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Union University Church | |
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| By Reverend Laurie DeMott |
January
27, 2008 |
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First impressions, as we all know, are very important. When we meet someone
for the first time, we size them up with a quick glance at their clothes,
the grip of their handshake, the way they hold their head, and the look
in their eye. That first impression will inform out estimation of their
character and shape our judgement about their later behavior as we get to
know them. Authors recognize the power of the first impression and so they
work to ensure that when a character is introduced into the novel, their
look and behavior will quickly convey the essence of their personality to
the readers. For example, the opening paragraph of Harry Potter and the
Sorcerer’s Stone is where we meet Harry’s relatives, the Dursley’s,
who will play a large role in his life throughout the series: “Mr. And Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you’d expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn’t hold with such nonsense.” In those two brief sentences, J.K. Rowling quickly paints the Dursleys as priggish and concerned about respectability, which in turn warns us that something very unrespectable is about to happen to them. When the gospel writers sat down to write their narratives of Jesus’ life, they knew that many people who would hear their gospels were hearing about Jesus for the first time. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were concerned about making a good and correct first impression for the Jesus they had come to know so well and so they constructed their gospels very carefully. Unlike J.K. Rowling, they were not creating a fictional world – Jesus was a real person and there we many traditions circulating concerning his acts and his teachings – but the gospel writers were gathering all of those pieces of tradition into a coherent whole for the first time and so they faced the task of choosing what to include, what to leave out, the order of events, and how they would describe those events. We can see the had of the gospel writers in the fact that no gospel opens in exactly the same way. Each gospel writer had a particular understanding of Jesus that he wanted to convey and he knew that those introductory scenes would be crucial to setting the stage as people came to know Jesus in the gospel story. And so in Mark’s gospel, the first public act of Jesus is the healing of a man possessed by an unclean spirit. Imagine the awe of the listeners as they realize that this Jesus of Nazareth has the power to subdue the forces of evil arrayed against us. Matthew chooses to show Jesus moving through towns teaching in the synagogues and curing the sick. “Jesus,” he tells us, “is the Rabbi who can heal you in mind, body, and spirit.” In Luke, like in Mark, Jesus also begins his public ministry by rebuking a man possessed by a spirit but in Luke’s gospel, Jesus performs this miracle immediately after announcing that he has come to free the captive and the oppressed. This is Luke’s warning shot across the bow of the elite: “Be forewarned,” he says, “Jesus comes not only to defeat the spiritual forces of evil but to overturn the human evils of economic oppression and your neglect of those in need.” These are provocative and powerful introductions to Jesus. Those first listeners must have been stirred with hope, wonder, and a desire to know more about this man. This, too, is the Jesus we have grown to know and love. As we reach out in our need for a Savior who will heal our hearts and give us strength to face the battering forces arrayed against us, we remember the stories of Jesus healing the sick and standing up for the forgotten. But the scripture lesson for today is not from Matthew, or Mark, or Luke. It is from the gospel of John, and John inaugurates the public ministry of Jesus with a very different kind of miracle. In John, Jesus’ first miracle is not to heal someone who is sick, or cast out an evil demon, or challenge oppression, or reach out to the homeless, or speak out on behalf of the poor, or free the captive from her chains, or dry the tears of a grieving father, or calm the fears of an anxious mother, or do any of those things that we have come to count on in our Savior. Instead, John chooses to introduce the Savior of the world as the man who will make sure that your wine cellar does not run dry! This doesn’t feel like the post auspicious start to a ministry. If you were on a search committee in charge of choosing a pastor for the church, and the first candidate came to the interview and healed your arthritis, and the second came and comforted you with powerful words that lifted your depression, while the third walked in and announced, “Looky what I can do” and conjured up a Budweiser truck rolling out 20 beer kegs onto the church lawn, I doubt that you’d select the third as your pastor. You might invite him home after the interview (!) But the ability to provide unrestricted amounts of communion wine is generally not a skill churches list in their requirements for the ministers. Why would John decide to introduce the ministry of Jesus with a miracle that benefits no one except a bund of already inebriated guests? During certain periods of our history, this passage has not only puzzled Christians but has even given them headaches of a non-hangover sort. Temperance preachers during the years of prohibition had to do some fancy sleight of hand to convince their congregations that the wine in those jars was not alcohol but only an abundance of grape juice. Even today, google “John 2:1-11" and you will get hundreds of hits for websites discussing whether it is appropriate for Christians to drink. One of my favorite comments was from a blog by Ken Collins who strikes a sympathetic chord with all of us introverts when he says, “...From the standpoint of a person like me who finds parties intimidating at best and threatening at worst, it’s bad enough Jesus went to a party, but did He had to supply refreshments so the revelry could be increased and prolonged?” (www.kencollins.com) The problem we have today in reading the gospel of John is that we are reading it without the cultural cues common to his first century audience. We read this story with its revelry and abundance of wine and the first image to come to mind is Jesus as Frat Boy because for modern day Americans, particularly those of us living in a college town, that’s the association we make with those things. Certain phrases and behaviors become part of our cultural shorthand and inform how we view the characters in a story. If I were writing a gospel and I had Herod say to John the Baptist, “I’ll get you my pretty, and your little dog too!” everyone reading it would know instantly that Herod is going to be bad news. But when time wipes away those cultural associations, we are left with a story that doesn’t make any sense. “What little dog?” readers would ask hundreds of years from now and bloggers would debate whether this is a scriptural referendum on dog ownership. So it is today that we read Jesus’ miracle at the wedding of Cana as a debate about the place of alcohol in church, a debate John’s listeners would have found irrelevant and silly because they would recognize instantly that Jesus is not concerned about whether the party goers have enough to drink. This is not a passage about alcohol at all. This is a miracle in which Jesus reveals his nature to the readers for when Jesus turns water into wine in unfathomable abundance, Jesus demonstrates that he is the very Wisdom of God and whoever shall seek him, will have life abundantly. For Jews, the Wisdom of God was the spiritual personification of the most holy. They wrote odes to the Wisdom of God. They talked about Wisdom as a woman to be loved, sought after, and nurtured carefully. Wisdom was more than a prophet, more than a servant of the Lord – she was the external expression of the internal mind of god. If you want to peer into the very soul of the holy, invite Lady Wisdom into your life. In Proverbs 9:5, Wisdom says, “Come and eat my bread, drink the wine which I have drawn!” When John opens his story of Jesus with Jesus transforming water into an abundance of wine – about 150 gallons of wine! – his listeners aren’t thinking frat party. They are saying, “Oh my gosh! This Jesus...He is Wisdom! He is the one we have been seeking. This Jesus is the very expression of the mind of God and if we receive him, we will receive the abundant life that Wisdom offers.” The gospel of John offers you life. Over and over again, John will hammer home of the point that Jesus is the one who will give you life in a way that you have never before experienced it. He is the bread that will nourish your soul more completely than the bread on your table nourishes your body. He is the living water that will quench your thirst more deeply than any water poured from a pitcher. He is light in your darkness, peace in your troubled hearts; Jesus is the resurrection and the life, life victorious even over death. In the gospel of John, Jesus offers life to all who follow but we would be mistaken to read his promise as only a promise of eternity to be won in the by and by. To distill the gospel promise into the admonition, “Be good and you’ll go to heaven” is to seriously misunderstand the abundance that Jesus proclaims. Life abundantly begins at the very moment that you embrace the gospel because the promise is for now, not just tomorrow. Jesus worked to open up the pathways between people because he wanted us to understand that when you reach out to make a connection with another person, you begin to live not only through your own self but through that other person’s self as well. You connect your heart to theirs as you share their concerns and love that person into well-being. While the doctrine of reincarnation teaches that you have a multiplicity of lives to live one after the other, the gospel asks, “Why wait until later to live those lives when you can live them right today? Instead of seeing your life as a linear progression stretching out in a single thread, the gospel invites you to see life as a web reaching out all around you right now. Even connection you make with another life in God’s creation is a multiplication of your own life; every connection to another life strengthens this life, augments it, and grows your heart until it encompasses dozens, hundreds of others. John describes it as abundant life; Matthew, Mark, and Luke use more prosaic language when they say, “Those who would save their lives would lose them whole those who lose their lives save them.” The self-centered person concerned only about her own needs and unable to open her heart to others, chooses to live only one life, narrow in scope, and limited in quality. But the other-centered person who is concerned about the needs of many, who rejoices with the man, and who binds themselves to all parts of God’s creation, will live their life a hundred times over. You will create a web of caring reaching out from your heart, until your one life extends far beyond your physical self and the limitations of your days and reaches even into eternity. For Jesus, the Wisdom of God who promised us life abundantly, eternal life begins today. When Jesus transformed the water into wine overflowing, he was making yo this promise: “Join your heart to mind and I will in turn join your heart to many, and so you shall have abundant life today and for eternity.” |
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