Sermon for January 16

Let the words my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable to you O Lord, our strength, and our redeemer. Amen

There’s an story about an old country preacher who was driving down a curvy mountain road. A police officer pulled him over for driving too fast and in an uncontrolled manner on such a road. The preacher told the officer how sorry he was and that he was distracted thinking about his sermon that he was to preach that afternoon at a funeral. The officer looked over at the passenger seat and asked the preacher what was in the bottle next to him. Oh, that’s just some Holy Water I use for Blessings and Baptisms and such he explained. Well let me see it says the officer. He opens the bottle and takes a sniff. That’s not water, Preacher. That’s wine! To that the old preacher responded: “Praise the Lord! He’s done it again!”

The story of Jesus turning water into wine is a very familiar one and preachers have used it for many different purposes. The reading is sometimes used in marriage ceremonies perhaps as a way of saying Jesus endorses marriage. But actually, Jesus said very little about marriage. And sometimes it’s used as reason to promote drinking or the opposite.

This miracle, or sign, as John calls them, is not like a healing, or the Transfiguration, or a raising from the dead, or calming a storm, or walking on water, or even feeding the five thousand. John put this story in his gospel for a reason. So, why? What are we expected to learn from it?

First of all, John’s gospel is very different from the other three. The other three are straightforward, historical narratives of the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus. It is John’s intent to reveal the spiritual truth though human stories. And sometimes they are a little tricky to figure out.

In his gospel, John writes about the beginning of a New Age. He writes of the coming of Jesus as the Messiah. He writes about how Jesus changes the world from what it used to be into something new and different.

Sometimes John writes in great detail, and when he does that, he does it for a reason. in this reading, John tells us the number of jars, their composition, their purpose, and their size. These are stone jars. They are more dense than earthen jars and therefore, would be less likely to contaminate the water from impurities. We are also told that these jars were used “for the Jewish rites of purification.” This refers to the practice of washing hands before meals. (Remember that Jesus and his disciples got into trouble with the Pharisees for not washing their hands while eating kernels of wheat while walking in a field.) There were six of these jars each holding twenty to thirty gallons—a minimum of 120 gallons of water because they were filled to the brim. This was an extremely large quantity of water, even for the washing of hands. In fact, this verse six is full of extravagance. And, then again, maybe this is a very large wedding.

The new wine is created in the old jars used for Jewish purification rites. The jars were there empty waiting to be filled. The old jars are not changed but given new content. And the Jewish pots were filled with a wondrous new gift. The miracle is not rejecting nor replacing the old, but the creation of something new (in the middle of Judaism). There was wine in jars used to purify. Is John looking towards the crucifixion? He could be. This was written well after Jesus death and resurrection.

We need to realize that Jesus did not take the bad and turn it into something good! He did not take the useless and turn it into the useful. He took good things from the past and transformed them, changed them, reformed them into other good things for the future. A good question then, for us today is “what does this text say to us today, in the year 2022?” What is our water that Jesus has come to turn into wine?

Dr. Delmer Chilton, one of my favorite writers who was raised Baptist, went to Duke Divinity (Methodist) and became Lutheran recently wrote: The church in America, is in the middle of transition. Church membership and attendance, already in decline before the pandemic, have plunged even more. Political and cultural divisions have bled over into the church. And, in and out of church, we are much less civil and kind in the way we discuss our differences. It is important for us in times of transition, upheaval and change to remember that God in Christ is actively involved in turning our old water into new wine. The New Age brought by Jesus the Christ is an ongoing age of transformation and growth. We in the church and in the country are not the people we once were, nor are we the people we will someday become. We are in a state of fluidity; we are water being changed into wine. We have choices, as individuals and as communities of faith. We can face the future’s changes with fear and resistance; or we can embrace them with faith and excitement. Either way, change is going to happen, a New Age is upon us, the water is beginning to change, and God is smack dab in the middle of it.
We all know church will not be like it was in 2019. Most of us have some way of communicating with our members electronically. Church is now being brought into homes. We are challenged how do we make that work better?

And so we move forward into God’s future for the church and the world. And we hear the cry, our cry of faith, “God has done it again!” And God does it in us and for us because he loves you and so do I!