A Sign of Transformation

A Sermon preached on Sunday January 17^th, Epiphany II at St. Augustine’s, Wiesbaden

Isaiah 62:1-5, 1 Corinthians 12:1-11, John 2:1-11

What can you remember about your wedding? Mine and Heidi’s was over 26 years ago, but when I think back, I can still remember a lot of details. We got married in the village church where my parents lived, a lovely little Saxon church with some less lovely Victorian additions. I remember the guests having to wait a long time for dinner because the photographer took us all over the gardens of Alton Towers where we celebrated to take his pictures! I remember the joy and the fun of the occasion, the dancing.  But I do wish I’d had Jesus as a guest at my wedding. It would have saved me a lot of money in drinks! 

The story of a wedding at Cana in Galilee is the setting for the first miracle, John calls them signs, in his Gospel. And the story is unique to John. In the other gospels we only find Jesus using weddings as a backdrop for his parables: the kingdom of heaven is compared to a wedding feast – one to which if you remember many of the invited guests would not come - so the king and bridegroom had his servants go out into “the highways, and gather together as many as they found, both bad and good until the wedding was filled with guests.” (Matthew 22:10) Clearly that was not the problem in Cana though, or they would not have been running out of wine!

As a Church we use this story in our marriage service, in the opening address: “Our Lord Jesus Christ adorned this manner of life by his presence and first miracle at a wedding in Cana of Galilee. It signifies to us the mystery of the union between Christ and his Church, and Holy Scripture commends it to be honored among all people.”[1] And marriage as a metaphor for the union of God and humankind runs throughout the Bible, not just the New Testament as we heard in the passage from Isaiah earlier. God is described as the bridegroom joined in union to God’s people Israel and “as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall your God rejoice over you.” (Isaiah 62:5)

But I don’t think that is why John places the wedding at Cana here at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry – and yet it must be important because it’s the first public event in John’s narrative. It is a miracle of transformation of course. Water is transformed into wine, into very good wine. But that is not the only transformation taking place. What could have been a disastrous event is transformed into a joyous one, a shortage is transformed into abundance and most important of all, it is the beginning of the transformation of disciples. Jesus “revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.” (John 2:11) Miracles are called signs in John’s Gospel because he uses each carefully selected event from Jesus’ life to show us not just what Jesus says and does, but what Jesus means. 

The first sign in Can of Galilee shows us that Jesus means life, joy, abundance, and transformation.  Remember that the passage began with the words “On the third day.” Important things happen in the Bible on the third day — most notably Jesus’ resurrection. We are already looking forward to his transformation and to the new and renewed life we are promised as a result. 

Isaiah also describes a transformation – one that the Jews who had returned from exile to Jerusalem could and must still look forward to. The reality of their life among the ruins was not so rosy … in fact it reminds me of the words of the former East German national anthem: Auferstanden aus Ruinen und der Zukunft zugewandt  or in English “Newly risen from the ruins and turning to the future.” Isaiah is describing this transformed future – a complete change of fortune for Israel that still awaits them. And a change of name will be a sign of the change of fortune:

“You shall be called by a new name that the mouth of the LORD will give. You shall no more be termed Forsaken, and your land shall no more be termed Desolate; but you shall be called My Delight Is in Her, and your land Married.” (Isaiah 62:2, 4)

We talked about the significance of name changes at our Bible study this week. When do people change their names? One example given was of witness protection, which is when people are forced to take on a new identity, in their case just to survive. Once a marriage always meant a name change – but for the woman only. Artists change their names – at least as a stage name for that often very separate identity. And in the Bible God often gives people a new name when they take on a new role or identity, and when they have been changed by the encounter with him. Abram becomes Abraham; Sarai, Sarah; Jacob, Israel; Simon, Peter – the Rock ….  

At the wedding in Cana the disciples start to get to know Jesus. So far they have followed him either because John the Baptist told them to. John exclaimed “look, here is the Lamb of God!’ The two disciples heard him say this, and they followed Jesus.” (John 1:36-37) or because they have been called by Jesus himself. But they don’t yet really know why. This first sign, and more follow of course, is meant to help them see both his power and his promise and to be transformed by that experience. 

The various spiritual gifts Paul describes in his Letter to the Corinthians, which while many and abundant are still only a small selection of the gifts God has for us, have no value in themselves unless they are also outward signs of an inward transformation. And that inward transformation has only truly begun, Paul writes, when people use those gifts to proclaim Good News, and when those gifts are used exclusively for the common good. Then they are also the means by which we can live the life that Jesus promises for us to the full:  “I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly,” he says, later in John’s Gospel. (John 10:10)

I know that YouTube is full of videos of wedding disasters, sometimes because there is too much wine available, even without a miracle. But on the whole a wedding is a time of celebration and of joy; of community and of visible love; of living not just for ourselves, but for others. These are all elements of living a full or abundant life. These are all reasons why John sets the beginning of the disciples’ transformation, the first followers of Jesus, in the context of a wedding feast. The disciples – and all who follow Jesus today – are to be transformed into people who can live a full, abundant, joyous, loving life and share this life with others too! 

The disciples’ transformation began at a feast through their personal encounter with God in Jesus. This is also what we offer here at the Lord’s Table every week. The Eucharist is a feast, a symbolic one, and the Eucharist is the place for a real, personal, physical encounter with Jesus in the bread and wine transformed by God’s Spirit and made Holy. And here at this Table God’s Spirit will transform you too, and empower you to reveal his glory, to bring Jesus’ message of joy and abundance into the world, and to invite all the world to share in the feast that is God’s kingdom.

Amen.

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[1] BCP 423

After Christmas?

A Sermon preached on Sunday January 3rd Epiphany (transf.) at St. Augustine’s, Wiesbaden

Jeremiah 31:7-14, Ephesians 1:3-6, 15-19a, Matthew 2:13-15,19-23

When I first looked at this morning’s Gospel reading from Matthew I was reminded a little of the chorus of one of the songs sung at our Victorian Music Box concert back in September:

After the ball is over,
After the break of morn,
After the dancers leaving
After the stars are gone;
Many a heart is aching
If you could read them all;
Many the hopes that have vanished
After the ball.[1]

Our Gospel reading also started with the word “after,” in this case with “After the wise men had left.” So, what happened after Christmas, after the birth of our Lord, after all the beloved characters – shepherds, angels, wise men – left, after the ball? Did all the praising and glorifying and paying homage continue? Or were we instead confronted with aching hearts and vanished hopes? Well, when we read on, it does sound as if the party was well and truly over: “After the wise men had left, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, ‘Get up, take the child and his mother, and flee!’”

This reading is one of three available every year, and so it has not been offered to us today because it is particularly topical, though it is. For sadly, almost every year it will relevant, because somewhere, someone is always fleeing from violence. Now of course, after the arrival of nearly 1 million refugees last year, and with more expected this year, it is especially relevant. This is the largest number of refugees that Germany has had to deal with since the end of WWII. But let’s not forget, that 70 years ago a total of approximately 12 million people fled here, into a country devastated by war with food, power and housing shortages. This country managed then, and will manage today – as Angela Merkel rightly says: wir schaffen es - and we as St. Augustine’s will also help where and how we can.

It is not a coincidence that Jesus was not just incarnated, made human, as a baby, but shortly after his birth also as a refugee. Before he had even learned to walk and talk, Jesus was a homeless refugee with a price in his head.  Those of you who were here last Sunday heard me quote from one poem in a book that I have been reading in Advent and through to the end of the Christmas season. One of the other poems, written by the book’s editor Malcom Guite, picks up on that connection. It’s called “Refugee:”[2]

We think of him as safe beneath the steeple,

Or cosy in a crib beside the font,

But he is with a million displaced people

On the long road of weariness and want.

For even as we sing our final carol

His family is up and on that road,

Fleeing the wrath of someone else’s quarrel,

Glancing behind and shouldering their load.

Our Lord is with a million displaced people. Towards the end of Matthew’s Gospel, in the parable of the sheep and the goats, a passage also known as the judgment of the nations, Jesus famously tells those who have been judged as being righteous: “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.” (Matthew 25:35) That’s what Immanuel, God with us, also means. That God is with us where the pain is. Jesus is in the lives and the bodies of those who suffer and who are oppressed and who look for our help. Christ is still a refugee. While we cannot travel though time to meet the holy family as they fled through the deserts of Egypt, we can still meet them now – just up the road from us in the refugees in the new refugee center.

The world Christ was born into was full of violence, oppression, injustice and poverty. That did not change with his coming. What comes after Christmas is not a happy ending, and the Bible is not a fairy tale despite all that Prof. Dawkins and his secularist friends like to tell us. No, what comes after Christmas is a happy beginning. The message of Christmas is not something for one night or one day a year. It’s not just for children and it’s not something we are supposed to forget as soon as the Christmas Tree is down and the crib or crèche has been cleared away. While the Incarnation is a historical event, it is also much more than that. The Incarnation is the beginning of God’s kingdom. It is the beginning of the glorious future that Jeremiah is looking forward to in our first reading. A kingdom that includes the “blind and the lame, those with child and those in labor” (Jeremiah 31:8) and a time when God promises that mourning will be turned into joy, that God will bring comfort, and give gladness for sorrow (31:13). That is what God came to do at Christmas and as Jesus makes clear both in his life, in the very beginning of his earthly life, and for example in the message of Matthew 25 it is a promise we who follow him are called to help fulfill, which we can do with “the immeasurable greatness of God’s power for us who believe.” (Ephesians 1:19)

Every Sunday, here at the Lord’s Table, we remember and celebrate not only the mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection, but also of his Incarnation when we receive his body born for us, his body and blood given for us. They are the source of God’s power for us who believe and the means of our transformation. The Incarnation was and is the beginning of a profound change in the world’s relationship with God and humanity’s relationship with one another. There is no “after” Christmas, there is no “after” the Epiphany. God did not come, look around, shake his head and go away again. There is no reason for aching hearts and vanished hopes. God is with us. All we have to do is accept this and live and love in the sure knowledge of God’s presence and in the assurance that there is now no “after” any more.

Amen.

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 [1] After the Ball, written in 1891 by Charles K. Harris

[2] Malcom Guite, Waiting on the Word (Canterbury Press, 2015), 115