January 30, 2016

Living in abundance


Sometimes John’s gospel pops up in the lectionary when we least expect it.  Here we are in Luke, following along in what seems a logical progression, then Heere’s Johnny! And like a crazy dream that we don’t quite know what to do with, we are trying to sort out a variety of images and reactions to a passage that is hard for modern minds to understand.

We could wrestle with the sheer volume involved in turning six stone jars of 20 to 30 gallons each into wine.  Cornell University has done an analysis of wine and says:

“A standard bottle of wine is 750 milliliters (ml), meaning a case of 12 bottles contains 9 liters, or 2.378 gallons. 2.6 pounds of grapes yields one bottle of wine. At 150 gallons per ton, a ton of grapes becomes 150/2.378 gallons per case, or a little more than 63 cases of wine. With 12 bottles per case, we have 756 bottles in total.”
     Conversion Factors: From Vineyard to Bottle from Cornell University

We could focus on the symbolism of Jesus turning water for purification rites into wine for celebrating new life in a community, from what we might assume was dry and empty ritual into the life of the party.

We could look at the fact that John does not have a last supper story with the institution of our communion service.

We could even dissect and puzzle over Jesus’ rather snippy remark to his mother, in what sounds very much like a Boxing Day conversation after a long Christmas day with the family, “Mother, I’m 35, can’t you start treating me like an adult instead of telling me what to do?”

Or we could dig into allegory and metaphor.  But I’d rather talk about pianos.  Or at least one piano in particular.

This piano was sitting rather sadly in a snowbank about three weeks ago.  Its family had moved out, leaving it in the back alley rather than take it to wherever they were going.  It had accumulated a new wardrobe of a snow hat and snow coat to keep it warm, but its wood didn’t like that very much.  And it was lonely and sad, feeling like a burden, I would guess, since its family had decided it was too much hassle and expense to keep it with them.

Someone came along who knew a little about pianos but had only ever played a keyboard.  She was not what you would call a musician, but she dabbled with different instruments and had sung in choirs since she was old enough to sing in the children’s choir at her church.

The abandoned piano got stuck in her head, and New Year’s Day things fell into place.  She was having coffee with a relative and telling him about the piano.  She had told her brother and parents about the piano, and they called a few friends to come and check it out.  One of the people had lots of reasons why the piano should be left where it was.  Stealing is stealing, even when the house is empty, people have been consulted and two inches of snow was covering it.  Snow would have permanently damaged it.  Pianos should only be moved by professionals.  The piano would damage the movers.  Even if we did get it out of the snowbank, there was no way we could drag it the block and a half to the house. And what about the steps? And where would we put it? And so on and so on.

The rest of us, curiously enough, were willing to give it a try because we loved the girl and also because we were all deeply committed to walking in the Christian path.  If Christians can put their hopes in a story as crazy as water into wine, a piano is easy.

However, dragging a small studio upright along an unshovelled sidewalk for what was more like three blocks not two was no cake walk. 

It was fun and encouraging.  We took plenty of breaks, talked about different ways to lever the piano up the front steps, how to deal with the chipping varnish and how to get it dry, and wiped snow off the wood at every break.  We did hit a bump where one of the beautifully carved front legs cracked, but the girl was sure that she could fix it in her woodworking shop with the help of a friend who knows how to restore furniture.

And we managed the stairs and put cardboard under it to catch any drips, tickled the ivories and checked all the strings and hammers.

The nay sayer pushed along with the rest of us, bad knee and all.  It felt like he wanted to say something else that would prove his point that this was a foolish endeavor, but he was at a loss for words.  The rest of us knew that we had accomplished something beyond the scope of one person, quite unexpectedly, and it cheered us immensely to know that we could work together to make a young lady’s dream come true.

The piano is now nestled in a dry, warm and hopefully musical environment, waiting to become acclimatized enough to get tuned.  It sounds a little like a honkytonk piano right now, and I’m sure it is as eager as the dreamer is to get back to making music.

When we gather with Jesus at the heart of our understanding of life, abundance pours out in unexpected ways.  Not just a little bit of abundance but abundance large enough to move pianos, turn a disastrous wedding into the event of the century in a little town that no one had ever heard of before.  No one knew Cana or cared much about it before John’s Gospel, and now it’s visited by tourists who want to see the place where John’s Gospel has Jesus start his ministry of abundant love and grace.

May we too find love and grace flowing abundantly in this community to help us find the faith that can move pianos, move mountains, and yes, maybe even turn water into wine in celebration of God’s amazing gift of Jesus to our scared world. 

January 09, 2016

Who Are You?

A trailer for a movie that is currently in the theatre starts with the question, “who are you?” and it begs other questions like, “where did you come from, why are you here, and where will you go from here?”

All good storytelling begins with those kinds of questions and every author or writer, if they want to really connect with their audience, needs to wrestle with those questions.  Every teenager wishing to be an adult, every person struggling with addiction, everyone filling out forms for employment insurance, everyone facing life after losing a significant life companion, everyone facing a job transition have to revisit these questions again and again.

Who are you? Where did you come from? Why are you here? Where will you go from here?  It is the human quest and it is the hero’s quest.  We all want to be heros, and these questions remind us of the fact that we are not as heroic as we wish, but we are all human.

The gospel writers were human too, and telling the story of where they found answers for their questions.  Whether they saw themselves as heroic or as human, they clearly found the answers in Jesus of Nazareth, to the point that they all saw him as Jesus the Messiah, the Christ.

The Christmas stories point to who they saw Jesus.  Matthew saw Jesus as the new Moses, planning to lead his people Israel to a new promised land despite terrible hardship.  Matthew included Moses-like incidents, the transfiguration on the mountaintop where Jesus talked to God, the wilderness wandering, the massacre of infant boys, royalty that recognizes the child, a stepfather confused with the identity of his son, and the refugee journey into Egypt, land of Joseph and Moses.

Luke saw Jesus as the new Adam, connecting all humanity, Jews and Gentiles alike, yet rooted and grounded in his Jewish heritage.  So we have shepherds, people that practised their trade around the world but seen as outsiders, we have prophets and prophetesses in the temple, we have infants in wombs leaping in joyful recognition of their master approaching, and a woman who ponders things deep in her heart.  We have a census to show his family struggling with Roman oppression, like many people in the ancient world.

Mark started his gospel off not with Bethlehem or angels or wise men or parents or stars.  He started it off with a man emerging from the Jordan River after being baptised by a well-known preacher.  And from that humble beginning, with feet planted firmly in the mud beside the Jordan River, Mark shows us a man with healing and teaching skills that bewilder and encourage the people around him.

John also neglects Christmas nativity and Bethlehem beginnings.  John doesn’t care about placing Jesus into a family context.  John, the last of the Gospel writers to put pen to ink, goes all the way back to Genesis.  “In the beginning was the Word”, he said, and the Genesis editors started with “in the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.  Then God said, “Let there be light” and there was light.

John equates Jesus with the very start of creation, the ‘once upon a time’ of the story.  John is metaphorical, striving to figure out just who this character is.  Jesus is the Word, the light of the world, the bread from heaven, the Lamb of God, the living water, the good shepherd, and the resurrection and the life.  John piles metaphor upon metaphor in a desperate attempt to really communicate who this person is to us his listeners.

Personally, I find John to be a little too poetical and heavy handed.  Enough, already, I hear you, and it’s overwhelming.  And sometimes I find his metaphors being used in ways that can be cruel and judgemental.  “I am the Way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me”, he has Jesus say, and many contemporary Christians use that phrase to condemn their neighbors for not being holy enough or religious enough or faithful enough and so we have people who would rather be atheists than come to church and be treated as shameful lesser beings because they can’t be as poetical as John in their hearts.

But it’s good to be reminded every so often to re-examine that basic question.  Who are you Jesus? Where did you come from? Where are you pointing us to next?

Jesus came out of a tradition of prophets like Jeremiah who wanted us to take care of the most vulnerable even in the midst of personal tragedy.  Jeremiah, who wrote to a defeated and traumatized rag-tag group of exiles and refugees who were forced to march into slavery.  Even in those dark times, in the midst of that suffering, Jeremiah said, remember who you are and whose you are.  Remember not to be afraid to sing for joy in the midst of your despair, and take care of laboring women while you are slaves.  Don’t afraid to be dignified followers of your God who will sustain you.  Don’t be afraid to search for meaning during your worst sufferings.

Jesus knew his Jeremiah.  He knew that challenging the system was his purpose, to challenge a culture of indifference, cruelty and egotistical survival where no one mattered except oneself.  He knew that it would not be easy, and he knew that his chances of survival were bleak.  Prophets get stoned, get ridiculed, get executed.  But his word would not be silenced, his message would not be lost.

C. S. Lewis once wrote that we still struggle with who Jesus is.  Either he is a madman, at the level of someone who says he is a scrambled egg, or he is something more.  Whether we believe that more is on the level of a prophet, a Moses, an Adam or a God, we can all learn to stretch our story by following in the footsteps of the man from Galilee.  May it be so for us all.