We could always count on it. Every year, on the second Sunday of January, my dad would preach his drinking sermon — or, I should say his anti-drinking sermon. Having seen firsthand in my mother’s family the deathly cost of drunkenness, having spent more nights than he could remember offering pastoral support to families dealing with the fall-out of alcohol, Dad was convinced that alcohol was a demon. It was all too often the destroyer of the abundant life which God gives us to cherish. His message was pretty simple. If our bodies are the temple of the Holy Spirit, as Paul so poignantly reminds us, then when we pollute our bodies with excessive alcohol, we are defaming the very dwelling place of God. He was right and still is.
Saturating the majority of automobile accidents, soaking the fabric of much domestic violence, floating maliciously in the center of many cases of heart disease and cancer are the toxic remnants of alcohol. In a past issue of the Duke Alumni Magazine, then President Nan Keohane offers a breathtakingly honest look at current alcohol use on college campuses. Every year, over 30,000 students are treated for acute alcohol poisoning. In one survey, it was discovered that on the Duke campus, 41% of all students reported binge drinking within the previous two weeks. Of the students, 28% reported having blacked out and 20% of the students had driven while drunk. A common feature at Duke parties was a 100-gallon trash can lined with plastic intended to receive vomit. Now, Duke is no worse than most college campuses — and better than some. We know that if alcohol was not so central to our culture, to our economy, to our adult behavior, these college statistics would not be so high. And the overall destruction of alcohol would not be so devastating.
All of which makes our morning gospel lesson problematic. Obviously, my father never used this text as the basis for his annual temperance sermons. John’s story of the wedding at Cana is vivid. In his debut as the power and presence of God, Jesus literally drowns us with wine and no matter how hard we try to “spiritualize” this story, there is no way we can hide 150 gallons of vintage rose. So, what is going on?
Eastern hospitality is a wonder to behold. In Jesus’ day the customs of hospitality were clear. Every village home had big jars of water at the entrance way to provide ready relief from the journey. Feet were washed the moment a guest arrived and then water was readily available for hand washing not only before meals but in between each course. With a large wedding crowd expected, the host stacked six water jars by the door — just in case. Weddings in first-century Palestine were amazing events. They usually lasted a week and the groom was responsible for providing food and drink through it all.
Wine, in those days, was the drink of choice and of necessity. The water was simply not pure enough to drink. But let us be clear what this vino was like — two parts wine to three parts water — sweet, tame, and thin by today’s frat party standards. As is the case in most Middle Eastern and European countries today, such common use of wine made drunkenness very uncommon and much more socially condemned than it is in our own alcohol confused culture. If we put all of this in context, it probably never occurred to Jesus that by transforming so much water into wine, he was offering a problematic sign and a problematic message. My friends, alcohol abuse is a uniquely third-millennium problem that was simply not part of the picture in first-century Palestine.
Today’s gospel text is not fair fodder for arguments about alcohol consumption or about who should drink, at what age, in what amount. At the same time, to use this text to justify unhealthy behavior is simply missing the point. So what is the point?
Today’s gospel text is about the very nature of God and about the very purpose of being human. The nature of God is pure grace — generous, abundant, excessive, surprising grace — grace overflowing to the brim — in times and places when we least expect it. And the purpose of being human is to long for this grace, this joy, this abundance — to thirst for God until we are finally satisfied. The French philosopher Blaise Pascal once said that the core of human identity is what he described as a God-shaped vacuum — and we are restless until that void is filled. One writer described this human longing in this way:
Our thirst for God will never be satisfied by taking an eye-dropper-ful of divine love and dribbling it onto our tongues... We want to swing out on a rope over the river, and let go, and splash naked into the deep, delightful pool... that is our thirst for God.[1]
As Christians, we believe that this insatiable thirst for God can be satisfied by Jesus — by his palpable presence, by his compassionate power, by his healing generosity. The gospel stories give us this Jesus and if we open our hearts we can meet him at weddings and at funerals. We can meet him in the temple and in the marketplace. We can meet him on our marriage bed and on our death bed. We can meet him in our homes and in our offices. And most of all, we can meet him in the dark night of our soul.
The wedding at Cana has become one of my favorite gospel stories because it offers me two rich and dependable promises that give flesh to Isaiah’s words this morning — the bold proclamation that we are the very delight of God.
The first promise is this. Because Jesus “domesticates God” in the very daily-ness of life, we can expect to find the extraordinary in the ordinary. We can expect to discover the holy in the mundane. We can expect to glimpse God in the humble clay of humanity.
Even when life is simple and mundane, God is filling us to the brim with possibility, grace, and joy — not happiness, but joy. Yes, God is filling us with the very elegance of breath and love and emotion — a wine rich enough to savor even on the bleakest day.
The second promise I receive from Jesus in today’s story becomes more precious the older I get. The promise is this: God saves the best for last. Despite my doubt and impatience, God has indeed proven this promise to be true. If you are like me, you have mourned the passing of each stage of your life. The simplicity of childhood is gone, the beauty of adolescence has faded, the freedom of college is over, the ambition of young adulthood has dwindled, the ardor of marriage has cooled, the exhausting delight of parenting has slowed down, the body is creaky, parents are dying and dead. You know the refrain — the best of life has already passed us by and we wallow in nostalgia.
Except that God keeps surprising us with new wine that is sweeter and tastier than that which has come before. Yes, I can’t move quite as fast or do quite as much — but the slower pace helps me savor each moment more fully. Yes, there is too much pain, disappointment, and failure in the world, but allowing rich emotion to flow honestly through me makes the beautiful and the lovely all that much more precious. Yes, the day-to-day craziness of car pools and lunches, homework and curfews is over — but the newfound distance gives me the delicious freedom to finally admit that I am not in charge of my children’s lives. Yes, the wine is sweeter and the aroma more pleasing the older I get. Such is the generosity of God’s amazing grace in our lives.
I remember paying a visit to Tom and Opal Ward — 89 and 91 respectively — living with their daughter and her husband. When I arrived Tom was curled up in bed snuggled into his blanket like a little boy content, warm, and cozy. Remembering his feisty, peripatetic, sometimes overwhelming presence just ten years ago, I was somewhat startled. But I was also touched by this new, diminutive Tom. We no longer could converse about philosophy or theology like we used to — about the cosmic nature of Christ and the intricate affair going on between religion and science in the post-modern world. Such exotic thinking was, for Tom, a thing of the past. But we could, and we did, talk about God almighty and about being “elegant.” Yes, for those who knew him, such phrases still rolled off Tom’s tongue.
At one point, Tom suddenly smiled and his eyes lit up. He talked about the tremendous blessings of his life, despite his many failings. He talked about the specific joy of having been married to Opal for 64 years. Rather than complaining about his old age, rather than bemoaning his useless body, instead of wishing that things were better, Tom simply glowed with the rock bottom knowledge that he had been blessed and continued to be blessed by the simple gifts of life. If that’s what hardening of the arteries does, then may it happen to all of us so that we too can savor every last drop of the ever new wine of God’s grace.
My friends, life is a party and God is the host. May we invite God into all the places of our living and may we glorify God and enjoy God forever.
May it be so, for you and for me. Amen.
1. David Rensberger, “Thirst for God,” Weavings, July 2000, p. 23.