I have never actually counted them up, but I’ve probably officiated well over 100 weddings in my 20+ years of ordained ministry. And in that time, I can honestly say I’ve never had a true disaster at a wedding I’ve officiated. That’s not to say there haven’t been some interesting moments. There’s certainly been the usual tightrope walks of working with feuding family members, overwhelmed flower girls or ringbearers, and even a couple of dogs (who were actually far more obedient than most of the humans in wedding parties).
But then there was the bride who was missing in 
action for over an hour after the service was scheduled to start without explanation; it turned out her limousine got caught in a parade in New York City and she left her cellphone behind, so we had no idea if she was coming or not. The congregation got treated to an almost 90-minute concert by the church organist, who also chaired the Organ Department at Julliard at the time, but that opportunity seemed lost on most of them as they began to squirm uncomfortably more and more as the minutes clicked by.
But finally, as I was walking back into the Sanctuary to give the congregation a non-update update, I saw a limousine screech up outside the glass doors into the Sanctuary from the street, and bridesmaids began leaping out of the car in rapid succession, like paratroopers suddenly given the green light to jump out of a plane. So I simply said, “Friends, I’m pleased to announce that we will be beginning the service in just a few minutes,” and we went on with things just as if we’d planned them that way.
Weddings are beautiful celebrations of love and family and commitment, but they are also high-stakes, complicated public events that are not just about the couple’s love and future together, but also inevitably bring in all the tangled tendrils of family systems, social status, cultural norms, and religious expectations.
Even when things go well, there is always a level of stress and anxiety in weddings about what might go off the rails and when, no matter how well your plans are made and laid to keep everything running exactly the way it should be. Because if things don’t go well, it doesn’t just impact the wedding itself, but the beginning of the couple’s relationship and even the reputation of the families involved.
That’s true today, but it was a thousand times more true in first century Judea, in a culture in which your standing and very identity was determined not by who you are on the inside, but on how others perceived you to be. We are not immune to those dynamics, but we still live in a hyper-individualistic culture in which we routinely say things like, “it doesn’t matter what other people think about you, just be true to yourself.” People would not only have never said or even thought such things in the first century, they would have questioned your sanity if you said it to them. You literally were what others thought of you in that hyper-communal, status-and-shame-based culture.
It’s crucially important to understand that cultural difference, because otherwise this story would seem like a very strange one as the start of Jesus’ ministry. Jesus’ ministry was still in the beta-testing phase as this story begins; he has recruited the first members of his launch team, the original disciples, but he is definitely not ready to go public yet. He even says so when his mother urges him to get involved: “They have no wine,” she tells Jesus.
She’s noticed the chief steward hissing at his assistants like an angry snake, demanding that they find some wine, any wine, to avert this disaster. Because it is a disaster: such a breach of hospitality on such an important occasion, such a conspicuous failure to provide in front of literally everyone who matters, would bring such shame upon this family that it would permanently damage their standing and prospects in that society.
“They have no wine,” Mary alerts Jesus. He looks at her: “What’s that got to do with us?” he replies; “my hour has not yet come.” Jesus isn’t ready to start his public ministry yet, but that doesn’t matter to Mary. There is an urgent need, and she somehow knows that he can do something about it. She doesn’t appear to know exactly what he can do, but he can do something, and something needs to be done. So she turns to the servants: “Do whatever he tells you,” and then turns back expectantly to her son.
“Do whatever he tells you.” That’s a pretty good rule for relating to Jesus in general, isn’t it? It’s really a statement of faith. It is based on a conviction that when our own power falls short and our own plans fall apart, Jesus is capable of doing something that we can’t know or imagine, but which will be more than enough to meet the need. But doing that is harder than it sounds; Jesus tells people to do some pretty strange things. Like here, for example. He tells the servants to fill up the water jars provided for people to wash up. They look the large jars over. It’s going to take a lot of time and effort to get the 120-180 gallons of water that they can hold poured into them.
But whether out of faith or desperation or just a desire not to go back to the chief steward empty-handed yet, they shrug and start doing what he tells them to do. When they’ve finally poured the last of the water in, they turn to Jesus. “Now draw some out and take it to the chief steward,” he says. They look at each other again, shrug again, and again do what he tells them to do.
We don’t even know when the miracle itself takes place. All we know is that by the time they give it to the chief steward, the water has become wine. And not just any wine: the best wine of the whole event. But he’s still not happy; his eyes widen in surprise, then anger. He can’t believe he’s working for a fool like this bridgegroom, and calls him over. “Don’t you know anything?” he seethes. “Everybody serves the good wine first, but then once the guests are drunk, you can save the good stuff and bring the cheap stuff out, because they won’t even notice.
“But this!” he exclaims, holding up the ladle; “this is the good stuff, and you’ve kept it back until now!” The steward does not intend it as a compliment. And even though he’s yelling at the wrong person, he’s right: Jesus would make a lousy steward. A steward’s job is to make sure that nothing gets wasted, which means ensuring that the resources he’s been charged with distributing are used as efficiently and effectively as possible. Don’t waste the good stuff; give it out early and carefully, as little as you have to.
But when Jesus uses this opportunity to make a clear statement through this wedding of God’s presence and power and intentions, he reveals that God’s understanding of wastefulness is very different from the steward’s. This miracle is a sign, a sign of who Jesus is and of what he has come to do; it is a miracle of abundance, in both quantity and quality. It is not only more than enough to meet the need, it is the good stuff, the best yet tasted. And as such, it is a fundamental rejection of how we tend to live life far too often, with the assumption that there’s not much of the good stuff, so we need to be very careful with it. We need to stretch it out, divide it up.
Maybe then we can make it last; maybe then we can have enough to get by. But that is God’s idea of wastefulness: wasting the good stuff by not using it, by trying to make do with a life outside of God’s abundance, carefully parceling out what we’ve been able to scrape together on our own because we’re afraid to risk losing it or using it up. And the irony, of course, is that in doing so we always end up wasting it, because sooner or later, our plans apart from God always fall apart; our reserves dwindle down; our stores always run dry.
But with God, everything is different. Jesus may not have been intending to start his public ministry at this wedding, but he does, and from the very beginning makes it clear that in and through Jesus Christ, God always provides the good stuff, and it never runs out. There is always more than we can possibly drink in; always more than enough to fill us and share abundantly with others. Because God’s grace is always a miracle, always something that unexpectedly overflows the narrow limits of our plans or even our beliefs about what is possible in order to show us who God really is and what God really wants for us and for this world.
That is true for us here at First Presbyterian of Bethlehem, and it will continue to be so into the future. I can’t imagine the wine ever running out here, because we do a pretty good job of remembering that we are not the ones making or providing it. We are just the servants; but unlike the servants in the Gospel lesson, we know who Jesus is, and we have seen what can happen when we do whatever Christ tells us to do, even when it seems to be some pretty strange things.
Now, as far as I know, water has never been changed into wine around here. But things almost as strange have happened. A bitter congregational division led to a multiplication of love and care and unity and purpose in our mission and ministry as a congregation. The problems of managing a building with decades of deferred maintenance on acres of unused land has become an opportunity to incarnate God’s love, mercy, and justice in powerful and profound ways with and for our neighbors in Bethlehem.
And day in and day out, one after another, cautious onlookers and curious explorers have been changed into intentional disciples and servants. All of these and countless other examples are miracles whose exact origins and timing may be hard to pinpoint, like the water changing to wine, but which are signs that manifest the glory of God in its richness and abundance and transforming power.
So let us commit ourselves to trusting in the good stuff; that through Christ, there will be more than enough to sustain us, satisfy us, and see us through, as there always has been, because that is who God is; that is what God does; that is what we will always be in Christ if we let ourselves be filled up and transformed, and poured out into the world as a blessing, so that everyone we serve can be filled themselves and rejoice in the good stuff that is being shared, and the knowledge that the good stuff will never run out, because there is always more than enough of God’s abundant grace to keep the party going.