For the Good of the World  

I love weddings.

Everything seems so full of life – the smells of the food, the taste of the wine and the sounds of gathered friends and family.

There is something about the commitment that the bride and groom make to each other that seems to give us all hope for the future. You can feel it in the pride of the parents, and the anxiety of the couple. You can see it in the gratitude that everyone has for the new life that the bride and groom have found in each other, and eagerness of the couple to share their new identity with the world.

Think back to the weddings you have attended. Remember how no one seemed to mind the children running around and yelling at each other. They were just having a good time. Remember when your aunt and uncle found a way to talk to each other for the first time in years. Remember when you looked around and realized that you hadn’t seen your best man or her maid of honor in awhile. The world seems full of possibilities that just didn’t exist before.

I am not surprised, then, that the prophets use the image of a wedding banquet to symbolize the extravagant joy that they associate with the coming of the messiah. I am not surprised that they envision the banquet as including an abundance of good wine. And, I’m not surprised that John uses these symbols to describe the inaugural event of Jesus’ public ministry.

You know the story well. Jesus and his mother are at a wedding banquet in Cana of Galilee. The entire village was probably there. Mary tells Jesus that the bridegroom has run out of wine. Jesus tells the servants to fill the stone vessels that were normally used at the beginning of the meal for the ritual hand washing, and then turns the water into wine. Surprised at the quality of the wine, the master of ceremonies chastises the bridegroom. Everyone knows to serve the best wine first because, after they have had a glass or two, the guests won’t even notice that you are serving a lesser vintage later.

The point of the story, of course, is that Jesus changes the water into wine. As he so often does, Jesus uses old religious symbols to point us toward a new living reality. He doesn’t seem to be throwing out the old as much as using it in a new way. Don’t focus so much on the water, he seems to be saying, that you miss the wine. Don’t try so hard to be perfect that you miss the grace of God. Don’t worry so much about standing against the world that you miss the opportunity to stand for it. Remember, the best is yet to come.

Yet, despite this example, I often catch myself trying to turn the wine back into water. Like the master of ceremonies, I sometimes have trouble imagining that the good wine should be served to everybody when so few will really appreciate it. The Gospel pushes us to use its promises of abundance, extravagance, transformation and possibilities for new life to save the world, but I sometimes find myself clinging to the old rituals of purity that promise only to save those who do the right things at the right time.

I know that I’m losing this struggle when I find myself worrying about what’s happening to me rather than what I can be doing for others. That’s usually when I begin to think of prayer, Bible study and worship as something that I do for my own benefit, rather than something that I do with the hope that they will make me a better citizen of the world. It’s usually when I start worrying about how many people are coming to services, or the size of the church, rather than the impact that we are having on the city. And, it’s always when I begin to see things in terms of “us” and “them.”

Based on the headlines in the newspaper this morning, I am thinking that maybe – just maybe – I’m not the only one having this struggle!

So, just in case you find yourself engaged in a similar struggle from time to time, I am going to suggest a standard that we can use to measure ourselves – a signpost that will tell us where we are on the journey. It seems to me that we can have some comfort that we are probably following the Gospel if what we are doing benefits people who are not Christians. Similarly, it seems to me that we should begin to worry that we are not following the Gospel if what we are doing benefits only Christians, and not anyone else.

The benefits of the church accrue to members and nonmembers alike. It’s not so surprising, when you think about it. Jesus commands us to love our neighbors, and he doesn’t distinguish between neighbors who believe what we do and those who don’t.

Think about the life and ministry of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. We will celebrate his birthday tomorrow. He was born the grandson of a sharecropper and the son of a Baptist minister. He enjoyed a relatively privileged childhood here in the Old Fourth Ward, was graduated from Morehouse college and, after seminary, took a comfortable job as the pastor of a prominent church in Montgomery, Alabama.

It was there, in 1955, that Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a city bus so that a white person could sit down. Dr. King organized the now famous Montgomery Bus Boycott and his life was never the same again.

He went on to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.

He spoke out against the government’s handling of the war in Vietnam in 1965 and against the war itself in 1967.

He launched the Poor People’s Campaign in 1968 and, on April 8 th of that year while in Memphis, Tennessee, supporting a garbage workers strike, he was assassinated.

If you close your eyes, and sit quietly for just a minute, you can probably picture him. I’m guessing that you see him standing in front of that familiar stone statue of Abraham Lincoln. I’m guessing that it’s a hot August day in 1963 and you see him facing a large and diverse crowd that has gathered on the Mall in Washington DC.

Sit for just a moment longer, and you can probably hear the cadences of his words as he describes his dream.

Looking back on it, I realize that Dr. King’s dream was bigger than I first understood. It was not just for the benefit of himself, or even just for the benefit of his followers. It was not just about freeing African-Americans from the separate but unequal segregation that enslaved them in this country. It was about the liberation of all oppressed people everywhere. It was about the right of every human being to be treated with the respect and dignity.

We have still not realized that dream. We have, to be sure, made progress over the last thirty years. Statutory segregation has been eliminated. Doors to schools, businesses and churches have been opened and the glass and marble ceilings in those institutions have been raised. But, the color of your skin still matters in this country and there is still an unholy alliance between race and poverty. We are once again trying to figure out how to extract ourselves from an unpopular foreign war and we are still funding violence with money that might otherwise be available to improve public education and alleviate poverty.

We, however, still have Dr. King’s vision of what the world could and should look like.

I love weddings.

Everything seems so full of life – the smells of the food, the taste of the wine and the sounds of gathered friends and family. The world seems so full of possibilities that just didn’t exist before.

But, I find myself recalling the words of Mary as she instructed the servants at the wedding in Cana of Galilee. “Do whatever he tells you to do,” she said.

I sometimes find it difficult to discern what Jesus is telling me to do. Though I have come to believe that it will not be something that benefits only me, or even us. It will be something that works generally for justice, freedom and peace. It will be something that makes Dr. King’s vision of the beloved community just a little bit clearer. It will be something that works first for the good of the world.

And, remember, the best is yet to come!

Comments? Contact George Maxwell at: GMaxwell@stphilipscathedral.org

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