Little Catastrophe, Big Miracle

The First United Presbyterian Church

“Little Catastrophe, Big Miracle”

Rev. Amy Morgan

January 20, 2019

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Isaiah 62:1-5

For Zion's sake I will not keep silent, and for Jerusalem's sake I will not rest, until her vindication shines out like the dawn, and her salvation like a burning torch.

 2 The nations shall see your vindication, and all the kings your glory; and you shall be called by a new name that the mouth of the LORD will give.

 3 You shall be a crown of beauty in the hand of the LORD, and a royal diadem in the hand of your God.

 4 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; for the LORD delights in you, and your land shall be married.

 5 For as a young man marries a young woman, so shall your builder marry you, and as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall your God rejoice over you.

John 2:1-11

On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there.

 2 Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding.

 3 When the wine gave out, the mother of Jesus said to him, "They have no wine."

 4 And Jesus said to her, "Woman, what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come."

 5 His mother said to the servants, "Do whatever he tells you."

 6 Now standing there were six stone water jars for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons.

 7 Jesus said to them, "Fill the jars with water." And they filled them up to the brim.

 8 He said to them, "Now draw some out, and take it to the chief steward." So they took it.

 9 When the steward tasted the water that had become wine, and did not know where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew), the steward called the bridegroom

 10 and said to him, "Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the good wine until now."

 11 Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.

Every wedding has its little catastrophe. I was once presiding at a wedding where the maid of honor locked her knees and passed out on the floor in the middle of the sermon. At my own wedding, my 2-year-old nephew decided he’d rather throw a tantrum instead of walking down the aisle with our wedding rings. At my sister’s wedding, the wedding march never came out over the speakers on the beach, so the guests all just started singing it as my dad walked my sister down the aisle. At my cousin’s wedding on the shore of the Sacramento river, an obnoxious boater kept buzzing by with music blaring. 

There are so many stories about butterfly releases gone wrong. They immediately froze and fell to the ground, dead. Or they flew up to the roof of the church where they were promptly gobbled up by hungry birds.

And then there’s the wedding at Cana where Jesus Christ himself, the Messiah, the Lord and Savior, was a guest. This is right at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, when he’s just another small-town guy being dragged to another small-town wedding.

A proper Jewish wedding feast was supposed to last seven days. And horror of horrors, the host had run out of wine before the festivities were supposed to be over.  This would have been the very height of hospitality failure, a major embarrassment with serious social consequences.

While all of these wedding catastrophes were embarrassing or annoying, none of them ultimately interrupted the business at hand. In the end, the couple was still married. The guests partied and had fun. Everybody lived through it. Except the butterflies. No matter how awful these mishaps may have seemed at the time, these were small catastrophes with fleeting importance.

The catastrophe faced by the Israelites returning from exile, to whom this later prophecy of Isaiah is addressed, however, is somewhat major. You see, when the Israelites were taken into captivity in Babylon, not all of them were carted off. Some were left behind – mainly those the Babylonians didn’t find useful: the disabled, the frail, those who were too young or too old. And now the exiles have returned, and a new generation has been born, and the city is a total disaster. There are disagreements between those who were left behind and those who returned and those who were born after the exile. The rebuilding effort is not going well.

The Israelites should be celebrating, partying, praising God that the exile is over. But the party is a huge catastrophe. Like relatives at a wedding, different factions are fighting. The caterer hasn’t shown up, and there’s a shortage of food. Everyone’s insisting that everyone else wasn’t invited. And the venue is in shambles, and no one can agree about how to fix it up.

And into this mess, the prophet Isaiah declares that the Israelites, all of them, “shall be a crown of beauty in the hand of the LORD, and a royal diadem in the hand of your God.” Like a bride on her wedding day, Israel is a pretty princess, treasured and beloved. Though the exiles identified as Forsaken and the ones left behind identified as Desolate, they will be given new names. The hyphenated “My-Delight-is-in-Her” and Married. As a side note, I learned this week that the name Beulah is the Hebrew word “married.” If you happen to have known someone named Beulah, you might find that interesting.

But this is all a big deal, a miracle, in fact. Surrounded by chaos and destruction, the Israelites learn that God rejoices and delights in them, God is building a new relationship with them. The covenant relationship between God and Israel has not been forgotten. It will take on new and joyful dimensions. Like a young bride and groom, Israel has a hopeful future.

In the ancient world, marriage was certainly not what it is today. I chuckle when Christians talk about “biblical marriage” because this typically included polygamous relationships, and women were considered to be the property of their husbands. Not something Christians would advocate for today, I hope.

But because of, or maybe in spite of, these cultural norms of the ancient world, this marriage metaphor was momentous for the Israelites. For a bride, marriage signified protection and provision. A woman who was unattached to a male relative was extremely vulnerable. The culture had no mechanism by which she could provide for herself or be protected from the many dangers that surrounded her. A husband meant security, well-being, and social acceptance in the community. Without a husband, a woman was desperate and forsaken.

In many places throughout the Hebrew Bible, including earlier in Isaiah, Israel is referred to as the bride or lover of God. But she’s been unfaithful. Some of the descriptions of her unfaithfulness would make you blush. And so God was justified in casting her off, divorcing her.

And now, though they’ve done nothing to deserve it, God is graciously taking Israel back into a loving embrace. This is a big miracle. The catastrophe of the bickering guests, sub-par refreshments, and disappointing venue are small potatoes compared to the hope and promise of God’s love and delight.

This love and delight overflows into the wedding at Cana. This story is found only in the gospel of John. And in John’s gospel nothing can be taken at face value. Every sentence contains layers of meaning.

This episode, we’re told, occurs on the “third day.” One the one hand, we could hear this simply as chronological storytelling. The gospel says that on the first day of his ministry, Jesus called his first disciples. On the second day, he called Phillip and Nathaniel to follow him. And here we are on the third day.

But knowing how John’s gospel is constructed, I’m more inclined to think we are supposed to draw the obvious parallel to the other “third day” in the larger narrative. Not only did Jesus resurrect a dying wedding party on this third day, he inaugurated the resurrection of a whole people, the Jewish people, who were like empty jars, waiting to be filled to overflowing with that which makes for joy and celebration.

These people were dried up from centuries of oppression, occupation and subjugation. Their rituals, like the jars, were empty. And so the jars overflowing with the wine of joy and celebration signal God’s love and delight overflowing for God’s people as Jesus begins his ministry of healing and teaching and reconciliation.  

This story begins with a small catastrophe: running out of booze at a wedding party. But it ends in a big miracle. Not just choice vintage wine to keep the guests happy and avoid a social faux pas. No, this miracle signals God’s delight, God’s marriage, God’s protection and provision for God’s beloved people, Israel.

But most of the people at this wedding miss it. They miss the miracle. The steward assumes the fine wine came from some hidden reserves of the host. The guests happily guzzle down this miraculous gift without a clue as to its divine origins. The party went on for the prescribed seven days, and everyone went home, ignorant of this major miracle.

Imagine drinking wine that had been miraculously transformed from water by Jesus Christ himself, and never knowing it. Imagine perhaps even getting drunk and foolish on that wine, and never knowing the difference. What a waste!

But we waste God’s big miracles every day. We get caught up in our little catastrophes, and we completely miss the miracle taking place before our very eyes.

There’s a terrible story circulating on the internet about a bride who canceled her wedding and broke up with her fiancé because her family and friends failed to finance her $60,000 dream wedding in Aruba. In a 17-page rant, she wails, “How could we have OUR wedding that WE dreamed of without proper funding? We’d sacrificed so much and only asked each guest for around $1,500.” She wouldn’t hear of scaling back or altering her plans and refused to forgive her fiancé for even suggesting it.

Not being able to finance her “Kardashian” wedding became such a major catastrophe for this bride that, in her despair, she discarded a man who loved her, who’d been with her since she was 14 years old.

This is certainly an extreme example, but we do this all the time in perhaps smaller, less public and perceptible ways. Our small catastrophes blind us to the love that surrounds us. We take offense at someone’s words or actions. We blow up at an unexpected expense or get bent out of shape about an out-of-stock item. We focus on our warring factions, the weakening global economy, and our crumbling infrastructure, and we have lost our capacity for joy, celebration, and gratitude.

And so I would invite us to take a step back from these catastrophes, and consider some big miracles.

·         This year, the World Health Organization unveiled a new vaccine that’s cheap and effective enough to end cholera, one of humanity’s greatest-ever killers.

• ·         Cancer deaths have dropped by 25% in the United States since 1991, saving more than two million lives. Breast cancer deaths have fallen by 39%, saving the lives of 322,600 women.
• ·         for the first time in history, half of all people on the planet with HIV are now getting treatment, and AIDS deaths have dropped by half since 2005
• ·         the ozone hole over Antarctica is the smallest its been since 1988 and could be completely repaired in our lifetime
• ·         Over 100 Cities In The World Are Now Primarily Powered By Renewable Energy
• ·         nearly 1.2 billion people around the world have gained access to electricity in the last 16 years.
• ·         The United States’ official poverty rate is now 12.7%, the lowest level since the end of the global financial crisis. And the child-poverty rate has reached an all-time low, dropping to 15.6%
• ·         Saudi Arabia said women would no longer need male permission to travel or study, and they now have the right to drive.
• ·         Rates of violent crime and property crime have dropped by around 50% in the United States since 1990, yet a majority of people still believe they have gotten worse.

And that is the real problem we face. Our perception doesn’t match up with reality. We may have finally been brought home from a long and horrible exile, but we are called Forsaken because the home we’ve returned to is not like the home we left. We may be reunited with loved ones taken into captivity, but we are called Desolate because they didn’t bring with them the wealth and prosperity to rebuild the trash heap we’ve been living in. We may be at a lovely wedding with family and friends, celebrating the joyful union of two people with their whole lives ahead of them, but we’re going to let the party be ruined because the host ran out of booze.

So many miracles are taking place all around us – advances in medicine, repair of the creation, declines in crime and poverty rates, a better quality of life for billions of people. But we call ourselves Forsaken and Desolate, we are victimized and polarized, we are angry and despairing and in chaos – because we focus on the small catastrophes instead of the big miracles.

Now, this is not to make light of the many challenges we are facing as a world, a nation, a city and a state. There are major catastrophes going on. But those are not the ones that keep us up at night, usually. It’s the small catastrophes that are wearing us down. The cognitive dissonance between how we imagined our lives would be and how we perceive them turning out. The personal rejection and professional disappointments. The screaming toddlers and dead butterflies.

And so we’re missing out on the greatest miracle of all. The miracle of God’s love for us, rejoicing over us like a groom over a bride. God is filling the empty jars of our lives with the wine of joy and celebration. We’re missing it.

But you know who didn’t miss it? Jesus’ disciples. They were watching, expectantly, for what Jesus would do next. And they weren’t disappointed. And they believed in him. And you know who else didn’t miss out on the miracle? The servants who filled the jars and served the wine. They were obedient and faithful, and they witnessed this surprising miracle. And Jesus’ mother, of course, who knew all along that Jesus would come through to provide what was needed.

When we experience small catastrophes, at weddings or anywhere else, let’s start looking for the big miracle. With expectation and faith, obedience and trust, let’s look for the big miracles God is doing everywhere. Water may not miraculously convert to wine, but we may experience unconditional love when we feel unlovable, or forgiveness when we are ashamed, or hope when we are desolate, or peace in times of chaos. And it seems like that should be miracle enough.

To God be all glory forever and ever. Amen.