NUCC
Epiphany 2
Polka Sunday
January 14, 2007
Do you like to attend wedding parties? As a minister I’ve been to plenty of wedding parties and plenty of wedding rehearsal dinners. To tell you the truth I often enjoy the rehearsal dinners more than the actual wedding party because they are more informal and provide an opportunity to meet the families of the bride and groom.
Truth to be told, Karen and I are not particularly party animals, although we did enjoy a couple New Year’s Eve parties this year ----- first in our church basement and then with some of Karen’s Optimist friends at the beautiful home of Joanne and Craig Blum. Most times, when we are invited to the wedding dinners, we enjoy the reception, eat at the dinner and then make our exit before the dance begins.
At our own wedding we didn’t have a wedding dance. My parents were still in their straight-laced phase of life and made the request of my dear mother-in-law that we not have a wedding dance. My father-in-law didn’t mind this request, because he himself came from a rather straight-laced, tea-totaling family of Swedish Covenanters. We always marveled at how he got hooked up with a bunch of dancing, beer-drinking Germans like those in his wife’s family.
However, we have one fine memory of Roy Nelson. At his niece’s wedding at the former
All of these memories come back to me as we today have read the account in the Bible of Jesus attending a wedding party. I don’t know if there was any dancing at this party. Most likely there was no polka dancing because the polka wasn’t invented until many years after our Lord walked the face of this earth. However, here in
What do we see at this wedding party? What do we learn about Jesus? What do we learn about ourselves?
1. First, we see that Jesus enjoyed life. He even enjoyed a party. Sometimes we paint a picture of Jesus as this solemn, serious teacher who was always “about his father’s business.”
As Michael Card points out, quite the opposite is true:
“Whenever Jesus wasn't preaching or teaching you'd find Him at a party. It might be at a tax collector's or at a Pharisee's home (religious leader). The guests might include power men in the community or the riffraff. What seemed to bother the stuffy, "religious" types wasn't that Jesus went to parties, but that He seemed to enjoy Himself too much. That, I believe, is why they called Him a glutton and winebibber.”
Years ago when Johnny Carson was the host of The Tonight Show he interviewed an eight year old boy. The young man was asked to appear because he had rescued two friends in a coalmine outside his hometown in
2. Secondly, we see the abundance of God’s overflowing love.
If you count up the amount of wine that Jesus produced at this wedding party, you might be astounded. Twenty or thirty gallons. That must have been a big party! How many glasses of wine would that make? According to my calculations that would make around 700 glasses of wine. And that is after the wine had run out!
What is the message here? To me the message is that just as those jars were filled to the brim with wine, God is ready to fill our lives to the brim with love. My daughter Annie gave me a book for Christmas. Its name is God Has a Dream and it was written by Desmond Tutu, the retired Archbishop of Cape Town, South Africa. In this book Desmond Tutu assures the reader of God’s unfathomable, limitless love. He writes: “In God’s family, there are no outsiders.”
The theological word we often use is grace: God’s unmerited, undeserved love. As we have been reading about a wedding party today, we might think of God’s love as the kind of love we receive in a marriage ----- at least for those of us who are fortunate enough to have married a spouse who loves us, “warts and all,” as Martin Luther would have expressed it.
In the United Church of Christ we have taken as our greeting:
“No matter who you are or where you are on life’s journey, you are welcome here.”
I believe this expresses that kind of overflowing, limitless love we know in Jesus Christ, the one who told another story about a wedding. When the invited guests refused to come and offered all sorts of lame excuses, the wedding host sent his servants out into the streets to invite all whom they met to come and join the party. Overflowing love. Just like overflowing wine.
3. Thirdly, we see Jesus setting the tone for his ministry.
Scholars speculate that this event happened at the very beginning of Jesus’ ministry. He was setting the tone for what would follow. At first Jesus wasn’t very enthused about solving the wine crisis. His mother pestered him, and he responded. One translator has him saying: “Don’t push me!” But Jesus did help and he continued to help. He was showing his generous nature.
Sometimes we like to think that Jesus had everything worked out in advance. He was perfect. He never changed. I wonder. He changed his mind at this wedding reception. Later he changed his mind when a foreign woman asked him for help and after an initial rejection decided to assist her.
Could it be that Jesus grew in his calling just as we might grow in our calling. Those of us who are married know that we are challenged to continually grow in our relationship. This year Karen and I will be celebrating forty years of marriage. We could tell you that we have learned something about one another and about ourselves in those forty years. We have adjusted to becoming parents, then becoming empty nesters, and then becoming part of the “sandwich generation.”
I think of this poem by Kathy Coffey:
The
By Kathy Coffey
That was only the beginning:
Ached and awkward we were then,
Embarrassed enough without the wine incident,
Indebted to Mary's son for flow of joy.
Ever since it has been miracle:
Touching the shoreline of the other in our sleep,
Waking warm beneath our roof,
Hoeing the wheat shoots in our fields.
Even the threats brought blessing:
Brooding death intensified our life,
Illness taught nurture of cherished child,
The needy repaid us with
Our union was not singular; we fought
And sulked, sickened like the other folk.
But in every glass of common water,
We tasted hints of garnet-gold.
All of us, no matter what our matrimonial state, are called to grow in faith. That’s why we come to worship. That’s why many of you participate in study and growth groups. That’s why you pick up copies of Upper Room.
Way back at the beginning of his ministry Jesus set the tone for a life of faithful growth. He enjoyed life and even went to parties. He expressed an overflowing love. And he kept growing in that love. Maybe he even danced a step our two along the way.
