“God's Abundant Grace”
Sermon Preached by
The Father Jim Hannah,
Our Lady of Perpetual Help
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Text: 1 Cor. 12:4-11, John 2:1-12
I am Father Jim Hannah. I am the Pastor of Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church, and it is my great pleasure to be here with you this morning. And, I want to say a word of thanks to Jean for her very warm welcome.
When I arrived, I noticed that in the vestry they have a book with all the names of the people who have preached here. So, I looked back, and actually, I was here almost two years to the day. It's getting to be a habit! Not a bad one, I think. It is a great pleasure to be with you this morning! I am here because we are beginning the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, and it is very important for us, as Christians, to pray that our communities continue to find ways to be in communion with one another.
We've come a long way over the last 50, 60, 70, 100 years. We have come a long way from the days when Catholics and Protestants wouldn't enter one another's church. We have come a long way from when a person would cross the street and walk along the sidewalk so he wouldn't have to walk in front of a church of a different denomination than his own. We've come a long ways from those days when someone who was marrying a Catholic or a Protestant couldn't be married in their own church. Thank God we have!
We still have a long way to go, but I think we need to pray prayers of thanksgiving for our theologians and our church leaders, who continue to work finding ways for us to be more united, more in communion with one another. They have done a terrific job so far helping us to find our way through our differences. But, as I say, we still have a long way to go.
Here, we ourselves are very fortunate to be part of the Churches on-the-Hill. As Churches on-the-Hill, we have a great relationship with one another, and there are certainly numerous things through the course of the year that we do together to celebrate our Christian faith. We need to continue to support those things. I am thinking primarily of the food bank, which is such a needed reality today, regrettably needed, but needed nonetheless.
I think we ourselves need to ask a very difficult question: how committed are we to doing what we can to support Christian unity? It is fine for our church leaders and our theologians and those out there to be working on that before us, but how much are we prepared to put ourselves on the line to support Christian unity? Now, I don't know what it is like here. I know my own church. They are good at the ecumenical service. I announce it. It is like pulling teeth to get people to go. And I can't point my finger at them without pointing it at myself, because I find myself saying, “Another service!” Do I really need to go to another service? You don't like the time; it may be inconvenient!
It is hard to make ourselves take our involvement in Christian unity seriously. But, I ask you to think about that. There will be an ecumenical service here next Sunday at four o'clock, and I encourage you to come, to make it part of what you do, how you involve yourself in the whole process of supporting Christian unity. At the Churches on-the-Hill, we do what we can, but we can always do more. Let's think about that.
Now, I will say a few words about this Gospel. It is one we are all very familiar with, I am sure: the miracle of the water and wine. There have certainly been times when I had wished personally that I could do that. I have not yet reached that point, but I am still living in hope! I think if we listen to that Gospel story and we focus on the miracle of the water changing into wine, we miss the point of the story, because the story is much more about the mission of Jesus himself.
It is a story that is full of symbols and imagery and, if we miss that, we miss the story. It starts out by saying on the third day there was a wedding in Cana. On the third day of what? Third day of the week? Third day of the month? Third day of what? It doesn't say. It doesn't say, because the author of the story is not interested in time. What he is doing is trying to get our attention.
Think about it this way. The first day is the beginning. The second day is the middle. The third day is the end: the end of something and the beginning of something new. So, the author of the story is saying that something is about to happen, pay attention. There should be a sense of anticipation as we hear the beginning of this story. What is this about?
Once he begins the story, then he introduces us to two of the main characters in the story: Jesus and Mary. In this story, there are also symbols. Jesus, obviously, is the symbol of the divine, the symbol of the presence of God among us. Mary is a symbol of all humanity, the symbol of human kind. We see Mary going to Jesus and saying to him, “They have no wine.” It is a very powerful statement. The brevity of it and the clarity of it and the directness of it is a very powerful thing.
You are going to hear that same theme repeated over and over again in the Gospel. It comes in different words, but it is the same point. The Samaritan goes to Jesus and says, “My daughter is dying. Please come and help.”
A man says, “I have no one to put me in the pool to help heal me.”
The disciples say to Jesus, “We do not have enough money to buy food to feed all these people.”
Over this past week, I think all of our attention has been focussed on people in our own times saying the same thing. The people from Haiti saying, “My children were killed in the earthquake.”
“We have no food.”
“I have lost my home.”
“My business is destroyed.”
“Our city is in ruins.”
Sometimes, we hear it closer to home than even that. When we hear people say, “I have lost my job.”
“My health is failing me.”
“My marriage has just fallen apart.”
“My children are in trouble.”
“They have no wine” is a statement about the fragility and the brokenness of the human condition. It is about how vulnerable we, as human beings, are. Mary is the representative of the human community who cares for all of those who find themselves in need. So, she goes to Jesus and she says, “They have no wine.”
Jesus' response to her is interesting. He says, “Woman, what is this to you and to me? My hour is not yet come.” It is interesting that Jesus does not call her Mary or Mother. He says, “Woman.” She is the mother of all humanity, the one who represents us all. He says, “My hour is not yet come.” What hour? That word, “hour” should remind us all of Christ's death and resurrection, because that was his hour, that was the hour in which his glory shone. And, it is in that hour that we see how God intervenes in the human condition.
Jesus doesn't take away our problems like a magician, waving some kind of divine wand, and all things become well again. He doesn't do it from the outside, standing above us, looking down on us. Jesus enters into our human condition, he suffers and he dies with us. He takes on our frailty and our vulnerability, and transforms us. He takes on our frailty and our vulnerability as he gives it new meaning, and he gives us hope in the midst of it. He becomes one with us. That is his “hour.”
When he says to Mary, “What is this to do with me?” The answer to the question is, “Everything.” As a human community, we can't find our way through all of the challenges of our lives. We can't find our way through all the pain and the struggle that this life confronts us with over and over and over again without the divine being part of it.
It is the presence of the divine in our lives that give us hope, that gives us courage, and that helps us find new meaning, and find our way through the suffering of life. For Mary, it is everything that God becomes part of this human journey. For Jesus, it is his mission to bring the good news of God's love for us by becoming one with us, and standing in the midst of this reality with us.
We hear Mary turn to the servant and say, “Do whatever he tells you.” What a statement of trust! She doesn't tell him what to do. She doesn't beg him. She just says, “Do whatever he tells you.” She trusts that Jesus will respond out of the full love that God has for us, for the need that has been presented to him: they have no wine.
I think challenge for us in some ways is to ask ourselves whether we trust Jesus that much. Do we trust that he desires nothing more than our good? Do we believe that what God desires for us is nothing but our good? In spite of all that happens in our lives, in spite of all that we see going on around us, do we truly believe that what God desires for us is life, and that what God desires for us is to be people of joy. Do we trust God that much?
It is not an easy question. It is not hard to say “Yes” when we are sitting upright and healthy or when things seem to be going fairly well in our lives. It is a much more difficult question to answer when we are confronted with the fragility of life, when we are confronted with how vulnerable we all are in the face of the challenges of life. Yet, Mary just says, “Do whatever he tells you.” It is an expression of trust that each and every one of us are called to. Jesus tells the attendant to fill up the water jugs full of water, fill them to the brim. We are told that there are six of them, and they hold 100 litres of water. “Fill them to the brim and then take them to the steward.”
What I find interesting about this story is that there is actually no mention of the miracle. There is no mention at all about what Jesus did, because it is not the point of the story. The water that these jugs contained was water that was to be used for the ritual of purification, cleansing the outside of the body, making it ready to be in the presence of God, and what Jesus does is transforms that water into rich, new wine, a rich, new wine that fills the inside, that enriches the inside, so that water now becomes the symbol of God's abundant love for us. It becomes the gift of God's Spirit given to us to fill up and to enrich us. It becomes a gift of God's Spirit dwelling within us. That new wine gives us new life.
And then, the Gospel goes on, and this is the first of the signs that Jesus performed, and the challenge is to start going through your Bible and saying, “Okay, if this one is the first, which one is the second? What's the third, what's the fourth?” Actually, there are no signs like that. There is no one, two, three, four, five. When the author says, “This is a sign” what he means is if you look through the Scriptures, you are going to see the same pattern repeated over and over and over again. The human needs, the separate desire of someone's heart presented to Jesus, his response and compassion, and his transforming whatever that need is into new life, restoring the person's ability to hope and to be joyful.
That is the easy part. The hard part comes now, because today, you and I are that sign. You and I are the body of Christ. You and I are the ones who are called to respond when someone says they have no wine. When the human need is presented to us, it now becomes our responsibility to allow the Spirit that has been given to us to work through us to give hope and meaning and joy to peoples' lives.
As our first reading today from Corinthians reminded us, we have all been given the gifts of the Spirit to respond to those needs. I know there is somebody sitting out there saying, “That may true for the person sitting next to me, but it is not me. I don't have any special gifts.” The reality is that is not true. The reality is that we all have gifts. Some have gifts that they can exercise in the broader community; others have gifts that they exercise in their own family.
Your gift may not be anything more than being able to turn to somebody and smile at them. Oh, what a gift that is! You give life to a person when you turn and smile at them. When you hold the door open for someone who needs it, when you sit down and listen to somebody who is hurting, when you are respectful of people, tolerant of other peoples' differences: those are wonderful gifts! They are things we can all do. And then, there are other things that other people can do. People who help run the food bank, people who are involved in other charities.
There are all kinds of things that people can do. But each and every one of us can do those little things every day. This makes life better for the people around you. That is the challenge for us. We become a sign of God's presence in the world. We are now the sign of God's compassion for humanity. And so, when we hear the call “They have no wine” we need to look at what our response might be. No matter what the issue is, is there something we can do?
We can't personally solve all the problems in the world. We can raise funds for Haiti, but we can't do much for the individual people there over and above that. We do what we can, and I don't think God expects more than that, but he expects at least that we do what we can. We can't stop the war in Afghanistan, but we can pray, we can support our own troops, we can ask God to find ways to bring peace to that land and to all lands where there is conflict, to bring justice to the lands where people are starving.
As I say, we can't solve all the problems of the world. We need to start with where we are, with the people around us, our own families, the people we work with, our own church community. We need to begin there to be the sign, the sign of the Body of Christ, the sign of the compassion of God welling up, filling the hearts of all, and then the world will know that Christ has come. Amen.