"Alternating Currents of Christ's Love"
How "One Wedding and a Funeral" illustrate Christ's love.
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, January 12, 2003
Text: John 2:1-11; Luke 7:11-17
I clearly must have movies on my brain at the moment when I am planning worship services and sermons. Last week I talked about "La Dolce Vita" and today in reading the text in preparation for today's sermon, my mind turned to my favourite movie of all time: "Four Weddings and a Funeral." Now, you can imagine as a minister why I would naturally gravitate towards such a movie, and I do so not only because of the hapless character played by Hugh Grant, who charged from one ceremony to the other, barely arriving in time, if at all. I also think especially of those moments of deep emotion: sadness, joy, broken hearts. It was a glorious movie in so many ways.
I think of the way in which emotions were at their very highest and people were ready for almost anything because of the nature of the ceremonies that they were attending. But for all of us who are in the ministry there is of course one outstanding character in the movie who continues to be a burden upon us all, and that was the minister played by Rowan Atkinson.
For those of you who haven't seen the movie, This was the phrase he continually repeated: "In the name of the Father, and the Son and the Holy Spigot." It has haunted ministers ever since, and every time I am about to perform a wedding and give the blessing I am always scared that I am going to fall into that very trap, so engraved is it in my heart and mind and memory. In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit today, I am speaking!
In that glorious and wonderful movie, what was very obvious was that weddings and funerals are often the most emotive events that human beings go through. They carry with them a stress and a tension, a power and a wonder, a glory and a misery - sometimes all in one. Very often they are remembered more for their faux pas and errors than for the things that go well. But it doesn't seem to matter. They're still important and they're still sacred. In many ways they are signs and symbols of God's grace and love in our midst.
Now over the centuries, there have been debates about whether weddings, particularly, should be considered a sacrament. The great St. Augustine in writing "A Good Marriage," described a sacrament as a "visible sign of an invisible grace." In some ways he was right in suggesting that wedding ceremonies are in fact signs and symbols of Christ's blessing and of Christ's glory. But that idea was taken and extended well beyond just weddings. By the time the l2th century came along, Peter Lombard, a very well-known Catholic scholar suggested there should be seven sacraments and of these seven sacraments, weddings should be one of them. And so weddings became institutionalized as a sacrament.
While funerals weren't known as such, what was a sacrament was "extreme unction," the anointing of the dying. It was considered one of the seven sacraments. Sir Thomas Aquinas, and even the churches in the east all agreed with Lombard on that point.
But as the Reformation came along, attitudes changed. The Anglicans took a via media or middle position. They said no. There are only two sacraments instituted by Christ: Baptism and Communion. But there are five other sacraments of the Church not given directly by Christ himself. The Reformers however, wanted to part company even from that. They said that there were only two sacraments: Baptism and Communion.
But whether you believe that weddings are a sacrament or that funerals have a sacramental element to them, particularly preceded by "extreme unction," matters little. The fact remains that they are very much part of the Church's life. They are engraved in our hearts and our minds and our lives and our witness, as symbols and signs of Christ's presence and of Christ's love.
In our texts this morning, we encounter both a wedding and a funeral, and in both, Jesus Christ's presence transforms the occasion. In the first, he takes a positive situation and enriches it; in the second, he takes a negative situation and ennobles it. But in both, Christ's presence and Christ's life make all the difference.
The first of these is the enriching power of Christ in moments of joy, and this is heard at the wedding in Cana. Anyone who has taken part in a wedding, helped somebody else with a wedding, attended a wedding or been married oneself, knows that weddings are not only joyful - they are stressful. Everything has to be perfect, everything has to work on time, everything has to be manicured to the finest detail, or else we think that a wedding is not perfect. The stress builds and builds and builds, and I am still not sure who experiences it the most: the bride or the groom or the parents of same, but weddings are stressful.
I want to tell you about one such occasion that explains why I am gun-shy about weddings. The first wedding that I ever performed was as a student minister in South Africa in a Xhosa community in the Eastern Cape. The senior minister had taken ill and he knew that under no circumstances could he cancel this wedding. It was an important one in the community, and the only person that he could ask to do it was me.
I'd never done a wedding in my life and so I feverishly read all the service material, memorized the liturgy, remembered right down to the nth degree every vow, every scintilla, every phrase that might be used. I was perfectly prepared. I was ready. This was an exciting moment. I was to perform my first wedding and the minister would sign the official papers later on. We were all set. The church began to fill up, the groom arrived in all his finery, the choir was ready, the music was splendid, the organist was tremendous, the bride came in and she was glowing, absolutely glowing. Her skin was glistening against the white dress, it was gorgeous, majesty, pageantry; everyone had done it right. I got through the service without making a mistake. Every word was perfect, every phrase from Scripture properly recounted.
Then we got to the glorious moment, right before the vows, when I asked the question that by law I must ask: "If anyone knows any lawful impediment why this couple may not be married, I charge you before God, the searcher of all hearts, to declare it."
A hand went up and a young man came up the aisle. I am going completely solo now. I have no idea what to do, because nobody ever prepared me for this. (In seminary nobody ever teaches this, it's not even in the books themselves and it should be, let me tell you. What do you do? Have you ever thought of that? What do you do? )
I said, "Well look, why don't you come and meet the bride and the groom?" and I hurried them out to a back room, and asked him: "What is the nature of your complaint?"
He said, "The bride promised herself to me a few weeks ago."
So, I asked the bride if this was true.
"No, it isn't," she responded. "I dated him three years ago and he's never gotten over me."
I said to the groom, "What do you think right now? Is this true?" and his fist started to come forward and I had to restrain him.
I said: "No, you can save that for the reception."
(Did you know, by the way, that if you make such a claim, certainly under South African law, and I assume it's the same here, that you cannot substantiate, you can be charged with disrupting worship in a public setting?)
And so the elders escorted this young man from the church. We went back to the service and, to this day, I still don't remember whether I actually married them. Talk about stress!
Now I want you to put yourselves in the time of John's Gospel. Jesus is attending a wedding ceremony, and to compound all the stresses of the moment, they run out of wine. They realize that the one thing that is essential, almost sacramental for Jews in a wedding celebration, is wine. And so Mary, who is a friend of the family, comes to Jesus and says: "Is there anything that you can do about this?"
And Jesus says, "It is not my time mother, it's not my time to declare myself as to who I am. I mustn't do anything miraculous right now." But she urged him, she pleaded with him to do something about it, and so he did.
John gives an account of Jesus turning water into wine. Now, many people have had a problem with this miracle: How could this possibly happen? It is contrary to nature! Some, like the philosopher Philo, have tried to allegorize this text, rather than deal with it. But for John, there was no problem at all. The miraculous was something that happened when Jesus was there and after all, if Jesus is, as the Bible claims him to be, "the Lord of the Universe," how could we even doubt it?
I have never had any problems with the miraculous. I've seen too much of it. I believe it, anyway, because it was Jesus who was doing it. But that's not the main point. The main point is that the turning of water into wine at this ceremony is a revelatory sign of Christ's glory. It is a sign of his loving and gracious and powerful presence. It is Jesus enriching what is a joyful experience in people's lives and John, very cleverly in the story, lets us know that they discovered that the best wine was the wine that Jesus brought.
One of the stewards asked, "Why do you bring the best wine last? Why didn't you serve the best wine first?" Of course he had no idea that it would be Jesus of Nazareth who would be the one who would bring this to bear. In other words, symbolically, Jesus of Nazareth brings into a joyful setting his presence and he enriches it. I believe that in our marriages, in our relationships, in our family lives, even in the workplace, the presence of Jesus Christ enriches relationships.
One of the things that I say to couples when they are married here at Timothy Eaton is what Jesus, in this great passage from the Gospel of John says to his disciples: "I want you to love one another as I have loved you." In other words, the pattern of Christ's love, that self-giving love, that gracious and outpouring love, that love that Paul in the Book of Corinthians says never ends - that is precisely the love that Christ brings into a relationship. And whatever relationships we have in this life and whatever bonds we might develop, it is Christ's presence that enriches and makes them wonderful.
So often, I hear that religion is nothing more than a balm for a troubled soul, nothing more than a way of patching the broken quilt of human life, that all we do is provide some support to people who find negative moments in their lives. But that is not the biblical Christ! The biblical Christ comes in moments of great joy and enriches and celebrates them. His love brings them alive. It's the new wine.
I seldom read a poem from this pulpit, but I read one by James Freeman Clarke not long ago that so beautifully and eloquently displays the very love of Christ in the water and wine:
Dear friend: whose presence in the house,
Whose gracious word benign,
Could once, at Cana's wedding feast,
Change water into wine.
Come visit us, and when dull work
Grows weary line on line,
Revive our souls, and make us see
Life's water glow as wine.
Great mirth shall deepen into joy,
Earth hope shall grow divine,
When Jesus visits us, to turn
Life's water into wine.
The social talk, the evening fire,
The homely household shrine,
Shall glow with angel-visits when
The Lord pours out the wine.
For when self-seeking turns to love,
Which knows not mine and thine,
The miracle again is wrought,
And water changed to wine.
Such is the enriching power of Christ. But there is also a profound sense in the Scriptures that he ennobles even the negative moments of life. And none could be more poignant than the story in the Gospel of Luke, where Luke gives an account of a funeral in Nain. Now, Nain is not a place that is well known in the scriptures; we never hear of it again in the New Testament. But in the tradition of the Shunnamite, this is the place where Elisha restored the dead to life.
It has then, in the memory and the minds of the people of Israel, a poignant place. When the crowds came in and mourned for seven days, wailing at the loss of the young man, Jesus was in the midst of it. Luke went to great lengths to explain that the widow in this circumstance was in great need and great pain because her only child, her only son, had died and she was all alone. Jesus came up to her in her mourning and showed his compassion to her. He reached down to this young man and he raised him up.
All the biblical scholars agree that this is a foretaste in Luke's Gospel of the resurrection of Jesus that was to come. It was a foretaste, a sign, a symbol of God's living, gracious presence, when He would lift up those who had no hope, those who felt that the last word was death, and give them the hope of life.
I find many people cynical about funerals these days. They often think we don't need them at all. I read an anonymous editorial in a British newspaper after the death of Sir Winston Churchill that said: "The only reason that I might consider attending the funeral is to make sure that he is absolutely dead."
Well, that is a very poor reason to go to a funeral, is it not? Funerals are important. It is important for the church and its ministry to be a living sign of the presence of Jesus Christ in people's lives. And the reasons are basically twofold: One, to acknowledge the pain and the loss and the grief that people feel. And, two: To give them a public setting where they can demonstrate their emotions - just like the Jewish people who walked the streets of Nain in mourning. To let the emotions, as negative, as painful, as sorrowful as they are, emerge. There is something cathartic about a funeral.
There is also something comfortable about a funeral. And what is comfortable and what is comforting is the very message of the good news of Christ's resurrection and Christ's presence. No Christian funeral can exclude the word of the resurrection and the word of hope and life everlasting. It is the cornerstone. And this is one of the great gifts that we give the world. One of the great ministries of our church is to bring the ennobling presence of Christ as he did to that widow on the streets of Nain, to people in grief and sorrow. You see, Christ's presence means so much.
At this time of the year, my mind goes back some five years ago, when I buried my dearly beloved father in the Annapolis Valley. I received a note this Christmas from one of my friends, recounting something that my father had done. You know, at my father's funeral there were these great ministers, one a colleague with whom I had worked and loved very dearly. A senior minister. Another was a minister from Bermuda, who'd been a friend of my father's from many years ago, and who used to attend cricket matches with him in Hamilton.
Oh, there were a great many people there. There were people from the church, from presbytery. There were dignitaries, fine messages, great tributes, wonderful words, glorious prayers and we sang some magnificent hymns.
But you know something? When I think back, I don't remember a single word that was said. I don't remember a single prayer, I don't recall one story that was told of his life. I remember none of it except this: When I went to the reception after the service I saw a friend whom I hadn't seen for years, since leaving Halifax, someone who used to work with Marial. And there he was, sitting at the back of the room. During the funeral there had been a snowstorm and this young man had driven all the way from Halifax, through the Annapolis Valley in the midst of a near-blizzard to get to the service. He sat at the back, not one of the dignitaries, not one of the greats, not someone I even expected to see. But he came out of the midst of the storm to make sure that I was okay. I remember that, if nothing else that was said. I remember the love and the presence, even if I don't remember the words.
Jesus of Nazareth is just like that. When even our words fail us, they don't really matter. What is important is the presence of Jesus Christ among us. The story of Cana and the story of Nain are stories of the enriching and the ennobling presence of Jesus Christ that make joy greater and sorrow bearable. And for this, this day we give thanks. For they are the alternating currents of Christ's love. Amen.
This is a verbatim transcription of the original sermon.