Water Into Wine: The Dynamics of Change
If I were to deliver a sermon or homily this coming Sunday, I would be dealing with the bible readings appointed for that particular day in the church calendar. The primary text in the set is the oft-misunderstood story of the wedding at Cana.
That's the one in which the Gospel of John's version of Jesus is said to have waved a hand over a couple of jugs of water, turning their contents into wine -- apparently a vintage that any sommelier anywhere would have been pleased to decant. "Change" would be my theme.
I could not forget that Monday will bring the annual observance Martin Luther King Jr. Day -- January 15 being his 87th birthday. At least a mention of Dr. King would be expected in anyone's homily. How to do it in a way that would honor that legacy as well as the gospel reading for the day?
Here's where I am so far:
One can take the Bible literally or seriously. Assuming that 21st-century people would rather it be taken seriously, I would offer a 21st-century interpretation of the water-into-wine story -- even as we know that water is water and wine is wine.
I thought first about water and especially the water in the Michigan city of Flint, which is seriously polluted with industrial effluent that appears to have become stuck in the mains that service the city's residents. The governor of Michigan, after much delay, has declared Flint's water system an emergency situation. Flint's citizens want and deserve to have the toxic cocktail that has passed for water turned in to actual water. For some in that otherwise ruined city, such a thing might be called a miracle.
One New Testament word for "miracle" is the Greek εργα (erga) meaning "work." It was bum work that allowed a substance posing as pure water to enter the taps and faucets of innocent people in the first place. It will take work, and plenty of it, to set things to right.
I would move on in the homily to the city of my birth, Detroit, and to its own water problems. After years of gross incompetence, the city's water authority decided to crack down on those who had not paid their water bills. In the city's ham-handed, bumbling way, workers were dispatched to turn off the water supply to houses, some of which turned out to be rentals with scofflaw landlords contracted to pay such bills regularly in arrears.
In an alarming number of cases, elderly widows and young single mothers with children awoke of a morning to discover that no water would come out of the tap. Great portions of heaven and earth had to be moved to get the water turned back on. Here and there, with the aid of concerned citizens, and here and there a city official with a heart, water was restored after some weeks or months.
If, in the midst of their troubles, had you offered any of those residents a fine bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon, they might well have asked if it could be turned into water. What happened finally was that nothing was turned into something.
And speaking of Flint and Detroit, a great majority of those affected by water shutoffs are minorities, many poor and -- if they're lucky -- on some form of public assistance.
Next I would turn to Dr. King and demonstrate how the Cana story is related to the εργα of his remarkable public ministry. The theme would remain "change," something that is generally resisted.
I heard Dr. King speak at a suburban Detroit high school just three weeks before his assassination in Tennessee. His address was all about change -- change that had taken place before him, in his time and what change he said must be achieved in the future. His martyrdom was a sacrifice upon the altar of change -- not from nothing into something, not from water into wine, but from injustice to justice, from exclusion to inclusion.
We have accomplished some of that change in fits and starts over the last 48 years, but the fine vintage of equal justice has yet to be achieved, let alone decanted into America's common cup.
That is the substance of what I would say, and in point of fact, did say more than once all those years ago in the late 1960s -- and not always with the approbation of congregants, some of whom were not ready for that particular change. "Too much too soon," a critic once fussed to me.
In reply I asked that if he could believe Jesus changed water into wine and that the priests of his church changed wine into blood by a mere prayer and ceremonial gesture -- which beliefs the man held dearly -- why could he not believe that a change from oppression to freedom was possible and, for that matter, desirable.
Cana and King. Great combination.
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