Good Water, Better Wine

The Second Sunday after Epiphany

20 January 2013

Saint Faith’s Anglican Church

Vancouver BC

Isaiah 62.1-5; Psalm 36.5-10; 1 Corinthians 12.1-11; John 2.1-11

Click here to hear the Sermon as preached at the 10.00 a.m. Eucharist at Saint Faith's.

            Few texts are as difficult to preach in our time as miracle stories.  We have lived through the scientific revolution that began at least four hundred years ago and that revolution has taught us to be suspicious of explanations that rely on the supernatural or on faith.  Perhaps our difficulty lies in what we think a miracle story is trying to tell us.

            For some people miracle stories are the theological equivalent of the ‘Hail Mary’ pass in North American football.  The game seems lost; only a last-minute pass of considerable length through a mass of defenders will result in the winning touch-down.  The quarterback backs up, lets the ball fly through the air and we all hold our collective breaths to see if the receiver down the field will catch the ball to win the game.  Most of the time such efforts are not rewarded with victory, but we can still hope.

            The miracles told in the Hebrew scriptures and in the New Testament are read by some Christians as reminders that the possibility exists in the midst of unbelievable difficulties and tragedies that maybe, just maybe, God will intervene and make everything right again.  Even the editor of the biblical book we know as Job gave into this temptation.  Job has three parts:  (i) the beginning where we hear how Job ends up losing everything he has; (ii) the longer middle section made up of conversations between Job and three other persons where the incomprehensible mystery of ‘why bad things happen to good people’ is explored with greater and lesser success; and (iii) the conclusion where God gives dear old Job everything back and more to make amends. 

            We all want things to turn out well when we are faced with what seem to be insurmountable challenges.  We cannot rule out God’s mysterious transformation of tragedies into stories with happy endings, but this is not why miracle stories have been collected and re-told in our Scriptures.  Miracle stories are signs that point to what God is doing in the world in the here and now.[i]  In other words, miracles are vivid reminders that if we have the eyes to see, the hearts to embrace and the minds to explore, we shall discover that all of creation, every moment of our lives are filled with the glory of God and with the evidence of God’s desire to heal creation and bring us into abundant life.

            In today’s reading from John’s gospel we hear the familiar story of the miraculous transformation of water into wine by Jesus.  Like the steward of the feast we are tempted to look only at the vast quantity of wine that appears just at the right moment in the feast and conclude that this is the meaning of the story.  But it is not.[ii]  The miraculous transformation of the water into wine is a sign of what God has begun to do through Jesus of Nazareth and what God continues to do through the body of disciples who have eyes to see, hearts to embrace and minds to explore the mystery of God’s transformation of the ordinary stuff of our lives into agents of God’s saving purpose.[iii]

            Let me also say that this story is not a story about Jesus’ repudiation of Judaism.  Some commentators have suggested that the fact that the water was in containers intended to be used for the Jewish rites of purification is an indication that this story implies a rejection of Judaism.  On the contrary:  this is a story about something emerging out of Judaism and rooted firmly in God’s promises made to the people of Israel and to those of us, as the apostle Paul says, have been grafted through Christ into these promises.[iv]

            So what do I think this story says to us?  First, I think that this story reminds us to look around us expecting to find signs of God’s activity in our everyday lives.  Most of our contemporaries live in a world which they believe to be filled with signs of God’s absence; we, on the other hand, have the eyes to see, the hearts to embrace, the minds to discover the signs of God’s presence in all places and in all times.  While I am the first to admit that I do not know ‘why bad things happen to good people,’ I am also the first to admit that, even in those situations, I am always surprised to find signs of God’s presence, signs of God’s transforming love.  A Palestinian physician loses children to an Israeli shell and then writes a book entitled, I Shall Not Hate.  Children are killed in a small town in Connecticut and their parents and others commit themselves to the Herculean task of challenging the gun-culture of the United States.

            I also think that this story encourages us to remember that God uses what we have and who we are to achieve extraordinary things.  Our culture is driven by an advertising environment geared to generate feelings of envy and scarcity.  We are rarely shown images of ordinary people doing extraordinary things.  No, we need this car or this technology or this cosmetic or this fashion accessory.  But at Cana in Galilee Jesus takes ordinary water and turns it into the best wine the steward has ever tasted.

            It strikes me that the Christian tradition has understood this for a very long time.  Even though this story has nothing to do with a theology of Christians in marriage, it is regularly read at weddings.  But actually there is something to this:  two ordinary people begin a relationship that has the potential to become something more than the sum of its parts.  If the couple is open to the power of God’s love to transform their water into wine, then they have the opportunity to do, as Mother Teresa was wont to say, ‘something beautiful for God’ and, I should add, for us and for all the world.

            What is true of a couple beginning their married life is also true of congregations.  For sixty-five years we have been a sign of God’s loving presence in this community.  Over those decades our society and our neighbourhood has changed.  We face challenges that the founders of this parish probably did not envision.  But they have bequeathed to us good water in good jars and God seems to be transforming jar after jar into the best wine.  One of our tasks is to offer God and our founders continued thanks for the gifts we already have and to pray that God will give us the wisdom and the will and the perseverance to see their transformation, to embrace the opportunities and to discover what shape our ministry shall take.

            So, my sisters and brothers, let us open our eyes, our hearts and our minds so that we can give glory to God, whose power, working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine.  Amen.

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[i] “. . . the miraculous abundance of good wine is a sign of God’s presence among.”  (The New Interpreter’s Bible, IX:540).  “. . . in the abundance and graciousness of Jesus’ gift, one catches a glimpse of the identity and character of God.”  (The New Interpreter’s Bible, IX:540).

[ii] “John uses the term sign to refer to Jesus’ miracles, because for John the significance of the miracle does not rest solely in the act of the miracle itself, but in that to which the miracle points.  That is, the deed reveals the doer and points to the significance of the deed as an act of eschatological salvation and God’s significance.”  (The New Interpreter’s Bible, IX:539).

[iii] In this text the word ‘first’ (arche) should be understood to mean ‘the beginning’ rather than ‘the first in a sequence’.  (The New Interpreter’s Bible, IX:539).

[iv] “It is inaccurate to describe this miracle as Jesus’ rejection of the waters of purification and hence a symbol of Jesus’ rejection of Judaism.  Rather, jars stood empty, waiting to be filled.  Jewish vessels are filled with a wondrous new gift (cf. 1:17).  This miracle is thus neither a rejection nor a replacement of the old, but the creation of something new in the midst of Judaism.”  (The New Interpreter’s Bible, IX:538).

An Open Letter to My Jewish and Christian Colleagues

19 July 2012

Dear Members of the Vancouver Jewish-Christian Dialogue,

When the news of the bomb attack in Bulgaria came to my attention, I knew that I could not share only private thoughts with one or two colleagues.  So I write to you as Co-Chair of our Vancouver Dialogue, but first and foremost, I write as a Christian who exercises a leadership role within my tradition.

Here in Vancouver Christians who use the Revised Common Lectionary have been following the story of David's rise to become the monarch of a united kingdom and the establishment of Jerusalem as the political and religious heart of his kingdom.  These readings remind us that the Holy Land is not only a religious symbol but the historic home of the Jewish people.  They also remind us that conflict has often been part of that history and that concern for land and security has been a never-ending dimension of Jewish life.  These readings also serve to remind Christians that God's covenant with Israel has never been revoked and that we, as Christians, understand ourselves, by God's gracious act, to have been grafted onto this olive tree.  

This summer we face the anniversaries of two terrorist attacks on the Jewish community:  the attack on the Jewish community in Buenos Aires and the murder of nine members of the Israeli Olympic team in Munich.  These anniversaries only serve to punctuate the continuing anti-Semitism in our world and the targeting of Jewish communities throughout the world for acts of violence and terror.

These anniversaries and other acts of violence against innocent civilians come during a summer when several churches in North America have debated or will debate resolutions regarding the State of Israel and how these churches can give impetus to a lasting and just peace for Israelis and Palestinians.  These resolutions have generated concern and criticism within the North American Jewish community as well as putting stresses on relations between Jews and Christians.

I ask my Christian colleagues to undertake to strengthen the personal and collegial relationships that they have with their Jewish neighbours and colleagues.  Now is the time, today is the day, to embody the covenantal love with which God loves all of us.  Now is the time, today is the day, for Christians to ask the leaders of our churches to make unequivocal condemnations of violence against any members of the Jewish community, whether in Israel or elsewhere in the world.

I ask my Jewish colleagues to remember that you are not alone.  You have colleagues here in Vancouver and elsewhere who are committed to the peace and security of the Jewish community.  We hold you and all victims of violence and terror in our prayers and in our consciences as we work with you for the peace of Jerusalem.

Shabbat shalom,

Richard+

(The Rev'd Dr) Richard Geoffrey Leggett

Co-Chair of the Vancouver Jewish-Christian Dialogue

Saint Faith's Anglican Church

7284 Cypress Street

Vancouver BC V6P 5M3

604.266.8011 (office)

604.266.8096 (FAX)

604.828.6704 (mobile)

www.stfaiths.ca

Let us overcome the darkness that is within us

[The following homily was preached at St Mary's Anglican Church in Vancouver BC on Good Friday, 21 March 2008.]

+ My friends in Christ, I speak to you in the name of God the Weaver, who through the shuttle of the Holy Spirit weaves us into the pattern of the Word made flesh. Amen.

On this Good Friday we gather to remember the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth and ponder the implications of his voluntary suffering and death for us and for the whole of creation. Let me begin with three stories.

The first story: The Gentiles tried to kill us but they failed.

Last night, while we were commemorating the last meal that Jesus had with his friends and stripping the sanctuary in anticipation of his passion, our Jewish brothers and sisters were celebrating the feast of Purim, a story told in the book of Esther. It is rare that Purim and Holy Week coincide.

The story of Purim takes place during the reign of the great Persian king Xerxes who counts a young Jewish woman, Esther, among his wives. One of Xerxes’ advisors, Haman, takes a keen dislike for Mordecai, a Jewish elder, and he hatches a plot to exterminate the Jews in the Persian empire.

Mordecai learns of the plot and advises Esther, his niece, to take action. She is at first reluctant, but when Mordecai reminds her that she shall not escape the fate planned by Haman, she agrees to act. Since Xerxes has not summoned her, she must risk his wrath and possible death by appearing unbidden in the audience chamber and then asking to speak with him. She succeeds and eventually foils Haman’s plot. Haman is executed and the Jews are permitted to defend themselves against Haman’s henchmen who have already launched their attacks. The Jews win and Xerxes extends imperial protection to the Jewish community.

Here we were last night, beginning our sombre journey to the Cross, while our Jewish friends were celebrating a great victory. Imagine how some of our Christian ancestors might have reacted: Christians in mourning, Jews in celebration.

The second story: The souls of the righteous are in the hands of God.

The ancient city of Alexandria was a cosmopolitan metropolis of several million people: Egyptians, Greeks, peoples from all around the Mediterranean, peoples from Asia and Africa and one of the largest Jewish communities outside of Palestine. There had always been particular tensions between the Jewish, Greek and Egyptian communities in the city. After the Roman conquest of the city during the reign of Augustus Caesar, Greeks and Jews were given certain rights and tax exemptions not given to the native Egyptian population. The Greeks despised the Jews for various reasons and denied Jews access to the public places where business and politics were conducted.

These tensions reached their height in the year 38. In the past the Jewish community had sent a traditional declaration of loyalty to the emperor on the occasion of his accession. But in the year 38 the Roman governor had failed to send this declaration of loyalty to the new emperor, Gaius Caligula, whether intentionally or not is still not clear. This political lapse was complicated later that year during the visit of Herod Agrippa, the titular Jewish king, who had been sent to Alexandria on a mission from Caligula. Herod had never been popular with the Jewish people and it appears that the Jews of Alexandria insulted him in some fashion. When the governor failed to take action, the Greek and Egyptian population rose up to take direct action against the Jewish community.

Jews were forced to abandon their homes in four of the five districts of the city and were forced into what we now call a ‘ghetto’. Jewish businesses were destroyed and thousands of Jews were killed on the streets, in the amphitheatre and by extra-judicial executions. Statues and pictures of Caligula were forcibly placed in Jewish synagogues causing the Jews to rise up to resist the desecration of their places for prayer and teaching. Eventually the riots came to an end, but the damage done to the Jewish community lasted until the year 117. In that year the emperor Trajan annihilated the Jewish community in Alexandria as part of the Roman effort to quell yet another Jewish rebellion in Palestine.

Sometime during these troubles, a member of the Jewish community in Alexandria took pen in hand and wrote what we now call the book of Wisdom or the Wisdom of Solomon. A portion of this book is frequently read at funerals particularly because of its simple yet hopeful beginning: “But the souls of the righteous are in the hand of God, and no torment will ever touch them. In the eyes of the foolish they seemed to have died, and their departure was thought to be a disaster, and their going from us to be their destruction; but they are at peace.”[1]

• The earlier optimism of the Alexandrian Jewish community for a rapprochement with the Greeks and for social and cultural acceptance by them had been replaced by a mounting sense of disillusionment and disappointment.
• The author addresses his fellow Jews in an effort to encourage them to take pride in their traditional faith. By presenting Judaism in intellectually respectable terms, he seeks to shore up the faith against hostile anti-Jewish attacks from without and gnawing doubts from within.

He is guided by three themes:

• the certainty that justice will be eventually triumph over injustice,
• the conviction that a life lived in accordance with God’s wisdom as revealed in Torah is better than any other life and
• the troubles of the present time are this generation’s exodus, its own experience of costly deliverance from tyranny into freedom.

Even if the present time is fraught with evil and injustice, the author affirms that it is still wiser to act morally and faithfully because moral and faithful actions plant the seeds that will eventually bloom into the harvest of righteousness, peace and justice. Perhaps the writer of Wisdom expected the seeds to sprout in the next generation, but he probably did not live to see this happen.

The third story: It is better that one community die if it serves the state.

Let’s fast forward nineteen hundred years. On the 30^th of January 1933 the President of the Weimar Republic appointed Adolf Hitler as Chancellor. On the 10^th of March 1933 the Nazi government opened the first concentration camp, Dachau, in an agricultural area just outside of Munich and incarcerated members of the Communist and Social Democratic parties. In 1936 Sachsenhausen, first a concentration camp, later an extermination camp, was opened near Weimar, a city always associated with liberal democracy in German history. In 1937 Buchenwald, also a concentration camp that became an extermination camp, was opened near Berlin. As these camps opened and political realities became more difficult, many Jews attempted to flee Germany. Some attempted to flee to the east into Poland, but the Polish authorities refused to permit the Jews to enter the country.

In a tragic Catch-22, the German authorities would not allow the Jewish refugees back into Germany. They were trapped in the border zone and their situation became increasingly desperate. The world took no action as people languished, unable to leave, unable to return. In Paris the son of a couple trapped in this ‘no-man’s land’ took a gun to the German embassy and shot the third secretary who died a few days later.

Just before midnight on November 9, Gestapo chief Heinrich Műller sent a telegram to all police units informing them that ‘in shortest order, actions against Jews and especially their synagogues will take place in all of Germany. These are not to be interfered with.’ Rather, the police were to arrest the victims. Fire companies stood by synagogues in flames with explicit instructions to let the buildings burn. They were to intervene only if a fire threatened adjacent ‘Aryan’ properties.[2]

• More than 1,000 synagogues were burned or damaged.
• 7,500 Jewish businesses were ransacked and looted.
• 91 Jews were known to have been killed.
• Jewish hospitals, homes, schools and cemeteries were vandalized.
• 30,000 Jewish men, aged 16 to 60, were arrested and sent to Dachau, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen.

This night, the 9^th to the 10^th of November, is known as ‘Kristallnacht’, the ‘night of broken glass’. On the 15^th of November Jews were banned from public schools. By December Jews were banned from most public places in Germany.

These events mark the beginning of what our Jewish brothers and sisters call ha Shoah, the Holocaust. By 1945 six million Jews had been systematically exterminated as well as millions of Socialists, Communists, gays, lesbians, Jehovah Witnesses, gypsies and prisoners of war. The scope of the Holocaust of European Jewry and the murder of millions of others is difficult to comprehend, so difficult that there are voices today that deny the Holocaust ever took place or assert that the Holocaust was invented by the Jews in order to maintain their secret control of the world’s economy and to bolster support for Israel.

Why do I tell these stories on a day when we gather to remember the death of Jesus?

I tell these stories because of the power of the narrative we have just read. John’s powerful narrative of the events leading to the death of Jesus has been read throughout the Christian world for at least fifteen hundred years. Many of us have been moved by Johann Sebastian Bach’s The St John Passion. We may have uncritically absorbed the message explicit in John’s gospel that the death of Jesus is the responsibility of ‘the Jews’, an entire people, rather than the Jewish and Roman authorities who saw Jesus as a threat to public order and to the stability of the state. He was, to use modern political language, a subversive, whose message, like the Dalai Lama’s, was seen by the political authorities as providing philosophical fuel to terrorist fires.

Throughout western history and into the present day, purveyors of fear, demagogues and dictators have found it useful to make Jews and other minority groups scapegoats for the problems faced by a given society. But purveyors of fear, demagogues and dictators are not the only ones who find scapegoats useful.

All of us have, from time to time, found it self-serving to identify the cause of our problems and challenges with a particular person or party or group. Let me speak in those voices.

• “I am tired of being told that I bear any responsibility for the present situation of First Nations people. It’s their own fault if they choose to live on their ancestral land rather than get with the programme of the twenty-first century. Let them get over it.”
• “The church used to be a comforting and peaceful place before women, gays and lesbians began agitating for their so-called ‘rights’ or so-called ‘justice’.”
• “It’s time for the conservatives to go away. They are all homo-phobic, critical fundamentalists.”
• “You know, our congregation was wonderful until that crazy rector moved the altar and brought in the BAS.”
• “You know, we could do great things here if the Prayer Book people would just move away.”

I do not know about you, but I do know myself. I have felt and, in one fashion or another, spoken these words in various times and places.

The problem lies, as Shakespeare says, not in our stars but in ourselves. When we gather here, year after year, to tell the story of the last days of Jesus of Nazareth, we are telling our own story. We are telling the story of how fearful we are of encountering the darkness that exists in each one of us. When God sends us the witness of the prophets and sages, when God sends us the witness of the people of the covenant of Moses and, in the fullness of time, when God sends us the witness of the Word made flesh, we resort to that primeval response to flee. But God, ever faithful, pursues us and finally, like even a cornered rabbit, we fight to the death to protect ourselves from learning the truth.

That truth is that deep within each one of us is the desire to be the centre of the universe. When Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego are about to be thrown into the fiery furnace, the king challenges them by saying, “Now let us see whether your God can save you.” But Shadrach responds out of a deep awareness that it is God who is the centre of the universe, mysterious yet purposeful, incomprehensible but ultimately compassionate. He says, “Whether God saves us or not, God is still God. If you are trying to prove a point, you will fail.”

The truth is that deep within each one of us is the desire to be the only beloved of God. When Jonah is furious with God for having dragged him from his home to proclaim a message of judgement on Nineveh and then, because the people heed the message and repent, God decides not to destroy the city, God asks Jonah, in so many words, “Do you think you are the only one I love? Do you think you are the creature whose existence is important to me?”

The truth is that deep within each one of us is the desire to be the final adjudicator of all value and worth. When Peter falls into a deep sleep and has a dream where God bids him eat what is forbidden, he challenges God by declaring he has never eaten unclean things. But God speaks to him, much like God speaks to Moses: “I am the one who will declare what is clean and unclean. If I choose to do a new thing, I will do it. Now go and bring the Gentiles into the covenant!”

But in the end, the desire to be the centre of the universe, the desire to be the only beloved of God and the desire to be the final adjudicator of all value and worth are illusions that can lead to even more dangerous delusions. The truth is found in the Cross of Christ, the ultimate symbol of humanity’s attempts to hide from the Holy One of Israel who constantly seeks to free us from the bondage of fear and death.

At the end of today’s liturgy, as we gaze at the Cross and remember the powerful story told today, let us ponder how we have avoided confronting whatever darkness lurks in our own souls that may lead us to find convenient scapegoats, whether near or far, rather than seek the heart of God that beats within each of us. Let us be conscious of how that story has been used to kill rather than promise life. Let us leave this place with the commitment to do all within our power to prevent the story of the Lord’s death from ever being used for other purposes than proclaiming the bottomless love of God for us and for all of creation.

Let us pray.

We veil our faces before your glory, O Holy and Immortal One, and bow before the cross of your wounded Christ. With angels and archangels, we praise you, our Mercy, and we bless you, our Compassion, for in our brokenness you have not abandoned us. Hear us as we pray though Jesus, our high priest: heal all division, reconcile the estranged, console the suffering, and raise up to new life all that is bound by death. Amen.[3]

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[1] Wisdom 3.1-3.

[2] ‘Kristallnacht.’ Encyclopedia Britannica 2007. Retrieved 10 November 2007 from Encyclopedia Britannica Online: http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9046254

[3] Revised Common Lectionary Prayers, 100.