September 12, 2004

"Stuck in a Rut?"

This morning I’d like to share one of my favorite sermon illustrations. You all have seen the launch of the space shuttle from Cape Canaveral on TV. You noticed the external booster rockets on the sides of the main rocket assembly hurtling the space shuttle into orbit. Now these external rockets were meant to be much bigger than they are, but many good ideas are compromised by practical concerns. The rockets could not be built any larger than they are, because they are built by the Morton Thiokol company in Utah and shipped by train to Florida.

In between are many tunnels and bridges that need to be accommodated, and these structures are all built to match the standard railroad gauge in this country, four feet eight and one-half inches.

To me the answer is simple—build a rocket factory at Cape Canaveral. But no, that’s too easy.

So everything has to be built to fit that railroad gauge, four feet eight and a half inches. But how did the railroad gauge get to be that rather odd width? Glad you asked. Because that’s what the railroad gauge was in England, and English railroad builders came over to this country to build American train tracks.

Oh, they tried different gauges, but there simply were too many problems, and eventually what became the standard for the country was—say it with me—four feet eight and a half inches.

But how did that get to be the English standard? Because the English railroads were laid right on top of the ancient Roman roads, paths that had been basically undisturbed for 1,500 years.

The rails were placed right on top of the ruts carved by Roman chariot wheels, and how wide apart were those wheels? You guessed it. Four feet eight and one half inches.

And why were the wheels that far apart? So that two horses could be hitched together to pull the chariot with the wheels balanced to the hitch. So the moral of the story is? Events of the 21^st Century are influenced by two horses’ rear-ends from 1,500 years ago. Talk about being stuck in a rut.

This morning I want to take a few minutes to ask us all, are we stuck in a rut? Or are we open to the winds of change inspired by Jesus Christ, the one who changed water into wine when the wedding feast ran dry of joy.

Years ago when Johnny Carson was the host of the Tonight Show, he interviewed an eight year old boy who became briefly famous for rescuing two of his friends who had been trapped in a coal mine.

As Johnny talked to the boy it became apparent that the little fellow was a Christian, who Johnny asked him if he went to Sunday School.

He said “Yep,” so he asked, “What have you learned lately in Sunday School.” The boy replied, “We learned how Jesus went to a wedding and turned water into wine.” The audience cracked up and Johnny was trying to keep a straight face, and he asked the boy, “What did you learn from this.”

The boy frowned; this was the first time he had thought about it. But then he brightened up and said, “If you’re going to have a wedding, you’d better invite Jesus.” That little boy was really on to something, wasn’t he?

But he could have taken it a step farther—If you want joy in your life, better invite Jesus to walk with you.

John tells us that Jesus performed his first public miracle at Cana, only a hop, skip and jump down the road from his home town of Nazareth.

There he was confronted by what seems like a trivial matter, a social faux pas—a wedding without wine.

Now I don’t know how many among you are wine drinkers, but I know each of us has been guests at weddings where wine was served, sometimes too liberally. But you can’t discount the important role of wine at a Jewish wedding, a weeklong affair that added joy and hope to the drab lives of workaday villagers.

To them, wine meant the difference between a social disaster and a good time. Water was good, but wine was better—it had more body, more flavor, more color. The wedding celebration could have gone on with just water, but with wine the event became more special, more festive, more memorable.

Villagers trudged to the well for water every day, but wine, especially the expensive wine served at celebrations, made the day into a feast. People can read all manner of motives into Christ’s action to save the day and turn water into wine, but for our purposes let’s accept a simple message from a simple miracle:

Christ acts in human life to add depth, richness and abundance to experience. Christ acts in your life and mine to change that which is mundane into what is sacred, to take ordinary human existence and transform it into something holy.

Most of us are quite insignificant people as far as the world is concerned.

But this story tells us a lot about the priorities of Christ and what changes he wants to make in this world.

Would the Son of God want to step into my little corner of that world and make a miracle, to turn the ordinary into the extraordinary? He would, he can and he has. The Jesus Christ I worship takes delight in reaching way, way down to little people, insignificant people, to those who feel their need for him and lifting them up. His miracles are not reserved for the powerful; rather, they are meant to empower all of us.

The difference between water and wine is a symbol, a shorthand way for us to understand the difference between mere existence and fully realized human life.  Water and wine spell the difference between a house and a home, between grabbing a bite and sharing dinner with a friend, between being polite and being connected, between holding a job and having a vocation, between indifference and caring, between toleration and enjoyment, between observation and participation, between being stuck in a rut and awakening to fresh anticipation of each day.

Water describes the bare essentials of being alive.

Wine describes the infinite joys and richness and flavors and possibilities of what being alive in Jesus Christ can be all about.

In a way, we’re all trying to turn water into wine. We all want life to be rich and varied. None of us want to be stuck in a rut. We’re trying to deepen the meaning of our lives, make our experiences richer, our commitments more intense, our relationships more significant, our broken places whole. Some people turn to various forms of psychotherapy to accomplish these things.

Some people turn to a vast assortment of self-destructive behaviors. But they all have this in common: they try to fix things through our own efforts. Surely you’ve heard the old joke about how many psychiatrists it takes to change a light bulb? Just one—but the light bulb has to want to change. Ultimately, the world claims, you’ve got to turn the water into wine yourself.

It is a sad fable about postmodern life that the more we try to change ourselves, the more frustrated we are to discover it can’t be done. We can see where we want to end up, and we try to get ready for when we arrive, but we can’t find a way to get there. To force ourselves to be different people or have different feelings and attitudes is as impossible as turning water into wine. But Christ can do these things. This story of the wedding feast at Cana is God’s way of saying to us that when Christ is present in our lives, those lives become fuller, richer, deeper and more whole.

God has given us Jesus Christ to allow life to be as full and rich and whole as God intended it to be from the dawn of creation. But to those who have received this gift, also comes greater responsibility. This is what Paul is saying in our passage from First Corinthians—as you have received different spiritual gifts, the Spirit also obliges you to use them. As much as we ourselves crave greater meaning and purpose and understanding, we know there are others who need and want it as much as we do. The wedding feast is open to all.

Part of our discipleship is helping others get to the party—to point out where the joy flows free.

And that’s more, much more, than the words we say from the pulpit. It’s the quality of our witness—the witness of how we live and who we trust, by being open and honest about what we believe, we impress upon others the simple truth that there’s another, better way to live. That in itself is an invitation to think differently, to be open to new possibilities. It’s the invitation to the feast where God can make anything happen.

And once there, it’s God who does the transforming—who makes the water of ordinary existence into the wine of a life lived in covenant with God. We need to proclaim this to the world. That’s the job the disciples like us are called to every day. We need to tell this dry, aching barren world that there is no limit to God’s graciousness. What Jesus gives is never just enough. It is more than abundant, more than our poor imaginations can take in.

He did not just give us trees; he gave us trees that flower in spring and run riot with color in fall and yield up oxygen, literally, life, 24/7. He did not give us oceans. He gave us limitless seas teeming with creatures so vast that we’re still not done giving them all names. God did not give us joy and life and peace.

He gave us extravagant joy and eternal life and the peace which surpasses all understanding. It pleased God when he created our world to fill it with beauty, and then give us eyes and hearts and minds and souls to appreciate it all.

And then there’s wine. To the Jewish people wine symbolized joy. The rabbis even had a saying, “Without wine there is no joy.” And at the wedding feast at Cana the joy had run out, abruptly, which is the way joy can suddenly drain from our lives, without warning. It is frightening when joy suddenly disappears—it can scare someone to death.

Ernest Hemingway was one of my favorite authors when I was growing up. His macho prose style has fallen out of favor today, but once he was the most popular writer in the world, perhaps because the sheer joy and vitality of his experiences came through loud and clear on the printed page.

He was an ambulance driver in World War I, a fighter on the losing side in the Spanish Civil War, a correspondent in World War II, and everywhere a pursuer of manly adventure like bullfighting and boxing and mountain climbing. He drank deep from the natural wine of life.

But one day the joyous wine ran out, and Hemingway couldn’t face the new reality of a dry existence. So one day he rose at dawn and took one of the symbols of his manly experience, a double-barreled shotgun, the one he had used for years to shoot pigeons, placed the barrels against his temple and pulled the trigger.

Here’s an amazing statistic to ponder, fresh off the news wire: a person commits suicide somewhere in the world every 40 seconds. A million people a year, souls that just vanish into a black pit of despair. And sociologists predict that the rate will only get faster in coming years. What are we doing about that? As disciples of the risen Lord? Maybe we would do more if we weren’t bogged down in that pit ourselves sometimes?

There are times when we all run out of joy. What are you going to do when the wine runs out? We become strangers to ourselves, and we have nowhere to go. It is a sad truth that for most people, we don’t come to God until we have a need, an emergency. I’m not saying this is right or desirable, I’m saying this as a fact—for most people, religion is a 9-11 affair. We come to Jesus when the wine barrels are empty. We come, but not before we are empty, exhausted, when life’s unexpected twists and demands have brought us to our wit’s end.

But John’s account of the first miracle of Jesus teaches us that just as the Psalmist predicted, though weeping tarries in the night, joy comes in the morning, and joy comes from God. So I ask you this morning, on a beautiful fall morning like the morning when joy turned to a seemingly endless night of weeping for thousands three years ago, how is your level of joy today? Are you stuck in a rut?

I’m going to go out on a limb now and suggest that there may be some people in this room now who are feeling as if they have run out of joy. One of the unique aspects of ministry, it seems to me, is that we are called to love the people we serve, and as Christ has indeed made our experience richer and deeper, the change also makes our emotions sharper and more painful. This summer I conducted the funeral for the man I was closest to in this church.

Bob was more than a face in the pew, he was my friend, a man I could share hidden thoughts and feelings with, someone for whom I wanted to craft my sermons just so, even though he had this habit of tapping on his watch if I went too long. And when he began to descend into his final illness this spring, I prayed long and hard that he would not be taken from me. Oh, I couched it in words that said I was praying that Bob’s family would not be deprived, but the reality was that my prayers were selfish. How could I pray that anyone’s reunion with their Lord and Savior should be delayed a day, a moment?

The answer I received is that the wine we drink is full of joy because it connects us to the new life that is ours because of  the actions of Jesus Christ in the world—the same Jesus who could not deny his mother a miracle in a social setting will not deny us the miracle of transformation, of wine flowing freely in what may have been a dry, dusty, painfully brittle space in our hearts.

So I ask you once more: Do you feel stuck in a rut?

This morning, Jesus Christ wants to work a miracle in all of our lives. Water changed into wine will be a sign once more of God’s loving abundance, as it was for the Prophet Joel, who looked forward to the time when “the vats will be overflowing with wine and oil.” Christ wants to bring new wine abundantly—even pouring it into some old wineskins like you and me—to fill us to the brim with joy for the tasks immediately at hand, and for the rest of our life’s journey.