When The Wine Runs Out

Text: John 2: 1-11

  They were at a party, and the wine ran out.

  Almost anyone who has reached adulthood knows from firsthand experience, that while the wine may not run out at most weddings, it does run run out in a larger, metaphorical sense.  The wine runs out in the wedding of life.  The sense of satisfaction, and celebration, runs out of a marriage, or a job.  A project, or a friendship.

  Some of you may remember an article in the Reader’s Digest many years ago now, entitled: The Day at the Beach.  It was written by a man named Arthur Gordon, and it began this way:

  Not long ago, I came to one of those bleak periods that many of us encounter from time to time, a sudden drastic dip in the graph of living when everything gets stale and flat, energy wanes, enthusiasm dies.  The effect on my work was frightening.  Every morning I would clench my teeth and mutter: "Today life will take in some of its old meaning.  You've got to break through this thing.  You've got to!" But the barren days went by, and the paralysis grew worse.  The time came when I knew I had to have help.

  The article goes on to describe how he went to his family doctor, a man older than himself.  Not a psychiatrist--a general practitioner--someone who from years of experience had accumulated a fund of wisdom and insight.

  "I don't know what's wrong," I told him miserably, "but I just seem to have come to a dead end.  Can you help me?"

  "Where were you happiest as a child?"  

  "’As a child?” I echoed.  Why, at the beach, I suppose.  We had a summer cottage there.  We all loved it.

  “All right.  Here's what I want you to do." He told me to drive to the beach alone the following morning, arriving not later than nine o'clock.  I could take some lunch, but I was not to read, listen to the radio or talk to anyone.  "In addition," he said, "I'll give you a prescription to be taken every three hours." He tore off four prescription blanks, wrote a few words on each, folded them, numbered them and handed them to me.  "Take these at nine, twelve, three, and six." I glanced at them, and asked "Are you serious?" He gave a short bark of a laugh.  "You won't think I'm joking when you get my bill!"

  The rest of this brief article is about the day at the beach: a day of silence, recollection, memory, being ministered to and healed by the sights and sounds of ocean and sky.  The doctor's prescriptions were brief instructions about spending the time.  The first said "Listen carefully." The noon one said "Try reaching back." The essay ends this way:

The Western sky was a blaze of crimson as I took out the last slip of paper.  Six words this time.  I walked slowly out on the beach.  A few yards below the high-water mark I stopped and read the words again: "Write your worries on the sand." I let the paper blow away, reached down and picked up a fragment of shell.  Kneeling there under the vault of the sky, I wrote several words on the sand, one above the other.  Then I walked away, and I did not look back.  I had written my troubles on the sand.  And the tide was coming in.

  I have no idea if the author, was a Christian.  But whether he was or not, his story carries a meaning for us who are.  The point is this: When the wine runs out, there's a guest at the wedding who can do something about it.

  Jesus took some very ordinary things--common household jars, water from the well out back.  He took ordinary things, and invested them with, I don't know; His power? God's grace? I don't know.  But you've been at a party where things were dead, and then they come to life.  Jesus was the life at that party.  He took ordinary water, invested it with himself, and it became extraordinary, one hundred and eighty gallons of liquid, according to the story, that Jesus made into great wine. 

  Then the writer of the gospel of John makes the point that this miracle is an indicator of who Jesus is, the first of a series of miracles that are signs of the true identify of Jesus.  This one that takes the stale water reserved for ceremonial washing and likely not very healthy and changes it into something flavorful, robust, life-giving and joy enhancing.  This is who Jesus is, the one who takes the ordinary and makes it extraordinary.  The one who takes the water and makes it wine and Jesus has never quit doing that.

  In the middle fifties there was a Ph.D. candidate at Boston University.  He had finished his course work and had everything done for his degree but his dissertation.  He was ABD.  Some of you, no doubt know that place, all but dissertation.  Being the son of a pastor and a son of the south, now married and with a family coming, he needed a way to earn a living while he finished it, so he looked for a church.  He got a job at a little church in Montgomery, Alabama: the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.  There he went to hide out, to lay low, to do only what he had to do to keep the church going while he wrote.  For this young man the greatest dream, hope and vision for his life was that he would be a scholar, that he would be a professor, perhaps, someday, the dean or president of a university.  His idea was to live a quiet life of scholarship.  But, not long after this young pastor came to Montgomery, Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus when a white man came along and asked to have her seat.  That action ignited the Montgomery bus boycott.  This boycott needed a spokesperson and the new preacher down the street at the Dexter Ave Church, Martin Luther King Jr., was asked to lead the boycott.  Working through the reluctant willingness of this quiet scholar, Jesus Christ was taking unhealthy generations of discrimination and Jim Crow policy and changing them into the wine of hope and promise and possibility that led, not just to the integration of public transportation in Montgomery, but to the voting rights act and the transformation of our country.  The water turned into wine.   

  Just so, Jesus continues to change ordinary water into extraordinary wine and ordinary people into extraordinary ones.

  I was standing in line at the supermarket check-out counter, looking at the headlines of those magazines they always sell these.  "Is Your Marriage Flavorless?" asked the headline.  "Does your marriage seem like all work, cleaning the house, taking care of the kids, fixing the leaking roof, having the car repaired?"  Sometimes it does, sure.  The wine runs out, even in the very best of marriages.  The never-ending responsibilities can become oppressive and deadening.  The author then suggested a list of very ordinary ingredients to put, or put back, into a marriage grown dull: really listening to one another, romance, self care, offering compliments, sharing household responsibilities, all ordinary things.  And, of course, that’s the point, Christ takes ordinary water and turn it into wine.

  God created common things--things like food, drink, sex, laughter, pleasures large and small--"to be enjoyed with thanksgiving,” Timothy reminds us, “For everything that God created is good, and nothing is to be rejected when it is taken with thanksgiving" (1 Tim 4:34).  When common things are taken with thanksgiving, the glory of God that went into creation shines through.  Ordinary water becomes Grand Cru wine.

  The seventeenth-century English poet, Richard Crashaw, wrote a poem about this wedding at Cana.  This is how he describes the miracle. 

  "The modest water saw its God, and blushed."

  In the poem's fanciful imagination, ordinary water became conscious in the presence of its Maker and the water blushed--overcome with awe, dazzled by recognition, by sudden awareness of the Holy.  That's how we react when we're in the presence of something overwhelmingly grand.  We get excited, we become modest, we experience a rush of emotion.  “The modest water saw its God, and blushed.”

  When we are able to recognize Christ as a guest at all our affairs--a wedding or a wake or anything in between, then we'll see even commonplace objects and mundane routines will be shot through with God's glory and your water will become wine, through the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.