| “When Water Becomes Vintage Wine” Sermon Delivered By Rev. Dick Stetler – January 17, 2016 Centenary United Methodist Church
Psalm 34:1-10; John 2:1-11
This morning we are going to talk about the story in John's
Gospel that describes a wedding feast where the families of the bride
and groom had run out of wine. Throughout the centuries, believers
naturally assumed that Jesus performed his first ministerial miracle by
setting aside the laws of chemistry. Actually, John's Gospel is about the transformation that takes
place once a person encounters the teachings of Jesus.
What better way to begin his Gospel after his Prologue than by
creating a parable that illustrates this process. If we take the text at face value, not only did Jesus make the
conversion of common cistern water to wine but he created vintage wine.
In other words, Jesus made the
good stuff that was readily
recognized by the wine steward to be superior to the wine that they had
been previously serving the guests.
Another aspect of this story is that during the unfolding of the
drama, Jesus appears to have become irritated with his mother.
Right after she made the comment, "The families are out of wine."
Jesus responded, "You must not
tell me what to do, Mother. My
time has not yet come." There are several things we need to know before we discuss what
message John was providing his readers.
What I am about to tell you is a completely different
interpretation of John's message. The message a reader gets from this
episode is that Jesus reluctantly turned water into wine.
This episode is of little value
to anyone. However, John was using Jesus and his mother as
principal players in a
parable that was communicating an entirely different message.
The reason scholars of the New Testament have not been more
dramatic in sharing John's message is that the general public has loved
the story just as it is.
Scholars have left well enough alone.
In so doing, today's readers have been denied understanding a
message that would deepen their understanding of what happens when lives
are completely transformed. What are some
of the characteristics that should be
dead giveaways
that this is a parable rather than an historic event?
First, no Jewish family would ever run out of wine! For Jewish
feasts, wine was the primary ingredient in the family's planning. The
Rabbis in Jesus' day proclaimed, "Without wine, there is no joy."
This did not mean that Jews drank until they became intoxicated.
Such a condition would have brought disgrace for the person who
overindulged. Besides, a
Jew would have to consume a lot of wine to get drunk.
The wine that the Jews drank in Jesus' day consisted of two parts
wine and three parts water. Secondly, John was writing for the Greeks that surrounded him in
Ephesus where he spent the last years of his life.
Greeks readily understood that
John's story was a parable because those attending a wedding feast,
whether Greek or Jewish, could not possibly consume one hundred and
eighty gallons of fine wine which represented the contents of the six
clay containers.
Finally, one of the interesting aspects of the Greek language
when it is spoken is that the same words can mean the exact opposite
depending on the spirit of the person speaking. The words in our lesson
that illustrate this are these:
"You must not tell me what to do, Mother.
My time has not yet come."
The same Greek words spoken compassionately would mean,
"Do not worry, mother.
Right now you will not understand what is happening, but please leave
everything to me and I will settle this matter in my own way." The confusion comes from those who translated the Greek without
knowing the spirit of Jesus.
There really is no way of knowing what Jesus said because, so far
as we know, Jesus spoke only Aramaic. The scholars that have studied John's Gospel understand that
everything he wrote came from a consciousness that
spiritualized his experiences
from the time he spent with Jesus during his ministry.
The richness of John's parable
has nothing to do with turning water into vintage wine. John was
telling his Greek readers that when Jesus enters the lives of people who
are empty, who have run out of their ability to give and receive love,
Jesus' presence taught them how
to reverse their energy.
John's Gospel was always communicating how Jesus
transformed people's lives.
In chapter two he used the words of turning common cistern water into
vintage wine to illustrate this.
Think of what happened to Zacchaeus.
Something occurred during his lunch with Jesus.
He was ordinary when Jesus invited himself to lunch, and after
lunch the chief tax collector had completely reversed his energy flow.
He was cistern water
and became vintage wine
because of Jesus. He was a
gatherer of wealth, and after lunch his experience with Jesus had
transformed him into a giver, one who wanted to make amends to anyone
whom he may have overcharged.
This is the same lesson that unfolded when Jesus was teaching
Nicodemus. Jesus explained
that such a reversal of energy was like being born again.
This transformation causes
plain cistern water to become
vintage wine. Before his baptism, Jesus was a common everyday carpenter.
After hearing a voice that said, "You are my Son.
I am pleased with how you are living."
he went through a transformation process in the wilderness that
changed his consciousness into
vintage wine. Recently, a medical team in our community has provided us with an
excellent demonstration of John's message.
The Royal Gazette did
a masterful job of storytelling when two divers brought a badly wounded
130 pound female Loggerhead sea turtle to the Aquarium.
After examining her, she was taken immediately to King Edward
Hospital.
Think of all the protocols, the rules and the valuable time of
the medical staff including radiologists, anesthetists, doctors and a
surgeon that were set aside.
When loving, concerned people entered the drama of a wounded turtle,
they became the vintage wine
of which heroes are made.
Try to imagine what took place at our hospital involving every level
of the healing community for a patient that had no medical insurance to
pay for any of it. A C.T. scan revealed that a large fisherman's hook was caught in
the turtle's trachea twelve inches from her nostrils.
The hook caused the hyper-inflating of the left lung while
partially collapsing the right lung.
It was estimated that the turtle struggled in pain for a year or
more.
The three and a half hour surgery was complicated.
They had to turn the turtle on her back to perform an emergency
tracheotomy to retrieve the hook and repair the tissue.
Her condition was monitored around the clock, and by morning, the
staff was able to put her back in the water at the Aquarium.
Their love and concern for a
turtle turned all of them into
vintage wine. It is obvious where John had gotten his expert training for
storytelling. Jesus
illustrated the identical truth repeatedly in his storytelling. We see
this in the Parable of the Prodigal Son. We also see this understanding
in his parable of the Good Samaritan.
The message of transformation does not need to be rooted in an
historic event. What Jesus did with his parable of the Good Samaritan was
ingenious. Jesus created this story specifically to answer a question
that came from a Teacher of the Law.
The lawyer asked, "Who is my neighbor?"
On the spot, Jesus chose the principal characters of his story
just as John had done with Jesus and his mother.
A man had been beaten, robbed and was near death.
Two men, a priest and a Levite, passed by totally ignoring the
wounded and dying man. Both
men were practitioners of highly religious lives, but during a moment of
human need they remained cistern
water. Then Jesus
chose for his
vintage wine
a Samaritan, a man that Jesus knew would help the lawyer to learn that
the quality of a person's spirit is far more important than his
ethnicity. The
Teacher of the Law had to concede publicly that
his neighbor was the person
that had been kind to a wounded man by taking care of his needs and
saving his life. The
Samaritan emerged as the vintage
wine. In our lesson today, Jesus represented loving energy.
When love consumes our
lives and governs our normal responses, we are changed drastically from
what we were. Anyone can
become vintage wine simply by
stepping up and directing their loving energy toward others.
The more we do this, the more we age to become
vintage wine. Do we realize who we become when we share a bag of canned or dry
goods to feed people we do not know?
Do we know who we become when we give support to someone in need,
whether it is a ride to church, or calling someone who has been sick, or
going shopping for a friend that cannot get to a grocery store? |