water into wine

It seems like I'm taking Garth's name in vain a lot.

He and I were discussing the matter of Christ our Lord turning water into wine, and Garth mentioned that it seemed likely to him that the miracle that Jesus effected was not to turn water into wine, but instead to move it.  To move wine that was somewhere else to where the water was, and then to move the water to that location.

It's an interesting thesis, and since Garth knows slightly more about physics than I do, I'm prepared to believe the possibility of the thing. But if the concept of the great switcheroo is true, then the question remains, what happens to the water?

The traditional understanding of the miracle would tell us that it just vanishes, that it is replaced as though through a conjurer's trick, with wine.  But whichever way you slice it, whichever way you think about how these things work, it's worth considering the nature of the wine, both good and bad. For you see, in the story of the Wedding at Cana, something happens, which is that a wedding is getting started, and everything seems fine.  Everything seems fine until the party begins to run out of wine.  All of a sudden, the burgeoning party that seemed so promising now only seemed to promise to grind to a halt, as any good party would without some dutch libations.  So, the folks putting the party on began to realize that their party was going to run out of good times, and they had nothing left to offer.  Doubtlessly, they'd already served all the wine they could, and so they had to serve their guests with something amounting to nothing at all.  This is troublesome, and would not only reflect badly on them as hosts, it would get the marriage off on the wrong foot.  So Mary goes to Jesus, and says to him 'they have run out of wine,' and Jesus, after an initial persuasion, goes to assist.  But his assistance is the stuff of legend. In his assistance, Jesus does the impossible, and serves the people at the wedding wine where there was no wine before.  So where's the water?  Where's the bad wine?  What happens to that?

Well, it's an interesting question, because the water disappears, and the party continues, and Jesus serves the best wine after everyone was convinced that it was all gone, and all opportunities were gone as well.  And this is what happens with us in our lives, too, which is that we have a way of thinking about our lives, our trajectory, and how it is all leading to collapse eventually.  We figure that we're on the road to death, and that nothing can change that.  Death is inevitable, but so is gradual cooling.  The gradual cooldown of the universe, in which everything gets cold and eventually dead.  There is no new energy, and so the only state of things is to get worse.

That's why this passage works so well as a wedding reading, and no, not just because there's a wedding in it, but because that's how people view the trajectory of marriages.  I remember the day that I was married, my wife and I stopped for a milkshake at a local Calgary eatery, and while we were going through the drive thru, our obviously 'just married' car attracted attention, and some teenagers cried out 'you're making a huge mistake!'

I shrugged that off at the time, but it's obviously stuck with me.  Why would some random teenager, who knows nothing about my relationship, my wife, or our future together, be prepared to make a judgment based solely on the fact that we were married when we weren't before? Well, because the idea is that it's all downhill from here.  Diminishing returns style, you're always going to be feeling worse as time drags on. Your best day of your marriage will be the first day, and then after that, 'each day's a little better than the next.'  Sad, but that's the way we've been conditioned to think about, well, pretty much everything.  Possessions, relationships, hobbies, it's all at its absolute best the minute you start, and then after that, all you can do is chase that high. It's never going to be as good ever again.

And this law of diminishing returns dogs us and drags us down.  It pulls us aside from where we believe, sincerely, that we should be.  It calls into question everything we do, and leaves us dissatisfied with the way things are.  We look at our world, we look at our surroundings, and say to ourselves 'well, I guess this is as good as it gets. This is your life, good to the last drop.  Doesn't get any better than this.  This is your life and it's ending one minute at a time.'  Left with that reasoning, why wouldn't you join a particular club that I'm not allowed to talk about?  Life has nothing to offer, so you may as well rage, rage against the dying of the light.

But there's another option.  Another option that is just hinted at in Cana, where Jesus gives us a promise, a promise that is good not only for our relationships, but also every aspect of our lives.  What is it in our lives that is lacking?  What has gone cold? What is it in your life that you have give up on, what relationship have you lost hope in?  What segment of your life is tinged with regret, and pondering over the idea of 'too late,' or 'this is just the way things are?'  That's not the promise of the scriptures, though.  That's not the promise of the scriptures at all. That's not the promise that Jesus brings you, rather, he gives you the opposite.  He speaks these words to you.

Behold, I make all things new.

We as Christians tend to limit this to the resurrection, that Jesus can bring everyone back from the dead.  But I ask you, which is harder?  To reanimate dead tissue and to resume cellular respiration, or to put a slightly bruised relationship back together?  So why do we want to limit God?

Why do we want to limit God. We think it's strange when Jesus initially resists his mother's plea for help, saying 'woman, what does this have to do with me?' but that's the same statement that we make as well.  When we are in flagging relationships, or when we are pressed against the wall of complete collapse, we look at the possibility of involving Christ our savior, and say 'what does this have to do with him?'  Sure, my relationship is failing, or my faith is falling apart, or I haven't spoken to my sister in years, but heck, what does that have to do with Jesus?

If his response to his mother gives you pause for concern and comment, if you've read through the Gospels and said to yourself 'he should help!  That's totally in his wheelhouse,' then I ask the same question to you, why would you look at anything you have going on, and say to yourself 'gosh, what does that have to do with Jesus?'  Good question.  And the answer is the aforementioned quote - he makes all things new.  That's his job, which is to restore, to rejuvenate, to make fresh and new and pure and, well, into the good wine that you thought you'd run out of years ago.  How does all this happen? 

I promised that I'd come back to the relocation of the water, and here's where it comes in.  I'm not sure about the water, but I do know about the bad wine.  The wine that Jesus makes for those in Cana is good wine, better than any of them have ever had before.  It's the best of all wine, to be sure, and can't be overstated.  But the bad wine that everyone was expecting, the wine that you can only eat after everyone's had enough to drank already, well, that shows up, you know.  It shows up at the cross, where the real good wine is served.  Lots of folks have no problem with Jesus being a good moral teacher, or a fine example for us all, or someone for us to look up to, and if that's your view of Christ, then you'll come to the cross at calvary, and figure that there, the suffering Lord, that's when we have a bit of a problem with the great human teacher.  When he's on the cross, nailed to it and dying, when he's being lanced through with a spear, it seems like we're going to have to drink the bitter and the sour.  It seems like it's all going to be vinegar for those of us in our faith.  The Christians, the followers of Christ, have had their best wine, and now they're going to have nothing but vinegar.  But who drinks the vinegar?  Christ does.  He takes the vinegar for us.  On the cross, the one who changed water into the best wine that any of them had ever had, he's immobile, isolated, can't quench his own thirst, can't move to scratch an itch or wipe his brow.  That Christ is the one who is thirsty, and asks for a drink, and drinks the vinegar.  And then he bows his head, and gives up his spirit.

And at that moment, the best wine was served; not to him, but to us.  The wine that transcends death, the wine that makes all things new, the wine that broke death and restored us to life and communion with God.  That wine was served at that moment, and continues to be served in Holy Communion, where the body and blood of Christ are offered for us.  If you need a reminder for all five of your senses that Jesus can make all things new, come to the altar, take his body and his blood, and realize that in there, he is serving you the best wine now.

The inside of the cup

I want to begin by making sure that we all know what I'm talking about.  If you have a dishwasher in your home, sometimes you can't tell if the dishes are clean or dirty.  Why is that?  Because they all go into the dishwasher upside down.

They go in upside down because if  you put them right side up, then they'll fill full of water, and be useless to you except as a way of collecting dirty water.  That's it.  Now, if everything is upside down, and the dishwasher is full, how do you tell if it's clean or dirty on the inside? 

Good question.  Probably some of you have fancy dishwashers from the future, where it can sense if it's clean or dirty, and will sound some sort of klaxon if you try to remove a dirty dish, but for those of us with turn of the century dishwashers, you can't tell just by looking which dishes are clean, and which are dirty.  The stock pots, the saucepans, the cups, the bowls, they're all upside down, and impossible to distinguish clean from dirty just by giving them a glance.  The outside is always pristine.

That's the situation with humanity, you know.  That's how we are as people, which is that we all look fine on the outside.  The outside of the cup, the outside of the bowl, it always looks fantastic, clean as a whistle.  And human beings, we're all hiding behind a thin veneer of respectability.  We all look great from the outside, very few of us look genuinely terrifying, not many of us are immediately identifiable as a dreadful person, that sort of thing, so we've mastered the art of cleaning the outside of the cup, and of the bowl, and making sure that it's plenty presentable.


So, in order for you to see what is clean and what is dirty, you have to open the dishwasher, and pull out one of the cups, and look inside.  If it's still marked and filthy, then you know for sure that this is a load of dishes that needs to be done.  But you can only tell by looking.

But there's another snag, which is that sometimes, when you run your dishwasher, things dont' get clean.  There are certain things that, like, never get clean.  Eggs in a frying pan is a good one.  If you fry or scramble eggs in a frying pan, there's a real slim chance that it'll come out clean, you know.  But you try anyway, thinking that this will be the time in which things are different. This time, things will be clearly different, so not to worry.  And when you run the dishwasher, the same thing happens as always, which is that the egg stubbornly clings to the pan, and you're left with egg slightly more baked on than before.  So what do you do?  You run it through the dishwasher again.  Which doesn't change anything.  Unless you do something different, that egg is going to be stuck on that pan forever. 

So, you have a couple of choices, really.  You could decide to just keep on running the pan through the dishwasher, and saying that the pan is just like that now.  It's an egg pan, both made of eggs, and made for it.  You can say that with cups, bowls, plates, whatever, that this cup is just like this now, and that's all there is to it. 

Your other option is to do the only thing that will actually make that item clean, and that is to handwash it.  Take the plate, or the cup, or the bowl, or the frying pan, or whatever, and clean it manually.  Wash it clean by hand, because running it through the diswasher won't do anything after a while.  This brings us to baptism, baptism in which we focus on Christ's baptism, as well as ours.  Jesus, upon his baptism, goes down into the baptismal waters, echoing the Old Testament reading where he promises that when we go through the waters, he will be with us.  This is good news, precisely because of what it represents.  After all, what is handwashing if you're not willing to put your hands into the water to clean the vessels?  If you're not willing to get your hands wet, then you may as well just use the dishwasher, but it won't clear off the problem.  Christ descends into the depths to ensure our cleanliness, because he knows another dishwashing principle, which is that you can't clean something without making something else dirty. 

Jesus descends into the depths of baptismal waters to take the sin that washes away from us onto himself.  In the same way as your hands become stained by beets, or your washcloth becomes clogged with bits of egg and crumbs, the sin has to go somewhere.  Just like food refuse, it doesn't go anywhere.  It doesn't disappear.  It just has to be attached to something else, and that something else is Christ.  Luther's small Catechism states that it isn't water that effects this amazing miracle of rebirth of the spirit, washing clean of sins, and generation of faith, but rather water in conjunction with the word of God.  It's the same with doing dishes, which is that it's not water alone that effects any sort of cleanliness, it's water combined with soap, with a cloth, with scrubbing that removes the dirt.  Water in conjunction with the word of God, that is spoken at baptism, and was also physically present in the waters of baptism, too.  Our confidence stems from the fact that Christ has been in the waters, and emerges from the waters of his baptism with our sins clinging to him.  Meanwhile, we are washed clean indeed.

How clean?  Good question.  Good question asking about the cleanliness of us as human beings.  For you see, clean has different definitions.  I can't find it right now, but there was an excellent commercial for the swiffer a number of years ago, in which a drill sergeant yells to his troops 'You call this clean enough?'  Inspection got tough for those troops, I assure you.  And there are different standards of cleanliness that abound in our world.  Parents have different standards from their children for example, as we do for our children.  When our boys wash their hands, we've been known to send them back as their hands aren't even slightly damp.  When they brush their teeth, they're sometimes sent back due to the tooth brushing exercise lasting about five seconds total.  When they go to clean their rooms, we have to remind them, however subtly, that cleaning their room is more than just tossing everything onto or under their beds. And pretty much all children are like this, you know.  This is just how they do. 

So too, do we have different standards of cleanliness from God.  We look at ourselves, and say that we're good enough.  In the same way that a child, when washing a cup or a bowl, would say 'eh, good enough,' even though there is still food clinging to it.  They'd be tempted to say that it was good enough, close enough, clean enough for us to work with.  And they'd be wrong. The grown adults would insist on cleaning it again, making sure that it was suitable for them to use to eat from.  To paraphrase the scriptures, if the son makes you clean, you will be clean indeed. 

How does baptism work?  Not just as a physical washing of dirt from the body, but as a washing clean of our sins.  Whose sins?  All of ours.  And the well known idea of having to clean the inside of the cup is even more important as we consider a fairly divisive issue, that of infant baptism.  There are a great number of churches that don't baptize infants, that have you wait until you're a certain age before you can be baptized in their churches.  In the Lutheran church, we baptize babies all the time (we have one coming up this week, actually).  Why do we baptize babies?  We do so because of what the Bible tells us baptism does, which is to wash away our sins, and to make us clean.  Now, this applies to us as adults, as teenagers, as people whose sins are obvious, and are well known to them and to everyone else.  But we believe that even babies need to be washed clean of their sins.

At this point, many of you may sputter and protest, and may claim that babies don't have any sins, and therefore have nothing to forgive.  It does us little to talk at this point about whitewashed tombs, but it is still useful to talk about cleaning the inside of the cup.  For you see, from the outside, the babies of this world look pristine, look perfect and tiny and wonderful, and seem to have zero problems whatsoever, just like a new mug just removed from its box.  But if you were to get a mug for Christmas, as I'm prepared to believe that many of you did, what do you do with it as soon as you get it, and before you use it?  You wash it.  You wash it first, and after washing it, to get rid of anything that might be on it, then you can use it.

This is why we baptize babies, you know.  Because they have a sinful inclination, which is why you don't need to teach them to lie, steal, to be selfish or rude, they have a natural proclivity towards such things.  They have sins and marks and a sinful nature on them that you won't discover for years to come.  Why do we baptize them, it is to have Christ wash them clean of their sins, of their sinful nature even, to ensure that they are clean as he would demand.  Every time you wash a mug, or a cup, or a bowl, you are bringing it back to the state when it was at its cleanest.  Not when you first got it, but right after when you first washed it.  We as confessing Christians, every time we confess and are forgiven, spiritually we return not to the point of our birth, but the point of our baptism.  Part of our insistance on remembering our baptism as often as we do, is to recall that our God is a God of precedence, and if he forgave us and washed us clean of all our sins once, he can and will do so again.

Swallowing pride.

King Herod is a bad guy. I'm glad we got that out of the way early.  He's a bad guy, and nothing I can say from this point onwards is going to alter anyone's perception of it.  He's a bad guy because his hatred for the possiblity of Christ was so powerful that he decided to wipe out an entire village's population of toddler boys in order to make sure that nobody was going to take his top spot. 

Had the Magi not shown up, I'm not certain that the massacre of the holy innocents would have ever happened.  I'm not convinced that the bodies would have piled up in that part of the world had it not been the Magi who showed up.  Why are they so important?  They're so important to this story because it shows that the word of God, the newborn king, the God of the Hebrew people is bigger than the Hebrew people.  And when Herod heard this, he was troubled, and all Jerusalem with him.

Why wouldn't he be troubled?  Herod had lived his life content in his position as high ranking vassal of the Romans in Judea.  He was content to believe that although he'd never be as powerful as Casear, he outranked all his fellow Hebrews, and was certainly bigger and more powerful than they would ever be.  A big fish in a small pond, if you will.  And as a big fish, he was comfy with his place as the best there was in his space.

But there was a problem.  The problem was that there were wise men coming from the east, who had followed a star to bring gifts and to laud and honor a king in Israel.  And it wasn't Herod.  It had nothing to do with Herod at all.  He was being passed by and passed over for a real king, the one who was bigger and grander than Herod himself.  The newborn king was such a big deal that even people from outside the nation, people who weren't Jews were asking to worship the King of the Jews.  And that's a problem for Herod.

If anyone is going to be in charge, to be getting the credit and gifts from surrounding kings, Herod believes it should be Herod.  In the same way that we all want to be the big deal, want to be acknowledged, want to be well thought of, and so on.  And this triggers our pride.

After all, what is pride?  CS Lewis had a lot to say about pride, which he rightly identified as being the great problem in our time, and honestly, even since his time, it has gotten worse.  Why is pride such a big deal?  Well, if you take Lewis seriously, and why wouldn't you, pride is a big deal because of how it can never be satisfied.  Pride is a hungry monster, a devouring fire, which seeks to consume and nothing else.  It cannot be satiated, as it will always want more.  You know that feeling that you get when you have Christmas dinner, and you can see that there are seconds still on the table, but you're not even hungry but you still want to eat?  That's what pride is like - you don't want the food, you're not hungry for it, but because it tastes good, you'll eat more than you need.  Pride is like that - Even if you don't want the things that are out there, you want to stop other people from having them.  even if they don't want what they're taking.  This is our pride at work, and it will stop at nothing but being the best.  We don't just want to be good, that's okay, I suppose, but we want to be better than anyone else.
You dont' want the house itself, but you want it because it's bigger than the house of your friends.  You don't want the car for itself, you want it because it is bigger and better than the cars that belong to your relatives.  This is how children think, you know.  They will grasp and want and take just to stop someone else from having more than they do

Pride is the killer, it's the disease.  So what's the cure?  Well, the Magi found the cure way out in a backwater of the Roman province of Judea.  They went to a nowhere place, they left their homes and nations, journeyed a long way from the East to Judea, and then, after meeting with Herod, chose to leave him in his opulent palace, and to voyage further to meet up with the Newborn King. 

There's something about worship.  The worship that the Magi wanted to do was to bow down before the Newborn King, and to worship him.  In worship, you acknowledge something, which is that God is in every way superior to you.  And you owe him everything.  There's something about worship, in which you bow before the Lord your God, realize your sin, realize that you're not who you want to be, and that he is your redeemer.

Ask yourself about the people you know whom you like speaking to the best.  Who is it in your life whom you like to talk, who is it that you like visiting with?  Almost universally, we would say 'good listeners.'  Nobody ever says 'you know who I like to talk to?  Someone who constantly talks about how great they are.  They're wonderful to visit with.'  Nah, we don't like talking to pople who only ever talk about themselves.  We find it tiresome and boring at the best of times, and at the worst, it makes us feel hopefully inadequate.  This is part of the burden that comes with having social media open, which is that you look across the vast wealth of excellent progress everyone else is making, and your pride kicks violently against them.  Honestly, it's hard to be genuinely happy for someone.  It's happy to delight in someone else's achievements, and to be pleased for them. 

Everyone except one.

The one person on earth that you want to sit there and listen to, the one person on earth that you'd love to is your child.  You want to sit there and listen to them, to hear them talk about the day that was, to talk about how they're feeling, what they're doing, heck, if anything, you wish they'd share more!  Why is that?  Why is it that you can happily listen to your child, even your grown up child, talk about themselves for hours on end and it doesn't trigger your pride?  For two reasons.  First of all, because their acheivements are an extension of your own.  What your children accomplish is at least partially due to you and your activity in their world.  Secondly, because there is no competition with your children, and what they accomplish doesn't threaten what you do. 

This is what happens with God.  He is here to listen.  Think about how he showed up in the world, how he was manifest in our universe.  He didn't show up to hold court, he didn't arrive in the Temple, teaching and leading.  He showed up as an infant, an infant who can't talk, who can't communicate.  An infant who can only listen.  When the Magi showed up, Jesus listened to what they had to say, listened to their worship, listened to their prayers.  When the shepherds arrived on the night of his birth, Jesus listened to them arrive, listened to their prayers, their concerns, heard everything they had to say.  Babies, honestly, are amongst the best listeners in the entire world, since when they're not crying, they aren't able to talk back.  And they absorb everything that you say, listening to it with attention and precision that you don't get from anyone else.  In fact, when it comes to how babies listen, they listen with more attentiveness than you want.  They absorb what you say, remember it, repeat it, and internalize it.  What you say will become what they say in the future, because they are so intent on your words that they will inform the babies about what normal speaking is. 

Jesus is here to listen.  He listens to every word we say, and is desperate for more and more.  Sometimes we don't share enough.  Sometimes we want to be the centre of everything, and be thought of as being the best.  We want everyone to listen to us, and to pay attention to our words only.  We want to be thought of as the best and brightest, king Herod style, to make sure that if someone is going to bring gold, frankincense and myrrh, that they'll bring it to us only.  But that's not what this is all about.  In worship something amazing happens.  You get to speak to the one and only individual who will always listen, who will rejoice in your accomplishments, and who will work with you in your weaknesses.  You have someone in worship who will be attentive to your words, who knows your needs, and who loves to hear from you.  Someone who loves you like parent to child, and who wants to hear what troubles you, and help as much as you will let him.

Understanding that relationship for what it actually is is key to understanding worship, and your place in it.  For in understanding your place in worship, in saying about Christ 'he must increase, and I must decrease,' in working through that we understand what place our pride has at the manger, or at the house that the Magi went to.  It has no place.  You have no place for your own sense of self when you journey to a child, and bow down and worship him.  What can you possibly offer to him when he is the king of all creation?  Can you speak of yourself highly when you meet the creator of your very atoms?  Unlikely.  So what we do in worship is to pray ardently to the creator of everything, the sustainer of life down to the very cells, and to realize with awe and wonder that the maker and redeemer of the universe wants you to talk to him.  He grants and bestows life and strength, he is God in the flesh, he forgives sins and gives everlasting life, and yet he still wants to hear from you. 

The Bible is quite clear on this topic.  Humble yourself, and you will be exalted.  When you go to a feast, don't take the place of honor, lest you be asked to move down when someone more important arrives.  Empty yourself of any pretention, do not esteem yourself to be better than you are.  Do nothing out of vain conceit, but think of others as better than yourselves.  Have you ever thought what a wonderful world it would be if we were busily speaking well of each other, and then talking about ourselves to God, knowing our sins and thanking him for our blessings?  It's when we dont' do that, when we want others to know how great we are, and only thinking of ourselves, that we turn into Herod, and turn into him quickly.  But with thanksgiving, we render offerings to Christ, trusting in his promises that even though he is immesaurably superior to us, he still loves us, cares for us, and wants to give us all the time in the world.  All the time in eternity.