Epiphany 2
January 14, 2004
Title: The Gifted Life
I know that what I am going to say is going to be hard to believe, at least
for many of you that know me, but when I was in seminary I was actually
known as quite the partier—no, its true, I swear! Actually, my roommate
Beth and I were actually known as the people who threw all the cool
parties—I mean, we threw all these silly theme parties—Bastille Day
parties, and Absolutely Fabulous parties, and probably my favorite, the
Abba party we threw during my second year of seminary: it was a
celebration of all things Abba, and all things 70ish—yes, that is bunch of
future Methodist preachers doing the dance moves for Village People’s
YMCA! Oh, how I hold their careers in the palm of my hand…
But, let’s face it, it doesn’t take much to gain a reputation for being THE
partiers in seminary—they’re not usually known for being the kinds of
places that attract a wild crowd. You know, the funny thing is that when I
finally became a minister and took my first parish, its like from that
moment on, whenever I now walk into a party, especially a non-church
related party, its like all the air immediately gets drained from the room if
they know what I do for a living, and all the gay Baptists, with their
cocktails in their hands, just start getting nervous—put away the beer,
the preacher’s here! So, if you want someone to take the life out of at
party, invite me to it—I’ll take care of it for you!
But in the story we heard earlier, its clear that Jesus didn’t have the kind
of reputation, because here he is, at this wedding, early on in the Gospel
of John. He has just come out of the desert, and he had just begun
surrounding himself with his early disciples. In this Gospel, there are no
birth stories, no mangers—Jesus simply arrives on the scene, almost as
if he came directly out of heaven—“In the beginning was the Word,” so
says John (1.1). And he is at this wedding, at this pretty raucous party,
and unlike us minister types, he just blended in because he hadn’t really
begun his ministry—they didn’t know who they had in their midst. But
there is one person in that room who knows, who knows what Jesus is
capable of, the potential that he has, the gifts he possesses. Jesus
mother, who is oddly enough, never actually named as Mary throughout
the whole Gospel of John, nevertheless, the writer of John hints that she
knows her own son—mother’s usually do, don’t they?
She asks him to do something about something that has happened at
the wedding—the hosts, the people throwing this wedding party, they’ve
run out of wine, and they’ve run out of it way too early. And this isn’t
Dallas—you can’t run out to the 7-Eleven, and pick up some cheap wine
to get you through the end of the party. This was a social disaster of the
first magnitude—I mean, I know that we get what it means to be socially
embarrassed, but in the ancient world, in Jesus’ day, it was really bad fop
a, because being a good host was so important in a desert environment,
it may be even a matter of life and death because your life might very
well be dependent on the kindness of strangers, the graciousness of
your host. So, Jesus is here asked to solve a problem that is not his,
and to be honest, in the great scheme of things, is not all of that big of a
deal—I mean, this is not healing a blind person, or raising someone from
the dead—this is just about saving someone from being embarrassed.
So, his mother just goes up to him, amidst the loud and partying crowd,
him against the wall, maybe soaking it all in with his disciples, and she
tells him that there is no wine left. A simple statement, really, and yet,
like any mother, those innocent words are loaded with a lot more
meaning—and a whole a lot more baggage than the statement of some
simple facts—you know what I mean, don’t you? She didn’t ask him to do
anything and yet…she did, didn’t she? Again, you’ve probably
experienced that as well—I know I have—ours Mothers saying something
seemingly simple and innocent, just a statement, really, but you knows
she means something else, she’s trying to tell you something or ask
something from without actually saying what she means. I’m glad my
mother isn’t here today, and that she doesn’t have internet access…
And Jesus knows that she’s not just giving him an update on the going-
ons at the party—he knows that she expects him to do something about
this, for whatever reason, but he just basically responds that its not his
problem and that this wasn’t the right moment—my hour has not yet
come, he says to her, setting some boundaries, it looks like.
But like all mothers, she’s persistence, and she knows her son, and so
she just tells the servants to do whatever he tells them…and, in fact, he
eventually does what she has asked me to do without actually asking him
to do it, right? Despite what Jesus has just said, despite the fact that he
has told her that he is reluctant to use his gifts, at this moment and for
this reason, still, he does it—he changes huge vats of water into wine,
and it ain’t the kind of wine you pick up at 7-Eleven because nothing else
is open at 11. This is good stuff, the stuff you usually serve early on in
the party, when everyone is sober, not the stuff you serve at the end,
when people really don’t know what’s being served to them or probably
don’t care at that point and couldn’t tell the difference anyway—you see
that kind of reaction in the text itself—“you have kept the good wine until
now,” the party planner says to the bridegroom.
I’ll tell you what I love about this text—a couple of things, actually. First, I
just love the fact that John tells this particular story about Jesus, which is
only told in his version of Jesus’ life, and that for him, the story of Jesus
began with a wedding party, and this simple miracle, this simple moment
where Jesus quietly turns water into wine in order to keep party going—
what a glimpse of our Savior, how human, how beautiful. And it also
makes me feel better about my crazy, wild, partying seminary days—
hah!. But for our purposes, in trying to figure out what it means to live
life after grace, I tell you the second thing that is amazing about this
story: I just want to point out something we sometimes miss in this story,
and that is this: the Savior of the world, the one whom so many of us
believe is God draped in human flesh, this Jesus, the son of Mary, and
this very child of God, even Jesus needs to be pushed into using his
God-given gifts. In so many ways, Jesus is just like you and I—we
receive the grace, over and over again, we spend a lifetime stumbling
upon the ways God just loves us and meets us, and yet we stay against
the wall at the party, we spend our life holding up the wall at the party
that’s going on all around us, unwilling or too scared to give some of that
grace to the people in the room—and for us, the people in the room, in
our case, are the particular people of God we’ve thrown in our lot with
here at CoH, the people around us in the pews, as well as the people all
around us that need to know that they’ve been invited to a party where
everyone is welcomed, and a party that lasts well into night, and is still
going at daybreak—indeed, a party that lasts well into eternity.
Michael did a great job last week reminding us of the power of grace,
what it means to get it, and to experience it. We all have our particular
ways of describing the meaning of grace for each of us, and the way I
understand grace, the way I’ve come to experience it is in those rare
moments in my life where I get the truth that I (we) are loved, completely
and utterly loved, and that I am not loved because I am good enough,
sweet enough, pretty enough, or that I am someone’s son, friend, or
pastor—it is those moments when I realize that I am loved by God for no
reason at all. God has no other agenda but to love, to love me, to love
you, and to love us through this life, and to love us into the next. You
and I, we are not loved because of anything—there are no “becauses” in
the way we are loved by God, unlike all the other human ways we are
loved by God, all of which are hints of that divine love, but which always,
in the end, fail to capture this love—many of us spend a lifetime trying to
get to that kind of love through those we love and are loved by, and try
as we might, in the end, it never, never quite reaches the moment when
we get how much the God of universe really, really loves us.
Grace, being loved by God completely and utterly, it frees you, it lets you
go, and it screams in your ear, or it whispers softly, that you are free
now, you have always been free, and the ultimate sign of God’s love is
what was done thousands of years ago, on a cross, through this One
who began the grandest and most beautiful story ever told at a wedding
party where the wine had run out and he was suddenly and awkwardly
put into the role of wine-maker, if only briefly. But it fascinates me that
even Jesus had to deal with the struggle of what to do when we finally
get it, when finally get that grace has always surrounded us, of what to
do after we get it, we get the truth of that grace. Mary has to push him
into being the man of grace that he already is, she has to remind him of
who he is and what he is meant to become—a man who will one day do
more than change water into wine—he will change lives, now and
forever. It’s strangely comforting to know that even Jesus has to be
reminded of who he was and what was meant to become. Some of us,
no, actually, all of us, need someone like Mary, to remind us of who we
are and what we are meant to become, as this clip from the Buffy The
Vampire Slayer shows us…(INSERT VIDEO CLIP here).
I suspect you are not probably not meant to hunt the undead, so we’re
not going to be doing ministry sign-ups for that calling this morning, but
still, you and I, we are meant for something—each of us have been
called to do something, to add our piece to the bewildering puzzle that is
church. The first passage that we heard in this service from 1
Corinthians, the piece about the spiritual gifts that each of us possess, it
reminds us that we need each other to function, to be healthy, to be
complete and that what you and I bring to the dinner table is exactly what
we need to complete the meal God is preparing for the world. The Holy
Spirit, which is just a fancy way of the church reminding us of that God is
within us, this Holy Spirit, this living piece of God within us, has given you
something that no one else possesses, in the ways that are needed in
this very moment, in the church, the world, the universe. You, me, we
are unique, everyone one of us, and the piece of God that each of us
brings to the table, the gifts given to us by the Spirit, they are needed
now, at this moment, especially now.
And the power of grace is that it frees us to be that piece of God that we
were meant to be, to be that piece of the living breathing body of Christ
that Paul speaks of in the passage from 1 Corinthians. Why? Because
it unhinges us from this idea that we need to be good enough, or
spiritual enough, or pretty enough, or nice enough to be the person
GOD HAS CREATED US TO BE, the unique piece of God, the unique
piece of the Body of Christ each of us is. I cannot fail this love given to
me by grace, and this love can never fail me—because there are no
“becauses,” no stipulations, no “ifs” to this love. I can be as reckless and
crazy with this love, this grace, as it has been with me—and that means I
can be who I was meant to be—for me, that means being the kind of
pastor I was meant to be, and being like no other pastor that has gone
before me. For you, it means something else, but know this—it means
something, the gift you alone possess, and whether or not you know it
right now, you are meant to bring something to the table that no one else
brings.
You know, life after grace is challenging, because most of us spend our
lives wanting to be like others, those that we admire for what they have
done, or who they are. Tomorrow is Martin Luther’s King birthday, and if
there is any story that reminds us that those whom we want to be like,
may not be who we were meant to be, it is his story. King has wanted to
be an academic, to be professor somewhere, like those scholars he
admires so much in seminary and yet the church kept pulling him back.
Then he wanted to simply pastor a church like his father, whom he
admired so much, to live a quiet life, amongst the people of God, going
with them through the rhythms of life and death together. And yet that
was not who he was created to be—God had something else for him, a
different sets of gifts that he possessed that only had, spiritual gifts that
would change the world forever. Now, all of us can’t be Martin Luther
King, but we’re not asked to be. We’re not asked to be someone else,
even the people we admire—we are asked to be ourselves, to be the
one that God has created to be, with the set of gifts that only we can
bring to the party. Granted, no one is asking you to turn water into
wine—remember, we’re not asked to be Jesus, we’re asked to follow
him—and to be honest, that job at the party has already been filed is
already filled—we’ve already got someone making sure that party goes
on forever, making sure the wine is plentiful.
I suspect most of us have at least one friend like Mary in our lives, you
know, the one who keeps reminding us that the walls don’t need our help
to stand up, and that we need to loosen up and figure out what we are
here for. But just in case you don’t have that kind of person in your life, I’
m going to briefly be the Mary in your life—no snickers, please.
Look, my friend, its hard throwing a party without everyone chipping in—
we may have a host, but what you bring to the party is going to take it
the next level, and we need some roof-raising, stomping good times
around here, especially now. Let the walls shake, I promise that you don’
t need to hold them up, they’re strong enough, and we need your to help
serve some more drinks—if we don’t get help, someone’s not going to
get served. You, over there, we need you to tell a good story, a good
joke, as we gather around you, help us laugh through it all, maybe laugh
until we cry. And you, with the wig, how about song—you are the only
one who knows how to sing that particular song, and it gets to us every
time. Someone needs to take care of the music, and the food, someone’
s got to make sure we have enough to spread around to everyone. You,
with the camera, get everyone to this side of the room, we’re not going to
want to forget this party, we’re going to want to get everyone in the
picture—this one is going down in the record books as the best one
ever, the best party ever thrown. We need your gifts if we’re going to
ever pull this off. And you know what? More than anything, I want you to
know that this party, the one you’re at right now, it would have not been
the same without you. I hope you know that because we sure do. And it
is so. Amen.
