Between Christmas and New Years I had the lovely privilege of attending my friend Spencer's wedding up in New Hampshire and being a member of her bridal party. As a member of the bridal party I got to wear a sage green suit with vest and all, a boxwood boutonnière, and line up behind our dear friend as a rabbi and a priest married her and her husband.
One of the things I love about weddings is sussing out the unique quirky little things that each couple does for their service or their reception, and my friends did not have a bar or a drinks table or wait staff circling to refill glasses. On the front patio of the reception hall-- mind you it was 20 degrees and snow on the ground-- there was an entire canoe full of ice and tucked into the ice in the canoe was every kind of drink you could imagine. Seltzer, beer, non alcoholic beer, wine of every color. More than we could ever drink, and by the end of the night the whole wedding had barely put a dent in half of it. Imagine that, a canoe full of drinks.
Some of my friends and I read the Gospel for this week together and one of them crunched the numbers- Jesus' water into wine trick would've been like if at the midpoint of the reception, somebody had set up eight more canoes, filled them with ice, put 100 bottles of wine in each of them, and said "what do you guys say we keep this party going."
I love this about the Gospel of John, that the first genuine story of Jesus' ministry, the first miracle, the first sign he performs is as a wedding reception hype man. Or at least that's one way of looking at this story. A fun thing about scripture is that there are a bunch of different ways of looking at each story.
This could be a story about how Jesus wants us to have fun and the name of fun is 250 gallons of wine.
This could be a story about Jesus' methods being a bit coy or sassy "Chief steward why don't you taste some of that water in there 'wink wink' or "Woman what concern is that to you and me?"
or in the very same breath, "Woman what concern is that to you and me? My hour has not yet come." This could be a story about Jesus openly foreboding his death from the very beginning of this Gospel.
This could be a story about miracles- and how when they needed it, Jesus gave them a sign that he was God, and that his mission- and he himself- was worth believing in.
This could be a story about any of these things, and to some extent it is about each of them. Our stories of scripture hold so much. And, for me, today, here, this story is a story of God's relationship to abundance, and God's desire for our relationship to abundance too.
So they're halfway through the party and Jesus makes six more cisterns of wine and the steward doesn't know where it's come from and calls the groom and says, like, hey- "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."
This is more wine than they could ever need, it's more wine than they could have accounted for, and it is better wine than human minds would- for better or worse- have decided was worth it. And it seems that what God thinks we're worth, what God thinks is the proper amount to lay out on the table is real different than how we see it.
God's relationship to abundance is not just as a runaway abundance that feels like the Virginia Lottery; there are soo many stories that clarify what God means. There is the wedding bar with enough wine for two thousand thirsty partiers, there is the five loaves and two fishes and 5000 people that resulted in baskets of leftovers. And at the same time, there is the story of the Widow's Mite being worth more than the great sums put into the treasury, there was the manna for the Israelites that spoiled over night (give us this day our daily bread), there was the rich man who stepped over Lazarus on his stoop every day who was said to have given up God's eternal abundance for his own present-day hoarding, there was Jesus sending out his disciples in pairs with nothing but their sandals, there was the admonishment to live with the quiet assurance of the lilies of the field who neither toil nor spin and yet Solomon in all his glory is not arrayed like a lily. What a puzzle to put it all together, huh.
This is where the work of theology -- where the teaching of the church -- is delicate work. In my work with my college students and my young adults, many of them have been sold many what felt like false bills of goods by pastors and churches, about any variety of topics, and one of them being a gospel of prosperity.
When we equate faith to abundance and abundance to worth, we end up with a Gospel that seems to teach that wealthy people are the most faithful and the most beloved of God.
When the church elaborates no further than "God will provide" it can make it hard to square with tremendous tragedies, like wildfires, when the need simply far outweighs the supply or it can make it seem like it absolves us of the responsibility we have to care for and with one another.
I have not been able get the phrase out of my head all week: "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."
I don't know if its the tension between optimism and pessimism or cynicism, or if its the tension between generosity and hoarding, or between hope/faith and despair but the sentiment that "we've already had all the good wine" feels so common these days, this idea that we're in the back half of the party and the age of miracles is over, as a sentiment, can be such a pervasive and potent idea that it can change the way we live. And it kind of cuts across all areas of life-- politically, economically, socially-- how much we allow the idea to take hold
The idea that "the best has already come and gone"
"we will run out and there will be no more"
"we will deserve only what we can plan for"
"there is nobody else looking out for us"
We know that God does not perform the sign- the miracle- at every turn. But as Christians, we are not called to wake up every morning and receive miracle after miracle all day long, we are called to live like miracles are possible. We are not called to a lives of unfettered abundance, but we are called to act like abundance is possible and that it might be just around the corner. We are called to believe that our best days are not behind us, to live like God is still working in the world-- even if we can't always see it--, and we are called not to stay coiled up in anticipation of the worst, but to show up bravely in the world hoping hoping for the best, and in either case knowing that God is not done working yet. Amen.
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