Kahu's Manao

Second Sunday after Epiphany
Hepedoma – Week of Prayer
Sunday, January 17, 2010

The Rev. Kealahou C. Alika

“Extravagant Sign”
Isaiah 62:1-5 & John 2:1-11

Late in the week a young Hawaiian couple and their six children stopped by to visit the graves of family members who are buried in our church cemetery. When I arrived at work that day they had already come and gone.

I noticed a box marked with a yellow and red label that read “T. Komoda Store: Bakery, Liquor, Frozen Foods, General Merchandise, Makawao, Maui” and knew in an instant that it was a box of pastries. Everyone on island knows that Komoda is synonymous with cream puffs.

Two cream puffs stood out among the assortment of pastries. Anyone who knows about Komoda’s knows you don’t pass up their cream puff. Lei and I consumed them without hesitation, making sounds of satisfaction only a Komoda cream puff could cause a grown man or woman to make.

Not long afterwards Barbara, our other office staff, arrived with an assortment of pastries she said she received from a friend in Houston, Texas. “If you like pistachio and honey you’ll love these,” she said. “A friend sent the pastries from a Middle Eastern bake shop and packed it in a multi-layered box.”

There was too much for her and her husband to consume she explained and so we were the lucky recipients of what turned out to be an abundant day of pastries. After the Komoda cream puffs we found ourselves making further sounds of satisfaction with each bite of the baklava. We live on an island and in a world that seems to be filled with abundance – whether it is the abundance of pastries that comes to us from Makawao or Houston, Texas.

Our reading from The Gospel According to John is a story of abundance – an abundance of wine that Jesus provides at a wedding feast in Cana. Biblical scholars tell us this is Jesus’ first miracle. It is a sign, they say, that many see as a demonstration of his supernatural power. Others insist it is an extravagant sign of God’s abundance.

But the miracle or sign of Jesus turning water into wine presents us with a bit of a problem. Carol Lakey Hess, Associate Professor of Religious Education at the Candler School of Theology in Atlanta reminds us as we look about our world: “We see a world in need, and we believe in one who claimed to bring abundant life to those in need. In a world where for so many there is no clean water – let alone fine wine – where is the extravagance of God? In a world where children play in bomb craters the size of thirty-gallon wine jugs, why the divine reluctance? In a world where desperate mothers must say to their small children, ‘We have no food,’ why has the hour not yet come? No matter how we rationalize divine activity, we still want to tug at Jesus’ sleeve and say: ‘they have no wine.’” (Feasting on the Word, Year C, Volume 1, Bartlett & Taylor, Westminster/John Knox Press, Louisville, KY, 2009,page 262)

They have no water. They have no food. They have no clothes. They have no shelter.

As we look back this week on the catastrophic earthquake in Haiti, Hess raises a number of rhetorical questions that beg our attention. “It is passages like this one about divine extravagance,” she writes, “that make God’s absence in the face of poverty, suffering . . . stand out. How do we reconcile a story of potent generosity with a world of tremendous need? If God is both generous and able, then apparently God continues to express Jesus’ attitude: what is that to me?” (Op. cit.)

Could it be, Hess points out, that “because we trust that God wants abundance (plentiful wine and lavish food are common signs of God’s grace in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament), we follow in the footsteps of the mother of Jesus by prodding God for divine compassion and generosity.” (Op. cit.) In other words, could it not be that God’s abundance is made known to us not by some instantaneous sign or miracle but by our own insistence of one another that we share out of our abundance and perhaps more importantly share out of our substance.

We know from the story that even Jesus is reluctant to respond. The need is a concern to his mother and it is at her prodding that he finally does respond. The biblical text is clear:

“They have no wine,” she tells Jesus.

“What concern is that to you and to me?” Jesus asks.

If Jesus meant to be sarcastic, his mother appears to ignore his remark.

“Do whatever he tells you,” she says with a confidence that indicates she wants him basically to stop being a jerk.

It is then that Jesus tells the servants, “Fill the jars with water.”

I know it is difficult for us to talk about God’s goodness in the face of the kind of suffering and poverty we see in Haiti and in many, many other places. Some would quote Jesus’ response to his mother as God’s response to our own prodding, “now is not the hour.” Others will tell us that God relies on human compassion to do the will of God and so the international relief effort that is now underway in Haiti is a demonstration of that compassion.

And some, Carol Lakey Hess adds, would “dare to argue that God continues to need the heirs of Jesus’ mother” – that is you and I – “to go on prodding divine generosity.” Or to put it another way, our response to the horrific crisis in Haiti includes not only providing money to

meet basic needs, but praying that God will act in ways that may not be so evident to us that in the midst of such a profound tragedy, miracles of compassion and healing will abound.

Having said all of this what makes the story significant is that Jesus’ turning the “water into wine” is not that it was a sign of a miracle. What makes it significant is that it was a sign of God’s presence in Jesus for the purpose of bringing others to believe that he is the Messiah.

For the writer of the gospel, belief is the crucial element in the story. The Greek word translated “believe” occurs three times more often in John than in all the writings of Matthew, Mark and Luke.

The story in Cana began with Jesus calling the disciples to follow him. The story ends with the disciples believing. The story concludes with these remarkable words: “ . . . and his disciples believed in him.”

On the one hand the story is about a sign of God’s abundance and on the other it is a sign of faith. It is this sign of faith that reminds us the abundance of overflowing wine is a metaphor for the abundance of God’s overflowing compassion.

The water that is being shipped to Haiti is intended to meet a basic human need. It is a matter of life and death. That it is being sent with compassion is what is essential.

So what are we to make of the cream puffs and baklava? It is evident to me that what we received was provided with an abundance of that aloha, of that compassion. Amen.

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