How and Why

Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Greenwood, Virginia
Snow Day
Epiphany 3
January 16, 2022
The Rev. John Taliaferro Thomas
 
For some reason, I have been thinking a lot about coaching lately.  I am not sure why… I could be because my Georgia Bulldogs won the National Championship last Monday.  Mercifully for you, that is not what this sermon is about.
 
For pre-season soccer at St. Andrew’s Episcopal School, where I was Chaplain, teacher, and JV soccer coach, we took the whole team to rural New Hampshire.  There, we had plenty of field space, cooler temperatures, and a singular focus on preparing for the season.  We stayed in a long defunct ski lodge with spartan, dormitory style accommodations and family style meals.  The best part of the experience was that the whole place was off the internet grid.  There was one rotary landline phone for emergencies in a locked office, thus the boys were out of contact with girlfriends, gaming, and helicopter parenting.
 
With ice on knees and ankles, we relaxed in the evenings and made our own fun, playing pool with the one surviving cue stick, Trivial Pursuit, and lots of card games.  One evening, Rodrigo, one of our players, amazed us with card tricks.  The one that got everybody was a trick where he would have a boy we chose pick a card, remember it and shuffle it back in the deck himself.  Rod then took the deck, and sprayed it all over the room.  While he sat in his chair, he told everyone to gather the cards. Rod put them back in the deck, fanned it out face up, and asked the boy to find his card.  It was not there.  He told us to look all around the room for the card.  We could not find it.  We looked again, and far across the lodge, by the fireplace, we found the card barely sticking out of a pile of firewood.
 
How did he do that?  We were consumed with figuring it out.  We suspected the boy we chose must have been in on it, but he had stayed at the table next to Rod.  For the rest of the trip and the rest of the season, we pleaded with Rod to tell us the secret.  His only reply was “magic.”  We are now Facebook friends.  He lives in Europe.  Every now and then, someone from that team will ask him how he did it, and he only replies “magic.”
 
I think of Rod every time I consider the Gospel we hear today.  It is one of seven miracle stories in John’s Gospel: three healing stories, the feeding of the 5,000, Jesus Walking on water, and this, the first one changing water into wine.  It is not just a little water changed into wine either.  Jesus changes all of the water into wine: 6 jars, 25-30 gallons each, that is 150 gallons of wine.  That is, more or less, about 600 standard sized bottles.  He had servants as witnesses.  He had a wine steward declare it to be really good wine, normally served first.  Magic.
It is hilarious to search the internet for sermons that try to make sense out of this miracle.  There are the puritanical grape juice adherents who cannot believe that Jesus would condone raucous partying.  There are the wine enthusiasts, who note the wine was weak and much safer to drink than water.  There are the social anthropologists that point out the fact that weddings, at that time in history, were week-long celebrations, involving the whole village as well as out of town guests.  And there are the demythologizers who dismiss the story as John’s brand of gaslighting propaganda.  All of these explanatory gymnastics revolve around the big question: how did he do it?  Our rational selves are sure there is a trick.
 
Sometimes our humanity gets all bogged down in how things happen, instead of the more important purpose of storytelling: why things happen.  John is not at all concerned about the mechanics of God’s work, he is too busy being astonished at all of the miracles at hand.  The fact that through embryology we can trace human development down to the molecular level, does not make it less astonishing.  The more we learn, the more we learn about what we do not know.  Even the smallest thing we can observe or conceive is made up something smaller.  Though matter and energy are finite, matter and energy are on the move, all of the time.  So much for explanation.
 
If not how, why do the water and wine thing?  Why is Jesus is reluctant to get involved before his mother gives him a shove.  This sets up the idea that the human Jesus was not completely aware of the divine, eternal Jesus, what the theologian Richard Rohr calls the “Cosmic Jesus.”  Why six jars? Well, those were empty ritual vessels reserved for religious rites of purification.  God is all about repurposing here.  Why a wedding?  Well, it is a time of new life and celebrating a new version of family.  Why good wine?  Why so much wine? Why just have the servants be the first to see the miracle that is Jesus himself?  Why did it take this for the disciples to believe in Jesus?  We can point to the why all day, and that is the point.  Questions without one final answer lead us into our own faith, asking where God’s abundance touches us, what miracles we might have missed, and where we might be amazed beyond explanation.
 
God knows what God is doing.  God gives us a glimmer of God’s infinity in all creation.  God is a profound and infinite mystery.  When we take all three of these things together, we begin to put ourselves into God’s unfolding story.  If nothing else, we watch this Jesus carefully.  As living, cosmic Christ, he is not bound up by the rules of time, space, or limited humanity. 
 
Jesus does not do magic tricks.  Jesus shows us who God is, what God does, and how we might see past our own horizons.  The story is not really about a wedding, water, wine, physics, or hasty fermentation.  The story is about God.  We do well to watch this Jesus carefully, not to discover how he does what he does, but why he does what he does for all to see… and just be amazed and grateful.  Amen.