Do You Notice the Change?

Sermon by James W. Crawford

The First Sunday in Lent, February 25, 1996

John 2:1-11

In l854, a 17 year old vagrant from Northfield, Massachusetts, found his way to Boston. He was orphaned and poverty stricken and he left behind in the Connecticut Valley a reputation as a troublemaker. Straining for independence, he refused to contact his Boston relatives until he was penniless and had nowhere else to go. His uncle gave him a room, a job and compelled him to go to Sunday School at the Mount Vernon Congregational Church. He hated the church and the church school. Amid this turmoil and adolescent fury a particular church school teacher broke into the boy's life. His name was Edward J. Kimball. One day Kimball put his hand on the young man's shoulder, and asked him, as he tells it, "if he would not give his heart to Christ." Half a century later that penniless, incorrigible vagrant, Dwight L. Moody, traveling the world, inspiring millions, received credit from the New York Times for teaching men and women how to use the Bible for the good of others, and generating a moral influence through his revivals cutting crime rates in the worst of precincts. In l894 Moody was invited again to New York to preach against corruption. He took on the challenge with gusto and promised his massive audiences, "There will be no more chicanery!" But perhaps even more promising, getting carried away with his sense of the millennium ending and a new world breaking in at the beginning of the 20 century, Moody promised what those of us who have been beaten to a pulp by the New Hampshire primary yearn for, not only an end to chicanery, but he proclaimed, "There will be no men seeking office!" (Now, that would be heaven!) And even as he crisscrossed the world Dwight L. Moody, remembered the encounter with Edward J. Kimball here in Boston in the Mount Vernon Church, " I can feel the touch of that hand upon my shoulder yet." The life of Dwight L. Moody changed. The American Church changed! Nineteenth century Christianity changed through Moody's confrontation with Christ.

Changed! Changed through a confrontation with Christ: that theme leaps from John's narrative of the wedding at Cana. John's intention is not that we debate the intricacies of water turning into wine. Far from it. John is convinced the change Christ brings to this world is as radical a change as if water turned to wine. The water in those ritual jars signifies religion and life apart from the decisive event of Calvary and the empty tomb. The new wine, its transformation from water is John's image for the change brought to this world by the event of Jesus Christ. The miracle at Cana proclaims our transformation in Christ.

I

John affirms this miracle of transformation, first of all, in your life and mine. He echoes a ringing New Testament theme: lives transformed, behavior changed, persons made new as if from water to wine. Do you remember the woman Jesus encounters, hemorrhaging for years? Do you remember how she approaches Jesus stealthily from amid a tumultuous crowd? She suffers an illness bearing a stigma driving her outside the religious community, pitching her beyond the pale of civic virtue. She lives with shame, rejected by her community, sensing a vast canyon between herself and the love of God. She reaches for the hem of our Lord's garment --and--and discovers restoration, healing, reconciliation; changed from a woman crippled and shamed to a woman now convinced of her full humanity and her welcome into the household of God.

Or Paul. Here is a lawyer who learned his lessons from one of Jerusalem's finest teachers. Paul, a man devoted to his heritage with an almost fanatic zeal. He is a one-man truth-squad going thither and yon refuting the claims of those "Jesus people," and standing idly by holding the coats of their executioners. Did Christ change Paul's life? Do we notice anything different about him after his decisive encounter? My word! Talk about change! The persecutor was changed into a propagandist. The religious lawyer became a passionate evangelist. The man knocked from his horse on the way to Damascus to crush Christianity became the man shipwrecked, beaten, tried, imprisoned on his way to Athens, Rome, Antioch and Jerusalem to proclaim the living, loving source of his life.

I wonder. Can that kind of change happen in your life and mine? Can an encounter with Jesus Christ get us off or own hands? Oh friends, you and I know it is tough for a lot of us. It is tough for ministers too, and what keeps us going is the inspiration provided by you in our congregations who are wonderfully and beautifully changed and live the Gospel in your own lives. But for some of us it is tough. I love the story told by Robert Goodrich of a man who boarded a plane and was assigned a seat next to an attractive, vivacious older woman, a grandmother. As soon as they were airborne she began to talk about her twelve grandchildren. She got out her portfolio of pictures and described the unique and marvelous qualities of each grandchild. She suddenly realized that she had been talking non-strop for nearly and hour. She ceased and exclaimed, "I've been doing all the talking. You must talk now. Tell me, what do you think of my grandchildren."

Folks, I know how that grandma feels. I have tons to tell you about my grandchildren. But I have always loved the way Gene Bartlett, who served as President of Colgate Rochester Divinity School when I was growing up - I've always loved the way Gene Bartlett describes this water to wine change by Christ in our lives:

"In a profound way," he writes, "the real experience of Christ is one of personal fulfillment and recreation. When a person has been encountered by Christ she comes away saying not simply, 'I ought,' though there are great ethical imperatives; not 'I will,' though there are great decisions. Deeper than these, the person comes away saying, 'I am,' for to some degree and in some aspect the person becomes a new creation. Something has happened to her. The mark of the encounter is not something she has learned, but something she has become."

And what does this changed life look like? What do we see? For the Gospel of John and for our faith itself, we discover it is the Lenten road to Jerusalem. It is life taking a bet on love, risking itself without counting the cost. To be ourselves changed, as if from water to wine--and this is the point John makes--means loving as Jesus loves, without boundaries, and living as Jesus did, all the consequences. It is your life and mine as if changed from water to wine!

II

But John's marvelous imagery touches not only our lives, it touches our religion, too. John tells us the contours and contents of our religious practice and procedures are renewed in fresh and radical ways as well. Those pitchers filled with water for ritual purification now filled with wine illustrate religion undergoing renewal and transformation by the power of the Gospel. In Jesus religion undergoes change--like water into wine.

This promise of the Gospel comes home to me more these days than almost anytime since the human rights revolutions of the sixties. But it's cut from the same cloth. Justice is at stake. How we talk about God these days; how we perceive our neighbors, how we understand the dimensions of the Gospel, its offering succor, dignity, grace, hope and full humanity to all of us, regardless of gender, race, sexual orientation, nation, language, culture is a crucial matter before us not only as citizens of this country - as we're witnessing right now amid this campaign - but as members of the body of Christ.

And it's this God-talk - God-talk - that's no small issue. How we talk about God, how we name God, how we perceive God, how we understand and serve this person to whom we offer our loyalty, our commitment and to whom we surrender ourselves is not a trivial word game, not a matter of some distant academics messing around with angels on the head of a pin. It's finally a matter of justice, a matter of embracing and recognizing each of us in our fullest humanity. What's going on in our churches is something like turning water into wine.

Let me illustrate. Forgive me as we what's at stake touch for just a moment on matters you and I have discussed and taken for granted for years. Did you know, for instance, that the hymnal we sing out of on a regular basis these days has inspired the fury of any number of our brothers and sisters in the United Church of Christ? Let me assure you its been a liberating work in may churches of our denomination, but in some quarters it has aroused grave concern and angry resistance. And I don't doubt there are some in our congregation who from time to time feel at least disconcerted. We don't have time this morning to touch on all the facets of our faith spread before us in this book, but let me say one of the most important is the book's insistence on balancing references to the gender of God. We call him "mother." We call her "father." The hymn texts try to balance the nouns and pronouns between masculine and feminine. That's because, in the first place, all religious language is a near miss. All religious language is analogical, parabolic, metaphorical - it cannot, within our human limits embrace all of God. It simply points in her direction. No single set of words can capture the fullness of God. And it's ridiculous to omit over one-half the world's experience of the sacred when the words we use are so feeble anyway!

But secondly, this gender balance is crucial because as one commentator writes, "when only male language is used for God, and any feminine images rejected as inappropriate for God, it suggests in some sense God is literally male and that only males image and represent God. Women are considered a lesser form of humanity who cannot exercise authority or be independent persons, but exist only under male authority." And friends, if God is pictured always that way, then we may well assume the structure of creation is divinely designed that way. Toni Morrison, the Pulitzer Prize winning novelist, puts it succinctly: "Be careful how you talk," she says…"It is that way."

Now this is nothing new to you. So why do I tell you this? Because if Toni Morrison is right - and I believe she is - "how we talk is that way" - I want to make sure that in the name of Jesus Christ, in the name of the Good News no one - no one - is diminished by the perceptual language we use. Language purporting to be good news asserts, by the grace of God, the full humanity and full dignity of every man and woman, sustaining, supporting, encouraging, healing, restoring us through whatever physical challenge we may have, whatever race we are, whatever our sexual orientation, whatever identities we bear. The language of the Gospel shatters the cosmic stereotypes traditionally putting us in our places. It turns upside down and inside out our usual perceptions of those on the outside or at the bottom; those on the periphery or on the margins. And if we may turn to Toni Morrison one more time, she tells us the debates about how we shall perceive and name God and each other is 'really about the power to be able to define. The definers want the power to name. And the defined are now taking that power away from them."

Right on, Toni Morrison! The scope and breadth of our religion tradition extends expands, deepens, broadens. It shakes all of us up and transports us to a new creation. Some of us are afraid. Some of us wonder what took so long. How can we describe the difference? How shall we note the change? How about like water turned to wine?

And so we are finished. As this Lenten season begins, my friends, I pray your faith and your life - indeed the faith and life of this church may be in transformation as John would have it, from water to wine. The world waits for us to serve as living testimony to the decisive difference of Jesus Christ in our common life. I believe Christ can transform our lives, our churches, indeed our world - water into wine. Do you believe it? Are you prepared - are you eager for the change?

 God grant it may be so!