Second Sunday after the Epiphany (C), January 17, 2016; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

O God of justice, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

By now many of you have seen the news of the Anglican Communion. This past week the Primates of Anglican and Episcopal Churches around the world met in England to talk about marriage in the Church. While I don’t want to make light of the lives that are at stake with regard to treatment of LGBT people all over the world, it does strike me as a little funny that leaders of our particular expression of church have been arguing about marriage since King Henry VIII. As luck (or the Holy Spirit) would have it, we have three scripture readings teed up for our prayerful consideration on this Second Sunday after the Epiphany that have some things to say to us about discerning a way forward with generosity and humility, with compassion and hope.

Our Hebrew scripture passage this morning lies at the very heart of the part of Isaiah that gets called “third Isaiah,” who writes: You shall no more be termed Forsaken, and your land shall no more be termed Desolate; but you shall be called My Delight Is in Her, and your land Married, for the Lord delights in you and your land shall be married. Your land shall be called Beulah – the Hebrew word for “married to” literally is “valued and cared about” (here is a Biblical definition of marriage for you to cite if needed!) What follows is often cited as prescriptive rather than descriptive: for as a young man marries a young woman, so shall your builder marry you. But I’ve never once heard an argument that an old man and an old woman must not marry, just because this verse says “young.”

Beulah Land is the subject of many songs about the sweet by and by in the sky. But this passage is about something much more immediate than what God might do for God’s faithful people after death. Isaiah is writing about life before death! This passage is about people returning to rebuild what had been devastated – in this case, the devastated city of Jerusalem. It’s about rebuilding hope, about creating a sign of hope for others. It lies at the very heart of scripture that contains radical proposals for an inclusive community – it’s a treatise written to defend an inclusive and expansive group against the actions of those who wanted to limit the access and benefits of the community.

We have before us Saint Paul’s reminder to the Corinthians (who had been arguing about who had real spiritual gifts and who didn’t), that everybody’s different – that everyone has gifts and the real test of gifts from God is whether they are used for the common good. That’s how you know if a gift is a gift from God according to Paul – you know not by its beauty or its extravagance or even its timing – you know not by whether it is given to slave or free, Jew or Greek, male or female (because in Christ such differences do not matter, Paul says). You know not by individual benefit, but by whether gifts are used for the common good – the commonwealth.   Those are gifts are from God.

And we have before us the story from the Gospel of John of Jesus and his family and friends at a marriage feast that had run out of one of the principal ingredients of a celebration! Running out of wine was not just a social embarrassment. It was an excruciating reminder of the perilous economic circumstances in which the wedding guests lived. [1] Wine was also a ritual sign of covenant with the Holy One. (It’s a sign we still employ.) Many know this story as Jesus’ first of many miracles – and it is that according to John (but not in Matthew, Mark or Luke). I always want to call out this story as the first of the many encounters of Jesus with women who challenge him to expand the effectiveness and the reach of his ministry.

Notice the mother of Jesus in her first act recorded in the Gospel of John. She’s the one who calls Jesus’ attention to the shortage – to the insufficiency. “They do not have what they need, Jesus, and you need to act.” She blows right by Jesus’ response that it’s not her problem or his and that, furthermore, it’s not really a good time for him just yet. Mary speaks, going counter to Jesus’ wishes. Mary takes charge. Mary tells the servants to do whatever Jesus tells them to do. Mary decides that the precarious situation of the hosts is indeed her concern and that it must be Jesus’ concern as well (whether he wants it to be or not, whether he is ready or not). It’s such a nice touch that when pressed, Jesus uses the stone jars that were for the rite of purification – a rite of hand washing before meals. Six stone jars – ritually pure, each able to hold 20-30 gallons, making an incredible abundance of really good wine. For me this is a lesson about Jesus’ ability to make something sacred of our lack or our precarious situation when we give him what we have and ask for his help.

Some interpret this mention of the Jewish rites of purification as an indication that those rites have been supplanted by the Jesus Way, but I think that is a mistaken and dangerous reading of this text. There is no negative connotation to the stone jars here. Furthermore, in the negativity the Gospel of John with regard to faithful Jewish religious practices, the writer betrays his own deep desire to not be excluded. John the Evangelist says that this was the first of Jesus’ signs. Signs of what? Signs of God’s in-breaking. Signs of hope. Signs of the inversion of the power structure. So this morning I want to say some things to you about rebuilding hope and creating signs of hope for others, using our gifts for the common good. To employ the metaphor of the stone jars as vessels for grace – we are called to be filled up, changed and drawn out.

Here are some things that I wonder about us as a parish – as a community, even as The Episcopal Church, or as a nation. What do we know from our experience of devastation and the need to rebuild? What do we know from experience of lack, of insufficiency in the world around us? Lack of sufficient food or clean water? Lack of the essential ingredients for celebrating community? Of health or shelter? Of energy and vision, of courage and generosity? Where, by God’s grace, is the power structure of this world being turned upside down? Who is speaking out, unwilling to be silenced, challenging, annoying, agitating for action, hopeful, although it might not be a convenient time?

Martin Luther King, Jr.’s voice is one of those unwilling to be silenced. In his essay called “A Testament of Hope,” Dr. King wrote, “People are often surprised to learn that I am an optimist. They know how often I have been jailed, how frequently the days and nights have been filled with frustration and sorrow, how bitter and dangerous are my adversaries. They expect these experiences to harden me into a grim and desperate man. They fail to perceive the sense of affirmation generated by the challenge of embracing struggle and surmounting obstacles. They have no comprehension of the strength that comes from faith in God and [hu]man[ity]. It is possible for me to falter, but I am profoundly secure in my knowledge that God loves us….” [2]

Later in that essay, Dr. King wrote, “Millions of Americans are coming to see that we are fighting an immoral war that costs nearly thirty billion dollars a year, that we are perpetuating racism, that we are tolerating almost forty million poor during an overflowing material abundance. Yet they remain helpless to end the war, to feed the hungry, to make brotherhood a reality…Our moral values and our spiritual confidence sink, even as our material wealth ascends. In these trying circumstances, the black revolution is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes. It is forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws – racism, poverty, militarism and materialism.” [3] Does that sound familiar to anyone? Black lives matter.

And where did Dr. King find hope in what appeared to be a most hopeless situation? He found hope in the spirit of dissent that challenged injustice; he called it “the sound of distant thunder increasing in volume with the gathering of storm clouds.” [4] He noted the emerging and re-emerging of courageous movements of social responsibility. He knew the emerging and re-emerging of those courageous movements from Biblical history and from American history. Martin Luther King, Jr. wasn’t perfect –far from it. He was complex and full of contradictions. The more radical he became, the more unpopular he grew with both whites and blacks. And yet his sense of hope was unquenchable and contagious. He was an embodiment of St. Augustine’s definition of hope – the combination of anger at the way things are and the courage to see that they do not remain as they are. His voice continues to challenge us.

On the other hand, as I have said before, I believe that it’s no coincidence that the same Congress and President [5] that “mandated that Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday be a federal holiday…refused to demand the immediate release of Nelson Mandela; refused to protect affirmative action; devastated the Civil Rights Commission; amputated the legs and arms of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission; cut off necessary support systems for the poor; …polluted the air; destroyed jobs;” [6] and so forth. The great preacher, Charles Adams explains that it’s no coincidence because: “The easiest way to get rid of Martin Luther King, Jr. is to worship him. To honor him with a holiday that he never would have wanted. To celebrate his birth and his death, without committing ourselves to his vision and his love. It is easier to praise a dead hero than to recognize and follow a living prophet. The best way to dismiss any challenge is to exalt and adore the empirical source through which the challenge has come.” [7] That is not so different from what happens with Jesus.

I have a few more questions for you. I don’t imagine that any of us can answer all of them, but perhaps one or two will stick with you to challenge and inspire you. What do we know from our experience about recommitting to dissent against injustice wherever we find it? Of getting our hands dirty, in order to participate in spreading the abundance of God’s realm? What do we know of risking contamination for the love of God? What do we know of being pressed to action, of being vessels of God’s grace, in areas that, at first glance, do not seem like our concern or for which we are not ready? What do we know about anger and courage? What do we know about demonstrations of vision and compassion? What gifts have we used and what gifts can we test for their God-given ability to improve the world around us? What testament of generosity and hope will we make? Pray that we will be filled, changed and drawn out in abundance by the grace of God!

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