The Servants at Cana & Martin Luther King Jr
1 Corinthians 12:1-11; John 2:1-11 - 2nd Sunday after Epiphany, January 16, 2022
Pastor Ritva H Williams
The 2nd Sunday of Epiphany presents a bit of a challenge for the preacher when it is the day after the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr, and the gospel lesson is Jesus changing water into wine. But this preacher will give it a try by lifting up the role of the servants, and Jesus’ mother as models for the work of social justice.
While we may think of Jesus changing water into wine as a miracle, the gospel writer says it was a sign. Signs point to things beyond themselves, just as road signs alert us to things that lie ahead. The sign of Jesus changing water into wine reveals something about Jesus and his mission that is much deeper than providing drinks for guests at a wedding.
Scripture itself provides clues. Psalm 104:14-15 praises God for bringing forth food from the earth and wine to gladden the human heart. At Cana Jesus reveals his divinity by providing abundant, extravagant amounts of wine. Pastor Linda Anderson-Little did the math and figured out that six stone jars, each holding 20-30 gallons would produce about 3,200 glasses of wine (1). That’s a lot of wine for a tiny village wedding! Christ’s gift of wine evokes the word-pictures painted by the prophets of mountains and hills dripping and flowing with sweet wine (Amos 9:13); of God preparing a feast for all peoples of rich food and well-aged wines (Isaiah 25:6).
For the ancient, mountains dripping with wine and feasts of rich food and wines had long been were images of God’s grace and salvation. This leads us to ask, what kind of people imagine salvation to be like a feast where the food and wine never run out? People for whom food insecurity, hunger and starvation are facts of daily life. The six stone jars gathered in the courtyard indicate that six households had pooled their resources to put on the wedding banquet, and yet they run out of wine. Scarcity rather than abundance was the reality of village life in the days when Christ walked as the earth as one of us. When word reaches the banquet room, the groom’s family will be publicly humiliated. Cana and its residents will be shamed for their inability or unwillingness to provide adequately for one of their own? Fear of humiliation and shame point to a world where grinding poverty made self-worth and dignity hard to claim and maintain.
Our gospel lesson shows us the paradox of a world where abundance is possible, yet scarcity is the reality for many if not most people. Notice how that situation is changed? Who knew that the wine ran out? Only the servants and the mother of Jesus. Who knew how the crisis was resolved? Only the servants, Jesus’ mother and his disciples. Not the groom or the bride or their parents or the chief steward. As Pastor Anderson-Little points out, “Those at the bottom really know what’s going on for they bear the consequences …when there is enough, they get to eat, and when there is scarcity they are the ones that starve. An abundance of wine at the party meant that the servants were able to [participate in the celebration too].
Seemingly ordinary, unimportant people make change happen. Again quoting Pastor Anderson-Little:
The good wine came because someone noticed and spoke up that there’s a crisis.
The good wine came because Mary knew that in Jesus, there was another way and she spoke up.
The good wine came when people got to work and gathered the resources they did have — even if it was only six empty stone jars.
The good wine came when they did what Jesus said — they filled the jars with water, they brought it to the steward to taste, they served the wine to all the guests.
The Civil Rights Movement led by Dr Martin Luther King Jr in the 1950’s and ’60’s was made up of humble people who could not longer endure injustice and spoke up. Dr King knew that in Jesus there was another way and spoke up passionately, inspiring a movement of nonviolent resistance and protest that began to change the landscape for people of color in America. When Dr King accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 he said he was accepting it for:
those devotees of nonviolence who have moved so courageously against the ramparts of racial injustice and who in the process have acquired a new estimate of their own human worth. Many of them are young and cultured. Others are middle aged and middle class. The majority are poor and untutored. But they are all united in the quiet conviction that it is better to suffer in dignity than to accept segregation in humiliation. These are the real heroes of the freedom struggle: they are the noble people for whom I accept the Nobel Peace Prize. (Martin Luther King Jr. Nobel Lecture, nobelprize.org)
Later in his lecture Dr King called out the shame of scarcity in the midst of abundance in America.
Take my own country for example. We have developed the greatest system of production that history has ever known. We have become the richest nation in the world … Yet, at least one-fifth of our fellow citizens … are bound to a miserable culture of poverty … the poor in America know that they live in the richest nation in the world, and that even though they are perishing on a lonely island of poverty they are surrounded by a vast ocean of material prosperity.
Then he issues a challenge for all who dare to call themselves followers of Christ:
Deeply etched in the fiber of our religious tradition is the conviction that [humans] are made in the image of God and that they are souls of infinite metaphysical value, the heirs of a legacy of dignity and worth. If we feel this as a profound moral fact, we cannot be content to see [them] hungry, to see [them] victimized with starvation and ill health when we have the means to help them.
The work of Dr Martin Luther King Jr and the movement he inspired is an example of how Christ works in, with and through God’s people to change crises of scarcity into celebrations of abundance. Yes, there is still much work to be done. The good news is that the Christ who changes water into wine continues to pour out gifts galore to equip the saints for this work. As the apostle Paul writes, the Spirit of Christ gives each person a gift, energizing each one for ministry, empowering each of us to work for the common good.
As we move into this new year of 2022 we are called to be like the servants at the wedding of Cana: to pay attention, to notice where there is scarcity and speak up; to be like the mother of Jesus and advocate for those in scarcity; to put our resources at Christ’s disposal even if all we have are empty jars, to go and do as Christ directs us for the common good. We are all invited to shift our priorities to create the beloved community of Dr King’s dream.
Please pray with me:
Holy and righteous God, you created all people in your image. Grant us grace to contend fearlessly against injustice and oppression, like your servant Martin Luther King Jr. Empower us through your love to serve all those to whom the world offers no comfort and little help. Through us give hope to the hopeless, love to the unloved, peace to the troubled, and rest to the weary. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.
Linda Anderson-Little, “MLK Day through the Lens of the Wedding at Cana,” published Friday, 25 January 2019 at soulstorywriter.net
