January 17, 2010
The Second Sunday after The Epiphany (Year C)
(Multigenerational Sunday – Children in for sermon)
Isaiah 62:1-5; Psalm 36:5-10; I Corinthians 12:1-11;
John 2:1-11
This story of the wedding at Cana has a deep resonance for me. I have two personal stories that help give this story a greater significance.
The first is that, when I was in seminary, some of us were asked to go to churches in the area to preach and to try to get parishes to donate money to the seminary. And the first time I went out on one such trip – really the first time I preached outside my own parish where I had been worshipping for years, the lesson that I preached on was this one, the wedding at Cana in Galilee.
Preaching that sermon at a very Anglo-Catholic parish (something I had at that point never experienced) in the low foothills of the Sierras in Sutter Creek, the heart of Gold country, is something I will never forget. So – my second story – when I went to Israel right after my ordination three years later, I wanted to see Cana because of this story. Cana is a real community, even today. The day we were going to Cana I was sitting in the back of the bus, and would you believe? I have still not seen Cana? I fell asleep!
Now there are lots of things I could tell you about this story, but I think what I am going to focus on is the relationship between Jesus and his mother.
Jesus and his mother spoke rather emphatically, you might even say rudely, to each other. He sounded a bit like my kids have sounded when I have asked them over the years to do things. What did you think? Have you and your mom or dad ever sounded like Jesus and his mom?
Sometimes the truth is that Moms know things about us. They see all that we can be; they hold us to task to become, not just who they want us to be, but who they know God has created us to be.
I think that is what Mary was like. She had a mother’s heart, and she had pondered in her heart all the things that had been said about Jesus when he was born. And she KNEW he could change the water into wine before he did.
Sometimes it’s not a mother who has this kind of foresight. Sometimes it’s a father or a friend or a teacher or another relative or a complete stranger. Sometimes other people know what we can accomplish before we do.
Sometimes it is not the miracles that inspire us or save us, but the wisdom of someone who knows us well enough, cares enough for us to inspire us to do whatever it is they believe we can do.
I could talk more about this and give you stories about how people have pointed me in the right direction in my life. I could ask you to think about stories you might tell me when “Mother, or someone else in your life, knew best.”
But this morning there is something very important on my mind and in my heart that I want to talk about with you. I want to talk about a big news story that has happened this week. Can you guess what it is? Yes, the earthquake in Haiti. I don’t know how many of you have seen the news or the pictures that are being broadcast all over the world from Haiti. I hope you haven’t spent too much time looking at them for I can truly say I have never seen anything so terrible, ever, in I my whole life, all sixty-three years of it.
When I see such devastation and such terrible things happening to so many people, I wonder what God was thinking! I find myself asking, “How can this happen to people who already have suffered so much?” I have lived through big earthquakes in California. Even when the Bay Bridge that I drove on every weekday for three years collapsed, there was not the kind of devastation that we are seeing the people of Haiti suffering this week. I have felt sort of numb with despair, or sadness, about what the people, already poor people with so little, must suffer because of this earthquake.
So, am wondering, many things. I have asked God many questions this week, and I am wondering if you have too? What questions do you have of God about this? What are you thinking about? What are you worried about?
God is with the people of Haiti. I believe that, and it gives me comfort. I don’t believe the religious people who say that this earthquake happened because God is punishing the people of Haiti. The God who loves us cannot love them any less! Our God, the Holy Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, our God, is feeling all the things we are feeling when we look at those terrible pictures and think about the tragedy they are suffering. Our God is right there with them in all their pain and sorrow and fear just as God is right here with us, with all our questions and fears and worries.
Sometimes we say during worship that “we are living in a broken world.” But I have come to think of it as not so much as broken but as a “not yet world,” an unfinished world, a world not perfect as God intends. And so if we live in this world that is not finished, just as none of us is finished yet, then things will continue to shape and reshape, form and reform. So if we are honest about the bare scientific facts of it, the earth moved. It quaked because the plates of the earth are not yet in their perfected place. Even the earth is still forming itself! Some of that forming is being shaped by what we humans do or don’t do which is why we pay attention to our carbon footprint. But we cannot control that shaping and reforming of the earth’s plates very much, if at all. God does not reform the world, or reshape it, to punish people. God loves the world and all of creation as we go through the process of reforming and reshaping and growing ourselves. God loves the world as it grows itself into what it will be, even when it causes such devastation to the people God also loves. And like Mary, Jesus’ mother, God see the world the way it could be. God knows all that potential and sees it in the world even now, even when it is still not yet perfect! God encourages us and all of creation to grow into the perfection God knows we are capable of just as Mary encouraged Jesus to help her friends/relatives at the wedding. But even when we fail to do it, because none of us is Jesus who was already perfect, God loves us. God loves the world. God loves the people of Haiti and is heartbroken and in despair over their suffering.
What I have come to know, by faith and through prayer and study and just living on this beautiful complex, still forming and reforming itself earth, is that we have to be God’s partner when we build things or do things so that this world and all of creation can get the chance to keep forming and reforming itself the way God wants and not in terrible, destructive ways. That includes not allowing a whole nation to suffer from such terrible poverty that they are forced to build houses in ways that cannot withstand the shaking in places that are predisposed to earthquakes.
We have to be God’s partners when terrible things happen to people, as the hurricane did to the people in New Orleans a few years ago and we went to help. So, now these people in Haiti need help.
We are the hands and heart and voice of God here on this planet. We are God’s partners. And now that there is tragedy we know what we must do. But we also need to do a better job of being God’s partners before tragedy strikes.
So right now, what we can do is: send money, raise money, today. I know there are ways to send hard goods to the people of Haiti, but the truth is money gets more people more help. People on the ground, who know the ins and outs of Haiti, can make the best decisions about what is needed and when to get it. The Episcopal Relief and Development (ERD) is one place to give money (there is an insert in the bulletin). The Sisters of St. Margaret is another. The Sisters of St. Margaret are Episcopal nuns from Massachusetts who work in Haiti and serve the poorest of the poor.
If you are a kid, you can help too. You can have a lemonade stand or some other fund raising project, and give the money to one of these organizations that is in Haiti. That would do more than gathering supplies, at least for now. (I suspect we will have the opportunity to be God’s eyes and hands and heart in Haiti for a long time, and hard goods might be needed later on.)
In the long term we need to be more serious about fighting poverty and not blaming the poor for their misfortune. All of us need to do that.
The other thing we must do is to pray. At General Convention last summer a new prayer for when catastrophic things happen in the world was adopted. Each of us can pray it every day because praying such a prayer leads to actions that save lives now and in the future. The prayer goes like this:
Compassionate God, whose Son Jesus wept at the grave of his friend Lazarus: Draw near to us in this time of sorrow and anguish, comfort those who mourn, strengthen those who are weary, encourage those in despair, and lead us all to fullness of life; through the same Jesus Christ, our Savior and Redeemer, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, One God for ever and ever. Amen.
I think this prayer expresses what we all do when something like this happens. We mourn. We become numb. We even are fearful. To be stunned is a very human reaction, stunned into watching the unwatchable on TV.
Then we pray, “How can I to be God’s hands and voice and means of aiding those whom God loves?”
And then our prayer leads us to action. We give generously. Then we give again. And again.
We can be hope for the people of Haiti, every one of us. That would be a miracle, to let no more people die in this tragedy because the world has been so generous. For me that would be more of a miracle than water changed into wine. And I have to believe God would be in such actions of help and comfort that we give even more powerfully than God at that old wedding feast.
Amen.
The Reverend Dr. Gale Davis Morris
Church of the Good Shepherd