Three weeks ago yesterday I was at a wedding. At The Bishop’s Ranch, which is a pretty special thing because the Ranch normally doesn’t host weddings. For those of you who may not yet be familiar with it, The Bishop’s Ranch is an Episcopal camp and retreat center in the heart of the Sonoma County wine country. A wedding in the midst of abundant wine, hmmm. I wonder where we’ve heard anything about that before?
In addition to its spectacular location, the Bishop’s Ranch has a lovely gem of a chapel and guest rooms and delicious locavore food, so they’d surely host weddings every weekend. Except that they’re committed to serving our congregations first, and we keep them full year-round. But Andrea, who is my staff associate at the diocesan offices where I work during the week, was their camp director for four years. So they made an exception for Andrea and her fiancé. And when the priest who was presiding over the ceremony welcomed us all, she made a point of reminding us of how countercultural this wedding was. Not because they Ranch doesn’t host weddings. Not because Andrea was marrying Maggie, although some of the extended family were still trying to understand two women marrying each other. But rather, Pat pointed out that the wedding was countercultural because the brides were people in their twenties getting married in church. With prayers, Christian hymns and Eucharist. As the mother of two twenty-somethings myself, I can bear witness that really doesn’t happen so often.
Sometimes we can totally miss the new thing God is doing if we allow ourselves to be distracted by something else. Which is a lesson from today’s Gospel that threatens to be overwhelmed by the glory of all that abundant wine. Many stone jars full. Likely about 180 gallons. Of the very best wine. That’s one heck of a wedding party, right? Its like the unlikeliness of a Bishop’s Ranch wedding multiplied by a factor of six. And of course we are supposed to know that this hyper-abundance of wine foreshadows the great banquet that is God’s reign. It’s no accident that John begins his version of Jesus’ ministry with this story.
But a good story needs not just plot, but also character. Which is where the Cana story starts to get interesting. Did you notice who has the speaking parts? Whose efforts carry the plot forward? The only people who speak are Mary, Jesus and the wine steward. The ones who have all the action are the servants. The bridegroom is passive, the bride is missing entirely, and the honored guests who might drink all that wonderful wine get no mention whatsoever. It’s important to notice these details, because one of the most powerful ways to read scripture is by way of the characters who are either not mentioned, or who are mentioned doing things we don’t expect them to do.
With that in mind, I’d venture to say that it’s Mary—not Jesus—who functions as the protagonist in this story. After the manner of Biblical prophets, she reminded God of what he was supposed to do—in this case, make the party a great one—and the people of what they were supposed to do. Remember what Mary tells the servants? “Do whatever he tells you.”
Which should really come as no surprise to us; Mary was exercising the ministry of prophet from the first time we met her in Luke’s Gospel. Remember what she said about God in her Magnificat? “He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty.” So no wonder today’s lesson has her again telling God what to do. Prophecy was Mary’s spiritual gift. And a prophet’s got to prophesy, as Paul reminds us in our lesson from 1 Corinthians. Like her forefather in prophecy, Isaiah, she was not going to shut up until the wedding guests could see the evidence of God’s rejoicing over them.
Martin Luther King, whose birth we remember this weekend, was also a prophet in the tradition of Isaiah and Mary, whose scriptural witness was deeply embedded in his imagination. And like his Biblical forebears, he wouldn’t shut up either. Martin Luther King had heard the cries of the people—the ones that white America had managed to write out of history and relegate to subservient roles—and for their sake he would not stop talking, proclaiming, preaching.
But of course a preferential option for those in subservient roles is the normal Biblical perspective. Consider the Cana story again: it’s the nameless servants who did what Jesus told them to, and who were the first to see and recognize the miracle. Even the steward, who knew how good the wine was, had no idea how it got there. It just looked to him like the drinks were served in the wrong order.
Which brings me back to where I began. Sometimes we can totally miss the new thing God is doing if we allow ourselves to be distracted by something else, like the drama being played out by the conventionally important characters. If they’re all we were paying attention to, our scriptures would have no Cana story, nor any story of Jesus, for that matter. If they’re all we were paying attention to, our country would have no Martin Luther King, nor Cesar Chavez, nor Black Lives Matter movement. Every prophet of the wrong gender, color or class has had to endure more powerful people telling them to shut up even when they knew it was their time to speak up.
A lot of drama has been playing out amidst important characters in the Anglicanism this week. Perhaps you’ve been following the news from Canterbury, where the Primates (that is, the presiding bishops) of the Anglican Communion have been meeting. There’s a lot I could say about what happened in those meeting—which would be another sermon—although I do think its important for us all to know that the Episcopal Church has not been suspended or expelled from the Anglican Communion. The Primates do not have that power. Instead, we’ve been asked to voluntarily step back from participation in some of our shared deliberative bodies for three years. In light of today’s Gospel, I would be remiss not to mention that the primary reason for this sanction is our commitment to marriage equality. And I would be dishonest if I didn’t say that this hand-slap hurts.
Hurts me because—as a former missionary—I really value our international network. Hurts Maggie and Andrea because it utterly denies the Gospel counterculturalism of their very Christian marriage. Hurts all of us who have ever been oppressed, or sided with the oppressed. Like our own Presiding Bishop Michael Curry, whose response to his fellow primates was this: “I stand before you as your brother. I stand before you as a descendant of African slaves, stolen from their native land, enslaved in a bitter bondage, and then even after emancipation, segregated and excluded in church and society. And this conjures that up again, and brings pain. The pain for many will be real. But God is greater than anything. I love Jesus and I love the church. I am a Christian in the Anglican way. And like you, as we have said in this meeting, I am committed to ‘walking together’ with you as fellow Primates in the Anglican family.”
A lot of people were expecting him to do something else, and I’ve no doubt a lot of people are asking him to do something else even now. To play hardball, like the important characters are wont to do. For example, by withholding our giving to the Anglican Communion—which we do generously—or by ceasing to pray for our international partner churches, which we do every week. I know of no other way to understand Bishop Curry’s extraordinary grace under these circumstances than to assume that he’s a servant who is listening to what Jesus tells him to do.
And he’s allowing himself—and all of us who ever thought that our church was one of the important characters—to take on the role of servants in God’s story for a season. Servants listening to the teacher. Servants paying attention to the other marginalized characters. Servants doing the ministries we are called to do where we are. Servants hauling water for others and waiting for the time when Jesus transforms it into Gospel wine so abundant that it cannot be denied to anyone. And we can do this because we have heard the story, and we know that’s what Jesus does.
