Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor
John 2:1-11I spent a few days in Florida back in August to help the Unitarian Church where Bishop Spong and I will hold a conference next month to get their planning kick started. Some members of the committee were trying to figure out why a guy who is not a Unitarian was being brought in to organize them and to conduct an educational event for them.
On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. 2Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. 3When the wine gave out, the mother of Jesus said to him, "They have no wine." 4And Jesus said to her, "Woman, what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come." 5His mother said to the servants, "Do whatever he tells you." 6Now standing there were six stone water jars for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons. 7Jesus said to them, "Fill the jars with water." And they filled them up to the brim. 8He said to them, "Now draw some out, and take it to the chief steward." So they took it. 9When 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 10and 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." 11Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.
One fairly skeptical gentleman asked, "Why, if you are a progressive pastor, do you still call your church a 'Christian' church and why do you still include communion in your services?'" I don't typically like to answer a question with a question but in this case, it seemed to fit.
I asked him, "Why do you call your church a Unitarian Universalist church when 'Unitarian' means that you don't believe in the Trinity when in fact, you no longer have a formal doctrine of the nature of God at all, and 'Universalist' means that you believe that everyone goes to heaven and you no longer believe that heaven exists?"
The name "Unitarian Universalist" no longer accurately describes what that denomination really stands for but the name has been around for generations and there is not presently a better option that is so compelling as to make them want to change. The same is more or less true of us. We started our church eight years ago and though we had some Jewish, Buddhist, and atheist participants, for the most part, we were a band of former Protestants and Catholics and we named ourselves based upon the preponderance of our experience.
Though our Sunday morning services have continued to evolve, we started out at pretty much the same point where we were when we first left traditional Christian churches. We have never wiped the slate clean but we're not making any firm promises about what we will call ourselves or how we will conduct our services five years from now, but realistically, we are a product of our culture and the influences we have chosen to help shape our present and our future.
This is how religion, language, politics, music, and art all work. As Carl Sagan is famous for saying, if you want to make an apple pie from scratch, first you have to create an entire universe. The truth is that we all work with the ingredients that we have at hand.
So, that being said, today we have heard read the very familiar story from the gospel of John in which Jesus turns a whole lot of water into more wine than any wedding party could possibly consume... literally turning a simple wedding feast into more of a Mardi Gras celebration.
What do we make of this story? Let me get the most obvious thing out of the way immediately: It didn't happen. John is not the least bit interested in literal history and is not concerned about the fact that he is making up an event whole cloth. He is creating this narrative for theological reasons, not for historical purposes.
And here you may have to trust me a bit, at least until you have time to go and research it for yourself... John is writing after the other three gospels in the New Testament have become fairly well known. He borrows from the previous works when it suits his purposes and he very liberally altars, corrects, or enhances the previous works to guide the evolution of the young Christian movement in the west in the early part of the second century.
You can't really claim that any of the gospels are firmly rooted in Palestine but they do deal a bit more closely with the Jewish elements of the faith of Jesus and his disciples. John is written at a greater distance, probably in Rome, and with greater disdain for all things Jewish.
Though John has shares many parts of the gospel narrative with the other three, one of the important differences is that there is no Last Supper scene in John. There is no clear precedent for communion.
It is an odd thing, especially when you consider the fact that Paul, the first of the Christian writers, appears to have almost no interest in anything that Jesus said or did beyond his death and resurrection, but he makes a big exception for communion. He stops cold in his first letter to the church in Corinth to describe what he believed was the historical event of the Last Supper to make certain that they were doing communion the right way.... You know, his way.... I totally get that.
Matthew, Mark, and Luke follow Paul's narrative to the "t" only pausing to embellish the story along the way. But John doesn't mention it at all. Is that because he wanted to root the practice out of the evolving church?
Most scholars don't think that was his goal. In fact, in some ways, he raises the ante a bit with a long priestly prayer and he connects it to a miraculous feeding in which he tells the crowds that they must eat his flesh and drink his blood. . . . sending the Catholic church cascading down a theological wormhole for 2000 years.
In a more subtle way, this account of turning water into wine is also a kind of communion story. Again, every culture, every movement, every author uses the images and words that are at hand. The first gospel writers used familiar Jewish imagery to interpret the significance of Jesus's sacrifice and so they cast him as the lamb sacrificed at Passover, changing the Passover itself from an annual Jewish observance into a weekly Christian observance.
John borrowed from the more familiar Greek and Roman image of the god of wine, Bacchus, whose temple featured a little priestly slight of hand in which gathered worshippers watched the priests fill a large vat with water. They enclosed the vat over night behind locked doors and the next morning, the doors were opened and the vat was full of wine. The laity were never to know about the series of tubes that drained the water over night and the tiny seep holes that allowed wine to drip in to take its place.
But John grabs the miracle from Roman tradition and suggests it into the gospel account. Wine might be a year round pleasure for the rich but for the poor it was more of a luxury most of the year.... But not at the time of the Bacchanal Festival at harvest time. When the grapes were gathered and the process of making wine was in full swing, everyone got a taste.
John doesn't call the turning of water into wine a "miracle," but rather he calls it a "sign." If it is a sign, what, exactly, is it a sign of? And that is the crux of the matter... that's why John includes it in the narrative at all.
Most of the time, the poor deal with scarcity. John takes the wine from the communion table, turns it into jars holding hundreds of gallons of wine and tells everyone, this is the sign of the coming Kingdom.... When there is no difference between the rich and poor, when everyone gets their fill.
Several years ago I took a team of church members down to Ecuador to a tiny, remote village in the mountains called Cumbas Conde. We had paid for the building materials and were helping to build a community center where the people would be able to bath, wash their clothes, and have rooms where they could safely store grain. When I was raising money for it in the United States we called it a Sunday School building because storing grain and washing clothes doesn't turn on many lights in big traditional churches.... I will assume that I am forgiven for any mild deception involved in that exchange.
Agriculture in the high Andes doesn't make anyone either fat or rich.
The people there needed all of the help they could get to make their largely bean and grain diet keep them alive. At the end of our week's work, the villagers wanted to have a big festival with us but there were not many chairs in the village and even fewer plates and forks.
So, they seated me and my team in the middle of their church with what chairs and tables they had, and the villagers all sat or stooped down on the floor around us. In front of us was a huge platter of fried chicken, probably every chicken that had been running around their sparse village that morning. There was rice, beans, and corn, and tortillas and cups of Kool-Aid.
And, we were hungry since not many of us had put in a full week of manual labor in a long time. But as we filled our plates and started to eat, we noticed that the villagers, if they were eating at all, were eating rice and beans out of their shirt-tails and off of leaves. Once we realized that the chicken was only for the North Americans, none of us could eat anymore.
It was a full 30 minutes before we could convince them to share the chicken with their families. They were so accustomed to giving the best food to white people and only eating what was left that it was nearly impossible to persuade them to do otherwise. If only I had known what they planned to do, I would have shown up that day with so many chickens that they would still be picking the feathers out of their hair but we didn't know. We had given them a small building that, given our resources, cost us very very little. They gave us their source of chickens and protein that they would take months to replace. It was one of the saddest days of my life.
Artistically, symbolically, in a literary way, John put in the starting of his gospel a vision of a kind of communion that breaks down the walls between the hoarders and the hungry, between the powerful and the weak, between the those who live in abundance and those who daily have to try to survive scarcity.
So, if I still think of myself as Christian, if I still stand at the communion table softly saying to each person in line, "the bread of life," it is because these are the images, this is the language of the church where I discovered a faith that makes me long for justice, that makes me hope for a day when everyone has an equal place at the table, that makes me have faith in the ability of people to change to make the world a more loving and fair place.
So that's my story, and I'm sticking to it.
