The good stuff

John 2 tends to be categorized as a wedding reading, which is quite unfair.  I mean sure, it has a wedding in it, but that doesn't mean that it itself is a reading only for weddings.  Just like with the whole Bible, all scripture is God-breathed, and useful, so limiting this one particular reading to one circumstance isn't really fair.

So, if the reading that has a wedding in it isn't just for weddings, what does the first of the miracles that Jesus performs, the first of his miracles in which people believe in him say to and about us today?  Well, let's say for the sake of argument that today isn't your wedding day. I know, it might be, you may very well be checking my blog right before you get married, but let's say that it isn't your wedding day.  Let's say that you aren't someone who, today, is too terribly interested in making sure that there is enough wine available at a particular feast.  You're more concerned with your day-to-day. And what is your day-to-day like? If you're like the rest of us, it probably involves a bit of the old 'going through the motions.'  It probably involves a bit of the running your engine in idle, of getting stuck in particular ruts.  And that doesn't just apply to driving in the winter in Saskatchewan, you know.  That applies to how you live your life.  For your habits become your destiny.  It's a tired old saying by now, but you have to understand that your habits are formed and forged a day at a time, and people like you and I, we tend to get stuck in a certain way of thinking, living, and behaving.   And the thing about getting stuck in ways of living is that we experience diminishing returns, and we also think about things in terms of sunk costs.  That is, things are at their best when they get going, but because we've been doing things for quite a while now, we don't feel as though it would even be possible to stop, or to change.

But that's where the reading about Cana becomes more important than you'd expect.  That is, at the wedding of Cana, in Galilee, they run out of wine.  And when Jesus is approached by his mother, she does what you would expect.  She looks at him and say 'they have no more wine.'  Simple, direct, and too the point.  And this is where the diminishing returns kick in, you know. You should know that according to the Holy Bible, 'wine gladdens the heart,' making it not essential for a wedding reception, but a darn fine idea, and a wonderful way to have a party, a gathering, that people want to attend.  The idea is to have a warm, happy gathering in which people are having a good time, and enjoying one another's company.  They'd all had a bit of wine already, their hearts were already glad, and nobody wanted this to stop.  And when things are going well, you don't want them to stop. When your heart is glad, when there is promise, when things are going well, you don't want anything to change.  But things do change.  You get stuck in patterns.  Things get old, they wear out, and all of a sudden, the charmed life that you were living in has become a cage and a prison, hemming you in on every side.  That's shockingly bad news, and it happens to all of us.  We are all victims and prisoners of what should be a fairly easy problem - that if something is going wrong, we should change and alter it.

Well, the despair that seeps in to the average life is one in which the devil himself is happy to rejoice.  He wants you to give up and surrender.  He wants you to quit.  He wants you to pack it in, and be content with your life the way it is right now.  He wants you to look at your sinfulness and shrug, and say 'well, this is who I am.  This is what I'm all about.  I thought that wasn't going to be the case, but I guess it is.'  More than anything else, he wants you to surrender and give in to the way things are.  They'll never change, they will never be any different, things wear out and break down, relationships disintegrate, people drift apart, it's all so inevitable.  We have the good wine at the beginning, it gladdens our hearts and makes us happy, we are in bliss and joy, but then the good wine runs out, and the drudgery begins.

Well, welcome to the world we live in.  And welcome to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  Welcome to the Gospel of Jesus Christ that is all about renewal, and rejuvenation.  It's about the ability to start again no matter how deep into the game you are.  It's all about how your past does not have to define your present, nor your future.  You don't have to settle for the law of diminishing returns for a lifetime.  Rather, the best wine can be served at any time.  Your open-mouthed shrugging at the issues at hand where you look at the situations you find yourself in, and say 'well, I guess I'm in this situation for good now.'  No you're not.  The diminishing returns that you are so sure of, the state and situation that you find yourself in, those things aren't permanent, you know.  They're not forever.  The devil wants to dishearten you, wants you to think about these things as being in your past, and that you can't get a hold of them ever again, that there is a green umbrella you can never get back, but that's not true, you know.  As Christian people, you need to know that there is no such thing as too late.  There is no such thing as over, and no such thing as done.  All those verses that are so popular, verses about being restored and not growing faint, about strength being renewed like that of eagles, all of that has to do with this, and with the reality of drinking the wine that Christ brings, which is the best wine.

How to get this wine? I'm supremely glad you asked.  I'm glad you asked, because this is the real ticket about how the Christian faith really works.  Right before Jesus turns water into wine, Mary talks to the servants and to the steward of the feast, and says to them 'do whatever he tells you.'  There, it's that simple.  The way that the spiritual wine Christ brings is accessed is through that same simple advice.  Do whatever he tells you.  That's the prescription to your woes.  Now, before you accuse me of works righteousness, of being a pietist, I want to remind you that I'm a Lutheran Christian.  And as a Lutheran Christian, I'm all in on the virtues of 'sola scriptura.'  Scripture alone.  Only Scripture is the source and norm for ethics, for faith, and for our religious and secular lives.  And with this being the case, if the advice that Mary gives is to do whatever Jesus tells us to do, what would that look like?

Well, here's the breakdown, according to the red letters of the Bible, the actual words of Jesus Christ:

1 - Believe in him whom he has sent (John 6:29)
2 - Repent and believe the Gospel (Mark 1:15)


Yes, there are a lot of other things, to be sure, but here's the core of the situation.  The core of the situation is to repent of what has happened, and to be forgiven.  You also have to believe that Christ can do what he promises to do.  With all of this, if you can do it, then the magic of the Gospel of Jesus coalesces into form.  Repentance is a wonderful gift, because it lets you look at your life accurately, without lying or deception, and to say ' you know, things aren't exactly where I want them to be.  I think I'd like them to be different.'  That's a simple sentence, to be sure, but to do that requires an almost superhuman effort to look at things with any kind of honesty.  We all want to be right, obviously. We all want to be good ,and we want to be correct.  We want to be righteous and holy, that desire is planted within us, but how do we get there? How do we get the good wine of holiness?  The usual approach is to say that the good wine isn't worth having. so we're perfectly happy to drink the bad wine, the cheap wine, or no wine at all. We all want to have good wine, but we have figured out that the fastest way to get to it is to pretend that the wine we are drinking right now is the best wine of all.  And it isn't. You have to admit that the wine you're drinking isn't the wine you want.  The wine you have and the wine you want are different things.  And so what you're looking at is Christ, obviously, the one that allows you to change what you are doing, and to leave behind what you have done.  Everything else will lash you to the bad wine, you know, will force you into thinking that the bad wine that you're drinking is the wine you always wanted.  You will be bound to your mistakes and errors forever, and continue swilling the plonk from now until the day you die.

But Christ bids you to repent.  To repent and to believe. To put the past behind you and bury you.  To marry your repentance with the promise of a new tomorrow, of the idea and the knowledge that there is no such thing as too late, and no such thing as over.  This is the great gift of the faith: that those of us who are bound and broken by the weight of our bad decisions that we have never been able to admit were bad, can instead rise up and say with confidence that these are things we wish to leave behind us.  We thought we had the good wine before, but the good wine can always be served now.

The final countdown

We live in a world managed by time and schedules.  Google calendar, and to a lesser extent, ical, runs the lives of the human beings here on earth.  Though they have largely taken the place of paper calendars, there are still paper calendars around, and they are still consulted fairly regularly.  For my money, when I was growing up, we did the dodo calendar thing.

I bet you’re not familiar with this, but it had five columns, for the five of us in the family, and then all of our activities were visible at a glance for that week….as long as you remember to write it all down, which you might not.  Be that as it may, back then as now, you write your events down in the calendar, and then you can keep track of everything as you need to.  No problem there.

But here’s the thing, which is that after an event comes up and is marked, then you can, you know, stop counting down to it, right?  The great countdown to Christmas has come and gone and is now over.  We now no longer need to count down to Christmas day, given that the 25^th of December has come and gone and is over for the year. And yet, somehow, this jpeg still exists:

How? How is this a thing?  I mean, I know how it’s a thing, but typically the whole point of counting down to something is counting down to its completion.  That is, you count down the days until the event happens, then you get to move on to other things, or so you might think.  But these days, we’re on a bit of a loop.  And it’s a sort of perpetual loop,  and you can tell that it’s a loop, given that you know where people were on the day that the elf above talks about, right? Boxing day (St Stephen’s day, or the day after Christmas for those who are in places other than the larger anglosphere), is a huge shopping day. That’s when all the deals start, that’s when things are cheap, and that’s when we get back to the mall after having been away.  For a day.  And after having complained about being at the mall so much.  You see, the loop hits, we get to moving in a very disappointing circle, where we are induced to shop and spend, counting down to the day when the shopping and spending is over, and then it starts back again the next day.

But perhaps you can imagine a day when the shopping is done.  I suppose not this side of paradise, but try to imagine a time in which such things would be done, and you’ll get closer to imagining the relief felt by Simeon and Anna as they saw the Christ child in the temple.  Simeon and Anna are people, to be sure, but they’re also representative of the larger people of Israel.  They’re representative of the people who had been waiting since the time of creation for redemption to happen. For the story of the scriptures is the story of redemption, of salvation.  It’s the story of a human race who, when presented with even one thing that was forbidden, still failed.  And when they sinned and fells short of the glory of God, when they became sinful, God, at that moment, made a promise to the man, to the woman, and to the devil: that there would be enmity between them, and that the devil’s power and authority would be overthrown by the son of man.  That promise was the promise of redemption, the promise of salvation, and the promise that the sacrifice for sins would be fatal to the one undertaking it, though he would triumph through it.  That story runs right the way through the Old Testament, you know.  From Abraham being sure that God would provide the sacrifice so that his son would be saved, to the Exodus, where the eldest children of Israel were saved and the eldest children in the homes of the Egyptians were killed, to the continual commemoration of the redemption of Israel through the need to redeem every firstborn child, this story runs through the Old Testament.  

Now for what’s important about this.  If this story has been going on, as we believe it has, since the beginning of time, really, can you imagine the situation in which Simeon and Anna, representatives of Israel, were actually able to see and to touch the redeemer? They were people who had spend their whole lives waiting for the Lord’s anointed, and in addition to them, the rest of Israel had been as well.  They were people who had been desperately watching and waiting for the coming of the king of kings, of Emmanuel, God with us, and now he had arrived.  And the great thing about this interaction is that after Simeon and Anna find the Lord, they stop looking.

Just like when Christmas comes, most sensible people stop, you know, counting down until Christmas, in that same vein, when the messiah arrives, Simeon, Anna, and hopefully everyone would stop looking.  But they don’t stop looking, do they? They don’t stop looking at all.  They keep on looking super hard. Think of it just like a boxing day sale, really.  Think about how we get into the situation where we have just opened all the gifts we can possibly handle, then immediately go back to the store for more. Now think about how the Pharisees dealt with Jesus, about how they resisted his word and fought against his positions.  Think about how they wanted to trap him with ‘gotcha’ questions, how they wanted to push back against his words actions.  What they were doing was unwrapping the present and then immediately looking for another thing.  If you can understand why we are like this with gifts and items, then you’ll be able to understand why we are like this with God as well.  Which we are.

But when we’re talking about gifts, it’s worth talking about how James views gifts, saying to us

Jas 1:17 Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above. All gifts that truly bless us are God's gifts. And cometh down from the Father of lights. God, the Creator of every light of the material world, and the source of all moral light.

All good and perfect gifts are from God, including the biggest and best gift of all, the gift of Christ.  And the wonderful gift of Christ is that when it is given, or received, then we get to stop looking for more.  When Jesus speaks of himself, he does so by saying that if we eat of this bread, then we will never be hungry again, if we drink from this water we will never be thirsty again, if we receive salvation, forgiveness, paradise, we will want for nothing anymore. In the world we live in, we’re always looking for the next thing, but in the divine, there is a way to satisfy our cravings, our desires, our wants.  Desires will one day be satisfied, peace will be found, and it won’t be about just having a temporary thing to keep you happy then to look for the next thing.  Permanent satisfaction.  Eternal satisfaction.  Eternity, lack of scarcity, that’s what this is all about, you know.  Where your needs are met, and your desires are satisfied, where for once you get to stop looking for the next thing, and being content with what you have, which is all that you need.