Sermon for Epiphany 4: The Intoxicating God

This is a fantastically rich story, and the problem is always working out what one selects to talk about.

Gospel of the day: John 2:1-11

I don't know about you, but I've never been all that interested in wedding planning.  I can't say I would ever sit down and watch "Don't tell the Bride", or anything like that, though clearly some people do.

However.  As (some of you) know, I recently got engaged, which meant that I suddenly found the subject of wedding planning a lot more interesting than I’d ever have expected to.  So the other day, I was looking through a book about how to plan your wedding.  It was full of advice – some of it decidedly more useful than others.  I have to say I find it slightly worrying that it needs to be pointed out that it’s unreasonable to expect your guests to dress according to a strict colour scheme.  But some of it was handy, such as the guide to how much alcohol you’ll need for the reception.

“Allow a couple of glasses of champagne per person for the drinks reception, more if it goes beyond an hour, half a bottle of wine per head for the meal, and half a glass of champagne for the toasts (a bottle of champagne half fills eight glasses).”

They also advise, in these budget conscious times, serving cava, not champagne, and house wine rather than anything more expensive.  Sound advice when you’re on a budget, though – having spent the next five minutes mentally reviewing all the people I was likely to invite, and considering how much they might drink, I couldn’t come to any conclusions about whether or not it the amount they recommend is sufficient or not.  I expect I’d end up panicking about what would happen if the drink ran out.

It’s probably not surprising, in the circumstances, that I found all this good advice coming back to me when I looked at the Gospel reading.  The parents of the happy couple in this story seem to have followed the advice on the cheapness of the wine – but they definitely didn’t get the calculations about how much wine to buy right!  And you can imagine the panic among the servants, later spreading to Mary, as they try to find some way to stop everyone noticing.  Which sounds quite impossible, because if there’s one thing everyone notices at a party, it’s when the drink runs out.

Now, running out of wine at a wedding is not the greatest disaster in the world – though I’m not sure that bride and groom would necessarily agree.  It’s not like the situation in the Old Testament reading, for instance, where the widow and her child are in real danger of starving to death before her kindness to Elijah is rewarded by God.  But all the same it would be an embarrassing, perhaps even humiliating situation, shaming the family in front of their neighbours.  Hospitality, after all, was an important social duty, and getting it wrong was at least a moderately serious matter.  This would certainly explain why Mary is so keen to help them “save face”.

Even though we might be tempted to think that the smooth running of a wedding reception is far too trivial a matter to merit God intervening in it – though that probably also says something about our assumptions about what matters to God – that’s not the hardest thing to deal with in the reading. The tricky part when we’re looking at this reading is how Jesus is apparently reluctant to help, so reluctant that he’s quite off hand with his mother.  How do we make sense of this? 

Certainly we can learn that we shouldn’t lose faith if our prayers aren’t answered immediately. Jesus isn’t being as rude to Mary as we might think from the way he calls her “woman!”, because it could be quite a respectful form of address in Greek, it’s still a very strange way to talk to your mother.  Perhaps it would be closer to the spirit of the original to use something like ‘Madam’ or ‘Ma’am’ – but either way, it’s slightly disturbing that Jesus is shown so distant and cold.  I think that the reason it’s portrayed as it is is that the Gospel writer is making the point that Jesus answers to the concerns of the Father – the redemptive work that will become manifest in his “hour”, which as usual in John means his death.  Now, Mary does not know what Father is doing in Jesus.  But Mary does know enough to recognise the work of God in her son.  And this is where Mary’s response becomes an example to every Christian.

In a striking gesture of faith, she just tells the servants to do what Jesus tells them, even before he’s agreed to help.  That is, she doesn’t allow herself to be put off by the fact that she can’t quite see what Jesus is doing.  Rather, she has faith that Jesus will act in love.

And when Jesus does respond, it is in a way that’s a strange mix of the unobtrusive and the spectacular, which I think echoes the way God works more generally. 

It’s unobtrusive, because Jesus doesn’t draw attention to the fact that he’s performing a miracle; the servants take the wine to the steward as if they had just found some more wine somewhere.  And yet, the miracle has an excessive, generous quality.  Jesus provides a massive amount of top quality wine, much more than the most lavish wedding reception could require.  The stone jars of water, used for purification in accordance with the Law become full of the new wine.  And this works as a symbol of the wider story told in the Gospel, the story of how God becomes a human being in a particular, obscure historical context, and transforms not just the lives of all those around him, but the lives of all humanity, and transforming all creation. 

The Father’s grace, manifest in Jesus, overflows and springs the boundaries of what we think is appropriate.  It may not always be immediately apparent what God is doing in, around, and through us, but in this miracle we are reminded that the God who made himself known in Jesus is generous, exciting, and – dare I say it? – intoxicating.

At the moment I'm working on John's Gospel.  Which is a fascinating text to grapple with, and there has been some very good recent criticism (Dorothy Lee's Flesh and Glory, in particular, is excellent).

Sometimes you find some very odd theories, though.  While in theory Mark Stibbe's idea of integrating a historical-critical and a literary approach is a good one, his theory that the narrative points us in the direction of the Beloved Disciple being Lazarus seems to go some way beyond what the text will bear, regardless of the hermeneutic lens you use to view it.

Admittedly his suggestion that if the BD were Lazarus then the rumour that he wasn't going to die is an ingenious one, though hardly (dis)provable.  But I'm not sure why the sight of the discarded sudarion in the empty tomb should have convinced Lazarus that Jesus was resurrected, nor that the reference to his head being bound when he came out of the tomb is supposed to point to this.  And the idea that the BD reached the tomb before Peter because he had been resurrected with better long-distance stamina...

Oh well.  Back to work - and to try to write sense in my own essay, about what literary perspectives can add to a theological understanding.

The Feast of S. Thomas Aquinas

As I have mentioned before, I do love Thomas...

Courtesy of a friend on facebook, I offer this lovely "prayer before study", written by the Angelic Doctor.

'Creator past all telling, you have appointed from the treasures of your wisdom the hierarchies of angels, disposing them in wondrous order above the bright heavens, and have so beautifully set out all parts of the universe. You we call the true fount of wisdom and noble origin of all things. Be pleased to shed on the darkness of mind in which I was born, the twofold beam of your light and warmth to dispel my ignorance and sin. You make eloquent the tongues of children; instruct my speech and touch my lips with graciousness. Make me keen to understand, quick to learn, able to remember; make me delicate to interpret and ready to speak. Guide my going in and my going forward, and lead home my going forth. You are true God and true man, and live for ever and ever. Amen.'

A Prayer of S. Wulfstan

I happened across a really lovely prayer of S. Wulfstan (whose feast it is today), and I thought I'd share it with you:


O Lord, have mercy on me a sinner.  
Stablish my heart in your will.  
Grant me true repentance for my sins; 
right faith and true charity, 
patience in adversity and moderation in prosperity.  
Help me and all my friends and kinsmen, all who desire and trust in my prayers.  
Show mercy to all who have done me good and shown me the knowledge of good, 
and grant everlasting forgiveness to all who have spoken or thought evil against me.  
To you, my God, and to all your holy ones, 
be praise and glory forever for all the benefits you have given me, 
and for all your mercies to me a sinner. 


For your name’s sake.  Amen.

It's curious that hardly anyone talks about Old English spirituality; I suppose it's because (a) the Norman conquest acts as such a mental barrier that it doesn't feel as connected to later developments in the church (or indeed history in general) as later mediaeval stuff does and (b) unlike Celtic spirituality, there's been no equivalent of George McLeod.  It's distant enough to feel foreign, but too close to be exotic, perhaps?  And possibly the terms "Anglo-Saxon" and "Old English" don't help...

At any rate, there's some very good stuff out there; it's got a grace and strength to it, and although it doesn't lack emotion, it's much more accessible than much of the later mediaeval stuff, which, wonderful though it is, can seem off-puttingly overwrought, till you're used to it.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

I haven't anything very profound to say, other than that: but I just found this wonderful retelling of Luke 2 from Joseph's point of view, by the fantasy author Jo Walton.  It's really rather lovely.

Have discovered II aorist verbs. 

*sobs quietly and wishes she could use the Vulgate*

Homilette for Christ the King

I was preaching at the college Eucharist on Sunday; it was bashed out in a bit of a hurry, due to pressure of work, and it's not the greatest sermon I've ever written.  It also illustrates my tendency to resort to the Middle Ages when looking for inspiration... But Elisabeth of Thuringia is a Good Thing, so I am less apologetic than I might be!

***

Today is Christ the King, when we celebrate… yes, you guessed it, Christ’s kingship.  But what does that actually mean?  Well, the Gospel focuses on the idea of Jesus as king, and how that’s understood – or misunderstood – by those around him, and I’ll come back to those in a moment.  But I want to start somewhere slightly different.

Last Thursday, the church calendar commemorated Elisabeth of Thuringia, or of Hungary, as she’s sometimes called, a thirteenth century German noblewoman.  It struck me that it’s appropriate that she’s usually celebrated round about Christ the King, because Elisabeth’s an interesting figure to help us think about the idea of what royalty means in terms of God’s kingdom.  Elizabeth was the daughter of the king of Hungary, but was sent at a young age to Thuringia, to marry the heir to the dukedom.  And she was very pious, and very charitable – and so far, she doesn’t sound very different from any number of interchangeable mediaeval women saints.  But there are a couple of things that make Elizabeth different.  One thing is that she had an unusually strong sense of justice and awareness of the wider ramifications of political power.  She refused to eat any food which had been produced by unfairly exploiting the poor – I suppose you could call her the patron saint of Fair Trade. 

But the other is that she simply didn’t have any patience with the strict rules of precedence and proper behaviour of the power structures of her day if it conflicted with the loving thing to do.  You can see it in the stories about her spending her dress allowance on food for the poor – which is a fairly standard thing for a mediaeval female saint to do – but you can also see it in less clichéd ways, like the way she disturbed the members of court by actually insisting on sitting next to her husband at dinner, so that they could talk.  And it’s shown, above all, by what happened after her husband died.  Royal widows often went off to found monasteries in the middle ages – it was a respectable retirement job, I suppose, but Elizabeth, to the disgust of her family, and in the face of very considerable opposition, went off to found a hospital.  And she disconcerted everyone by joining in with all the nursing and the chores.  The evidence available, incidentally, suggests her cooking was really dreadful…

Elizabeth’s life turned the conventions of what royalty was supposed to do on its head, and she did this because she was trying to live the life of Christ.  Elizaebth’s ‘royalty’, her power and influence, was only significant to her because she could give it away, and in doing this she was following the example of Jesus, who though, as Paul put it ‘the image of the invisible God’ emptied himself of all his power, to the point of painful and humiliating death, so that there would be nothing in human life, however broken and horrible, where God was not present.  “through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross”

The gospel reading does some interesting things with this concept of Jesus as king.  The people mock Jesus for claiming kingship, when he’s powerless, betrayed, and abandoned.  Yet the joke is really on them.  Jesus is the king, the lord of all, the only person who can rightfully be called a king.  But the kind of king he is is not what humanity – who think that power exists to be held on to and used over people – expects.  He is a king who gives up his power for the sake of others.  In a final irony, the only person who manages to recognise this is the ‘good thief’.  Luke leaves it totally unclear what prompts him to ask to be remembered ‘when you come into your kingdom.’  Dorothy L Sayers, who as well as writing detective stories wrote a very good series of radio plays based on the gospels, actually suggests that the thief was just being kind and humouring a harmless lunatic – which might explain why he’s the only person in the gospels to call Jesus by his first name, without any sort of title.  But that act of kindness is enough for Jesus, who with the generosity of God, responds to all our attempts at goodness, however inadequate they are.  Jesus’ kingship is about self-giving love, and one of the forms that self-giving takes is God’s willingness to treat us as better than we are – and thus make us into the better people God wants us to be.

It’s hard for us to grasp the sheer goodness of God, of the depths of the love of God which makes him become a human being, and live and die to bring us from death to life.  The world couldn’t cope with Jesus – they couldn’t stand the challenge to the structures of power and authority we all build up in an attempt to protect ourselves.  It’s why they killed him.  And we, too, find it hard to cope with God’s love.  We’re a bit like Elizabeth’s courtiers, unable to grasp why she couldn’t just stick to the rules of proper behaviour.  But she didn’t because it was the loving thing to do; it wasn’t proper behaviour for a mediaeval noblewoman, but it fitted the kingdom of God.