There is little in this world that is spectacular beyond breath, but there is much in this world that is spectacular beyond breath!
One needs to listen and hear, look and see, feel and experience everything knowing the Grace of God is always at work, in abundance.
Yesterday I went looking and after a few other stops found the Emeralds, a band with saxophone, voice and keyboards … and more. And their schedule had them playing in north Edmonton. So I called for more details, precious few were available on line.
And we went to dinner and dance.
Great Food! Great Music!!! And SPECTACULAR dancing!!!!!
To be able to dance and move and change the step to fit the music or the density of the dance floor or the mood … it doesn’t get much better. And there were dancer of age, spectacular in what they could do to the music!
Oh, heaven broke through from the infinite to the finite and there was … Grace!
And we worked on this sermon, for this morning. And Linda challenged me with my nose in my phone, thinking I was playing games. And when I explained, she read some and asked that the sermon get posted, shared. So here it is.
Oh, the celebration so precious and costly and over the top?
Ukrainian New Year’s Eve.
We could not stay real late, with this morning looming and plumbing half finished … But it was a part of a wonderful life!
And now the requested sermon:
The banquet of the kingdom of God is not a special snack for a few friends and close associates. It is a huge gathering with the tables weighed down, bursting with good food for everyone. God’s generosity results in spontaneous words of gratitude and praise.
In her book The Spark, Kristine Barnett tells the story of her son Jake.
At a year and a half, Jake started to crawl into his shell, by 2 he was rarely speaking or making eye contact. When he was diagnosed with autism, everyone predicted what was not possible, including that Jake would not speak or be able to communicate at all long before 16.
Instead, at age 16, we see little Jake, a boy small for his age standing and talking animatedly and easy with a math professor. Giving the others a head start Jake waits to join one of the groups of college students working on the problem the professor has given them and then he stands to the whiteboard to write a few equations. He turns and, giving the students leading questions, entices and invites the others to understand what he sees clearly in a multitude of ways.
Soon one, two and four students from the other groups come across to Jake’s board. Soon most of the students are there listening, eagerly absorbing what Jake offers them, until first one, then another, and then most of them nod understanding and return to their own whiteboards to work through the problem before them.
God gives us abundance, over abundance, just over the top, overwhelming abundance. It’s amazingly perfect wine flowing freely for us.
In today’s Gospel from John we get a taste of this wonderful stuff: In the Bible being out of wine is not just a social faux pas. It is a sign that God’s blessings have run dry. Wine was a sign of the harvest, of God’s abundance, of joy and gladness and hospitality. So when they run short on wine they run short on blessing. And that is a tragedy. A sign that God did not bless the marriage.
And there is even more to be said. If you don’t know it yourselves yet, here is nugget of wisdom we receive from our Jewish brothers and sisters: for those who are married the blessings of being in love with your spouse is the most important thing. It is the blessing of blessings, the one blessing that makes your whole world right. It is the one gift that’s worth everything you have and are, – the most significant gift that you can pass on to your kids. Nothing else can replace it. And nothing else is out of reach if you have it. So when the wine runs flat out: it’s a sign of sure disaster!
Mary tells Jesus about it. He sidesteps the problem. She places it back on his lap. What follows is Jesus’ first miraculous sign that teaches us what grace looks like: God intends for us to be blessed beyond blessing, beyond imagining. Jesus doesn’t just turn some water into some wine. Jesus turns a huge volume of water into the best wine of all time, and there’s enough of it to last … and last …. and … last.
We human beings are hardwired to pay attention to scarcity. It’s a survival thing. If you have too many potatoes or meat it’s not really dangerous. But if you’ve got nothing to eat, that requires attention and energy focused on it so that you can survive!
So we pay attention to scarcity. Like low oil prices, dropping provincial revenues, dropping house values. We pay attention to failing health, dropping membership in churches, disastrous events in our communities.
We may even feel privileged that in this area the economy may not be so bad. Our attendance is better than most small rural congregations, and we have people who are willing to serve on committees and Council. Yet said that way, it brings to mind a fundamental fear, a fear that elsewhere it is worse than here and it’ll catch us sooner or later! Fear…, fear,… fear!!
But God wants us to live without fear! God wants us to know that there’s enough blessing to transform the world for every million years it’s going to exist! God inundated us with so many blessings that it’s overwhelming!
A man once calculated the amount of water [Jesus turned] into [that spectacular] wine. He presented his estimate to St. Jerome and asked if the guests at Cana had really drunk all that wine. [It was close to an additional 1000 bottles!] Jerome responded, “No, no, definitely not. We are still drinking of it today.”
Love, being in love, not just for a day or a few months, the kind that God gives us when we fall freshly in love; but the long-term kind -being in love for a lifetime – requires choosing to be there each day, choosing to do what it takes to be in love. It means continuing to do the loving thing through everything that could destroy love, and doing those things every day whether you feel like it or not…. That kind of doing love, of making your love … that is like Jesus’ wine, the blessing that God gives us … every minute of every day … of every week … of every month … of every year of our lives.
Knowing this what are we to do?
First pay attention: listen and hear; look and see; notice and feel; fully experience God’s abundance. God’s generosity is something other than what we normally see going on in this wonderful world.
Second – know there is not a thing you can do to change God’s generosity. You cannot earn it, deserve it, do anything right with it, or turn it into something more useful. Not only can we not; we don’t have to. God has already done all that for us.
Third, we can respond, we should respond, and we can respond well … but we don’t have to. God will still place the blessings in front of us, give them to us, shower us with them, and call us to move forward with them, and acknowledge that God is there with us.
This is the fabulous wine that overwhelms, the awesome love that carries us perpetually through every challenge.
And knowing this, we can remain humble and live life full of gratitude. As our second reading teaches, everything is a gift! First and foremost: God gives us faith, faith to see what God is up to, around us, in us, and between us!
In the 2nd reading today we are reminded that the people of the congregation in Corinth are richly blessed. God gives them many gifts for building up the community, but those very gifts become a source of contention. Several of the people accept the conclusion that the gifts varied in value and therefore the gifts reflect the worth of the person. Paul writes to the Corinthians, hoping to bring a healthy kind of harmony to the group. “Your gifts,” he tells them, “are just that, gifts, and they all are from the same Spirit. They have been given to you, not as reward, nor to increase your own personal worth or power within the community. They come as pure grace to be used in the service of the Lord. They are for the common good of the whole community. Their gifts each and every one support our confession that “Jesus is Lord.”
Jake, that autistic boy who everyone, except his own mother, everyone thought would never talk, well that boy got his first summer job when he was 12.
As a research assistant at the university where he studied, the youngest research assistant so far in our modern world, each day he’d get assignments to finish. And finish them he would … on the 20 minute drive home! ! Jake told his mom the LAST assignment was more bothersome, because he wasn’t sure if he could get it done.
His mom just gave him her best advice and encouragement and a bit of fire in the pants by telling him that he needed to apply himself, and to work at it until it was done. Every other night Jake would play outside with his friends. He had lots of free time.
That night Jake went to his room to complete the assignment. Within two hours Jake’s mom looked up and saw him outside playing with his brothers. She called to him. He confirmed that he wasn’t sure, but he thought he had something for the assignment. So she let him play.
The next day the professor called to thank her for supporting Jake through the summer of research. Then he told her what Jake had done the night before. He’d been assigned an open problem in math. No one had ever solved it. In less than two hours, the boy who everyone had given up on and said would not even talk, this boy Jake with autism had taken a problem that no one ever had come up with a solution for, and – in part because his mother didn’t’ know, and partly because she just always trusted that he was given some extraordinary gifts and he was to use them, – Jake solved an open problem!!, a problem deemed unsolvable!!!
Years before (at age 10) Jake had been able to propose a new unique theory of light and relativity that fixes some of the problems left over from Einstein’s theory of relativity. His theory is not complete but it’s possible that this boy may do something more significant than what Einstein did for us all.
God’s gifts are given to each of us, not just Jake, in an astounding over-abundance.
We don’t have to respond. We are not going to get rid of death and illness and decline and decay and poverty and pain and war and abuse and any of the other really horrific things we humans are too good at.
But we can respond well to God’s over abundance for us … if we want to.
And then we can, no, … then we will change the world!
Be not afraid!
Have a wonderful week.
Know that you are blessed to be a blessing. Your cup and your neighbor’s cup, is overflowing with God’s amazing, abundant wine given at that wedding in Cana.
Amen
So far the sermon.
This past year there have been many things, so abundantly filled with Grace:
This for Simon and Cyrus, Simon’s whose passion is soccer, who does math relating to the way he can see the field while he plays, And Cyrus who is always there practicing hour after hour with Simon, giving him a goalie, an opponent, a companion.
And this M’s grandma. A reworking of her old postage stamp photo into gifts for Grandma’s three daughters.
And this: as it turns out, the last opportunity for Phoebe to venture to drive the tractor, and she does with gusto!