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January 14, 2007 The Second Sunday after EpiphanyIn our business-driven consumer society, it is easy to think of the parish church as an institution that delivers services to consumers. After all, we offer what some think of as a weekly public performance that you can rate like you do concerts or movies: They were a little off their game today, don’t you think? Last week was better. We promote diverse programs, hoping that participants will buy in. We measure our effectiveness by numbers of people and size of budget. We offer counseling and chaplaincy as a benefit to members. And some speak in terms of whether or not this parish is meeting their needs.
In this model the institution exists off by itself, developing and selling its product. The consumer is a separate entity who walks in, evaluates what is offered, and decides whether to consume or not.
There is a bit of truth in all this, and we must all deal with the way people operate in this world, but how different the consumer model is from the way in which many of us experience this community. And how different this is from the biblical understanding of the church. St. Paul spoke of the church as the living Body of Christ, working together as different members, bound together in love and the Spirit.
Today we’ve heard the first of three consecutive readings from the 12th and 13th chapters of 1st Corinthians, to be continued in the weeks ahead. In these chapters, Paul makes the point that all the members of this living organism that we call the church manifest different and unique gifts , all activated by the same Spirit, all working towards the common good. He says that all of these members need one another in order to function well, even the less honorable parts. Finally, he says that the greatest gift of all, the gift that holds everything together and guides it according to God’s purposes, is love.
Your Vestry, clergy and staff are currently preparing for our Annual Parish Meeting, which will take place 2 weeks from today. On one level, this meeting is about the institution. It is about money, property, organizations, activities, and elections. But as Annual Meeting approaches, this year, like every other year, I think of our community on another level.
My mind turns to the biblical imagery of the Body. I look around here and see old and young, people in crisis, contributions of hard-earned money, musicians, seekers, and an unknown number of you that carry hidden, urgent questions into this sacred space. I see us all crafting beauty and meaning out of ancient words and rites, out of candles, vestments, song, wine and incense. I see all of us working together to help one another through crises, and to serve those who are suffering in the world around us.
What this means is that there is no individual consumer that is separated from the institutional provider here. There is only us. We gather as an extended family in faith, we pray for God’s guidance, we decide what we will do, and then we give our time and our money to make it happen. Consider what usually takes place when one of you asks one of the clergy or the Vestry Why doesn’t St. Michael’s have Bible study groups, or a bigger and more vital Sunday School, or a tutoring program for at-risk kids in the neighborhood? You know what happens next. We respond Why that’s an excellent idea! Let’s get you together with other interested people in our community and see how you all might like to put that together. We turn the tables, switching the definition of our parish from a institution that delivers products to an organic, evolving community who gathers, decides, creates, evaluates, changes, and funds it all.
Now, why would you or anyone else want to be a part of such an organism? There are many answers to this question. Some of us don’t have a lot of family around, and we want to be surrounded by others who care. Some of us feel like our society is way too disconnected and impersonal; we are compelled to create connection in groups just because we’re human, social beings.
But there is another reason that today’s gospel story illustrates. It is this: in our faith community we get to experience an alchemy of human and divine, where our common efforts become infused with Spirit, where water turns into wine, if you will.
Jesus attended a gathering that we are all familiar with: a wedding feast. He went with his mother and some of his disciples, as invited guests. If you’ve ever been a host of such an event, you know the horrible sinking feeling that can come when you realize that the food is cold, the tent has blown down, the DJ hasn’t shown up, or the bride forgot to bring her shoes to the church. In this case, the wine ran out.
Jesus called for 180 gallons of water; that’s about 900 bottles more than whatever they started with. This was either a very large wedding or a bunch of drunks. He then changed it all into wine – not just ordinary wine, but an abundance of very good wine.
This miracle has long been interpreted as a sign of the human and the ordinary - represented by water - being transformed into the divine and the extraordinary – represented by wine. John’s gospel says that Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory, and his disciples believed in him. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and the human became divine.
This is what happens here. Every day around here is the wedding feast of Cana. Every Eucharist is a miracle of human transformed into divine. And this is why we gather together as a community. Because as we worship, discern, work, create, express, fund, love and serve, as we struggle through our issues both personal and corporate, something else is taking place. It’s not just all about our efforts, our creativity, our effectiveness. There is also a divine spark that transforms what we do, so that our human institution becomes a holy organism that serves God’s purposes. The Word becomes flesh, and water becomes wine.
In our parish, someone gets an idea. Or we’re doing something already, and someone begins to see its greater potential if done differently. People begin to talk and pray, and at some point, a spark enters in. We’re always looking for that spark; we can’t force it, but we can peek around, invite it, and experiment with different things to see if we can’t tease it out into the open. Miraculously, sometimes it comes. A new thing takes on life, and eventually it evolves into something beautiful, something good, something helpful. We then not only have enough to go around, we have an abundance of very good wine.
This is what happened with the construction of this beautiful worship space a decade ago. It is what happened with Journey to Adulthood, our youth program, and Godly Play. It is what started over lunch one day several years ago when two of us got the idea for the character of the 9:00 Sunday service which we were planning to start.
I think that this spark and momentum is what is happening right now with things you’ll be hearing about at our Annual Meeting in two weeks: a new building project, a Habitat for Humanity house-building, our new mission congregation of San Gabriel, and a significant increase in funding for ministries. I think it is happening in conversations that are taking place now about a very different sort of weekly Eucharist on Sunday afternoons, which we may undertake this fall.
All of this is miraculous, because it depends upon an alchemy of human and divine that we can’t control and which does not always happen – some things fail, after all - for God doesn’t give energy to everything we try out. That’s why I say I think it may be taking place here and there, now. But when it happens, it is a mixture of our creative effort and an indefinable something else that enters in, giving it new direction and momentum.
We do all of this, however, not only so that we will have a wonderful experience for ourselves here. For we Christians are ultimately mission people, not a cozy club. We’re called to transform the world so that it more closely resembles the kingdom of God.
We learn this lesson here in order to take it out into and improve the world in which we live. Here we are safe. Here the norms are love, risk, trust, openness, cooperation. In this environment we experiment with what we can do to glorify God, to nurture one another, and to serve this broken world. And we learn that there is another energy at work in the midst of our efforts.
Then we take what we’ve learned here out into our families, our friendships, our workplace, our city, our nation, our world. We build the same norms there that we have here – love, risk, trust, openness, cooperation - and we work together for the common good. And as we do, ordinary water becomes an abundance of very good wine.
End Document — St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church