It’s all about grace, you know, and I don’t necessarily mean the Grace we baptized this morning, though that similarity in name is a pleasant coincidence nonetheless, this infant born into a family filled with the kind of love to which Jesus called us, a family grateful to God for the most miraculous gift we ever receive, the gift of new life.

But our story this morning calls us to a wedding in a small town in Galilee, lost to history, no doubt, but for John’s account – and it’s the only account of this wedding in all the Gospels – of Jesus turning water into wine.  We all know some version of that story, don’t we?  It’s like when we’re feeling really challenged, really pushed, to do something we know we can’t do, and we blurt out in exasperation, “Do you think I can walk on water?”  Well, the same thing happens with the story of the wedding in Cana.  That’s some trick, isn’t it, turning water into wine?  We’d all be in good shape, we contend, if we could do something like that.  Sometimes we can get caught up in these tricks Jesus performed and forget what they really mean.

And they’re not “tricks,” you see, they’re what John calls “signs” and others call “miracles.”  They all fall in the category of bending expectations beyond our reality – like calming a storm, restoring a dead friend to life, healing a long-suffering person with a chronic illness –  or walking on water or turning water into wine.  John tells us that these are all signs Jesus performed to show that he was distinctively different from other people.  Turning water into wine at the wedding in Cana was the first of the several signs recorded by John in his Gospel.

As I said, the signs in John are similar to the miracles in the other Gospels, but in John they play a very precise role.  First, they reveal or confirm that Jesus is indeed sent by God.  Remember the story of Nicodemus, the Jewish religious leader who comes to Jesus under the cover of the darkness of night to find out more about him.  “Rabbi,” he says, “we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.”  This is what John wants all of us to see in the signs Jesus performs: they reveal that he has the power of God in him.

Second, the signs in John are meant to convey what the heavenly world is like.  We all know a lot about the earthly life, don’t we?  So did John and all those who shared life with him in those times.  And from his Gospel we know that John’s view of reality was that there is a heavenly realm as well as an earthly realm, and that in the heavenly realm things go a lot better than they do on earth.  In the earthly realm he knew as we do about lives of conflicted relationships, people groping for insight and meaning, our being unsure of the truth and often feeling enslaved to forces beyond our control.  We all know about such things.  But John wanted us to believe in another world that is quite different from that.

So, a third thing these signs do is to help us know that we might experience even now some of what is promised for the future.  In those immortal words of chapter 3, verse 16, John tells us that God loves us so much that God sent Jesus into the world to reveal the possibility of our experiencing heaven in a partial way even while we continue to live in the world of limitations that we have grown to know all too well.  John believed that the sphere of heaven is something to which we will find our way eventually through the love of Christ, but that in this day, as well, we can have at least a taste of bliss both to entice us for the future and to open us to a life of abundance now.

And so the first sign Jesus performs in John’s Gospel is to turn water into wine at a wedding reception when suddenly the host discovers that the wine has run out before the celebration has concluded.  The setting of a wedding is particularly important for the telling of this story for in antiquity a wedding was usually a bigger celebration than even some of our lavish receptions today can be.  In Jesus’ culture a wedding reception went on for several days and brought a whole village together in celebration.  To run out of wine before the end of the party would be a shameful social indiscretion, which is why Jesus’ mother implores her son to do something for these poor people who are about to be very embarrassed in front of their friends. 

We realize, of course, that the whole story is told with symbolic meaning.  We’re talking about a wedding feast and running out of wine only because we’re trying to learn something about the nature of Jesus and his role among us.  The story is not really about wine; wine is used only as a symbol.  The story is really about the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.  It’s all about grace.  It’s about how Jesus keeps the party of life going just when we think it might end prematurely.  It’s all about the abundance of the grace of Jesus Christ that fills our drab world with joy and celebration.

I do think at least a mild disclaimer is called for here.  Wine is used by John as a symbol of bringing life to a party.  All too many of us know first hand how the use of wine can bring devastation to an alcoholic’s life and to the lives of people touched by the disease.  For all such people alcoholism flies in the face of the symbol of wine as the conveyer of joy to the party of life, but we have no choice but to accept that image in the story we have.  It’s just that we must keep all these things in mind and in proper perspective.  Then we can understand that when Jesus turns water into wine he demonstrates several things.  He shows that he has the power of heaven in his hand.  He shows also that he transforms the drab, ordinary, water-like world into something exciting and alive and sparkling like wine.  Into something the psalmist says “gladdens the human heart.”  This is part of the promise Jesus brings into our lives.

Remember that John’s Gospel begins with the words, “In the beginning . . .” as if in Jesus the world is starting all over again.  That’s how strongly he believes in the revelation of Jesus Christ and the grace with which Jesus comes to bless our lives.  If it’s all about grace, then it’s all about abundant grace.  While Jesus promises a life to come that will be beyond anything we have known on earth, then on earth he wants us to have a few glimpses, some definite hints, a bit of revelation about the Kingdom to come.  And that’s what the signs he performs are intended to show.

And perhaps for us this is precisely where our reality makes a rude and mocking entrance.  How can we talk about abundance of life in the aftermath of a horrific calamity of nature?  How can we talk about abundance when all around us loom the signs of scarcity?  How?

As a start we might turn to a fellow traveler in faith of the century just past who managed to reconcile the aspirations of faith with the undeniable mire of reality.  I’m referring to Reinhold Niebuhr who spent much of his thought and writing, especially in the years around World War II, wrestling with human sin in the light of the revelation of God in Jesus Christ.  Recognizing the persistent selfishness permeating fallen human existence, Niebuhr nevertheless insisted that love is the “law of life,” deeply embedded in human nature.  The trouble is that we never encounter love at full strength.  It is always compromised and curtailed by self-interest.

A little Jewish girl in Amsterdam, Anne Frank, intuited much the same thing at the same time.  She was a theologian of the heart.  She wouldn’t give in to a world not permeated with the spirit of love, despite all the threat she knew and the horror she would come to know.  We thought of her again in the past few days as the woman who helped preserve her image for history reached the end of her life, too, calmly and still with protestation that trying to save the Frank family from the Nazis was merely a human response to evil requiring no credentials of heroism.

But, we, hardcore pragmatists that we can be, might yet ask Niebuhr, wouldn’t it be better just to accept things as they are, to rest content with lesser moral principles to guide our action?  Why aspire to higher things when more often than not we can have only lower things?  Niebuhr, though a man of strong faith, was enough the realist to  ask those things himself, and the answer he came up with is that the norm of love is yet relevant and essential, even if it is impossible to maintain consistently in this life.  Heaven yet points the way beyond our day-to-day

“Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,” the poet said.  “Or what’s a  heaven for?”  And that goes for women, too.

Recognition that our nature as God’s creatures is to love selflessly – that’s what Jesus taught us – even though we cannot actually carry it through in every situation in every time, should make us dissatisfied with our various compromises as well as our outright failures, breaking us out of our complacency and opening us toward continual transformation.  In a similar way, the abundance of the grace of Jesus Christ in the world acts as a way to orient our response to a time of scarcity.  It is not that we should expect abundance to randomly break in and then be disappointed when it doesn’t, but that we should recognize that scarcity, like love fallen short or a lack of hospitality sending friends away from the table, is a mark of a socio-economic order that is not yet fulfilled, that falls short of realizing the full blessings of the creator.  Things really aren’t as they should be.

There’s not a lot any of us could have done to prevent the earthquake in Haiti, but, as in New Orleans before the hurricane, there could have been more attention to preventive measures.  Something could have been done about building codes, for instance, to prevent such horrific destruction of property and human life.  And there is something many in the world are doing right now in response, and in that response of compassion the abundant grace of Jesus Christ cries out among mangled limbs and shattered lives.

Isaiah’s words this morning – words Jesus knew and followed – proclaim that God has always wanted to restore all people to be known as “God’s Delight.”  The story of the wedding in Cana helps flesh out that image of delight.  It tells us that in the ways of Christ we can expect to discover the holy in the mundane.  We can expect to glimpse God in the humble clay of humanity.  Every day we open our eyes to another dawn we realize that God fills us with the elegance of breath and love and joy in savoring the simple pleasures that we cannot make ourselves.

And it tells us something else, as well.  Despite the ills of old age that come inevitably upon us all, there is something yet beyond comprehension that infuses the years after work and childrearing and the hectic pace of life with a wisdom and an honesty of emotion that taste like a rich and full-bodied glass of wine poured out around a table where God is yet the gracious host and we the welcome and cherished guests.  Amen.