Cana , John M, Buchanan
John 2:1-11 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
January 16, 1977 Columbus, Ghio

In 1950 Ernest Hemingway wrote to a friend: "If you are lucky enough to have
lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it
stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast..." (A Moveable Feast ,Frontispiece).,

I wonder if that is not something of what the friends of Jesus felt when,
years later, they found themselves telling and retelling the story of a wedding Chey
had attended once in Cana, Just as He had transformed the significance of the simple
act of breaking bread and sharing a cup for them, so every wedding, every happy,
joyful occasion, was a vivid reminder of His presence, The wedding in Cana summed
up so much of the meaning of their experience with Jesus that it was their "moveable
feast",

The author of the Fourth Gospel, writing perhaps seventy - eighty ~ ninety
years after the fact called it a sign. "This, the first of His signs," John wrote,
"Jesus did at Cana in Galilee, and manifested His glory; and His disciples believed
in Him," And if we simply take seriously his designation of "sign" we will be spared
the somewhat silly inquiries into how in the world water becomes wine, A sign exists
to direct attention somewhere else, It is a distortion of a sign’s function to focus
too much attention on it, It points elsewhere, If you've ever been so busy reading
road signs that you got lost, you know, existentially, the hazards of Biblical Funda~
mentalism, The signs in the Fourth Gospel point to the Lordship of Jesus Christ,
They set out to communicate an important truth about Him: the first of them happens
at Cana,

Cana was not far: it appears that Jesus' family and the family celebrating a4
wedding were close friends. So Mary and Jesus were invited to the feast, Wedding
feasts lasted for seven days, They must have arrived in the middle or near the end
for shortly thereafter the wine ran out, Mary apparently knew her host and hostess
well enough to issue an order to their servants, She apparently was on intimate
enough terms with them to feel their acute embarassment when the wine ran out, Tt
was she who called it to His attention, "No greater catastrophe could strike the
heart of hospitable people hosting so gala an affair'' is the way one commentator
describes it, It was, obviously, a Cisaster; not the life or death variety to be
sure, but the kind that is extremely and excruciatingly painful when it happens to one,

There is a difficult exchange between Mother and Son when Mary told Jesus
about the quandary, The translation is a tenuous one: "O woman, what have you to
do with mg?" sounds terribly theatrical and slightly irrelevant, What she had to do
with Him was that He was her son and a dear friend of hers was in trouble and she
wanted Him to do something about it, The sense of what He said was, “Let's not be
upset about it,"

Jesus told the servants, panicked at this point, to fill six stone jars with
water, The author includes an explanatory note for his Gentile readers, The jars
were used in the Jewish rite of purification, Several times a day, ordinarily before
eating, orthodox Jews would wash their hands, It was a ceremonial act as well as a
functional one, When a guest arrived at the party he would wash in the water, These
jars were empty too - more evidence that a busy party had been transpiring for
several days,

So the harried servants filled the jars with water and I can imagine the way
they must hava looked at one another as they did it: somehwere between 120 and 180
gallons, It was not a task they could have performed discretely.

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The fact that the author is singularly uninterested in the mechanics, the
chemical transition and the awesome implications for physical science, of what happened
next is indicated by his total neglect, He is frustratingly silent about that matter
which concerns us first: “How did it happen?"

the steward was summoned, A professional maitre d', he was persuaded to take
the first sip and discovered immediately that it was wine - very good wine, in fact.
A touch of pedestrian humor emerges at this point. The professional puffs up his
chest and gently chides his employer; "This isn't done: you dan't keep the best
wine till last, You are supposed to serve it first, and after your guests have drunk
freely you bring out the mediocre, less expensive wine." Wobody, it is asnumed, will
know the difference, And the wedding party continued, fueled now by 120 or so gallons
of new and superb wine ~ with Jesus and His friends as guests, participants, co~
celebrators, That is the "first sign’!, according to the author of the Fourth Gospel.

To what, now let us ask, does it point us in 19772? Not, I trust, to itself;
not to a literalistic fascination with a carpenter who does magie tricks in order to
prove His authority. Our habitual focusing on the sign is one of the reasons people
of common sense and intellectual integrity find our religion hard to swallow, To
what, then, does if point?

First, I would submit that this sign points to the direction of that most
incredible of assertions: namely, that Almighty God is intimately and personally
involved in our affairs, ‘The sign, that is to say, points away from God's remoteness,
Now that - God's remoteness - seems at times to be a favorite Presbyterian dogma, It
is a product of our theology: we hold out for a God who is God, the omnipotent, awe-
some ground of all being and creator of all that is, It has always seemed wrong to
us theo logically, and presumptuous socially, to assume too much about our status with
Him, We can contemplate, at least, God's concern for World Peace; or perhaps Peace in
the NMiddie East or Northern Ireland, But we have difficulty thinking of God's will
in terms of the trouble we're having with a neighbor across the back fence, or the
lingering, smoldering conflict under our own roof with our own children, We can
contemplate, at least, God's concern for something as vague as world hunger, But we
cannot - or will not - see God's compassion for the welfare recipient, shivering in a
two room apartment this morning, who will materialize tomorrow in the halis of this
Church with whiskey on his breath because it's the only friend left, wanting for God's
sake - someone to do something,

Or we can contemplate, at least, something as remote as God's concern for the
health and well-being of His people, But we cannot ~ or will not ~ understand God's
personal concern for our guilt, our anxiety, our grief - or even our joy,

The sign of Cana is Jesus, getting Himself involved in a problem that is at
best, trivial, peripheral, An embarassing situation for the host, to be sure, but
hardly more than irritating to anyone else, That, I think, is precisely the point.
God cares about us, and what matters most to us, There is nothing trivial in His
eyes about something that causes us to be hurt,

That's the miracle beside which water turning inte wine pales in drama: the
mysterious, holy God came among us in the flesh; in the life of a man who cared
about things like the wine running out,

The sign of Cana points us in the direction of a God who can turn stale
ritual into something delectable and exciting and lively. That is to say, it points

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away from the srinness of much public religion, Again, we Presbyterians are vulner~
able, Our strength has been our theology; a faith that appeals to mind as well as
heart - only sometimes it is mind instead of heart; a religion that does not have to
retreat from the rarified atmosphere of the academy. If we have been solemn it has
been for good reason, We have done theology and done it well, But in process we
are guilty, I believe, of too much solemnity: we are so dignified that sometimes we
bore ~ even ourselves, Soren Kierkegaard, theologian and gadfly, said a lot in an
observation that goes something like this: "where Jesus changed water into wine, we
have done something more difficult, We have changed the wine back into water,"

Jesus took those ceremonial jars and used them to keep a party going. He took
the water of religious ritual and made it into something with which people could
celebrate, Kierkegaard observed that institutional religion seems bent on reversing
the process,

John the Baptist wouldn't have been caught dead at an affair that featured
120 gallons of good wine, Neither would the most vocal and therefore most conspicuous
contemporary Christians. Along the way of our two thousand year history we Christians
have flirted constantly with that old Greek idea that religion and pleasure - physical
pleasure, eating, drinking, feeling-goed pleasure - are mutually exclusive, You can
do one or the other but not both, We don't articulate it, but somewhere deep within
us we harbar the suspicion that we are nearest God's will for us when we're feeling
bad, It is simply an alien idea that the God who willingly stands by us in suffering
also gladly graces our high and joyful moments,

Our public religion reflects it: we turn the wine of the Gospel into the tepid
water of piety, We assume that the essence of religiosity isin the repetition of
ritual and the preservation of tradition, And it should come as no surprise to us
that the young who are both more free and more honest than we, tell us that sometimes
when they sit through cur worship - our corporate celebration of God's love ~ they
get bored,

How would you paint the face of God? This sign points to a God who can Laugh,
deeply, heartily; a God with a twinkle in His eye, who approves whenever His gift of
Life is affirmed and enjoyed, Certainly our historic Presbyterian penchant for
solemnity and dignity has merit; but not to the degree that our God appears grim, For
here is His son at a party - with old and good friends, sharing their jay at one of
the truly important and happy events in life, Certainly ours is a religion of
Crucifixion: but it is also a religion that needs to be expressed with other symbols
as Well - such as a wedding feast,

The Old Testament Lesson this morning alludes to it, Israel is back from
exile: Jerusalem is reestablished and the prophet wrote: "As the bridegroom rejoices
ever the bride, so shall your God rejoice over you." (Isaiah 62:5). The allusion
sounds a bit chauvinistic, to be sure, but can you remember it, men? Can you remember
that ineredible moment of pure love when you stood in the front of the church and
looked back and saw her coming down the aisle - your bride? The intensity of that
moment: that moment: of utter joy is a little like God's attitude toward us,

The sign of Cana points to a God who is in the business of changing people,
George Eliot expressed impatience with "those whose celestial intimacies seem not to
improve their domestic manners", The power of the Gospel has always been adulterated
by the fact that it seems to have made no difference in the lives of many of its

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adherents. The sign of Cana, however, points to a God who has the power to transform
your life and mine; to take the luke warm water of our spirits and turn it into
zestiul, sparkling wine,

Gn the broad, global scale, we need the oceasional reminder that the Gospel
of Jesus Christ has powerfully influenced the history of civilization, Professor
William Barclay is fond of reminding his readers that Christianity has profoundly
influenced western history by holding out at critical points for the dignity and worth
of the individual, In pre-Christian Rome, for instance, forty infants were abandoned
on the steps of the Forum nightly to be collected each morning: the boys to be raised
in the school for gladiators; the girls in brothels,

We have not always done it: sometimes we have been the heaviest weight to be
removed from the status quo. But at some very important junctures of history the
people of Jesus Christ have stood firmiy and magnificently transformed the future. I
think historians will one day say that about the 1960's, It was the considered and
scholarly opinion of the Late Reinhold Niebuhr that the Civil Rights Movement was the
only thing that saved the American Church from total irrelevance,

But it is at the personal level that we have the ‘moet difficulty following this
sign, Jesus took water and made wine, He took a group of people, took the raw
material of their lives and remade them, recreated them, as joyful, courageous ser-
vants, That's the destination to which the sign of Cana is pointing.

We try to keep it at arm's length, We're not sure about it, We're not sure we
want to be disturbed, changed, recreated. We may not be altogether happy with who we
are, but we are uncomfortable with the very suggestion that God might make us into
something else,

Frederick Nietzsche stood outside the faith throwing his brilliant barbs at the
lack of integrity he observed at precisely this point, He wrote: "They must sing
better songs ere I learn belief in their savior: his disciples must look like the
saved," (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in The Interpreter's Bible, Vol. 8, p.494).

That's the issue and always will be. We approach it weekly: at the conclusion
of our corporate Prayer of Confession the Minister sometimes says: "Tf a man is in
Christ he is a new person altogether: the past is gone: everything is fresh and new,"

When last did you allow your religion to touch you as deeply as that declara-
tion implies? When last were you moved to tears of joy at God's love for you: or to
an act of lonely courage or quiet sacrifice because of that same Love for all people?
We're embarassed by intense religion that makes a difference: we're skeptical about
the honest simplicity that says, "I belong to Jesus Christ and I mean to be His
disciple,"

And so Pentecostal Churches are full, and we sit smugly in half~empty Sanctu-
aries. And across the world intense Pentecostalism is experiencing phenomenal growth,
as the Presbyterians bring home another hundred missionaries, | “ie will be Listened
to," John Arthur Gossip once remarked, “when we demonstrate to those outside that we
have something infinitely valuable that they lack," (Interpreter's Bible, Vol. 8, p.494),
The sign of Cana points to a God who is involved, radically, in our life; a God who
graces our high moments and is pleased when His gift of life is affirmed and enjoyed,
God can enrich our Lives - bringing peace, meaning, great joy, He can change us,
That is the Gospel, Amen,