Sunday, January 17, 2010
Preached at Bethesda Presbyterian
www.bethesdapresbyterian.org
Scripture John 2:1-11
The Power of Intimacy
There’s a certain volatility to the supposed intimacies of our visual age.
Fred Allen discovered this. One of the last of the great American radio comedians “(Allen) had loved radio precisely because it depended on the listeners’ imagination to create a whole world out of words.”1 And inflections. And … pauses …
A true and lasting sense of intimacy, radio. So much so that in 1950, there were 108 different series that had been airing for a decade or more. Twelve for two decades or more.
But then another medium came along. Television. And Fred Allen could not make the transition well. His humor was too dry … too droll.
But some did make the transition. Milton Berle. Lucille Ball. Theirs was a manic humor, full of sight gags. What you saw was what you got.
For with the arrival of television, the task of using one’s imagination to create a world out of words began to dissipate. Now, the world was determined by budgets … scenic designers … carpenters ... all too soon, by special effects. The felt intimacy between performer and audience intensified. Geometrically, it intensified.
But it was – and is – a volatile intimacy. The highs are higher – and because they are, audiences prove fickle. A star – a politician – could descend just as quickly as she or he arises. Shows and success come, and shows and success go, far more quickly.2
There’s a certain volatility to the supposed intimacies of our visual age.
Enter as antidote: the intimacy conveyed in today’s gospel passage – Jesus’ changing of water into wine at the Cana wedding feast.
Isn’t it interesting that in John’s narrative, unlike in the other three gospels, Jesus does not lead off his newly-baptized ministry with a flashy healing. No crowds to oooh and aaah at the spectacle. Only the water-drawing servants seem to take notice of what he has done.
It’s an intimate first miracle, this. And for one of the most raucous yet intimate of celebrations: a first century Jewish wedding.
For the little town of Cana, it may have been the biggest event of the year. That nice Rabinowitz boy and that sweet Goldberg girl – betrothed, promised to one another for quite some time – finally getting hitched! The party would last a full week. Everybody who was anybody would be there.3
And I do mean “anybody”! The hospitality was such that not only was Jesus and his mother invited, so it was with even these new disciple “friends” of his – that rabble, who after all he had just met.
Soon, his mother – who must have known the hosts, if not the caterer, pretty well – learned from the circulating whispers that the good stuff was nearly tapped out. As biblical storytellers Phyllis Williams Provost and Barbara McBride-Smith relate, “Now there are some things you just don’t want to do. You don’t want to insult a three-hundred-pound-biker named Tank. You don’t want to leave the house wearing dirty underwear … And you don’t want to run out of liquid refreshment at a (first century) Jewish wedding.”4
And so leave it to Mary to intervene. “They have no wine,” she kvetches to her son. Jesus to his mother: “Woman, what concern is (this) to you and to me? My hour has not yet come.” Mary to the servants – brushing Jesus off while tugging at his arm: “Do whatever he tells you.”
Ahhh, intimacy: the ability to struggle with one another … and not run away.
And so, Jesus performs his first “miracle”. And so, the good stuff continues to flow. And so, the unwitting wine steward applauds the equally unwitting bridegroom, saying, “Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine when folks get sloshed. But you have saved the best for last.”
But the real applause comes from the kitchen. The ones who knew who was really responsible.
There’s a certain volatility to the supposed intimacies of our visual age. Everybody seems to know everybody’s business. Or – like the wine steward to the bridegroom – we think we know.
And yet, authentic intimacy tends to runneth over from the coldest and dirtiest and what may appear to be the emptiest stone jars of our lives. Where the least of these among and in us all – the kitchen workers in our midst and in our souls – are more apt to detect, in their own quiet way, God’s miraculous movements, and are more apt then to pour forth praise.
For John’s gospel shapes this water-into-wine miracle as a powerful precursor not only to Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection – God’s new intimacy with God’s world. John’s gospel shapes this miracle as a precursor to how we are called to live: out of the heat of our kitchens, and into the light of God’s kingdom!
God’s kingdom – read, God kin-dom – as sisters and brothers in the faith. In other words: as intimates! Disagreeing, struggling with one another at times – and yet, steadfastly refusing to run away.
Having come to know, as we were reminded last Sunday, that we are be-loved by God through our baptisms, our primary call now is to imagine and to live such true intimacy into being. Like listening to a good radio show or reading a good story or hearing an amazing symphony on a CD, sometimes it takes all the creative powers we can muster to celebrate the matrimonial closeness of life abundant – married or no. All the while keeping a respectful distance from the cacophony of choices that would shape and even determine our lives. Choices that would find expression in an all-too-human desire to possess rather than to steward … to abuse rather than to enjoy … to numb through excitement than delight through awareness. Choices that would drive us to exploit external sources of God’s created pleasures in a futile attempt to alleviate our internal fears.
How, then, are we to drink from the good and intimate wine of God’s abundance, without getting drunk from the wine of the world that always runs out?
It begins – of all places – with our thirst to be recognized. In one of his most famous sermons, Martin Luther King called this thirst “the drum major instinct.” Like all instincts, King said, the drum major instinct is God-given. It is not for us to smother with our guilt, much less submerge even further into our shame. If we use the drum major instinct rightly – to be servant leaders, “drum majors for justice”, as he put it – we will be recognized. For our ways of servant leadership will make God known through our lives. But only if we know God’s love for us, first.
For knowing God’s love for us first means we will know what the servants in the wedding kitchen are getting so excited about. Knowing God’s love for us first means we will know and return in praise to the source of the best – even and perhaps especially when the best shows up last. Knowing God’s love for us first means we can trace God’s hand over the bumpy roads of our lives – past, present, glimpsing into the future – trusting, as Dr. King pronounced at the end of the 1965 Selma-to-Birmingham march, that “the long arc of history bends toward justice.”
Authentic intimacy. Taking the time – from time to time – to trace our spiritual biographies. Sensing, awakening, for the first time perhaps, to God at work in our back kitchens – waiting, watching, and imagining in wonder what is to come. And celebrating, when it always does.
Authentic intimacy. Not only knowing we are be-loved by God – that priceless sense of knowing that we are known. But consequently coming to know others as God has already known them: visualizing for ourselves others’ deepest longings through their own eyes!
It was difficult to believe that Jane could imagine or celebrate much of anything. At her memorial service, a packed tall-steeple church in Michigan listened to one of her daughters eulogize a mother with hardly a memory – a woman who had just succumbed following a lengthy bout with Alzheimer’s.
According to Jane’s daughter – a member of my church in Ann Arbor – her mother, a joyful and much-beloved woman in her community, refused to sing her entire adult life – in church or out. It seems she had been told as a child that she could not sing. And so, being the decent and orderly and at least in this case obedient Presbyterian she was, Jane did not sing.
Until her last year on this earth. With her memory gone – perhaps including even that earliest of childhood memories where she was told, “Jane: You cannot sing” – she burst out in song. And it was then – and only then – that her family realized that she seemingly knew every stanza of every hymn she’d ever heard. And while she could hardly carry a tune, Jane at least could sing!
As Maya Angelou might put it: Jane knew why the caged bird sang. Her songs were laying around in the supposed emptiness of her stone cold jars, all along. Waiting to be “outted”. Waiting to be transformed. Wine waiting to be poured out, in celebration, and in love. For out of the heart of Jane’s disease, she grew intimate with God.
Our God, who is known to save the best for last. Or so “last” may seem to us mere mortals.
For as St. Augustine once said: “For behold, the end – and there is no end!”
Whoever has ears to hear … let them hear.
1David Halberstam, The Fifties (NYC: Villard Books, 1993), pp. 183-84.
2Ibid., pp. 184-87.
3Phyllis Williams Provost and Barbara McBride Smith, “The Wedding Feast at Cana”, in Dennis E. Smith and Michael E. Williams (eds.), The Storyteller’s Companion to the Bible, Volume Ten: John (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996), p. 44.
4Ibid.
Prayers of the People …
Coaxing, Beckoning, Insistent and Persistent God –
There’s a certain volatility to the supposed intimacies of our visual age.
In these perilous and uncertain days, where the televised suffering of our Haitian neighbors less than 1500 miles away stir within us a connection with them that is both miraculous and illusory …
In these perilous and uncertain days, where miracle would barge into our living rooms as political theater – more shock, less awe …
In these perilous and uncertain days, where wedding epiphanies to servant leaders are eclipsed by megachurch spectacles of self-serving leaders …
In these perilous and uncertain days, it takes our imagination – sometimes, every ounce of it – to realize that the stone cold jars of our souls can be filled anew with the Good News.
The Good News: that you, O God, prefer to use the least of these in and among us all to say to us, hey: I may be saving the best for what only seems to be last.
What seems to be last, perhaps, in our personal lives. What seems to be last, perhaps, in our church lives …
Benediction …
In the winter of our discontent, the prophet Isaiah – in a lectionary passage today we did not hear – perceives with remarkable vision how God has saved the best for what seems to be last in bringing us all home from our exiled ways: “You shall no more be termed Forsaken, and your land shall no more be termed Desolate; but you shall be called My Delight Is in Her, and your land Married; for the Lord delights in you …”
That’s true intimacy. And you know what? Like I said last Sunday in a similar vein: There’s not a thing we can do about it!
Go out into the world in peace, to love and serve our servant Lord.
Scripture John 2:1-11
The Power of Intimacy
There’s a certain volatility to the supposed intimacies of our visual age.
Fred Allen discovered this. One of the last of the great American radio comedians “(Allen) had loved radio precisely because it depended on the listeners’ imagination to create a whole world out of words.”1 And inflections. And … pauses …
A true and lasting sense of intimacy, radio. So much so that in 1950, there were 108 different series that had been airing for a decade or more. Twelve for two decades or more.
But then another medium came along. Television. And Fred Allen could not make the transition well. His humor was too dry … too droll.
But some did make the transition. Milton Berle. Lucille Ball. Theirs was a manic humor, full of sight gags. What you saw was what you got.
For with the arrival of television, the task of using one’s imagination to create a world out of words began to dissipate. Now, the world was determined by budgets … scenic designers … carpenters ... all too soon, by special effects. The felt intimacy between performer and audience intensified. Geometrically, it intensified.
But it was – and is – a volatile intimacy. The highs are higher – and because they are, audiences prove fickle. A star – a politician – could descend just as quickly as she or he arises. Shows and success come, and shows and success go, far more quickly.2
There’s a certain volatility to the supposed intimacies of our visual age.
Enter as antidote: the intimacy conveyed in today’s gospel passage – Jesus’ changing of water into wine at the Cana wedding feast.
Isn’t it interesting that in John’s narrative, unlike in the other three gospels, Jesus does not lead off his newly-baptized ministry with a flashy healing. No crowds to oooh and aaah at the spectacle. Only the water-drawing servants seem to take notice of what he has done.
It’s an intimate first miracle, this. And for one of the most raucous yet intimate of celebrations: a first century Jewish wedding.
For the little town of Cana, it may have been the biggest event of the year. That nice Rabinowitz boy and that sweet Goldberg girl – betrothed, promised to one another for quite some time – finally getting hitched! The party would last a full week. Everybody who was anybody would be there.3
And I do mean “anybody”! The hospitality was such that not only was Jesus and his mother invited, so it was with even these new disciple “friends” of his – that rabble, who after all he had just met.
Soon, his mother – who must have known the hosts, if not the caterer, pretty well – learned from the circulating whispers that the good stuff was nearly tapped out. As biblical storytellers Phyllis Williams Provost and Barbara McBride-Smith relate, “Now there are some things you just don’t want to do. You don’t want to insult a three-hundred-pound-biker named Tank. You don’t want to leave the house wearing dirty underwear … And you don’t want to run out of liquid refreshment at a (first century) Jewish wedding.”4
And so leave it to Mary to intervene. “They have no wine,” she kvetches to her son. Jesus to his mother: “Woman, what concern is (this) to you and to me? My hour has not yet come.” Mary to the servants – brushing Jesus off while tugging at his arm: “Do whatever he tells you.”
Ahhh, intimacy: the ability to struggle with one another … and not run away.
And so, Jesus performs his first “miracle”. And so, the good stuff continues to flow. And so, the unwitting wine steward applauds the equally unwitting bridegroom, saying, “Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine when folks get sloshed. But you have saved the best for last.”
But the real applause comes from the kitchen. The ones who knew who was really responsible.
There’s a certain volatility to the supposed intimacies of our visual age. Everybody seems to know everybody’s business. Or – like the wine steward to the bridegroom – we think we know.
And yet, authentic intimacy tends to runneth over from the coldest and dirtiest and what may appear to be the emptiest stone jars of our lives. Where the least of these among and in us all – the kitchen workers in our midst and in our souls – are more apt to detect, in their own quiet way, God’s miraculous movements, and are more apt then to pour forth praise.
For John’s gospel shapes this water-into-wine miracle as a powerful precursor not only to Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection – God’s new intimacy with God’s world. John’s gospel shapes this miracle as a precursor to how we are called to live: out of the heat of our kitchens, and into the light of God’s kingdom!
God’s kingdom – read, God kin-dom – as sisters and brothers in the faith. In other words: as intimates! Disagreeing, struggling with one another at times – and yet, steadfastly refusing to run away.
Having come to know, as we were reminded last Sunday, that we are be-loved by God through our baptisms, our primary call now is to imagine and to live such true intimacy into being. Like listening to a good radio show or reading a good story or hearing an amazing symphony on a CD, sometimes it takes all the creative powers we can muster to celebrate the matrimonial closeness of life abundant – married or no. All the while keeping a respectful distance from the cacophony of choices that would shape and even determine our lives. Choices that would find expression in an all-too-human desire to possess rather than to steward … to abuse rather than to enjoy … to numb through excitement than delight through awareness. Choices that would drive us to exploit external sources of God’s created pleasures in a futile attempt to alleviate our internal fears.
How, then, are we to drink from the good and intimate wine of God’s abundance, without getting drunk from the wine of the world that always runs out?
It begins – of all places – with our thirst to be recognized. In one of his most famous sermons, Martin Luther King called this thirst “the drum major instinct.” Like all instincts, King said, the drum major instinct is God-given. It is not for us to smother with our guilt, much less submerge even further into our shame. If we use the drum major instinct rightly – to be servant leaders, “drum majors for justice”, as he put it – we will be recognized. For our ways of servant leadership will make God known through our lives. But only if we know God’s love for us, first.
For knowing God’s love for us first means we will know what the servants in the wedding kitchen are getting so excited about. Knowing God’s love for us first means we will know and return in praise to the source of the best – even and perhaps especially when the best shows up last. Knowing God’s love for us first means we can trace God’s hand over the bumpy roads of our lives – past, present, glimpsing into the future – trusting, as Dr. King pronounced at the end of the 1965 Selma-to-Birmingham march, that “the long arc of history bends toward justice.”
Authentic intimacy. Taking the time – from time to time – to trace our spiritual biographies. Sensing, awakening, for the first time perhaps, to God at work in our back kitchens – waiting, watching, and imagining in wonder what is to come. And celebrating, when it always does.
Authentic intimacy. Not only knowing we are be-loved by God – that priceless sense of knowing that we are known. But consequently coming to know others as God has already known them: visualizing for ourselves others’ deepest longings through their own eyes!
It was difficult to believe that Jane could imagine or celebrate much of anything. At her memorial service, a packed tall-steeple church in Michigan listened to one of her daughters eulogize a mother with hardly a memory – a woman who had just succumbed following a lengthy bout with Alzheimer’s.
According to Jane’s daughter – a member of my church in Ann Arbor – her mother, a joyful and much-beloved woman in her community, refused to sing her entire adult life – in church or out. It seems she had been told as a child that she could not sing. And so, being the decent and orderly and at least in this case obedient Presbyterian she was, Jane did not sing.
Until her last year on this earth. With her memory gone – perhaps including even that earliest of childhood memories where she was told, “Jane: You cannot sing” – she burst out in song. And it was then – and only then – that her family realized that she seemingly knew every stanza of every hymn she’d ever heard. And while she could hardly carry a tune, Jane at least could sing!
As Maya Angelou might put it: Jane knew why the caged bird sang. Her songs were laying around in the supposed emptiness of her stone cold jars, all along. Waiting to be “outted”. Waiting to be transformed. Wine waiting to be poured out, in celebration, and in love. For out of the heart of Jane’s disease, she grew intimate with God.
Our God, who is known to save the best for last. Or so “last” may seem to us mere mortals.
For as St. Augustine once said: “For behold, the end – and there is no end!”
Whoever has ears to hear … let them hear.
1David Halberstam, The Fifties (NYC: Villard Books, 1993), pp. 183-84.
2Ibid., pp. 184-87.
3Phyllis Williams Provost and Barbara McBride Smith, “The Wedding Feast at Cana”, in Dennis E. Smith and Michael E. Williams (eds.), The Storyteller’s Companion to the Bible, Volume Ten: John (Nashville: Abingdon, 1996), p. 44.
4Ibid.
Prayers of the People …
Coaxing, Beckoning, Insistent and Persistent God –
There’s a certain volatility to the supposed intimacies of our visual age.
In these perilous and uncertain days, where the televised suffering of our Haitian neighbors less than 1500 miles away stir within us a connection with them that is both miraculous and illusory …
In these perilous and uncertain days, where miracle would barge into our living rooms as political theater – more shock, less awe …
In these perilous and uncertain days, where wedding epiphanies to servant leaders are eclipsed by megachurch spectacles of self-serving leaders …
In these perilous and uncertain days, it takes our imagination – sometimes, every ounce of it – to realize that the stone cold jars of our souls can be filled anew with the Good News.
The Good News: that you, O God, prefer to use the least of these in and among us all to say to us, hey: I may be saving the best for what only seems to be last.
What seems to be last, perhaps, in our personal lives. What seems to be last, perhaps, in our church lives …
Benediction …
In the winter of our discontent, the prophet Isaiah – in a lectionary passage today we did not hear – perceives with remarkable vision how God has saved the best for what seems to be last in bringing us all home from our exiled ways: “You shall no more be termed Forsaken, and your land shall no more be termed Desolate; but you shall be called My Delight Is in Her, and your land Married; for the Lord delights in you …”
That’s true intimacy. And you know what? Like I said last Sunday in a similar vein: There’s not a thing we can do about it!
Go out into the world in peace, to love and serve our servant Lord.
