Reverend Ian Doescher

The Second Sunday of Epiphany

Every Christmas and Easter, I play a little game of identifying miracles.  At Christmastime, the game usually starts when we open the box of Christmas lights, and plug them in to see if they’re working.  When they all light up, as they have for two or three years in a row now, it’s a magical moment and I usually declare, “It’s the first miracle of Christmas.”  And from then on, throughout the Christmas season, I go looking for other “miracles,” unexpected blessings that may not exactly be the blind seeing or the deaf hearing, but are still signs of grace.  “The fourth miracle of Christmas!”  “The seventh miracle of Christmas.”  This year, I think we got up to ten or eleven.

This morning’s gospel passage tells the story of the first miracle Jesus ever performed, turning water into wine at a wedding feast in Cana.  We don’t know much about the setting, except that this ends up being one of the first times when Jesus’ power is revealed to humanity.  Listen to the story again, as recounted by Eugene Peterson in The Message: “there was a wedding in the village of Cana in Galilee.  Jesus’ mother was there.  Jesus and his disciples were guests also. When they started running low on wine at the wedding banquet, Jesus’ mother told him, ‘They’re just about out of wine.’  Jesus said, ‘Is that any of our business, Mother—yours or mine?  This isn’t my time.  Don’t push me.’ She went ahead anyway, telling the servants, ‘Whatever he tells you, do it.’”  Let me pause in the story there—I have always been half amused and half perplexed by this part of the story.  Jesus very clearly thinks the moment is not right for him to perform his first miracle, and he tells Mary as much.  But Mary doesn’t listen to Jesus—maybe she knows that his respect for her will outweigh other considerations.  Whatever the reason, we may have Mary to think for Jesus’ first miracle.  The reading continues: “Six stoneware water pots were there, used by the Jews for ritual washings.  Each held twenty to thirty gallons.  Jesus ordered the servants, ‘Fill the pots with water.’  And they filled them to the brim.  ‘Now fill your pitchers and take them to the host,’ Jesus said, and they did.  When the host tasted the water that had become wine (he didn’t know what had just happened but the servants, of course, knew), he called out to the bridegroom, ‘Everybody I know begins with their finest wines and after the guests have had their fill brings in the cheap stuff.  But you’ve saved the best till now!’  This act in Cana of Galilee was the first sign Jesus gave, the first glimpse of his glory.  And his disciples believed in him.”  The summer after my junior year of high school, I had the opportunity to go to France with my high school singing group, the Royal Blues.  We visited all of the popular tourist sites, including the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, and the Louvre Museum.  In the Louvre, there is a painting from the mid-sixteenth century called The Wedding at Cana, by Paolo Veronese.  And this is not a painting you can easily miss—the painting takes up an entire wall of the museum, and is about twenty-two feet tall by thirty-two feet wide.  If you’re curious about it, you can see a much smaller print of it hanging on my office wall.  In any case, the painting depicts a typical wedding scene, though of course the characters all look far more at home in the Renaissance than the ancient Middle East.  But one character in the painting stands out.  When I was sixteen, seeing the painting for the first time, my eyes scanned over the people in the painting, enjoying the good time everyone seemed to be having in it, until I looked right in the center.  And there, staring straight back at me—the only character in the painting who looks directly out at the observer of the painting—there was Jesus.  Jesus was looking at me, and frankly he didn’t look very happy, certainly not nearly as happy as everyone else in the picture.  At the time—when I was sixteen years old and not very sure of myself in terms of faith or life—I felt convicted by the stare that met me in the painting of the wedding at Cana.  I guess the feeling was guilt, but it was a good kind of guilt, almost a Jesus-reclaiming-me kind of guilt.

I still look at that painting and feel convicted, only now, after about sixteen years, the bones of my guilt have more flesh on them.  This past week, the world watched as an earthquake devastated the poor country of Haiti.  The next day, I opened up Facebook and found that many of my friends, and particularly my divinity school friends, had posted something about the tragedy in Haiti, comments like, “holding the people of Haiti in thoughts and prayers,” “fixing to pray for Haiti with my church on Sunday,” “an earthquake in Haiti puts my day in perspective,” and so on.  I saw all of these posts, and felt myself inclined to post something similar.  But I couldn’t help asking myself whether it’s immoral to start showing a sudden, newfound concern for Haiti when I have done so little to educate myself about the country up to this point.  I can’t answer this question for anyone else, but for me, it’s not wrong that I give money to relief organizations for Haiti, it’s not wrong that I pray for all those who have died in the earthquake and their families, but it is wrong that I know so little about Haiti.  It is wrong that I know so little about Haiti.  So I glanced at the painting on my wall this week, and I saw Jesus looking back at me, and I was convicted once again. 

The broader point here is that this is a world in need of miracles.  Where are the miracles in Haiti?  Where are the miracles for those we know who live with pain, with suffering?  Where are the miracles that could turn human life over, could turn it around?

Tomorrow is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and last Friday would have been Martin’s eighty-first birthday.  Martin, the leading civil rights leader of the twentieth century, was also a Baptist pastor.  I heard a lecture called “Five Myths of Community” the other day, and one of the things the speaker said was, “Pastors are just people.  We like to think pastors are special, or saintly, or more in touch with God, but really pastors are just people like the rest of us.”  So Martin Luther King, like any pastor, was just a person, a human with all the flaws and temptations and imperfections of any human.  But in a world in need of miracles, the lessons we can continue to learn from Martin are as true today as they were forty and fifty years ago, when he was alive.  I want to recall three of Martin’s more well-known sayings this morning, as we celebrate his life and think about our world in need of miracles.  The first thing Martin was fond of saying was actually a quote from nineteenth-century abolitionist Unitarian minister Theodore Parker.  It is this: “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”  The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.  There is hope in these words—hope that could drive a person to spend over a year boycotting a segregated bus system, hope that could make a person march all the way from Selma to Montgomery, hope that trusts in the promise of God’s future, even when it’s not visible yet.  The night before he died, Martin compared himself to Moses in the book of Deuteronomy, able to look into the Promised Land without actually entering it.  In that sermon, Martin preached these words: “Like anybody, I would like to live a long life.  Longevity has its place.  But I’m not concerned about that now.  I just want to do God’s will.  And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain.  And I’ve looked over.  And I’ve seen the Promised Land.  I may not get there with you.  But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!  And so I’m happy, tonight.  I’m not worried about anything.  I’m not fearing any man!  Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!”  This is the kind of hope that allowed Martin to say, over and over, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”  I read an interesting piece this past week that mentioned justice.  It said this: “It’s reported that Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan Chase combined have set aside $47 billion for bonuses… Haiti’s annual gross domestic product in nominal terms is about $7 billion a year.  [So] seize the bonuses.  Send them to Haiti.  It’ll never happen, of course.  But if there were any justice in the world, it would.”  Now, regardless of what you think of the banking industry or the financial crisis, this is a bold vision of what justice means, and one that actually sounds a lot like something Jesus would have said.  What the article didn’t mention is how much of a miracle such a public redistribution of money would be.  If Jesus can turn water into wine, surely he can turn bonuses into healing?  And this is a world in need of miracles.

A second thing Martin Luther King said that I want to remember and honor comes from a sermon in which Martin was talking about Jesus’ command to love your enemies.  In that sermon, Martin said, “…it’s significant that [Jesus] does not say, ‘Like your enemy.’  Like is a sentimental something, an affectionate something.  There are a lot of people that I find it difficult to like.  I don’t like what they do to me.  I don’t like what they say about me and other people.  I don’t like their attitudes.  I don’t like some of the things they’re doing.  I don’t like them.  But Jesus says love them.  And love is greater than like.  Love is understanding, redemptive goodwill for all men, so that you love everybody, because God loves them.”  There is a lot of discussion in our house lately about loving and liking.  My two boys have realized that, like Martin says here, loving is more significant than liking.  And in their effort to get under my skin, or rebel, or express their feelings, or whatever you want to call it, they have started informing me, “Daddy, we don’t love you, but we like you.”  Or, “Daddy, we like you all the time and love you only some of the time.”  Or, when they’re in a particularly bad mood, “Daddy, I don’t even like you right now!”  We all know people who are hard to like, much less love.  Not coincidentally, those people we have a hard time liking are often people who find it hard to like others.  This past week, Christian commentator Pat Robertson made a very unchristian comment about a possible reason God might actually have punished the people of Haiti with this earthquake.  And Robertson is not alone here—it seems that after almost every major crisis or natural disaster, somebody mouths off saying it must be God’s punishment for some sin or other.  Suffice it to say Pat Robertson and I stand on different theological ground.  And my point here isn’t to chastise Pat Robertson, though I think his comments were inexcusable.  It’s more to point out that Martin’s sermon hits me dead on when it comes to Pat Robertson, because Pat is a person I find it hard to love, and I sure am glad Jesus didn’t say I had to like him.  Me learning to love Pat Robertson might be a miracle.  Pat Robertson learning to respond to natural disasters with a recognition that God is with people in their suffering, rather than being the cause of it—well, that might be a miracle too. And this is a world in need of miracles.

The final thing Martin said that I want to recall today is from his most famous speech ever, at the March on Washington in 1963.  The words themselves are amazing, but they’re even more powerful when you know the context: the United States government had determined that the March on Washington could only take place if all of the speakers provided the White House with advance copies of their speeches.  All complied, so Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech was prescripted.  Except that Martin, being a Baptist preacher, was also known for going off-script.  And the “I have a dream” sequence of that speech, which calls on biblical prophets and the Declaration of Independence, is among the most well-known speeches in United States history.  Hear these words: “…even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream.  It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.  I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’  I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.  I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.  I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.  I have a dream today!… I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; ‘and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.’”  I wish I could read the whole thing to you—better yet, I wish I could play a video of the whole thing for you, because it’s all so much more powerful in Martin’s own voice.  But the point is that we are a people who need dreams, dreams of justice, dreams of love, dreams of hope.  We remember Martin Luther King because he helped this country see a vision we were unable to see, helped us see and begin to enact the dream he had.  Martin was no Jesus, but if I can casually call my Christmas tree lights coming on year after year a miracle, then I think we can all agree Martin was a worker of miracles.  Today, as we hear about Jesus’ first miracle at the wedding in Cana and are convicted by his example, as we celebrate Martin Luther King and are inspired by his dream, as we witness a poor country devastated by senseless pain and suffering, let us keep looking for miracles.  Because friends, this is a world in need of miracles.  Thanks be to God for coming to us in Jesus Christ, the perfect miracle-worker.  Amen.