The sermon for January 19 was based on John 2:1-11.

The Epiphany of our Lord and the Sundays that come afterward all tend to deal with Jesus’ self revelation. With the summoning of the Magi Jesus reveals Himself to be the Savior of the whole world and not just the God of Israel. In His baptism, Jesus shows Himself to be the very Son of God, the 2^nd Person of the Holy Trinity. Today’s miracle identifies Jesus, not only as our omnipotent God, but as someone radically other, someone completely unlike our fallen selves.

Jesus, Himself, says that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. Many of you here this morning are dangerously rich. You are too accustomed to wealth and power to be suitably impressed by what our Lord does at the wedding in Cana. This miracle seems to many of you like an extraordinarily convenient way to do something rather mundane, get more wine, a kind of divine, 1^st century beer run, no big deal.

Truth be told, you’re apt to feel much the same about the feeding of the 5,000. Yes, yes, Jesus is the Son of the God so He doesn’t have to go to the grocery store like the rest of us. Very nice. We’re a little more impressed with raising the dead, because that’s not something we can do for ourselves yet. But we’re already pretty blase' about Him healing the sick. That... we do all the time and most of it’s even covered by insurance. Modern medicine, genetic manipulation, cloning, capitalism, free markets, the global economy and the internet all make the kinds of things Jesus does in the Bible seem... quaint. He walks on water but we’ve been to the Moon.

Actually, the kind of unprecedented wealth that you and I, so easily, take for granted threatens to make Jesus seem even less that merely quaint. It’s a small leap from the kind of wealth that fills your wallet to the kind of wealth fills your soul and crowds out Christian humility. It is wealth that allows otherwise useful people to sit idly in the halls of universities dreaming up worthless and ungodly theories about which parts of the Bible are true and how we can tell the real bits from the false bits. Wealth, far more than hardship leads to unbelief and misbelief.

We get so used to power of wealth that we fall in love with it. It becomes everything to us. It ceases to be a means by which God blesses us and becomes a god in and of itself. In stead of using our wealth to spend out time pay especially intense attention to what God says of Himself in Scripture we waste it criticizing what we find recorded there. We end up losing our sense of wonder and the capacity to be awed. If what God says doesn’t make sense to our wealthy and powerful intellects, it must be false. Besides, a real God wouldn’t perform tricks like turning water into wine anyway. We who are perfectly content to assume that either God, Himself, or His chosen Apostles and Evangelists are lying to us. But perhaps neither God nor His men could help it. They weren’t privileged with the wealth and power and the scholarship we have at our disposal

The end result is that Jesus, Himself, becomes, like His miracles, ...quaint. He is a teller of moderately moving tales, (although, I must admit, Garrison Keilor is more likely to tug my heartstrings than most of what I read in the Gospels.) Jesus becomes a promoter of general niceness, along the lines of the so called Golden Rule. But that’s all He is, nothing more, and in the minds of so many of our contemporaries, oh so very much less. Ask your loved ones what they think of Christ and then be prepared to cry yourselves to sleep. He’s a great teacher, a prophet, a myth, the personification of Jewish values as they were being absorbed into Roman culture, etc... There is no good answer other than the one St. Peter gave, He is the Christ, the Son of the living God. We who believe that come here to be with Him according to His promise.

A lot of you come here for less salutary reasons and with less appropriate expectations. Many of you come here to learn how to be good. You expect the Church to teach you how to act, to encourage you to behave well, to modify your behavior. Others of you come here to shore up your piety, to help keep yourself on the straight and narrow. Some of you come here hoping to release some tension and to relax. Some of you come here simply because you believe that you are supposed to. These are the reasons the wealthy and powerful offer for going to Church. In congregations that are larger and more affluent than ours the reasons get even worse. In such places people will go to network, or to wiled influence, or for esthetic reasons.

Those of you who come to carefully Christian congregations to learn how to live and how to behave are in constant danger of being so disappointed that you fall away altogether. You don’t really care if your needs are met miraculously or not, just so you get what you need. All you want is to feel better. Its all about you. That’s not such a shocking idea. The people at that wedding in Cana simply wanted to have a good time. They didn’t care if the wine appeared miraculously or was hauled in on a donkey cart. But Jesus decided that it did matter. He says that it does make a difference. He could have arranged for the wine to arrived ordinarily or never to have run out in the first place. But that isn’t what He did. It isn’t our place to speculate about what He chose to share this miracle with us. It certainly isn’t our place to question whether or not the account is true. It is our duty to try our best to understand what He’s says in this miracle.

When we go to the doctor we tell him where it hurts and he runs down his list of answers until he finds one that works. When Christ comes to us it works the other way around. He gives us an answer and it is our task to examine our lives and find out which ailment He’s busy curing. At Cana Jesus is treating the deadly illnesses of unionism and pragmatism and secularism. He’s working to cure the damning and destructive effects of pride and arrogance. We all believe that the universe exists for our sakes and we’re right. The haughty, the arrogant, and the wealthy think that it should also work they way they want it to. And that goes doubly for anything "spiritual".

As a Pastor with a lot of experience with weddings, many of them Navy and Marine Corps weddings, I appreciate the fact that Jesus chose to assault our selfishness and arrogance in the context of a wedding. Weddings can be some of the most grotesquely self-indulgent occasions in life. Nothing brings out the worst in a mother like a wedding, and if she happens to be the mother of the bride... oi!. I don’t know how many more times I can actually hear one woman say to another, "It’s your day!" and mean not just that this is a good day for her but that everything should go the way she wants it to go. We have to learn to be content with receiving what’s good for us, whether it comes to us in the way we would have chosen or not. And its not just women and its not just weddings. Marriage itself can bring out the ugly in us too. We discover our spouse’s weakness and begin to use them against them. We use the wealth of marital intimacy as a bludgeon on the very person we swore publicly to love and cherish. We are such, such sinners!

What’s missing from our thinking at weddings and in marriage is a lack of recognition of any truth more important, more universal than our own desires. And what’s missing from our consideration fo Jesus’ miracles is any thought of His relationship to the truth. Jesus Christ doesn’t discover truth. He doesn’t uncover it in some lab. Jesus Christ doesn’t merely proclaim or promote truth the way I do or the way your father hopefully did. Jesus Christ creates truth. There is no one or no things else in all of the universe even remotely like that. Jesus Christ creates truth.

When our Lord changes the water into wine He doesn’t perform some magic trick. Nor does He do science on some lofty psychic level. He alters the nature of reality. Jesus Christ created the stone from which the water jars were made. He created the water that filled them. Those were miracles He worked, by speaking the Fathers Words, thousands of years before arriving in Cana. He created the wine in the same way, with His Word. He told the water that it must now be wine and the water became wine. When Jesus would later calm the storm at sea it would be in the same way. When He would heal and feed and resurrect, it would be by His Word. I don’t know the names of the people married that day in Cana and I don’t know if they ever had children but if they did it would be because God created a child in their womb. (Incidentally, those who recognize God at work in the creation of children live differently than those who don’t. We live more humbly and much less violently. Our President has declared that this is a day for Americans for contemplate the sanctity, the holiness and the divinity of human life. Christians know that every day is such a day. Those, however, who set their hearts and minds above and beyond the Word of God are left with blood on their hands and despair in their souls.) The gift Jesus brought to the wedding was His power as creator of the universe. And for what did He use it, in part so that people who were already well drunk could get even more well drunk and with wine they were too drunk to appreciate! Let’s not be like those besotted guests and miss the point but let us rather be like Mary and the table stewards who know where the wine comes from and what it means to us.

Jesus is not someone to discover or find. He isn’t a piece of information that we can use. His Word, while good for us and at our disposal and given for our sakes, isn’t something we can change to suit our fancies. He and His Word are completely unlike anything else in the world. We confess week after week in the Creed that He is begotten, not made. He is of the one substance with the Father. His ways are most definitely not our ways and neither are His ambitions. We want to make ourselves better. He wants to destroy us and make us brand new beings.

Jesus comes to us to transform us, to transform us as thoroughly and inexplicably as He transformed the water into wine. He hasn’t come here to teach us manners or to make us nice or otherwise modify our behavior while letting us remain essentially the same. He has come to put us to death and to raise us to new life. He has come to alter our substance. To change us from the crude and misshapen things we were at our birth into glorious beings of grace like Himself. He describes the work in Isaiah and the outcome in Romans.

The instruments of His salvation are the same this morning as they were at the wedding in Cana: flesh and blood, water and wine and every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. These are not our tools they are His. They are His as surely and as necessarily and as rightly as the instruments of the surgeon belong to the physician and not to the patient. The Means of Grace function beautifully, miraculously and effectively when used by the Lord God but they are simply dangerous in anyone else’s hands, be he ever so well intentioned.

Let’s start with the water. Baptism isn’t a symbol. In your hands it becomes a symbol. In our minds it becomes something we do to and with one another. But in God’s hands it is a miracle. Baptism isn’t a process of refinement or extraction, it doesn’t bring out the best in us. It transforms sinners into saints and it does so by drowning the sinner and burring him in the tomb with Christ. Baptism isn’t a symbol. It creates faith in all who receive it. It makes all who receive it capable of union with the infinite God and gives possession of His own Holy Ghost. Baptism saves us and to refuse it or to deny it is to commit either suicide or murder.

Now for the flesh and blood. The Lord’s Supper is no mere ritual either. Here too is the very creating power of God at work. When Pastor Trouten consecrates the bread and the wine, they will no longer be just bread and wine. They will become the very Body and Blood of Jesus Christ. It doesn’t matter whether you believe it or not. The Word of God makes it so. If you come up here and secretly doubt that you are receiving the Body and Blood of Christ, it won’t change a thing about the Sacrament. It is what Jesus says it is whether you believe it or not. That is why neither Pastor Trouten nor I are able to decide who gets it and who doesn’t. It isn’t ours to say. We’re like the stewards at the wedding in Cana. We know where it comes from and we know what it is and we give it to those whom Christ says should have it. If there is any doubt at all about whether or not a person should receive it, we withhold it. Not because we only give it to our favorite people but because we know what it is. It is the Body and blood of Christ and it will kill and damn and surely as it will strengthen and forgive. This isn’t child’s play. It’s life and death. St. Paul is very careful in 1 Corinthians to warn us about the deadly power of Jesus’ Body and Blood for those who receive it improperly. No one has the right to demand Holy Communion. One either longs for what Jesus promises or does well to stay away.

The same is true for Pastoral absolution. It is the Word of God that makes Baptism what it is. It is the same Word that makes the Lord’s Supper what it is. It is, likewise, the Word of God that makes you what you are. When I absolve you it is a miraculous event. Absolution doesn’t just change your status. It changes you. Absolution makes you sinless. It makes you a child of God. It transforms you. The opposite of absolutions isn’t condemnation but simply the refusal to absolve. The binding key isn’t one that actually gets used. It is nothing other than the refusal to absolve. You go to hell unless you are absolved by the Word of God in the way God instructs. Baptism, the Lord’s Supper, Holy Absolution and the hearing of His Word are the ways you can be saved. They are the only ways that He has promised to work and they are the only assurances He’s give to any of us that we may be redeemed. You are what God says you are. You are not what you think you are. You are not what you feel yourself to be. You are not what you seem to be. You are what the Word of God declares you to be. Be that sinner or saint.

This is why we Christians so love the Word of God. In that Word He reveals Himself to us and He reveals us to ourselves. In the Word we find Him to be gracious, willing to forgive our sins without any work or cooperation or worthiness in ourselves. In His Word we learn that He comes to us through things we can see and taste and feel and hear and smell. His Word assures us of His love and shows us His will for us so that we can learn to avoid the pitfalls of pride and arrogance or to repent of them when we fall prey. On the last day Christ will come in fire and judgment and dry up all the water so that there will be no more baptism. He will likewise consume the earth with fire so that there will be neither bread nor wine and the sound of His trumpet will drown out all preaching but until then every means of grace is given to you for your salvation. I invite you to receive them all. Amen.

Last Updated: 7/15/2008