Mural from the Anglican Cathedral of Port-au-Prince

You may have seen the story last year about a nurse (Bronnie Ware) who counseled the dying in their last days and revealed the top five regrets we humans tend to have at the end of our lives:

1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

2.  I wish I hadn't worked so hard.

3.  I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.

4.  I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

5.  I wish that I had let myself be happier.   

Let me repeat those one more time --- Often we human beings who seek to live a spiritual life, who yearn for a connection with the divine make Jesus or any other spiritual teacher into a party pooper. Instead of following a Jesus that turns water into wine, we seek out a religion that wants to turn down the music, flip on the lights and send everyone home with a list of chores, duties, responsibilities and guilt trips. We turn our gurus and spiritual traditions into excuses for not "being true to ourselves", we make religion into a task master, another reason to deny how we really feel, to cut us off from others rather than connecting us with them, and above all we let our piety keep us from happiness.

But if we are serious about Jesus --- the untamed rabbi who turns the world upside down, the Jesus of scripture and of history and not the pious Jesus created and propped up by the self-righteous of the past and present --- we have to let go of our purity rituals, our fears of not having enough or being good enough and invite transformation and celebration to lead us onto the dance floor, where we can let our freak flags fly.

You may say as Jesus says to his mother, "but my hour has not yet come" meaning I'm not ready to spring into the fullness of life that I'm capable of ---- I'm not ready to let folks see my gifts --- let me just conform, blend into the background, be a wallflower. But Mary knows her son, and is perhaps sick and tired of waiting patiently for her miracle baby to show his stuff --- remember her powerful song about the hungry being filled with good things and the rich being sent away empty --- Mary's nudging Jesus onto life's stage, she's throwing him into the swimming pool --- "you are as ready as you will ever be."

Will we let Mary nudge us into our first miracle? Will we show our stuff? Are we prepared to break a few customs, bend a few rules --- live a life true to our selves, work less hard, express our true feelings, stay in touch with our friends, and let ourselves be happier? We need a religion that asks us to consider not whether there's life after death but whether there's life before we die?

I think that's actually the invitation that Jesus gives to us throughout the gospels, in all his teachings about the realm of God, his actions of healing and feeding people, proclaiming forgiveness, eating with supposedly the wrong kind of people and calling out the hypocrites --- Jesus seems to be pushing up against those 5 human regrets at the end of life --- & saying we have freedom to choose a different course --- Jesus and Mary offer us a fuller, truer and more exciting life right now of ongoing celebration, joy and laughter, where the best wine is still yet to be poured, and there is more than enough for everyone.

I know a few people who have been burdened rather than liberated by the religion of their youth, a few weeks ago I was visiting a family member who was raised in a very conservative evangelical household and I sensed that he was in great pain, a kind of labor pain, as the self that is within him is striving to be born, and yet the container, especially the religious container is too small, too confining for that baby to fit ---- he expressed anger with God about the frustrations he was having trying to make sense of his call to serve and the narrowness and rigidness of the institution --- I wondered whether God wasn't angry too --- not at him but at the ways that the same faith tradition had limited God as well as this man's journey and power. Rather than my relative being angry at God, I asked him if he could imagine God being angry in solidarity with him, as a fellow sufferer and captive of a broken and oppressive system?

So what does this water into wine story have to say to us at Turk & Lyon? Perhaps we are invited to consider these 5 regrets before death not just as individuals but as a community --- perhaps we may want to revise our approach to what being faithful to the way of Jesus looks like? Maybe we need to let Jesus move and transform us from taskmasters to party animals --- there's enough examples of Christianity in the world that put down rather than lift up the human condition, there's far too many somber wakes for lives half lived and not enough celebratory weddings where wine is overflowing...