A Sermon for the Second Sunday after the Epiphany, Year C

 

My hours is not yet come.

 

The other night, Judith was reading a novel in which a wedding takes place and commented that it made her wish she could relive our wedding today. That’s always a nice thing for a husband to hear, of course, but I couldn’t quite attend to the wistful joy in her words.  I was in the middle of reading online news accounts about the earthquake and its aftermath in Haiti.

 

Weddings and disaster. Both are before us today -- Jesus at the wedding in Cana in today’s Gospel; Haiti on the news and in our hearts. What – if anything – does one have to do with the other?

 

At Cana, Jesus, is asked by his mother to facilitate the festivity of a wedding.  He demurs, saying his hour has not yet come. His mother, though, is persistent. She instructs the servants to do whatever Jesus commands them,. He listens to his mother and the servants listen to him. They fill jars of water as Jesus instructs and take it the MC of the feast, who discovers that Jesus has turned water into wine -- and very good wine at that.  The party goes on, and all seem happy.

 

Other than the Last Supper and feeding of five thousand, this is the only instance in John's Gospel of what we see more often in the other three:  Jesus sharing meals with others.  

Jesus enjoyed eating and drinking so much that he was criticized by opponents as being a "glutton and drunkard." [1]  His initial demurral at Cana notwithstanding, Jesus seems to have liked a good party.

 

In the other Gospels, Jesus is criticized for the meals he shares with others not only because of his enjoyment of good food and good drink.  He is challenged because of the people he eats with –  sinners, tax collectors, and the outcast;  the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. [2]  These were people thought to be outside the scope of God's love by the “righteous” people of his day – but that didn’t stop Jesus from eating with them.  His meals with these people in need and at the margins of society were central to his ministry. These meals were a dress rehearsal for the Kingdom of God:  that blessed gathering of all, including the most unlikely, from north, south, east and west to sit at table and eat and drink in the restored world of God's reign.  [3]

 

That John sets Jesus' first sign at a wedding feast points in this direction, also. God's Kingdom, we are to realize, is like a wedding feast – a time of rejoicing in love, fellowship, good food and good wine. Jesus, though initially reluctant, enables the feast to continue with joy, as it should.  He makes possible the rejoicing and feasting that is one of the blessings of human life, and he shares in that joy himself.

 

Still, something felt premature about this celebration to Jesus. “My hour has not yet come,” he says.  What was the hour Jesus was waiting for?  In John's Gospel, “the hour” refers to just one thing –  the hour in which Jesus' glory (!) is to be revealed as he is lifted up on the Cross, the hour in which he will draw the whole world to himself, the hour in which he shares the suffering of all humanity. Only this hour could make the  eternal joy of the Kingdom wedding feast possible.  Only his suffering and death could bring lasting life into being.

 

As we ache watching the horrific suffering of the people of Haiti, we need to remember Jesus’ hour, the turning point in history in which God incarnate took on himself, into himself, all the suffering that comes with life on this planet.

 

People look at Haiti – we may look at Haiti – and wonder where God is in that unrelenting suffering. It is a natural question and not one to hide from.  The pain we see makes it impossible not to ask the question.  What matter is how we answer it.

 

If we think, as some do, that God controls each and every event on this planet;  if we think, perhaps, that God chose for the people of Haiti to suffer so, then the question becomes acute indeed.  An Op-Ed poster in the New York Times wrote a piece called “Haiti’s Angry God.” [4]

“If God exists, he’s really got it in for Haiti,” she writes— and apparently some Haitians think so, too, attributing their suffering to divine retribution.

 

Pat Robertson, who has a knack for giving Christianity a bad name, told his viewers Wednesday morning that the earthquake along with the suffering, poverty and violence which has afflicted Haiti in the past, is God's punishment for a bargain made with the devil hundreds of years ago. [5]  If God willingly inflicted such suffering on these people, is such a god one we want anything to do with? 

 

Authentic Christian faith says something different about God’s presence in such suffering.

It says that God is suffering with the suffering people of Haiti; that as much as Jesus joined in the joy of human celebrations like he wedding in Cana, even more Jesus joined in human suffering and death – unjust, undeserved, torturous suffering and death such as the people of Haiti are now undergoing and have been undergoing for decades from dictatorial politicians, devastating poverty, civil unrest and natural disasters.  

 

Jesus shows us a different God from the one Pat Robertson preaches –  not a vengeful god but a suffering God, a God of compassionate presence, a God who is with us in the joys of human life – and in its deepest suffering as well.  In this Epiphany Season in which we seek to unpack the mystery of the Incarnation we celebrated at Christmas, the most important consequence of the Word being made flesh to recall may be just this:  that God in Christ has come not to punish sinful humanity, but to share in our sufferings.

 

In Jesus, God  came also to call us to do what I’m sure many of us have already have begun to do -- to pray and to give to relieve the sufferings of our sisters and brothers in Haiti. We are to live out the compassion of the suffering God. We are to be Jesus’ hands and feet and his aching heart, doing all we can to make God’s love real to the people that so desperately need it.

 

My online reading about Haiti the other night brought me to something more in tune with this truth of Jesus’ suffering presence with the people of Haiti and God’s call to us to serve in Jesus’ name.  In my email, I came across a hymn written to help us pray faithfully in this painful time.

Carolyn Winfrey Gillette, a contemporary writer of hymn texts, has composed words to a familiar tune [6] that start with the anguished questions so many of us have, and answer them by claiming the compassionate presence of the suffering Christ. I want to close by singing them for you:

In Haiti, there is anguish that seems too much to bear;
A land so used to sorrow now knows even more despair.
From city streets, the cries of grief rise up to hills above;
In all the sorrow, pain and death, where are you, God of love?

A woman sifts through rubble, a man has lost his home,
A hungry, orphaned toddler sobs, for she is now alone.
Where are you, Lord, when thousands die: the rich, the poorest poor?
Were you the very first to cry for all that is no more?

 

O God, you love your children; you hear each lifted prayer!
May all who suffer in that land know you are present there.
In moments of compassion shown, in simple acts of grace,
May those in pain find healing balm, and know your love’s embrace.

Where are you in the anguish?  Lord, may we hear anew
That anywhere your world cries out, you’re there-- and suffering, too.
And may we see, in others’ pain, the cross we’re called to bear;
Send out your church in Jesus’ name to pray, to serve, to share. [7]

 

 

 

 

The Rev. Jack Zamboni

January 17^th, 2010