Wedding at Cana

The Rev. Denise Giardina
Sunday, Jan. 17, 2010

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

In the name of God who creates the earth, Christ who redeems and renews the earth, and the Holy Ghost which dances and blows and swirls and grows in wind and rain and sea and forest. AMEN

May we take a moment in silent prayer for the people of Haiti.

In 1988, when I was living in Durham, North Carolina, I went to see the Martin Scorsese film The Last Temptation of Christ. The film was based upon a novel by the Greek writer Nikos Kazantzakis, and it was controversial. At issue was the final section of the film and book, which gave both their title. Jesus is dying upon the cross, and as he suffers, he has a hallucination, a final temptation. He imagines that he is not dying, but is in fact living, is married to Mary Magdalene, and raising children. He is happy; his life is normal, uneventful. It is a lovely dream of a perfect life. And then he comes back to himself, dying a torturous death upon the cross. And he realizes his death upon the cross is the true reality, and it is what was meant to be, and he accepts it.

This may not seem particularly controversial. Surely a dying man might hallucinate, might imagine something more pleasant, especially when he has chosen a difficult path he need not have taken. And the conclusion, Christ’s acceptance of his death, could not be unorthodox? Could it?

Well, apparently it could, if you are a fundamentalist Christian. All across the country, including North Carolina, protesters flocked to theaters. They had not seen the film, of course, and were oblivious to its subtleties, to the fact that in the end, it upheld orthodox Christian belief. All they knew was that someone told them the movie showed Jesus refusing the cross and marrying Mary Magdalene. Horror of horrors.

I went to see the film in Durham, and in order to do so ran a gauntlet of protestors screaming that I was going to hell. It was very much like my experience as a substitute teacher in the Kanawha County School system during the infamous textbook controversy, when teachers and students were condemned to perdition for attending class and reading supposedly “dirty” books. I had already read the Last Temptation of Christ so I knew how mistaken the protesters were in their outrage about the ending. But early on, a scene unfolded which grabbed my attention. And as I watched it, I thought, those poor folk outside. If they would actually watch the film, THIS is the scene that would outrage them. The scene depicted the Wedding at Cana.

Willem Defoe plays Jesus in the movie. As the scene unfolds, a large room is filled with drunken people, dancing. Imagine a first century mosh pit; wild music pounding, flailing bodies packed together. And right in the middle is Jesus, bouncing up and down, head flung back and forth, long greasy hair flying everywhere. Jesus is clearly having a very good time, and he is not the Jesus of your typical Southern Baptist Sunday School illustration.

But the wine is running out and he is begged to provide more. At this point, there is no need to consult a Martin Scorsese film to understand the scandal of this passage. The Gospel of John does quite well by itself. According to John, Jesus replenishes the supply of wine by transforming water into - something more interesting. The quality of the new wine Jesus provides is far better than what has already been consumed. And what I noticed when reading the account this time is the sheer volume of wine Jesus supplies. He asks that six water jars, each holding 20 to 30 gallons, be filled to the brim. Now I did a little math. Jesus provided somewhere between 120 and 180 gallons of wine. That on top of what had already been consumed. It must have been some party.

In my Sunday School days growing up Methodist down in McDowell County, it was explained to me that the wine people drank back in biblical times wasn’t really alcoholic; it was grape juice. That made no sense to me then; nor does it now. Would the folks at the wedding have noted that the grape juice Jesus provided was of better quality than the grape juice that had run out? I imagine that if Jesus had turned 180 gallons of precious water into grape juice, he would have been run out of Cana posthaste.

Let me hasten to say at this point, I am not condoning overindulgence in alcohol as a regular event. Or overindulgence in anything else, for that matter. Alcoholism and alcohol abuse are great problems for many of us. So is eating too much, or hoarding or spending too much money. When it comes to material goods, moderation in all things is surely a good policy. But also, Christianity at its heart embraces the material world as a good. When we compare different world religions, it seems to me that orthodox Christianity is unique in this one particular way, and that is how at its very core the physical, material world is not only accepted, but celebrated. For Buddhists and Hindus, the physical world is not permanent, and so is unimportant, an impediment even. For Judaism and Islam, the idea of God taking on human physical flesh and participating in the material world is a bit scandalous. But Christians believe that God did take on flesh and came among us, and yes, made some wine while he was here.

And yet many Christians also, deep down, have been uncomfortable with the physical world and God’s place in it. The desperation to wish the poetry of wine into something prosaic like grape juice points up to me a great split between those Christians who are uncomfortable with the things of this world – perhaps we may call them puritans or ascetics – and those Christians who embrace the pleasures of the flesh. The wedding at Cana is problematic for some because first, it was a wedding. And at weddings we celebrate the physical joining of two human beings. Some Christians are, frankly, squeamish about that. Then, there is all that partying and attendant goofy behavior.

It would be one thing if our theological problem with God as a party animal and provider of wine simply made some us uncomfortable, and led us to continue, in our own lives, to be more strait-laced. There is nothing wrong with being strait-laced. But there is a flip side to this discomfort with the physical world, and it is more negative than just being strait-laced. Within that strand of Christianity which is uncomfortable with the partying at the Cana wedding, there is also not only a discomfort, but in some cases even a repugnance for the messiness, the brokenness, the sinfulness if you will, the smelliness, the craziness of this physical world we live in. And that repugnance leads to a sort of disconnect from creation, to a judgmentalness, a narrowness, even a hatred for the world and this human condition we find ourselves in.

My thinking this week has caused me to take a sort of imaginative leap, which I hope you can follow – a leap from the joy of a physical wedding to the horror of this past week’s central event. I have tried to follow these thoughts from Cana to Haiti, from Jesus’ affirmation of the physical world, to the reality that this world we live in can and does turn on us. It is a gift from God; it is also a perilous gift.

Some Christians would recoil in discomfort at encountering the drunken Jesus at that big party in Cana. Such a Chrisitian might not even recognize that such a Jesus could be the Christ. And that same sort of Christian, bless his heart, might say, sincerely and with what he thought was great logic and sympathy, that God is punishing the people of Haiti because 300 years ago their ancestors made a pact with the Devil. So those who suffer in this earthly existence are somehow at fault, and God is remote and in control.

We don’t want the world to be the unruly place that it is; we want it neat, and sweet, and orderly. When something bad does happen, we want there to be a purpose to it, or we want God to fix it. Such a fixing God would be a God who is in charge, in control. Such a God could save people if God wants; and could visit an earthquake or hurricane or flood, or an illness or a car wreck upon others if God wants. That idea of a controlling God can be comforting to us. It allows us an illusion of control over our own lives.

We don’t like chaos. We don’t want people flinging themselves around in a massed frenzy and falling down drunk. We don’t want the earth flinging itself around and buildings toppling down. When people act out at that wedding celebration, we want them to calm down and sip their grape juice. We ask them, Don’t you know how to behave? When a society descends into suffering and chaos because of a terrible calamity, we blame the pathetic government of that place, or the geology of that place, or the culture, or bad luck, or the devil. Or we blame God, and say Where are you? Don’t you know how to behave? Why aren’t you taking care of this?

Theologians have a word for trying to explain why bad things happen in the world, given the existence of God. The word is “theodicy”. I don’t have time this morning to explore all the aspects of theodicy – that would require countless sermons, countless seminary courses, and the Book of Job, among other things. And at the end of it all, we would still ask, Why God, why? And we would ask God, where are you?

We Christians proclaim that Jesus was God. But Jesus was not the man of bad religious art with the spotless white robes and gleaming long blond hair like something out of a shampoo ad. Jesus was filthy dirty. He smelled bad. He lived in one of the poorest places in the world, a place more like Haiti than our own. When there was a party, he was supplying the booze. When there was a horrible earthquake, he was there, is there, desperately digging out the survivors, carrying dead children in his or her arms, weeping and wailing. He is looting food from a destroyed store to feed some children; she is trapped in the rubble. God is there, with them. With us.

Of course we pray for deliverance, because we are human beings. We don’t want to suffer, we want to be saved. Our prayer book begs: From all natural disasters, from hurricanes, fires, tornados earthquakes, blizzards and floods – Good Lord, deliver us.

But let us be clear-eyed about this. God won’t answer that prayer the way we want. To think otherwise is to hallucinate as Willem Dafoe did in the film Last Temptation of Christ, and fool ourselves into believing in a kind deliverance that God cannot or will not bring about. God is not with us by waving magic wands and making everything OK, or by giving us safe lives without tragic event. God is not with us by whipping us back in line when we stray, or by punishing us because Pat Robertson thinks our ancestors made a pact with the devil. God is with us, here in this sometimes horrific, sometimes joyous, always messy – world, not by delivering us from it, but by being with us in it. That is a hard message to hear in this world of earthquakes. It is a hard message to deliver from here in what seems to me the safety of this pulpit in this seemingly unscathed city. But who knows what earthquakes each of us will face. Each of our deaths is an earthquake.

I have a feeling that this message – God did not do this to us, God is here suffering with us -- is also being delivered this morning in Port-au-Prince. I hope so. And let us pray that soon, hundreds and thousands of gallons of precious water will be there as well, for those who now have none. And that after that, there will be a wedding.