"Word: John (Water to Wine)" by Jim LePage, on Flickr

Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. To one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the discernment of spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. All these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses. (1 Corinthians 12:4-11)

On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. When the wine gave out, the mother of Jesus said to him, "They have no wine." And Jesus said to her, "Woman, what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come." His mother said to the servants, "Do whatever he tells you." Now standing there were six stone water jars for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons. Jesus said to them, "Fill the jars with water." And they filled them up to the brim. He said to them, "Now draw some out, and take it to the chief steward." So they took it. When the steward tasted the water that had become wine, and did not know where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew), the steward called the bridegroom and said to him, "Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the good wine until now." Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him. (John 2:1-11)
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Matt and I are in the process of buying our very first house. We spent Friday morning looking at four houses, weighing the merits of beautiful, old wood floors versus the size of the backyard, the size of the kitchen versus the size of the garage, the number of bedrooms versus the number of bathrooms. At the end of the day, we had two contenders – the biggest and most expensive house we looked at, and the smallest house that we looked at. An exercise in weighing scarcity and abundance.

Going forward, when we pack up all of our stuff to move, I can guarantee you that I will, at various points, exclaim, “we have too much stuff!” and decide that I need to ditch half my clothes, half my shoes, half of our extra towels, and all of the half-used bottles of shampoo and lotion that live under the sink. And I’ll cringe at how many boxes we fill up with books alone! And then, we’ll move into our new place, and we’ll put all of our stuff where it goes, and we’ll realize that we don’t have nearly enough furniture or artwork, and I’ll feel in a rush, once again, to go out and find things to fill the empty space. An exercise, once again, in scarcity and abundance.

It’s a hard balance, trying to find the sweet spot of “just enough” in life. And truth be told, most of us, when given the option, would rather find ourselves with “too much” than with “not enough.” Unlike the host at today’s wedding feast in Cana, we would rather have too much wine than ever let the wine run out.

Wedding feasts in Jesus time were a very big deal. They were all about abundance. You wanted a lot of people to come to the feast – remember the parable of the wedding feast that Jesus tells where the host invites a lot of friends and family who all give him excuses why they can’t come, and so he ends up going out and collecting whomever he can find from the street to fill his table with guests? Wedding feasts were days-long affairs, full of people and food and drink and celebration. As the host, you were responsible for keeping your guests entertained, and filled with food and drink.

So at this feast, when the wine runs out, it is a problem. A serious one.

Word spreads through the crowd, and I suspect that people took the news as a sign that the festivities were drawing to a close, and they started to pack themselves up and say their goodbyes. Word reaches Mary, and she does what any good, proud, overreaching mother would do: she say, “Hold on! My son can fix this!” And she finds Jesus, and even though he isn’t terribly enthused at granting the request, he nevertheless instructs the servants to fill jars with water, which he then transforms into wine, in what must be the best party trick ever recorded.

But this miracle is far more than a party trick. It is the first of many signs that Jesus performs in John’s gospel, leading all the way up to him raising Lazarus from the dead. It is a sign to the crowds, the disciples, and to us that Jesus is the son of God, the word-made-flesh, the one who brings life and light.

The true miracle is not that Jesus turned water into wine, but rather that he turned a lot of water into a lot of very good wine.

The stone jars of water that Jesus changed to wine were huge barrels of water used for the Jewish rite of purification. Jesus didn’t just come up with a few bottles of wine or even just a barrel’s worth. Jesus turned one hundred fifty gallons of water into one hundred fifty gallons of wine. It is an absurd quantity. An obscene quantity. Probably way more than Mary had bargained for.

And as to the quality of this wine? When the steward tastes the wine, he rushes to the groom and wonders out loud why he saved the best wine for last, when the custom was to start with the good wine and pull out the cheap stuff after people were too drunk to notice.

The miracle in today’s gospel is not that Jesus was able to provide when the wine ran out, but that Jesus chose to respond to scarcity with extraordinary abundance, beyond anything that we could provide for ourselves, beyond anything we could expect. The Jesus who meets us when our wine has run out is the Jesus who (later in John) says “I came that [you] may have life, and have it abundantly.”

Now I think that when we hear Jesus say this we automatically assume that his offer of abundant life looks like our own ideas of abundance: more stuff, more education, more money, more opportunity, more independence.

After a very full day of house-shopping, I sat in our motel room Friday afternoon, decompressing and mindlessly flipping channels. As I flipped, I found two different channels that were airing afternoon marathons of shows about hoarders.

On one of those episodes, a woman nestled into the center of a bedroom filled floor-to-ceiling with papers, food containers, clothes, pictures, and shopping bags, saying into the camera that she found all of the extreme clutter to be comforting, because she was surrounded by things that were important to her, padded in by stuff, protected from the world outside by mountains of clutter.

Is this the abundance that Jesus is talking about? Is this a picture of abundant life? We know that it isn’t. And we know that, on a lesser scale, we do the very same thing. We mistake abundance of stuff or wealth or opportunity for abundant life, because we find comfort in all of these things that pad us in and protect us from the world. We say that we are just trying to be prepared, with our extra bedrooms and extra calories and extra clothes and shoes and even that money we have set aside “for a rainy day.”

But in truth, I think that we collect all of this stuff because we are scared. We are scared about what we’ll find if all of this other stuff gets stripped away. We are scared about what will happen if the wine, someday, runs out.

We are scared to take down the front that we put up when we smile and say “everything’s fine,” even if we know that everything is NOT fine, because we are scared to let our emotions out.

We are scared to cut things out of our crazy busy schedules because we are scared that these are the only things that bind us together as couples or families, or we are scared that saying “no” to a good opportunity will hurt us or our children down the road.

We are scared to live with less stuff, because advertising keeps telling us that we are woefully unprepared for the twists and turns of life, unless we buy more stuff, and there is a little part of us that actually believes that manipulative message, and so we are scared of being unprepared or left out.

We are scared to let the wine run out, because when we clear away all the clutter that comforts us, we have to then look at ourselves for who we are, and let others see us for who we are, and we don’t always like who we are, so it’s much much easier to face a superabundance of stuff and opportunity instead of facing the truth about ourselves.

But we do not have to be scared. God has given us a new name and delights in us, and this is the only truth about ourselves that actually matters. God gives us the promise of life and life abundant. God promises us gallons and gallons of his best wine, precisely when our own decanters have run dry. The life-abundant that Christ gives is a life showered with gifts of the spirit – gifts of knowledge and faith and comfort and healing, gifts given to us for our own good and for the common good. The abundance of Christ is hope even in hardship, joy even in trouble, love even in brokenness, live even in death.

We do not need to be scared. We do not need to be stingy with our wine in fear that it might run out. We can go forward to share our gifts and to pull down the walls of our cluttered lives. God loves us for who we are, even in times of scarcity, even when we are vulnerable. For God’s greatest picture of love for us is that God himself became human, vulnerable, weak even to the point of death, so that we might have life.

So I don’t know about you, but my heart clings to the God of today’s gospel: the God of water and wine, the God of overflowing abundance, the God who is everlasting and generous and who promises not to abandon us when we run out of the wine of hope or joy or strength or patience or faith.

And when we come up to this table, and celebrate our own feast with bread and wine, I can cling to the promise that even just a taste of this heavenly food will sustain me in a way that no other food can. Christ’s table is an everlasting banquet, one where the wine will never run out, where the wedding feast will never end, where there is no limit to the guest list and no expectation that we bring along any expensive gifts.

We simply come to this table with our empty hands. We come empty and leave filled with the grace of God. This is what the wedding feast at Cana is all about – God’s abundance of grace for our lives.

Trusting in that grace is a leap of faith, certainly. But hear God’s word of promise for you and for me: He says, “ I am enough. I am more. Be free from your fear. Trust me, and celebrate. For I give you life and life abundant. I am the good wine, and I have saved for you the best for last.”