ministers who are gifted to be able to say what needs to be said in eight minutes. And on the other hand, there’s a whole lot of ministers who are just plain tired of the weekly deadline routine amongst the other overworked minister stuff and they’re just plodding on so to speak.  But, if your minister has something to say and its engaging and informative and she can do it 20 minutes, keep her.  You will learn something and grow.

And then there’s Jesus.  What we have here in our reading this morning is probably the shortest sermon ever given.  Jesus is in his hometown of Nazareth and they are eager to hear him and he gives them a six second ditty that says it all, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”  And they are amazed.  They can’t believe it’s their hometown boy, Joseph’s son.  But, if we were to take this passage without having heard the first three and a half chapters of Luke, we would just think this Jesus is deluded.  We wouldn’t much get the point of it.  So sorry, I’m going to need to sidetrack for a few minutes and bring us up to speed to ensure that we get the point.  

Luke, unlike Matthew and Mark, doesn’t give his readers a good dose of Jesus’ preaching and the ministry he conducted in Galilee before coming to Nazareth.  Matthew and Mark give us a few chapters of Jesus wandering about Galilee calling disciples and preaching the message that the Kingdom of God had drawn near and inviting people to come into it and live faithfully.  And then all the while, Jesus proved the reality of the Kingdom by healing people, casting out demons, and going toe-to-toe with the religious leadership about their hypocrisy.    

In Luke, Jesus’ sermon in his hometown of Nazareth is the first thing we hear from him as far as preaching goes.  If we have read the first three and a half chapters, we would have heard him speak twice, and oddly enough, we wouldn’t have seen any miracle working either.  Those two times he speaks tells us something about him.  The first time is when he was twelve years old and he skipped out on his parents for three days while they were returning home from a feast in Jerusalem.  They find him in the Temple and scold him a bit.  He comes back at them with, “Why were you so desperately searching for me?  Didn’t you know I would be in my Father’s house?”  That thing about God being his father is pretty in our faces in Luke’s Gospel. More on that in just a second.  

The second time we hear Jesus speak in Luke’s Gospel is when he rebuffs the devil and his temptations by simply quoting Scripture at him and being faithful to do what those Scriptures say.  After fasting forty days he doesn’t magically turn stone into bread to feed himself.  He lives not by bread alone but every word that comes from the mouth of God.  He doesn’t seek power for himself by worshipping the devil, but worships and serves God alone.  He doesn’t put God to the test by taking the unnecessary risk of jumping off the highest part of the temple knowing angels will catch him.  He doesn’t have to prove himself to the devil and oddly, that is the temptation the devil is presenting him with.  You see, the devil started his tempting with, “If you are the Son of God…”.  Those temptations were all about whether Jesus will use his power and authority as Son of God to serve his own ends or to serve the will of his Father. There’s that Son of God thing again. Maybe will should go down that rabbit hole.  

In Luke, we get the first inkling that Jesus is the Son of God when the angel Gabriel appears to Mother Mary and tells her that she will conceive and bear a son and he will be the Son of the Most High.  Now, if you are a non-Jew Graeco-Roman type person back in the day hearing Luke’s Gospel read at a dinner party consisting of a group of people who call themselves “The Way” or “Christianos”, you would raise an eyebrow at that “Most High” thing because that was the way people would refer to the Greek god Zeus who was the chief among the Greek gods.  But the angel soon makes clear that it’s the God of the Jews who is Most High and the child to be born will be from the line of the Jewish kings.  So, you’re going to have to ponder that the God of the Jews is the true Most High and his Son born to Mary is the true ruler over the world just like an emperor.  He’s bigger than the Emperor, this Jesus is.

Now get this, Son of God was also what that the Roman emperors deceptively claimed for themselves.  They created a religion called the Imperial Cult where they claimed to be sons of Zeus and were gods either actually in the present or became one when they died.  And so, they made people worship them in the temples that they built all over the empire in order to promote loyalty.  And, we know something else about the Roman emperors.  Without fail, they used their power as “sons of Zeus” to serve themselves.  They succumbed to devil’s temptations and served him.  Luke lets us know by the way Jesus rebuffs the devil that Jesus isn’t in it for his own power and glory like the emperors were.

Back to Mary and the angel, the angel goes on to tell Mary how it will be possible for Jesus to be born the Son of God.  The Holy Spirit will come upon her and the power of the Most High will overshadow her, and she will conceive.  Therefore, Jesus will be born from above and be born divine not just become a god when he dies.  And then a few verses later, Mary sang a song praising God for how her boy will turn the world upside down as far as wealth and power go and all according to the promises God made to Abraham.  To a person hearing Luke’s Gospel back then at that dinner party there is no question that this is the God of those pesky, rebellious Jews we’re talking about and this Son of God is foremost their king and he won’t serve himself like those emperors do.  That’s good news.

There’s one more sidetrack we have to take before considering Jesus’ very short sermon and it’s about the Holy Spirit.  The activity of the Holy Spirit in the first four chapters of Luke makes clear that God gets involved in the world on behalf of the those who have been beaten down by the powerful and does so by the Holy Spirit coming upon people and filling them and enabling them to speak and do the things of God.  I’ll run the examples here.  The Angel Gabriel tells the priest Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, that John will be filled with the Holy Spirit even before he is born in order to turn people to the Lord and prepare the way of the coming Saviour, Jesus.  The Holy Spirit comes upon Mary that Jesus, the Son of God, may be conceived.  Filled with Holy Spirit, Mary’s cousin Elizabeth upon seeing Mary at her door recognizes that Mary is pregnant with her “Lord”, a title Jews reserved only for God.  Filled with the Holy Spirit, Zechariah sings a song at the birth of John that spells out the saving ministry that Jesus will do for God’s people and how John will be the one who prepares the way for him.  The Holy Spirit rested on the aged prophet Simeon and promised Simeon he would not die until he had seen the Saviour.  Then when Mary and Joseph bring Jesus to the temple to be circumcised, the Holy Spirit guides Simeon to them and he sings a song saying that he can now die because his eyes have seen the one who is the means of God’s salvation for all peoples not just the Jews.  Luke makes clear that God announces what he’s going to do and he does it through people by the power and presence of the Holy Spirit.  Nothing salvific happens apart from the presence and power of the Holy Spirit. 

Well, all this Son of God and Holy Spirit talk comes together when Luke tells of Jesus’ baptism by John the Baptist.  It’s just a couple of sentences and you might miss it.  Jesus gets baptized and while he’s praying heaven opens up and the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove descends upon him and God speaks, “You are my Son, the Beloved, with you I am well pleased.”  Incidentally, that’s what a Roman emperor would say when he would adopt somebody as a son in order to be his successor.  The Holy Spirit is on Jesus and Jesus is the Beloved Son of God with God’s full favour.

After that, Jesus filled with the Holy Spirit is led by the Spirit into the wilderness.  For Forty days and nights, Satan tempts him as we’ve already discussed.  Jesus prevails.  Jesus, the Holy Spirit-filled Son of God is the real deal that all the emperors of the world are not.  If you are the normal Joe or Jane non-Jew back in that day this is Good News.

Jesus came out of the wilderness and preached around Galilee and soon came to his hometown synagogue where they gave him the scroll of the prophet Isaiah and Jesus laid out the nature and scope of his ministry.  Jesus found and read the passage that begins: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me.” The Holy Spirit will enable him to bring good news to the poor, proclaim release to the captives, give recovery of sight to the blind, set the oppressed free, and proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.  That last one had to do with economic equity.  Jesus, the Holy Spirit-filled Son of God has and will turn the world upside down as far as wealth and power go.  Jesus is in it for the poor, the captive, the oppressed, the disabled, the economically disenfranchised.  That’s Good News.

Jesus told the people of his hometown, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”  They were amazed and they should have been.  You see, if we read on into Luke’s second book, the Book of the Acts of the Apostles, we discover that on the day of Pentecost God filled the followers of Jesus with the Holy Spirit and then they went throughout the world and boldly proclaimed Jesus to be the Son of God, and Lord and Saviour and they embodied his ministry in their fellowships.  The brief glimpses that Luke gives us into the communities that arose because the Holy Spirit had awakened faith in or loyalty to Jesus in people who heard the proclamation of the Apostles show us that in those communities Christians eliminated poverty.  People were released from those things that held them captive, be it demonic or otherwise.  Slaves were treated equal to masters and women regarded as equal to men.  Spiritual as well as even physical blindness was healed.  People could see their way forward.  They could have hope.  Finally, people shared.  There was economic equity in these Christian fellowships.  It was evident in those early Christian fellowships that Jesus, the Son of God, was reigning and that by the power and presence of the Holy Spirit he was making his reign of unconditional healing, freeing, hope for the disenfranchised loving-kindness evident.  These fellowships were signposts, to use N. T. Wright’s term, signposts of the reign of King Jesus, the Holy Spirit-filled Son of God who will return and establish his kingdom.

Now, I’m going to try Jesus’ six second sermon out on you: “Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”  What do you do with this Jesus?  What is your response to this Holy Spirit-filled Saviour/King who is God the Son become one of us?  Are you amazed at him?  This is the Jesus you’ve heard about since you were wee tiny and taught to sing, “Jesus loves me this I know.”  Are you amazed at him, challenged by him, confronted by him?  Do you feel anything at all about him other than saying, “I choose to believe in God because it helps me cope with the trials of life?” Or, “I’ve had some moments and Jesus wears the face of the one who was with me in those moments?”  Is he and his ministry Good News to you?

Well, to be honest I don’t think “amazed” is the word we would use to describe our reaction the Holy Spirit-filled Son of God Saviour/King Jesus.  I think the reason for our lack of amazement is we missed that paragraph Jesus read from Isaiah that spells out Jesus’ Holy Spirit-powered ministry and which in turn frames and guides the ministry of the fellowships of those who follow him who are also filled with that same Holy Spirit.  We seem to have read a different paragraph from somewhere else; one that doesn’t mention the Holy Spirit.  This paragraph simply reads: be a good person, believe in God whom it’s your duty to worship at church on Sunday because that’s what good people do, and God will bless you with providing what you need and you’ll go to heaven when you die.  It’s all about you individual and whether you’re a good person and whether you’ll go to heaven when you die.  Nothing about this Holy Spirit-filled ministry of Jesus the Son of God.

Friends, the Holy Spirit was/is upon Jesus and upon us his followers that we may be fellowships of Jesus followers who strive to eliminate poverty among ourselves.  The Holy Spirit is upon us that we may be fellowships where people can find release which means forgiveness from the captivity of guilt and shame and that they may begin to see their way, the Way.  The Holy Spirit is upon us that our fellowships may be places where people find freedom from the things that oppress them, things like addictions and prejudices and broken relationships.  The Holy Spirit is upon us that we may be fellowships that strive to empower the disenfranchised and who publicly strive for their rights.

Jesus has placed us in his Kingdom that together we might seek it and strive for it.  When we do that we discover Jesus in our midst and we personally encounter him.  That’s when he gets amazing.  Amen.

 

Water and Wine

 John 2:1-11

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If you’ve ever had the privilege of paying for a wedding reception, then you’ve probably wished you had the ability to turn water into wine.  It’s expensive.  Weddings are big, joyous occasions and it would seem odd if there was no wine to lift the spirits a bit more; or, at least just loosen everybody’s inhibition a bit…a bit.  We’ve all been to a wedding or two where we wished the wine would run out.  But anyway, a wedding is a time for joy and for celebrating.  It’s good to have some wine around.  And if you’re going to have it don’t run out.  It can be a bit embarrassing.

That would have certainly been the case with this wedding at Cana and worse. Their culture was a very hospitality-based culture.  It was the host family’s responsibility to spare no cost to welcome and lavish their guests with delicious food – the fattened calf, the finest lamb – and of course, fine, aged wine.  The best you can find, none of that home-made, Winexpress stuff.  Running out of wine would have been taken as an insult by the guests.  Even if the guests were just “hittin’ it” too hard, you should have been prepared for your guests.  As the head-steward at the wedding in Cana noted, it was the tradition to serve the good wine first and then have plenty of the boxed wine around for when the palates were less discriminate.  You just don’t run out.

Unfortunately, at this wedding the wine ran out.  The host family was soon to be shamed over what should have been a very joyful, God-is-Good kind of occasion.  You see, wine at a wedding back in that day had some religious meaning to it.  It wasn’t just the juice that sparked the life of the party.  In ancient Jewish faith wine was symbolic of God blessing his people with abundance; symbolic of life transformed from mundane (or even sorrowful) into joyful and full; life full-filled – filled full – with God’s presence.  And…a case can be made that in Jesus’ day under Roman occupation most people were expecting a great wedding feast at the coming of the Messiah who would liberate God’s people and establish the reign of God so that God’s people may worship God in freedom.  Wine at the wedding was symbolic of God’s saving and abundant presence.

We would be remiss if we missed these theological undercurrents in John’s story of the wedding at Cana.  John says this event was the first of Jesus’ signs (there are seven in John’s Gospel) by which Jesus revealed who he is.  This wedding wasn’t just a wedding in which the groom’s family miss-planned the wine.  It stood representative of the point to which God’s people had come in their life of faith.  Their faithfulness, their relationship with God should have been like a joyful wedding feast abundant in food abundant in wine, but the wine gave out. 

It’s like those six big jars standing empty off to the side that John talks about.  Jars capable of holding twenty to thirty gallons of water that at one time would have been used for everyone to ritually clean themselves before the gathering and the feast.  Just a historical note here, back at that time many among the Jews had become nearly fanatical about ritual bathing as a means of “symbolically” keeping themselves clean before God.  Many houses had small bathing pools just inside the door in the foyer for people to dip in to wash off the “uncleanness” they would have taken upon themselves by encountering other people who weren’t as observant.  

John the Baptist was the culmination of this bathing movement.  He brought to this ritual bathing the idea of being washed in the Jordan River where Israel first crossed into the Promised Land so as to start anew as the faithful people of God.  This nearly fanatical need to ritually bathe likely arose as the result of people having lost faith in the Temple establishment and the sacrifices offered there by a priesthood that was largely corrupted. You know, how does one get rid of the stain of sin and be acceptable in God’s presence if the blood of the sacrifices you brought to the Temple got tainted by the sins of the priests?  They apparently turned to trying to wash it off.

Well, those jars used for holding the water for ritual purification at the home of this wedding stood empty.  That means something.  Either in lost hope they had given up on that practise of bathing and didn’t care about their relationship with God anymore or they had gone into the river with John the Baptist and felt they didn’t need to ritually bathe anymore.  We don’t know why they were put off to the side and stood empty.  Regardless, these jars stood there like a vacant church on the side of the road where there was once a vibrant faith being practiced, but not anymore.  The wine had given out at the wedding feast, so to speak.  The jars of hope and faithfulness had run dry.

There were some folks back in that day who would have said that the family hosting the wedding was getting what they deserved.  The wine had given out because the purity rituals were not being observed and so now, they would suffer the shame of being poor hosts at their son’s wedding.  John’s Gospel is full of authoritative religious legalists who took that tone.  They were the ones who orchestrated Jesus’ death.  But as Jesus was raised from the dead on the third day, it just so happens that this wedding feast occurred on a third day.  On the third day new life happens.

In steps this feisty, proud Jewish mother, the mother of Jesus, who knows her son can solve this problem.  Ignoring his excuses, she gets Jesus on the job.  She says to the servants, “Whatever he says to you, DO!”  So, what does Jesus tell them to do? “Fill the water jars with water.”  Fill those empty vestiges of faith with water.  And that’s what they did.  Let’s dig into this for there are some spiritual metaphors here.  Water and Wine are more than just water and wine.

Water here, like wine, is a loaded word.  People who study John’s Gospel soon realize that there’s a bit of the Genesis story of creation floating around.  At the beginning John proclaims that Jesus is the Eternal Word by which God created everything become flesh.  At the end, Mary Magdalene and Jesus resurrected are in a garden reminiscent of Eden and all that went wrong in Eden is now put right.  Looking at Genesis, God spoke His creating word to the waters of darkness above which the Holy Spirit was hovering awaiting the Word.  God began to speak and the waters separated and formed a bubble, a space, in which God made land and sea and sky and filled them with life.  The basic or root symbolic meaning of water here is being the place that is open to God’s creating work.

Then, looking elsewhere in John’s Gospel where water shows up, we find there’s more meaning to read into what water represents.  The water of the Jordon River was where the faithful were coming to straighten out their relationship with God.  There, John the Baptist told them he baptized with water while Jesus would baptize them with the Holy Spirit.  Water there is faithfulness.  It’s the water of coming, seeking God with a sense of repentance, with wanting to do what God wants.  

In another place, Nicodemus, a Pharisee (one of those authorities) came seeking Jesus under the cover of darkness to learn from him.  Remember the waters of darkness from Genesis.  Jesus told him that in order to enter the Kingdom of God one had to be born both of water and the spirit.  The kingdom of God is the place where human faithfulness and God’s life-giving presence come together.  Water is the place of living faithfulness where we encounter God.

In yet another place, Jesus met a Samaritan woman drawing water at Jacob’s Well in Samaria.  Jacob was one of the ancestral fathers of the Israelites.  That well was the well Jacob dug when he returned to the Promised Land and reconciled with his brother Esau.  If you remember, Jacob had fled from Esau after having stolen Esau’s blessing from Isaac their father that determined which of the sons the family line through which God would fulfill his promise to Abraham would continue.  The water from Jacob’s well represented the restoration of Israelite peace according to God’s promises to them.  Jesus told the woman that the water of Jacob’s well, the water of the ancient faithfulness would still leave one thirsting for God, but he had living water to give, meaning the Holy Spirit, to take away that thirst.

There are two other places water shows up in John’s Gospel.  Jesus washed his disciples’ feet with water at his last meal with them and that’s how he taught them what true faithfulness to him is: that they love one another by serving one another.  As James said, “love covers a multitude of sins.”  Then, while Jesus was hanging on the cross, a soldier pierced his side with a spear and water and blood came forth from the wound.  Water is faithfulness.  Blood is life.  In Jesus, following Jesus is where our faithfulness encounters the living, life-giving presence of God.

Back to the wedding, Jesus told the servants to fill the empty jars with water and he turned the water into wine.  And not just any old wine, but the finest wine; finer than the finest wine the host would have put out in the first place and ran out of.  I hope you have put two and two together here and have come to see the deeper message within this act – the meaning of the sign of the empty jars of the purification rituals filled with water that Jesus turned to wine.  Take the empty vessels of the old way of doing things and repurpose them, fill them with the water of faithful discipleship and Jesus will meet us there with the power and presence of the Holy Spirit.

Those empty jars represent a way of faithfulness that simply didn’t stand the test of time and trial.  The church in North America is at that point now.  As congregations, if we are not in our twilight years, we are palliative.  The world around us has changed and the ways of being the church that we grew up with and lived are just no longer applicable in a culture where Christianity is no longer the established faith of the land.  We are told by the Census that the largest religious classification/practice is “None”.  Those who regularly practice a faith of any kind number less than 20 percent.  Active Christians are less than 10 percent.  Probably the largest classification outside of “None” if it were on the Census would be “Done”.  These are people who have fallen by the wayside due to the squabbling, judgementalism, and meanness that came up as a result of our not knowing how to handle Christianity’s cultural decline. 

As individuals, in the church there are many who would be “done” if we could be, but God won’t let us go.  For some reason, we keep coming back.  We keep hoping against hope for God to do something new.  Add to that, this pandemic has been tough on us, creating a real trial deep within us for which the only solution is to just patiently endure and keep the faith knowing “this too will pass”.  These folks are, we are, the ones who are like the servants in this story; the ones who have to do what Jesus says to do – fill the jars with water.

David Fitch is one of today’s best and brightest for pondering what the church today needs to be and do.  He approaches things from the perspective of planting churches rather than the church revitalization thing that was so popular a decade or so ago and didn’t work.  There’s a widely held assumption now that if a church is going to revitalize it needs to plant new churches and not churches per say, but fellowships.  Fitch says we just need to create spaces where Jesus can come and make his presence known and do what he does; the turn water into wine thing.  Create space for relationships of love and trust to develop where people can meet Jesus at the point of their deepest need and not be judged, but rather be held up in prayer.  This is something called discipleship – the space where we together can share our weaknesses without being judged, a space where we pray for one another.  This space is the bubble for new creation like in Genesis.  When we fill these spaces with the water of faith and hope and love that Jesus has poured into us we realize that the shape of the old jar, the purpose of the old jar – the way we’ve always done “church” – just doesn’t matter. 

Being able to come together as friends who believe in Jesus, who follow Jesus, is more important than the religious traditions we’ve got wrapped up in our ideas of what “going to church” are.  Location doesn’t matter either.  Whether it be the sanctuary, the church basement or kitchen, or our living rooms and kitchens, or Tim Horton’s, Church is anywhere the followers of Jesus can gather and practice hospitality and friendship with one another, and with our neighbours, and with strangers in his name, which means in the foot washing kind of way.  Let’s take the empty jars of the way we’ve always done our faith and fill them with the fresh water of faithful discipleship and let Jesus make his wine. 

Lastly, it’s ever so important that we continue to give Jesus space in our individual lives as well.  We must continue to live, each of us, as his followers distinguished by the way we love and treat others.  Practicing hospitality, generosity, unconditional love, working for peace and healing in relationships.  We know that and we do that.  We must also take time to read a few chapters of the Bible daily and give God space to speak to us.  I like reading two Old Testament, 2 New Testament, and 2 Psalms daily.  Pray for people.  Try to develop a mindedness of prayer.  Like, instead of grumbling about how long that person is taking to pick out a carton of eggs at the grocery store, see that as moment God has given you to pray for them.  Finally, actually give space for God’s presence to be with you.  Take some time to sit with Jesus in the presence of the Holy Spirit.  Give Jesus an empty chair to sit in and just be with him.  Just be still and know you are God’s beloved child. Fill the empty space with the faithful act of just being open to God.  God will come and make wine.  Amen.