The Good Stuff (Epiphany C2)

 

The Good Stuff
Homily delivered for the Second Sunday after Epiphany (Year C)
20 January 2013

8:00 a.m. Said and 10:00 a.m. Sung Eucharist
Trinity Episcopal Church

Ashland, Oregon

Isaiah 62:1-5 ; Psalm 36:5-10 ; 1 Corinthians 12:1-11 ; John 2:1-11

God, take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

When I was a boy, we would travel to my Grandmother and Grandfather’s house in Idaho about once every year or so. There, we would eat wonderful homemade meals that were not common in my mother’s home.  My mother worked outside the home, and had learned to simplify her cooking in the 1950s and early 60s by using processed foods like Bisquick, Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup, and even Cheez Whiz or Velveeta in her day-to-day cooking, often using recipes that included brand-name items as a way of product promotion.   Not so in my Grandmother’s House.  There, they raised most what they ate in their large garden, and “put up,” as they said, much of their garden produce for use in the winter.   I remember the first time I ever tasted real ketchup.  It came out of one of the white glass bottles that my Grandma used to preserve homemade ketchup, steak sauce, and chutney.  I was shocked.  It tasted nothing like the Heinz 57 Ketchup I was used to.  This was too tart and tomatoey, with a lot of fresh vegetable overtones.  I wondered to myself how my Grandparents could stand such stuff, a weak imitation of the real thing, all because they were so poor to buy real ketchup in a grocery store!  It was only years later that I realized that my Grandma’s ketchup was far better than any commercially produced stuff, and in fact, was the real thing.  Heinz and Del Monte were the cheap imitations.  

Today’s Gospel reading from John tells the story of the first sign of Jesus’ glory:  at a wedding at Cana, Jesus simply says the word and turns 180 gallons of water stored in jars for purification rites into wine.   There is an interesting detail near the end of the story.  The steward, after tasting the wine calls the bridegroom and says, "Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the cheap stuff after everyone has become drunk and can no longer tell the difference.  But you kept the good stuff until now."  The point is that the wine miraculously made by Jesus is better than any other wine, wine produced by the more pedestrian miracle of sunshine, water, grapevines, skill, and time.   The wine Jesus offers is “the good stuff;” all other wine, the cheap imitation.

More than the other three Gospels, John tells the story of Jesus wholly from the point of view of his disciples after they had seen him die and then come forth once again more fully alive after Easter. John puts the insights of this later post-Easter faith right into all the details of the stories and words on the lips of Jesus in his Gospel.

The author of John is very up front in telling us his purpose: "...these things are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through faith in him you may have life” (20:31).

The Johannine Jesus is revealed to the reader through a series of marvelous acts: turning water to wine (2:1-12), healing the royal official’s son and then the paralytic (4:46-5:18), multiplying the loaves and fishes (6:1-16), walking on the sea (6:16-21), curing the man born blind (9:1-40), raising Lazarus from the dead (11:1-44), and finally coming forth alive again after his death by crucifixion. John does not call these things miracles. He calls them signs, or pointers to the true meaning of Jesus. The word he uses is semeia—the word where we get the word semiotics, or the study of meanings.

John sees these acts of power not just as evidence that Jesus is God’s chosen One. Rather, for him they indicate—they point to, they serve as symbols for and participate in—the mystery that John sees as the reality of God in Christ.

Interspersed between these signs in the narrative are speeches or dialogues that make John’s meaning explicit. 

The multiplication of loaves story is followed by the great discourse where Jesus says, “I am the bread that gives life.”

Meeting the Samaritan woman at the well of Jacob in chapter 4, Jesus says “whoever drinks the water I shall give will never thirst; the water I shall give will become in him a spring of water welling up.”   In chapter 7, on the last day of the feast of Tabernacles, he says, “Let anyone who thirsts come to me and drink.  Whoever has faith in me, as scripture says: ‘Rivers of living water will flow from within him.’”

In chapter 8, probably at the Feast of Hannukah when the candles of the Feast of Lights are being lit (cf. 10:22), and again in chapter 9 just before he cures the man born blind, Jesus says, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”

In chapter 10, after an argument with the leaders of the people who persecute the man born blind who has been healed, he says, “I am the gate for the sheep. . . . I am the gate. Whoever enters through me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture… I am the good shepherd. A good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.”

In the final sign of Gospel before the passion, just before Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead, he says in chapter 11, “I am the resurrection and the life; whoever has faith in me, even if he dies, will live, and everyone who lives and has faith in me will never die.”

Here in chapter 2, Jesus as his first sign makes wine from water at a wedding. Later, in his last discourse before the passion, Jesus in chapter 15 says that he is the source of God’s wine: “I am the true vine, and my Father is the vine grower. . . . Remain in me, as I remain in you. Just as a branch cannot bear fruit on its own unless it remains on the vine, so neither can you unless you remain in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit, because without me you can do nothing.”

The signs, symbols, and images are rich and varied, but all point to one reality, one truth: Jesus as God Incarnate, the ultimate measure by which all things must be seen.   Bread, Wine, Vine, Water, Light, even Life—all these are good, very good indeed.  But they are mere hints of the real thing, the really good stuff. 

As I was driving back from Diocesan Council retreat in Corbett yesterday, I saw again and again the beauty of the world.   Just outside of Cottage Grove, as the sun began its late afternoon decline toward the western horizon, there was dense fog that had settled in the valleys and on the mountains south of the Willamette Valley.  But it was intermittent, so there were spots of brilliant azure, almost aquamarine, sky, and the fog and clouds were lit by the oblique sunlight, and glowed brilliant white and sparkling greyish blue.  Faded, washed out black mountains and hills, all bristling with pines, cedars, and madrones, would appear vaguely in the glowing mist.  The beauty was so great that I caught my breath several times at these views as they appeared, and wept in joy at a couple.

There is joy, beauty, and wonder in our lives.  There are many, many good--no, make that great--things.   But we can be beaten down at times by the hard things:  Money problems, relationship stresses, work stress and fear of failure, illness, mourning, the pain and fear of advancing age.     It is easy at times to lose sight of the beauty. 

Recognizing the beauty behind and in all things is key to a sacramental theology of life.   It lies at the roots of the faith whereby we see in outward signs the inward reality of grace, that what we eat at the Holy Table is indeed the body and blood of Christ.  It is why we sense we are in holy ground when we smell incense and perceive it as a sign of grace, a fragrant remembrance of sacred things offered to God.  It is why a worker at our homeless shelter could say she had seen the face of Jesus in the face of one of our guests. 

What John is saying in all these stories of signs and discourses on Jesus being true light, wine, water, bread—is this: as good as the good things in our mixed lives can be, Jesus is the truly “good stuff.”   No matter how sweet, beautiful, and wonderful something in our lives may be, it is a mere hint, a dim reflection of what God truly has in store for us, of who Jesus is.
C.S. Lewis tells a story from his own youth about the contrast between “the real thing” and poor substitutes:  stealing cigarettes from his father’s stash.  Occasionally when the cigarettes were so few that even one might be missed, he dipped into his father’s plentiful cigar stash, which he kept only for honored guests.  He says that when this occurred, he and a friend thought “poor us, today we’ll have to put up with cigars when we might have had cigarettes!”    Again, if the only thing we know is a weak imitation, or a distorted shadow, when we actually run into the real thing we may think it strange, and perhaps mark it as the poor substitute. 

Think of the things in your life that truly make you happy.  Think of the things that give you joy, and that take your breath away or make you weep in awe. 

Today’s Gospel, through this sly remark “you left the good stuff till last,” is telling us that these good things, these points of joy like wine at a wedding, these, as wonderful as they are, are just shadows, cheap wine to followed by the really good stuff.

John argues that in Jesus, we find all that we need. Now that is not to belittle other real needs. To say Jesus is the bread of life is not to say that we have no need to work to earn our daily bread, or to help feed the hungry with real bread.   It is simply saying something like Jesus says in Matthew, quoting the Book of Deuteronomy, “A human being does not live by bread alone, but by the word of God.”   

This week, I want you to take some thought about the truly good and wonderful things you enjoy.  Make a gratitude list, if you need to.  And then reflect on what the real thing, the good stuff for each of these might be.    Where in our life are we accepting cheap imitations or pale reflections of and rejecting the real thing?  Where in our lives can we be signs to God’s greater love and care? 

Jesus says, I am true wine, the true bread, the true light, the real water.  I am the vine that gives wine; you are the vine’s branches.  Trust me. Have faith in me.

May we so live, and that each day.

In the Name of God, Amen.