January 19, 2025 - The Second Sunday after Epiphany

My friends, I speak to you today in the name of one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated.
Good morning, Epiphany. Did anyone stay up to watch the Lions lose their playoff game last night? I did. I’m bummed. I joked with Abbey afterward that today’s sermon focuses on joy, and yet there is very little joy left for me now, knowing I’ll have to watch a Super Bowl without the 15-win Lions in it. I’ll survive, don’t worry. There’s always next year, and disappointment comes with the territory of Lions fandom, I’m told. Also, a bit more seriously, tomorrow will bring, for some, a far more serious equivalent of my Lions joylessness with the Presidential inauguration. So, let’s talk about joy. We need some joy.
Our gospel today finds us at a wedding. I would guess that everyone in this room has at least attended a wedding, and many of you have looked forward to them, planned them, and participated in them yourselves. As you might assume, there is one wedding that stands out to me as particularly memorable: my own. Abbey and I got married in Westerville, Ohio, just north of Columbus, on February 11, 2012, on the coldest day of that year at the beginning of a snowstorm. We got married in a barn slash event space before we were remotely familiar with Episcopal liturgy, and we had about 70 people in attendance, keeping it to only our extended families. We had a simple ceremony with a surprisingly long sermon in the middle of it; we had a reception where Abbey and I led a round of pub-style trivia and never got a plate of food, and so we had to grab McDonald’s on the way home. We danced, we drank champagne, we shoved cake up each other’s noses, or more accurately, she got me good and I avoided smearing her makeup. We left the barn after the reception, and we stepped out into the falling snow, surrounded by guests with sparklers on our way to our car. And it was all magical.
Though I was certainly nervous to get in front of 70 people that day, the main emotion I remember from the ceremony was not anxiety nor fear nor worry, but barely containable joy. Weddings, you see, are joyous occasions, about as joyous a day as you can get, and to look at someone you love and make a commitment in front of your family and then have everybody celebrate with you, it’s just all joy. For one day, and if you’re really lucky for a few more days after that, it’s all joy.
We also likely know that wedding ceremonies are not always smooth affairs. Something is almost always guaranteed to go wrong; there are too many moving parts, too many people to please, too many people who want to be involved. That’s not to say couples should streamline or simplify their weddings either. Part of the joy of a wedding comes in the group participation, and sometimes things will go awry. At our wedding, the lighting was a bit brighter than we wanted, and the smell of the appetizers served to our guests apparently filled the lobby area in the barn, though we ourselves didn’t notice. One of Abbey’s cousins still points out to me that her memory of our wedding will always be the smell of those appetizers. That’s fine, I suppose, but that’s not the memory we intended to create. We didn’t even realize there were going to be appetizers, that was someone else’s idea. But we still laugh about it, so I guess, still joy.
Here in our gospel reading today, we have our third of three “epiphanies” in the story of this liturgical season, three times celebrated for first revealing God’s glory through the person of Jesus Christ to the world. We had the star with the Magi, we had the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan, and now, we have this story. This epiphany comes at a wedding, and one of the wedding details is amiss, something is indeed going wrong: they’re running out of wine. Unwilling to let the party come to a halt, Mary, the mother of Jesus, steps up and takes care of it. She knows, perhaps, that it is time for her son’s true identity to be revealed through the “first of his signs,” as John puts it, what we have come to know as miracles.
Mary lets Jesus know that the wine has run low. Jesus responds with words that sound gruff or grumpy or even rude to our ears in English, but commentators all assure us that there is no ill intent in Jesus’s response. These are simply the words used to address each other in that time, with all due respect intended. Don’t get lost in translation here. “Mom, what do you want me to do?” Jesus essentially replies, and then Mary goes to the servants and says, “Do what this man Jesus says to do.” And then they do it, a lesson about following Jesus without hesitation might be available to us there... but let’s continue.
Jesus then takes six stone water jars of purification, the jars set aside for rituals and cleansing, and essentially says, “Let’s use those to keep this party going.” He has them filled with water, and then when the drink is served to the chief party planner, the master of ceremonies, it is somehow the best wine he has ever tasted. He tells the groom about it, and this sign, this miracle, is convincing enough that people begin to believe in him.
There are so many beautiful lessons from this short story of epiphany here in the second chapter of the Gospel according to John. The fact that Jesus didn’t reveal the glory of God on the dance floor or at the first-century microphone in a toast to the couple or in the always-too-long wedding ceremony sermon, but that he revealed his identity to the servants first, and through an act of service, there’s an important lesson for us there. The fact that Jesus used the purification jars is interesting too, taking an old religious ritual and making it new, connecting the Jewish ritual with good wine in place of water, that’s fascinating to me. I think I’ll save that lesson, that sermon, for next January. The levels of that go too deep for today. But what I think we need to hear from this passage, this epiphany, this morning here at the Church of the Epiphany, is that God did not come to earth to be revealed in a joyless religion of guilt and self-denial and concern that we aren’t good enough, worry that we ourselves might not make the cut. The glory of God was revealed at a wedding, where Jesus simply made sure the party kept going, where a joyous feast could continue, and better than before.
University of Chicago theologian Richard Hotchkins writes that, “Christians rightly ought to be celebrating constantly. We ought to be preoccupied with parties, banquets, feasts, and merriment. We ought to give ourselves over to endless joy because we have been liberated from the fear of life and the fear of death. We ought to attract people to the church quite literally by the fun there is in being a Christian.” That last line might bring a skeptical laugh if you consider how stark the contrast often is between “having fun” and “being a Christian” in our twenty-first century American context. The well-intentioned ideals of a life of discipline, of self-denial, of purity, of confession, and of perfection have been elevated by churches for so long that they have become the dominant image of Christianity, one that often ends up being dour and gloomy and dark. You’re never good enough, and there’s undeniably more fun to be had outside the church than inside it, right? That’s the popular image, and it’s hard to refute or push against it today.
But our Savior Jesus Christ’s very first sign at Epiphany two thousand years ago was not to shut the party down, but to make it better, bringing the best wine they had ever tasted to guests who had already drained their supply. God wants our lives to be a celebration, God expects our communities of faith to be parties so appealing and compelling that no one can see us and deny the truth of love, the goodness of this life we get to live.
For too many, religion (and Christianity, in particular) has instead become a few moments of ritual clearly separate from real life; an odd, semi-weekly observance of values we believe enough to profess; a strangely quiet and disconnected hour or two on Sunday morning that we might see and frame as fuel for the rest of our week, but often reduced to a formality that rarely connects with anything we truly enjoy.
Friends, that is not my experience of this Church of the Epiphany. Thanks to our Sunday morning worship and our community brunch, we get to see joy on the faces of our gathered friends and church family every week. I even get messages from those of us so unfortunate to have to go on tropical vacations, messages that say how much they miss being together in these colder months of the year. Abbey and I regularly marvel at how much we’re looking forward to church each week. In an hour or so, I’m going to have the privilege of sharing our 2024 annual report which is full of genuinely joyous messages about the good work we’re all doing to make South Haven and western Michigan look more like biblical shalom, like the kingdom of God. We are living this message well already here, Epiphany, we are drinking of the good wine, and the party keeps going. People see that we’re living out of joy and love and welcome and they want to be a part of it.
What I will ask of you this morning, church, is to continue drinking that good wine. Continue, in the face of the Lions’ playoff loss but more importantly in the face of the far more serious difficulties and worries of life, of tomorrow and of this coming year, continue to celebrate, to feast together, to “suck all the marrow out of life,” as Henry David Thoreau once wrote. Continue to be endlessly joyous. Continue to make hope possible through your very lives in the face of convincing despair.
There is an image of the divine being that focuses solely on the cross, on our desperate need for resurrection, focusing so much on it in all seasons of the year that the darkness we’re struggling to fight against becomes the prevailing image rather than the light of the Incarnation, of Epiphany, of Easter. Today though, with Jesus’s miracle at the wedding as our Epiphany story, I want us to remember that even the Lord our God attended a party in an unjust and broken world and made it his work to keep the wine flowing.
Remember, friends: his light - his joyous, holy light - it shines brightly in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it. Amen.
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