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Light Seeping In Around the Edges
A sermon by Dr. Jim Somerville, Pastor
Richmond’s First Baptist
Church
Richmond, Virginia
January 17, 2010
The Second Sunday after the Epiphany
John 2:1-11
Many of you know that it was my father’s special calling to help the poor in
West Virginia, and although he was a Presbyterian minister and not a Catholic
priest he took what amounted to a vow of poverty in order to do that job.
My mother’s calling was different. As a self-appointed missionary she was
determined to share the good news about Jesus with as many people as she could
while we were there in West Virginia, but as a mother she was determined that
her boys would love the Lord, study hard, and stay away from junk food. As
a result of my father’s poverty and my mother’s convictions, my five brothers
and I didn’t have much ice cream or candy when we were growing up, and we
certainly didn’t have soft drinks.
Except.
On the one vacation we took each year (whether we had any money or not), my
father would gas up the family station wagon, we would all pile inside, and then
he would drive as far as he could go before we had to stop for gas. My
mother would be sitting in the front passenger seat all that time, usually
spreading peanut butter on thick slabs of whole wheat bread and handing them
over into the back seat just as fast as she could. We would read books and
count cows and look forward to that first gas stop, because when it
came—finally—my father would do something he didn’t do at any other time of the
year. He would pull up to the pump, get out of the car, and then—while my
mother was looking the other way—dig down deep into his pocket to find a quarter
for each of us. We would tiptoe across the hot pavement in bare feet and
come to a stop in front of the drink machine.
In those days the drink machine usually had a long, narrow glass door on the
right side through which you could see the bottle caps of the different soft
drinks. You would put your quarter into the slot, open up that door like
the door of a refrigerator, grab an ice-cold bottle of soda by its neck, and
then give it a hard yank. If everything worked like it was supposed to the
machine would release the bottle and it would come out with a loud, satisfying,
“Chunk! Chunk!” There was an opener built right into the machine, so you
could pop the cap off that bottle and watch the vapor from the carbonation rise
to the top and waft down over the sides. That first sip was so cold, so
delicious, and so satisfying (especially after waiting a year) that I can hardly
describe it. The sweetness on my tongue. The tickle in my nose from
the bubbles. The delightful, tingling aftertaste. Ahhh!
I could have made a commercial.
My favorite in those days was orange soda. I liked the reliable flavors
of a Nehi Orange, the slightly sweeter taste of a Fanta, or the strong, tingling
surge of an Orange Crush. Not that I was a connoisseur. When you
taste only one bottle a year it’s hard to develop the discriminating taste buds
necessary for such a thing. Still, I liked to think I knew my orange soda.
I savored every sip. And when I daydreamed in those days I dreamed about
someday having a house with a kitchen sink that had three knobs on it: one for
hot water, one for cold water, and one for orange soda. Can you imagine?
Putting your glass under there, turning the tap, and watching it fill up with
ice cold Fanta, or Nehi, or Orange Crush? I could imagine, and I did quite
often. For me it wasn’t just the idea of having orange soda whenever I
wanted, it was the idea of having lots of orange soda, buckets of it, bathtubs
full. With so much scarcity in my life I dreamed of abundance. Which is
why this story about Jesus turning water into wine has always been one of my
favorites. For most of my childhood I wished that someone would come along who
could work just that sort of miracle.
Jesus was at a wedding, John says, in the little town of Cana in Galilee,
which was probably just as small and poor as some of those towns I lived in when
I was a boy. And because I went to some weddings then I can almost picture
a wedding there: bride and groom standing outside a yellow-and-white trailer on
a rainy day, her trying hard not to get mud on her white shoes while she lifts
up the hem of her dress and he holds the umbrella for both of them, a cigarette
dangling from the corner of his mouth and a crooked grin on his face as he
pretends to hike her dress up a little higher. They’ve just come from the
reception, which was held at the fire house because they don’t allow drinking in
the fellowship hall at the Baptist Church. The boys down there just backed
the fire truck out into the yard, swept the concrete floor, set up some folding
chairs and tables and brought in a case of Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill wine,
because you don’t get married every day. But then Jesus showed up with a
bunch of those disciples he always ran with and before you know it the wine was
gone. Everybody started giving his mother dirty looks, and that’s when she
came looking for Jesus.
“Can I talk to you for a minute?” she asked. “In private?”
“What is it?” he asked.
“They’ve run out of wine,” she said.
“That’s not really our problem, is it?”
“Well,” she said, “it could be. They might not have run out if you
hadn’t brought all your wine-bibbing buddies with you. Here,” she said to
some of the firemen. “Do whatever he tells you.” And suddenly there
they were, standing there looking at him, like they were expecting some kind of
a miracle or something. For a full minute he didn’t say anything.
Like he told his mother, his hour had not yet come. But at last he
shrugged his shoulders and asked, “Is there any water in that truck?” “Oh,
yeah,” they answered. “It’s full of water.” “Well, drag a hose in
here,” he said, “and fill up that tub over there.” It was one of those big
galvanized metal washtubs, hanging on the wall. They used to fill it with
ice and put those little bottles of Coca-Cola in it for their annual barbecue
fund raiser. But for Jesus’ sake they took it down, dragged the firehose
in, opened the valve just a notch and watched in amazement as dark red wine
flowed out of the nozzle and into the tub. If they had been connoisseurs
they might have known that it was a nice Chateau Lafite, from a good vintage
year. They didn’t, but the Methodist minister who performed the ceremony
(a kind of a snobby social-activist type from New Jersey) took a sip and said,
“Oh, my! Now that’s good wine!” And that’s when everyone there
looked at the washtub full of wine, and then down at the hose still lying on the
floor, and then followed it with their eyes out the door to the truck—that big
tanker truck full of water—and realized with a kind of a pleasurable tingle that
this was going to be the best wedding reception they had ever attended.
And then they looked back at Jesus and felt the little hairs on the back of
their neck stand up.
No matter how you tell the story it’s that moment that matters—the moment of
epiphany—when the door between heaven and earth is opened just a crack, and the
dazzling light from the other side begins to seep in around the edges. It
is the moment in the Gospels where people begin to see Jesus for who he really
is. John calls this miracle in Cana a “sign,” and like all signs it points
to something else. You see water turned into wine and that’s something,
but then you look at the one who did it and that’s something else altogether.
John says that “Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and
revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.” Did you catch
that? John doesn’t say that they believed in miracles; he says that they
believed in Jesus. But what did they believe him to be? A
miracle-worker? A magician? Or something more?
There was an old legend in those days about the Messiah, God’s anointed, who
would come to his people Israel and set them free. Not everyone believed
that legend, of course, and not everyone believed it the same way, but some of
the rumors about this Messiah were that, when he came, he would usher in a new
age, and that one of the characteristics of this age would be unprecedented
abundance. Listen to this passage from Isaiah 25: “The Lord will
destroy the shroud that is cast over all peoples, he will swallow up death
forever, and wipe away the tears from all faces. On this mountain he will
make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines, of rich
food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear” (vss. 7-8, 6).
Or this one from Jeremiah 31: “They shall come and sing aloud on the
height of Zion, and they shall be radiant over the goodness of the Lord, over
the grain, the wine, and the oil, and over the young of the flock and the herd;
their life shall become like a watered garden, and they shall never languish
again” (vs. 12). When the Messiah comes there is going to be plenty, the
Scriptures say: the banquet table will be loaded down, the wine will flow like
water. That may not mean much to the man who has everything, but to the
one who has almost nothing it would sound mighty sweet, wouldn’t it?
In those places where I grew up in West Virginia, and in the kind of poverty
that was there, people put most of their hope in God. They knew that they
had little chance of getting a good education or a high-paying job.
Probably, like their fathers and grandfathers before them they would do what
they could to scratch out a living in those stingy hills, but when times got
especially hard they would pray to the only one they knew who was really on
their side, and who could really do something for them, and every once in a
while something would happen. Someone would show up at their door with a
basket of food when they really needed it. A collection would be taken up at
church for someone whose husband had been killed in the mines. Or
something would happen that they couldn’t explain by any natural means, and they
would just marvel. They would catch a glimpse of God’s glorious light
seeping in around the edges of their dark reality, and they would believe in
him, just like those disciples saw what Jesus did in the little mountain town of
Cana, and believed in him.
This morning I’m thinking about the people of Haiti, the poorest country in
the Western Hemisphere. For so long now it seems that the only abundance
they have known is an abundance of trouble. After Tuesday’s earthquake a
journalist said, “I was here during the 2008 hurricanes that left thousands dead
and thousands and thousands homeless, and that felt like the Apocalypse.
But that pales in comparison to this.” In the aftermath of this horrific
tragedy the Rev. Pat Robertson has suggested that the Haitians are cursed
because of a pact their ancestors supposedly made with the Devil two centuries
ago. “Ever since,” he said, “they have been cursed by one thing after the
other.” Although he didn’t go so far as to say that this earthquake was
God’s wrath poured out on the people of Haiti what else could they infer?
Robertson seems to subscribe to an Old Testament theology that makes every act
an act of God. If San Francisco fell into the ocean this afternoon,
Robertson would be on television tomorrow, telling us why. But I hope the
people of Haiti will won’t look at things the way he does. I hope they can
understand as we do that bad things happen to good people, sometimes to the best
people we know, and for no apparent reason. When Jesus’ disciples asked
him, “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” Jesus
said, “It wasn’t this man or his parents. It was so the works of God can
be seen.”
I hope that’s what happens in Haiti. I hope those people can understand
that earthquakes happen not because God is angry, but because the crust of this
living earth shifts and moves. I hope they will see this one for the
natural disaster that it is, but see in our response to this disaster the “works
of God.” As rescue workers come from this country and others, as relief
flows into the ruined city of Port-au-Prince, as it comes with an abundance
unlike anything the Haitians have ever witnessed may they see it as a sign—not a
sign of God’s judgment, but of God’s grace. May they sense that the door
between heaven and earth has been opened just a crack, and may they see light
seeping in around the edges.
—Jim Somerville © 2010
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