Monday, April 22, 2013

More Like Jesus: Involved with the world (Sermon for 4/21/13)

John 2:1-11
The Wedding at Cana 

  On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. When the wine gave out, the mother of Jesus said to him, ‘They have no wine.’ And Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come.’ His mother said to the servants, ‘Do whatever he tells you.’ Now standing there were six stone water-jars for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons. Jesus said to them, ‘Fill the jars with water.’ And they filled them up to the brim.
  He said to them, ‘Now draw some out, and take it to the chief steward.’ So they took it. When the steward tasted the water that had become wine, and did not know where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew), the steward called the bridegroom and said to him, ‘Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the good wine until now.’ Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.


************************

************************

You all have probably figured out by now that I love food. Also, I'm pretty susceptible to food advertising. If a commercial for food comes on tv, I'm hungry. It doesn't matter too much what I've just eaten—I'll be hungry. You could take me over to Ruth's Chris Steak House, feed me the finest steak they have along with all the fixins to the point that I can scarcely stand up, take me home, put me in front of a television, and if a commercial for Long John Silvers comes up and they advertise those square fish sandwiches, and it sounds good. This doesn't make sense, but I'm just saying that there is a direct link between what I see on tv and the sensation of hunger.
Now, as you probably know, food advertisers have a few tricks up their sleeve. Have you ever wondered why cereal never looks soggy when it's in milk on a tv commercial? That's because they don't actually use milk. That white stuff? It's glue.
Or perhaps you've wondered why the syrup on the pancakes in a Denny's ad never actually soaks into the pancakes. Well, wonder no more—they cover the pancakes with fabric protection. Oh, and they use motor oil rather than syrup.
And the steak that always looks perfectly cooked on the outside, yet rare on the inside, the look that you can never quite duplicate? Well, it'd be hard to do so, unless you use raw meat, because cooking tends to make the meat shrink and dry up. The brown covering is probably shoe polish.
All these tricks explain what happens when you go to the restaurant. You order something off the menu that looks scrumptious. You can't wait to dive in, except that, by the time you get your food, it looks markedly different than the picture on the menu.
In a way you're glad about this, because you're not too interested in eating something that's been produced with motor oil and shoe polish.
But part of you feels that you got something very, very meager. I don't know how many times I've ordered something from Chik-fil-A (yes, I realize how dangerous it is to criticize Chik-fil-A in the South) and expected it to look like the picture on the menu. When I open the carton, it's usually a sad looking bun with a piece of charbroiled chicken inside it that looks like it's been passed around the back a few times, and the pickle is typically hanging on for dear life. It just feels meager, like a sad representation of what I wanted, and I'm disappointed. I expected more.

Do you ever feel that way about your life? Did you rush forward into something with great expectations, with wild dreams, and then you got a few years down the road and you began to wonder what happened? Have you ever looked around at things and wondered if someone sold you a false bill of goods? Have you accumulated everything they told you to get and yet you still feel somewhat empty on the inside? Maybe you've made it to a point where you just feel like what you're getting out of life seems somewhat meager compared to everyone else. There's a new phenemenon that is being experienced by millions of people around the world—it's called the fear of missing out. People who were once happy with their lives are now connected with so many people through the internet that they're spending time comparing themselves to others. And the other to whom they compare themselves only post the best things about their lives, and since you don't know them well enough or talk to them often enough to know that their kids are actually driving them crazy and they can't find anyone to take their new puppy and the washer and dryer both exploded at once, you start to think that everyone in the world has a better life and takes better vacations and has perfect children, and suddenly your life feels meager. You compare yourself to everyone else, or to everyone else's best, and you feel like you come up short. You had great expectations, but you fall short.

Sometimes, if we're not careful, we construct an image of God that falls short and feels meager, too. What happens is we allow our image of God to be constructed by the voices that speak the loudest rather than finding it in Scripture, and we find ourselves thinking of God as an angry, judgmental father who is constantly on the warpath and in search of any possible reason to sentence you to an eternal destiny of suffering and pain far from him. We start thinking of God as a rules-oriented teacher who will slap the back of your hand with the proverbial ruler the second you get out of line, but if you're good enough you get to go to heaven and fly around with dainty little wings and play a harp in a Thomas Kinkade painting.

In the face of life, that image of God seems pretty meager, doesn't it?

Because what could a God like that say to a country in need of answers in the face of evil exploding bombs near the finish line of a marathon, killing an 8 year old little boy who, had he stayed hugging his father rather than running back to be with his mother, would have lived? If our image of God is meager, than we have no hope of holding onto answers in the face of tragedies that cause us to lift our eyes to the hills, from whence our help should be coming, but if we live in expectation of judgment, help in the face of personal pain and tragedy, in the face of a nation's mourning, isn't coming.

That's why we need to understand who Jesus Christ is, because Colossians tells us that Christ is the image of the invisible God. What this means is that to understand Jesus Christ means that we understand God—to know Christ fully is to know God fully.

This sermon series is all about getting to know Jesus Christ and his personality better. Each Sunday that we explore a different side of Jesus, we get to know God a little better. So today, we're talking about the wedding feast at Cana, the scene at which Jesus turns water into wine. You might not think this has much to teach us about the character of God. Hopefully, in a few minutes you will see differently!

John's Gospel is different than the other three Gospels. The other three are very similar in nature, style and tone, and many of the stories overlap. John's Gospel, however, presents us with a much more spiritualized Jesus, a Jesus who clearly states who he is and what his mission is. Also, John only includes seven miracles. If you're counting to double check me, make sure you don't count the resurrection. You'll end up with 8 and then find yourself debating whether walking on water is a miracle or not. It is, but for some reason they don't count the resurrection. Apparently, it's complicated.
Anyway, John only lists 7 miracles, so each one takes on a level of extra importance. Also, this one is first. It's his first public miracle, and his ministry has barely begun. He's called some disciples, but there isn't much of a public following yet. Until now...

All of this is rather curious. From what we first think of when we think about Jesus, we'd imagine that John would want to emphasize a healing, or perhaps a dramatic deliverance from demons, or the resurrection of Lazarus. We'd imagine that's what he would want people to know first about Jesus. Instead, we find Jesus at the home of some wealthy people giving them more booze. They could have sent for more wine, right? They could have afforded it. This is a luxury, not a need—no one's life suffers because they don't have any wine. And Jesus gives them more wine than any wedding party could have consumed in a whole week (which is about how long one of these weddings lasted) —roughly 150 gallons of it. What's that about?

Well, there's one word that is a key to all of this: abundance. In John 10:10, Jesus tells us that he has come to have abundant life, and this passage is the proof to all of this. Honestly, I also believe that this passage also gives us insight that helps us answer so many of our other questions.

See, Jesus didn't come just to give us a life that would barely meet our deepest needs, give us what we need to scratch out an existence, and helping us limp across the barrier into eternal life. Jesus has come to give us abundant lives, above and beyond what we think we need, above and beyond what we deserve. Jesus comes to give us abundance, and so it's no surprise that we find Jesus at the home of wealthy people in the midst of a party—Jesus calls us to enjoy life and the gifts he has given us.

Think about the scenes of Jesus that have been painted throughout history. Often we get the meek and mild Jesus or the broken and hurting Jesus, and sympathetic Jesus is often included as well. And these are all important sides of Jesus—but so is the part that sits down at the party and enjoys life, the side of Jesus that gives far more than we can imagine—this is superabundance, and it's not the only time. Three of the 7 miracles deal in this idea of superabundance—here, when Jesus feeds 5,000 and has 12 baskets left over, and after the resurrection, when the disciples haven't caught a fish all night and end up with enough to tear the nets after following the commands of Jesus. Jesus gives us impossibly more than we can imagine, and it's all a gift, a free gift.

So we, then, are called to enjoy this life. We're called to recognize the abundance God gives us and enjoy this gift. Life surrounds us—the beauty of God's creation, the gift of community, of the people, friends and family, that surround us, the gift of life itself. We're called to enjoy it, to enjoy loud dinner parties and exciting baseball games, to give thanks and laugh and sing and rejoice at all God gives us. We don't have to sit like Puritans and be afraid of laughter—we're called to be a people who enjoy God's abundance that he lavishly has poured out on us.

And what then, of the tragedies? How does a wedding feast respond to those? What this wedding feast tells me is that Jesus cares about our everyday lives. It matters. If Jesus cares enough about a lack of wine at a wedding of wealthy people, how much more is he going to care when we're hurting? How much more will it matter when Jesus sees one of his children hurt, weeping and mourning? How much more will Jesus join us in our slow walk through the darkest valleys of life? Rather than picture Jesus as merely our ticket into eternal life, we can view Jesus as the Savior who claims all of our life and wants us to live it abundantly. Everyday life matters to God.

The best part about this text? Jesus saves the best for last. The guests at the wedding have been drinking wine the whole time. Now that Jesus has performed this miracle, the wine merely gets better, improving markedly.

The same is true of our life with Christ. Our entire lives, we are drinking wine. We can live sacramentally, enjoying God's gifts and rejoicing in his love. We can love with reckless abandon and give freely out of a deep gratitude for all we have been given, knowing that we cannot out-give God. And upon our deaths, we then taste the best wine that Christ gives—we enter into the banquet feast that marks the fullness of the Kingdom of God. We pass through the valley of the shadow of death and can exclaim, along with the chief steward, that while the promises of the world give us the best first and cannot fulfill that promise later, the King of Kings gives us abundance in our lives, and then saves the best for last, for our eternal home.

Let us pray


No comments: