He turned it into wine, not prune juice

He turned it into wine, not prune juice The Dover Church
January 20, 2013 –2nd Sunday after Epiphany   Isaiah 62: 1-5, John 2: 1-11

Tonight is the big game and I would like to start this morning by talking about a phenomenon called the National Football League experience. The NFL experience is a spectacle as well as a sporting event, with so many peripheral avenues for engagement that entire regions become engaged in the party. I speak as someone who watches a football game for the football game and is sort of amazed at all the other stuff going on which other people seemingly enjoy as much as I enjoy the game, the personalities, the side shows, cheerleaders, the shirts and paraphernalia, the concession stands. Driving down the road, surfing the radio dial in the car, we’ll hear snippets of this bad song or that bad song as the radio scans, when suddenly the words “Tom Brady” will jump out and from the back seat I’ll hear, “what about Tom Brady?” Leo doesn’t know much about Tom Brady and doesn’t yet understand the rules of a football game, but he knows that Tom Brady is someone special. All his friends talk about Tom Brady. Many of them have Brady shirts as prized garments. What he knows is that Tom Brady makes people feel excited, filled with the sense of possibility, or even certainty, of really good things coming our way.
Take that phrase, “coming our way.” I hear people referring to the Patriots with the words “we” and “us,” as in “we’re going to win” and “there’s no way they can stop us.” We who? Us who? No one I know is going to be on that field tonight, but something about the NFL experience makes people identify strongly and personally with the superhuman characters running around out there. We love them. We hate them. They make our dreams come true, or crush them. We are all in this together. Many people metaphorically live and die with the home team.
Then there’s the game itself. We may not care much for football, but most of us are aware that there is a game going on tonight and that most of us will be watching it. Even if we don’t enjoy football, most of us would enjoy getting together with others to share the event, have a party with food and drink, fun conversation regularly interrupted by the outbursts from the football enthusiasts, “would you quiet down. I can’t hear!” Or “did you see that?” and everyone will stop talking for a moment, except for the few in the kitchen who will have to be called in, focus on the TV, and see what needs to be seen repeated over and over again in replay, from this angle and that, in real time and slow motion, with expert commentary and evaluation of what we are seeing and what it means. Even if we watch alone, we still do a few things that make the big game special, liking having some of our favorite foods and drinks on hand. Most significantly, we’ll clear our calendar, set this evening aside so that we can watch the game without interruptions…sort of the way Sunday mornings used to be when people felt the same way about church. The big game takes priority.
Then there’s being at the stadium itself, with the parties going on in the parking lot, everyone dressed up in special clothes, everyone happy and expectant, everyone tolerant of each other, everyone enjoying the eccentricities of various oddballs who would be looked at askance in other places at other times, although our oddballs are tame compared to Raiders oddballs who dress up like monsters or Packers oddballs who body paint in subzero weather. Sure, there will be public drunkenness, but it’s mostly good natured part of the fun and security is present to corral anyone overstepping the norms, not at all like the bad old days at Schaefer Stadium.
The energy in the place is infectious. A roar starts and spreads around the stadium. People are on their feet with excitement. The music. The musket volleys. Someone starts a wave and it rolls all the way around. People hold up signs and are delighted when they see themselves on the jumbo-tron. Everyone lives the ecstasy or dies a thousand deaths with each bounce of the ball. When we win, which is quite a lot these days compared to my youth, everyone’s expectations are met and we float home on a tide of euphoria, looking forward to Sports Talk radio in the morning when we can relive it all again and begin looking forward to the really big game in two weeks. When we lose, it's never because the other team was better. Someone played badly of the refs were inept.
I imagine that most of you are moderate to enthusiastic Patriots fans. Am I right? I further imagine that the rest of you are at least mildly tolerant of the rest of our enthusiasms, because if you weren’t you probably would have moved to Arkansas or Idaho by now where they don’t have any sports teams. But you get it, the joy of the party, the fullness of life which brings us all together. Well here’s the kicker. When we heard our lessons for this morning, did it occur to you that they were trying to tell us that that is how our faith in Jesus supposed to be? This is how our life together as the church is supposed to be? It's supposed to be a party: a great, big, raucous Jewish wedding banquet, with wine in overflowing abundance. We are supposed to be the barrels of water transformed into the very best wine. It's about being called by name by a God who knows us and loves us better than we know or love ourselves, and getting in the dance. It's about joy and community, mystery and wonder, about being on the way and not wanting to just settle down somewhere comfortable, because the path and destination are so much better than anywhere we could be right now for long. It's about a personal relationship with a God, known to us in the person of Jesus, and the hope, confidence, blessing, energy and purpose we receive from that relationship being both the wellspring of our life force and the purpose to which we devote ourselves, mind, body and spirit…in other words, a lot like living the National Football League experience!
Now before you chalk off what I am saying as the wild enthusiasm and starry eyed dreaming of an unapologetic extrovert and a Patriots fan who thinks that everyone has to be happy, boisterous, unguarded and dancing every moment of every day, let me set you straight. I spent much of my life in libraries with books. Sure I taught, but I wasn't pals with my students. For fun, I went off fishing by myself...nothing better. I lived alone for many years. Sure I carried on with my friends and had a social life, but I needed long stretches of pure contemplative solitude to energize me.
If you don’t believe me, listen to this. When I was going through psychological evaluation for fitness for ordination, I spent three days taking exams, filling in questionnaires and hopping through aptitude batteries. My first meeting with the psychiatrist went something like is. Me sitting in a comfortable armchair across from the doctor, with the doctor looking through my reports. The doctor puts down the folder of papers, looks at me over the top of her glasses and says, "Maxwell, did it ever occur to you that everything you like to do does not require other people? That your happiness might preclude other people?"
Because her question seemed so obvious to me, it took me a moment to figure out what she was really asking. I leaned forward in my chair and asked, "is that a problem?" To which she continued in her stating the obvious way, "ministry is a people business, Maxwell, and people don't seem to rate essential to your personality type." Since she was trying to help me which could only happen if I was honest, and I hadn't Marie-Laure yet so I really didn't know what I was talking about, and I had been serving churches for four years by this point so I thought I knew everything there was to know about "being out there in the field" as opposed to being a doctor in an office, I responded, "I get enough of people at work. The things I like to do for myself and by myself replenish my spirit so I can go back to church and be with all those people." As you can see, they still ordained me. I guess you don't have to be Anthony Quinn in Zorba the Greek to be a follower of Jesus.
My point is simple: There are churches all over the place that are a lot like NFL games: enthusiastic, overflowing with expectation and goodwill, a sense of identity and purpose, a strong commitment to specific outcomes, an expectation that others will want to enjoy what they enjoy, and a real conviction that it’s going to be good, really good, maybe even Super. Communities where things are so good that they go out the places where they aren’t and fix them. Communities that are so happy that they go out and invite people who are sad. Communities that are so confident that they go out and invite people who have lost hope. Communities that are so warm that they go out and invite people who are alone or lonely. They come in all shapes, sizes and personality types, from small churches of quiet Lutherans in upstate Minnesota to mega churches in Lexington full of suburban Bostonians. I've seen it in monasteries in Vermont and France, a synagogue with the confirmands, Quaker meetings, catholic churches here and there, and even New England congregational churches. These communities of faith are living the Good News. It doesn’t have to be Gillette Stadium sized. It doesn’t have to be that wild, but Jesus turned the water into wine, not prune juice.