God be in our head, and in our understanding.
God be in our eyes, and in our looking.
God be in our mouth, and in our speaking.
God be in our heart, and in our thinking.
God be at our end, and at our departing. Amen
God does break through. Whether we like it or not, whether we notice it or not, and whether we can deal with it or not. Mostly we can’t, because we’re too blind, or too distracted, or we’re too focused on what we think we want rather than what we pray for, or we’re just too overwhelmed by our own humanity and everyone else’s. This is you, and me, and all of us.
Most of the time, the Spirit infiltrates the routine passages of our earth-bound lives, when we’re not looking for it, or like a thief in the night, as seems to have been a common way of understanding the phenomenon in the earliest days of the Jesus movement—various iterations of that phrase “like a thief in the night” turn up in the revelation of John, The gospel of Matthew, and the letter of Paul to the Thessalonians. God breaks through when we least expect it.
That form of words, “like a thief in the night” occurs over and over in scripture, including Matthew’s gospel, the Revelation of John, and Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians. It appears not to convey fear or admiration of thieves, but to describe the unnoticed intruder: quiet, alert, and determined. That’s the thief in the night. And that’s the in-breaking of the Divine hand, the sudden and unstoppable face of God, smiling on us when we least expect it, and this is a way to read the familiar gospel story of the wedding at Cana in Galilee, which we heard this morning, where water turned into wine.
A wedding feast is not a frequent event, but it is a routine passage in human societies. Different peoples do it differently, but all societies have rituals to mark and formalize and celebrate the joining of mates and the joining of families. And the rules are so well known we barely think of them. Ask anyone who is employed at a popular wedding venue—if you’ve heard one best-man toast, you might actually have heard them all. Any given best man doesn’t get instructions. He doesn’t need them, because the ritual is so embedded in our social consciousness. (Actually, sometimes we do get instructions, but their formulation really proves the larger point. When I was preparing to get married, my uncle—reflexively standing in for my deceased father—said “John, you only need to know three things: when, where, and what do I wear.” It’s not like I didn’t know the answers to these questions, but my uncle’s instructions clearly pointed to the resilient ordinariness of the event.)
At the wedding in Cana, the ordinariness of the event is slightly disturbed, slightly disrupted; it doesn’t go as expected. And even with water miraculously turned into wine, the steward is clearly bound by the ordinary social rules, as his words reveal. When the steward tasted the water that had become wine, and did not know where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew) the steward called the bridegroom and said to him, “Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk, but you have kept the good wine until now.” We might be inclined to read this as astonishment and admiration, but taken at face value, the steward was as likely fussing at the bridegroom for breaking the rules, admonishing him for departing from a well-established routine. In the reading the steward offers no assessment of the event, he doesn’t say “thank you,” or “good job” or anything like that. He doesn’t know that the wine had been water a few minutes before—he just knows that what “everyone” does has not been done. And the effect of the miracle in the story is actually pretty limited—the drunken wedding guests just got drunker, albeit on better wine, but because of the sign, the disciples believed in him. This is pretty interesting, as it suggests that the disciples didn’t believe in him before he turned water into wine. And yet they were disciples. Even the disciples, who were already disciples, needed the Spirit to break through before they were really on board with the Anointed One of God. And the Spirit did break through, through a side door, noticed only by a few people.
In The Weight of Glory, my absolute favorite essay by CS Lewis, he observes that
“It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us. . .We are far too easily pleased.”
(On a side note I will offer that drink and sex and ambition may have some constructive place in human society—wine certainly does in the New Testament; perhaps we could update Lewis’ fooling about list to include Facebook, Twitter, and Tik Tok.)
In any case, the problem, in other words, is not that we expect too much of God, but that we expect too little, and moreover, that the offerings of a transcendent nature are incalculably abundant, and altogether within reach, if we would only pay attention get out of our own way.
Think of a moment of Grace, a moment when you were cared for just because, or when a door opened not because you knocked, but when, in fact, you were too scared or too ashamed to knock. If we are honest, it happens all the time, when we least expect it, like a thief in the night, or in the middle of a celebratory dinner when we’ve run out of wine for our guests.
God breaks through.
Amen.
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