They Have No Wine

 John 2: 1-11

Epiphany 2 January 19, 2025

Wedding at Cana
Oleksandr Antonyuk

 

Weddings are supposed to be joyful occasions, right?

As a pastor, I’ve been to some great and festive weddings

and I’ve been to some that were

kind of morose and sad.  Sometimes I knew why,

but sometimes it was hard to say.

 

In Jesus time, wedding celebrations lasted for days

weddings were supposed to be a joyful,

happy celebrations just like now.

And a lot of the joy depended a lot on the consumption of wine.

 

We as a society drink a lot of wine now.

We share it in social situations.

Some people drink it alone.

For many people it has become a serious problem.

But in Jesus time, they drank a lot more wine than we do.

Water wasn’t always safe,

and there weren’t as many beverage options.

The fermentation of wine made it resistant to

mold and bacteria and other nasty things.

So people drank a lot of wine. A lot.

 

I read somewhere that in the 1^st century,

The city of Rome alone,

drank 25 million gallons of wine per year.

Wine was a part of everyday life.

 

Good hospitality dictated that if you had a wedding,

you would have wine. Enough wine for your

guests to drink for the duration of the time

you wanted them there. If you had a

good wedding it meant you were a good host

and the couple would have a good marriage.

 

Running out of wine was a big faux pas.

It was a bad omen for the couple and their future.

It was a bad mark of shame on the family.

Everyone would remember them

as the people who didn’t have enough wine

to share with their guests.

 

I give you this introduction about wine,

to tell you that this story is not about wine.

And it’s not about weddings either.

In the gospel of John, things aren’t what

they mean on the surface.

Everything is a sign of something else.

 

And this miracle is not about wine.

It’s about what that wine represented

to those wedding guests.

It’s about joy, about treating others well.

It’s about a hopeful future.

It’s about abundance over scarcity,

and how Jesus brings those things

to our life and to our world,

and into desperate,

impossible situations that seem hopeless.

 

The first person to notice that they were

running out of wine was Jesus mother.

 

Interesting side note:

Jesus mother was never called

by her name in John’s gospel.

She’s only referred to as “Jesus mother”.

And Jesus only refers to her directly twice –

Here at the wedding and later at the cross—

And he calls her “Woman”, which is not as harsh

in their culture as it sounds in ours.

 

So Jesus mother is the first to notice

this big approaching wedding faux pas.

This approaching shame for the entire wedding family.

Maybe she noticed the looks on the waiter’s faces,

maybe someone said something.

Maybe she noticed some of the guests

going away with empty cups.

Maybe mothers just have this uncanny ability

to tell when something is going wrong.

 

So she tells Jesus “they have no wine”

Which is a really prophetic statement.

when you think about it.

 

Prophets don’t necessarily predict the future.

They are the ones who tell it like it is.

They share the hard truths with

the people and those in power.

 

Sometimes in the middle of the festivities,

someone has to be the party-pooper

and point out that the celebration

is about to end if something doesn’t change.

Sometimes that has to be us.

 

Sometimes we have to say, “They have no wine.”

Remembering that this story is not about wine.

We have to be the ones to say that the guests

aren’t being treated well.

That the abundance that some might be experiencing

hasn’t trickled down to everyone.

That some people aren’t able to feel joy.

That some people’s future is looking bleak.

 

Sometimes someone has to point out

that they have no wine.

They have no money. They have no healthcare.

They have no housing. They have no water.

They have no food.

They have no hope for a better tomorrow.

And this is bringing shame on the entire country.

 

I think that a lot of preachers and church people

can identify with Mary here in this story.

Church people exist, for the most part, in the US

in middle and upper class societies.

We live among people who can

retreat to their own celebrations

and parties and can focus exclusively on their own

well-being and whether they’re having a good time.

 

Sometimes our role as Christians is to point out the

horrible scarcity, right there in the middle of the party

that no one around wants to hear about.

 

We live in Hilton Head, one of the wealthiest

places in the United States.

It’s a place of great beauty and comfort for lots of people

like us who have chosen to make their homes here.

 

But there is also great need and crippling

poverty here. Much of it due to oppressive

practices and rules that have kept generations

of native people in difficult situations.

And some due to neglect and a lack of

infrastructure to care for people.

 

So many people live comfortably behind

gated communities and close their eyes to any of this.

And then, other people, because of their faith,

have dared to look and to notice, and to act.

People like Charlotte Heinrichs,

a member of this congregation

who our fellowship hall is named after,

who started the Deep Well Project.

She wasn’t afraid to get up

in the middle of everyone’s parties and say,

“They have no wine.”

 

And this week we remember Martin Luther King Jr.

His legacy was his ability to be that prophet

like Jesus mother. To call out in the middle

of people’s parties, that there was not wine

for everyone.

In 1967, his gave a speech called “the Two Americas”

and I think it’s still very relevant today.

 

Every city in our country

has this kind of dualism, this schizophrenia,

split at so many parts, and so every city

ends up being two cities rather than one.

There are two Americas. And I use this subject because

there are literally two Americas. One America is beautiful.

And, in a sense, this America is overflowing

with the milk of prosperity and the honey of opportunity.

This America is the habitat of millions of people

who have food and material necessities for their bodies;

and culture and education for their minds; and freedom

and human dignity for their spirits. In this America,

millions of people experience every day the opportunity

of having life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness

in all of their dimensions.

And in this America millions of young

people grow up in the sunlight of opportunity.

 

But tragically and unfortunately, there is another America.

This other America has a daily ugliness about it

that constantly transforms

the ebulliency of hope into the fatigue of despair.

In this America millions of work-starved men

walk the streets daily in search for jobs that do not exist.

In this America millions of people find themselves

living in rat-infested, vermin-filled slums.

In this America people are poor by the millions.

They find themselves perishing on a

lonely island of poverty in the midst

of a vast ocean of material prosperity.

 

That was more than 50 years ago and the situation in the US

has not really improved. In many ways, it’s gotten worse.

 

On the day we remember Martin Luther King,

we’re installing an administration that seems

intent on rolling back many of the ideals that

Martin Luther King Jr. gave his life to institute.

 

We live in the same two Americas that

Dr. King was talking about.

The middle class is largely disappearing.

 

The simple dream of home ownership is

out of reach for most young people.

So many people are drowning in debt.

The number one cause of bankruptcies in

the US is medical debt.

The federal government has not

raised the minimum wage since 2009.

Meaning someone working full time,

can still make less than $300 a week.

 

66 % of the wealth in the US is owned by 10% of the

richest families and corporations.

And the government in all its branches

has apparently been for sale to

the highest bidder for a very long time.

 

I don’t want to spoil the party,

but I feel like this country

is running out of wine.

 

Back to Jesus mother, the prophet.

I think there are some lessons in this story

about how to act as people of faith when

it seems that the party is about to go badly.

 

She tells Jesus, “they have no wine”

For some reason, Jesus seems very apprehensive

to help out. I don’t know what to make of that

theologically, but I understand how Jesus mother

must have felt at that point because

I’ve been feeling that way too.

 

Sometimes this prophecy and screaming out

into the wilderness seems futile.

It gets frustrating. It seems like

God is just not responding.

 

But Jesus mother is persistent.

Jesus says to her, “what concern is it to you and me?”

and “the time isn’t right yet”

and all the things that other people seem to say

to prophets throughout the ages.

But Jesus mother keeps at it.

She does not cave in and take no for an answer.

She doesn’t care if Jesus is not ready.

 

There isn’t any dialogue to explain

Jesus’ change of heart.

she probably stared Jesus down with that

stare that is really a dare.

Maybe only Jesus mother can do that to him.

 

But we can do what she does here:

She trusts Jesus ability to solve this problem.

And she is persistent with her plea.

We can be persistent with our prayers.

And we can trust that our savior will act.

We don’t know when, but we know that it will happen.

 

And when she sees that Jesus is ready to act,

she tells the servants  “do whatever Jesus tells you”.

And when the time is ripe to do something,

we can do the same.

We can do whatever Jesus tells us to do.

 

And what he tells them to do is not an easy task.

Even though it sounds simple and only takes one line.

This is hard stuff. “Fill the jars with water.”

There’s no hose out back. No running water.

Those water jars were big and heavy without water

and they must have weighed

a ton with the water in them and there were six of them.

But faith in Jesus ability is contagious.

It can give us strength to do what we

didn’t think we could do and help in ways

that we didn’t think we would be able to.

We can do what Jesus tells us to do.

 

And then, the jars came back

and the miracle did happen.

They were filled with wine. The party was saved.

And it was not just any wine.

It was the best wine. The wine so good that the wedding

coordinator was shocked.

“How is it that you kept the best wine to the end?” 

They said.

 

Remember, this story isn’t about the wine.

 

As people of faith, we keep this hope in us.

Jesus is inviting us to right now,

to act in trust even when the ending

doesn’t seem clear for us.

Even when the wine is running out,

and it seems like the wedding party might

have a sad and shameful ending.

 

We are called to notice the pain in the world,

to be prophetic in our words,

to be persistent in our prayers,

when the time is ripe,

to do what Jesus tells us to do,

and to have hope that the

best that God has to give

is still to come.