An Open Table where Love knows no borders

Enough and So Much More

A sermon on John 2:1-11 by Nathan Nettleton
A video recording of the whole liturgy, including this sermon, is available here.

In my sermon about baptism last week, I made a comment comparing getting baptised to getting married. I said that both of them were exclusive commitments, taken for life. It hadn’t occurred to me at the time that this week we would be hearing about Jesus attending a wedding. The story we heard tonight about Jesus attending a wedding in the town of Cana only appears in the gospel according to John, and it is something of a surprise how it comes up, almost out of the blue. 

John’s gospel starts with all that philosophical stuff about Jesus being the Word who was with God in the beginning, and being the Word who becomes flesh and moves into our neighbourhood, as Karen put it so helpfully for us two weeks ago. Then Jesus is baptised by John, and some of John’s followers start following Jesus, and then all of a sudden, here we are at a wedding. We’re never even told whose wedding it is. Apparently that’s not the point, which may be a big disappointment to the couple themselves!

I’ve been thinking a bit about weddings recently. Most of you know that I teach a course on conducting weddings as part of the marriage celebrant training for the Baptists, the Churches of Christ, and the Christian Community Churches. And in my position on the Board of the Open Baptists, I’m involved in helping to ensure that Open Baptist pastors will continue to be licensed to conduct weddings. Those things have me thinking about weddings at a more formal bureaucratic level, but I’ve also been thinking about weddings at the more personal level. 

Not only have Rita and Frank asked me to conduct their wedding later this year, but a number of Acacia’s cousins and friends are getting married. Some of those weddings, I’m conducting, some I’m just attending. At one, I was supposed to be just attending and then ended up coming off the interchange bench as a replacement celebrant because the intended celebrant didn’t finish the required training in time.

The last few years have been an interesting time to be thinking about weddings, because marriage has been something of a political football in the culture wars. Australia has had its painful same-sex marriage debate which is done and dusted in the civil realm but continues to tear churches apart. One of the consequences of that debate was that so much angst was expended over whether the definition of marriage could say that it was between two people, or only between a man and a woman, that among far too many people, everything else about the definition of marriage has been forgotten. We know it is about coupling up, but giving it any more thought than that has become rather unfashionable.

I notice, more and more, that the celebrations surrounding a wedding seem to be becoming an astonishingly expensive, competitive arms race, which couples will spend eighteen months meticulously planning. And then, almost as an afterthought, they’ll give about an hour and a half to planning the actual wedding ceremony and the lifelong vows that they are going to make to one another in that ceremony. And believe me, the impact of those vows is going to last way longer than anyone’s memory of how your wedding celebrations measured up to the escalating expectations. 

I attended two weddings in November. At a guess, I’d say that one of them cost about thirty times as much as the other. And yet it seemed to me that the budgets made very very little difference to the celebratory spirit and enjoyment of the two. They were both lovely weddings and everyone present had a great time. And the two couples are certainly just as married as each other now.

Now to be fair, whatever my personal biases might be, the account of Jesus attending the wedding in Cana gives absolutely no attention to the wedding liturgy either. The main story happens entirely within the context of the wedding feast, an event which in that culture quite likely went for several days, and may have been just as socially competitive as today’s weddings.

There are preachers around who will try to argue that the presence of Jesus at this wedding is somehow an endorsement of their particular view of traditional marriage, but given that neither the identity of the couple nor the content of the liturgy were considered relevant to the points the gospel writer wished to make, that seems awfully far fetched.

It is not far fetched though to note that John the gospel writer has deliberately presented us with a baptism and a wedding as the opening scenes of Jesus’s ministry, so even before I get to the water-into-wine thing, I feel that it is warranted to come back to that point I made last week. Baptism and marriage have some important things in common, and it’s to do with commitments or vows taken for life.

In religious circles, the monastic traditions have tended to swallow up our understanding of religious vows. If anyone talks about “religious vows” or “living a vowed life”, the images that most often come to mind are people joining religious orders as nuns or brothers or monks. What has unfortunately been lost is the older understanding that that was just one of several pathways of vowed life. The more important one was commenced in baptism, and was the vowed life for all Christians. For those who marry, additional religious vows are taken, committing two people to a life-long relationship of trust and intimacy. 

The thing that is often forgotten is the purpose of these vows. What is the point of making lifelong vows that commit us to certain ways of life? Why not just leave all the options open and live with freedom to do what we like at any given point in our future?

I want to get into the water-into-wine story to properly answer those questions, but the short answer is that it has to do with depth. We can go deeper when we commit to sticking at something. If you wanted to dig a really really deep hole in your back yard, you’ll get a lot deeper by committing to keeping on digging in the one place rather than digging a bit here and bit there and a bit all over the place. So, even if I believed that no religion was any better than any other, I’d still argue that you can achieve a much deeper and richer spirituality by committing yourself wholly to the practice of one than by trying a little of this and a little of that and never really mining the depths of any of them.

The main focus of this story of Jesus at the wedding is his response to the anxiety over whether there will be enough. Enough food. Enough wine. Enough love maybe. Enough anything. We’re only three sentences into the story when Jesus’s mother says, “They haven’t got enough wine.”

I reckon that anxiety over having enough is one of the big subconscious things that underpins the competitive arms race of wedding planning. If we are trying to launch a wonderfully successful marriage, will this be enough. 

You sometimes see this in a more explicitly manipulative form around funerals, where profit oriented funeral salespeople will ask you whether perhaps your loved one was worth a more lavish and expensive coffin. Is this really enough to show how special they were to you? When we come back to weddings, I’m sure you’ve heard speculation about whether the size of a diamond ring was enough to demonstrate a love that could last. Is it enough?

“They’ve got no wine. There’s not enough.”

Not enough. It’s an anxiety that most of us know in one area of our life or another. For some it is not enough to put food on the table, not enough to keep up with the costs of housing, clothing, and feeding a family. For others its not enough time, or not enough energy, or not enough health, or not enough emotional resources. For those at this wedding, it is not enough wine to meet the social expectations of appropriate hospitality at a wedding. 

Just like people now, with the ever escalating expectations of how lavish a wedding should be, there was a lot of anxiety about measuring up here, and running out of wine would be seen as a horrible faux pas, a total embarrassment, a lasting social shame. Never mind that the guests had been drinking for several days and were all well and truly drunk. It wasn’t about having enough to quench anyone’s thirst. It was about enough to meet the social expectation of lavish and excessive hospitality, of making it a real wedding.

When Jesus produces more wine, what he is responding to and saving the hosts from is their potential humiliation. As much as people like me who like a drink or three might like to appeal to this story as a sign of Jesus’s enthusiasm for alcohol, that’s not really the central point of the story. And yet the scandalous aspect of it is certainly not being downplayed. 

The stone water jars that he produces the wine in were there for a ritual handwashing that was an important part of good social behaviour. Not washing your hands as expected would have been seen as rude and uncouth and disrespectful to those around you; a bit like an uncovered cough in a crowded tram during the height of covid. But at this wedding, if you just want to wash your hands, you can’t because Jesus has filled all the hand basins and the sanitiser bottles with wine!

So not only is Jesus responding to the anxiety about enough with an outrageous abundance, but he’s disrupting some of the social niceties in the process. If you thought that keeping yourself nice was what would make you a good person, Jesus has just poured wine all over your best clothes and pushed your head into the chocolate fountain!

But in a funny kind of way it is precisely this uncomfortably scandalous and over-the-top abundance that brings us back to the idea of making vows to live by, the unmentioned but central thing that was taking place at this wedding. Because making vows and taking them seriously is pretty unfashionable. It is seen as excessive and unnecessary, as a bit primitive, unenlightened and uncultured. 

Even wedding vows are dismissed by many as nothing but an unnecessary piece of paper, and many of those who do marry seem to not understand what vows are. At more and more weddings I hear so-called vows that are a romantic gush of lovey feelings with little or nothing that actually resembles a vow, a commitment for life. It’s like they’re saying I’m with you as long as I continue to feel this way.

But the way these stories unfold at the start of John’s gospel is telling us that Jesus is both calling us to something more extravagant than that, and promising us that the rewards will flow abundantly beyond anything we could imagine. We have the story of the baptism with the commitment of the first disciples reminding us what our baptismal vows are committing us to, and then we are with Jesus at the wedding feast where the water of anxiety is turned into the wine of ridiculously abundant blessing, so extravagant that it feels irresponsible and scandalous and wasteful. “Why waste the best wine on this drunken mob?”

Our nagging questions are real. Is there enough? Will there be enough? Am I enough? Can anything be enough?

Come and see, says Jesus with a laugh. If you trust me enough to give yourself to me for life, to follow me with whole hearted commitment, you will see how rich and deep we can go. Fill these stone jars with your anxieties, with your fears of not enough. Fill them to the brim. Now draw some out, and take it to the chief steward. And right here at this table, you will know enough, enough, and far far more than enough, outrageously more than enough. Right here with the rich wine of God’s love, let the celebration begin.

0 Comments

Add a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.