Epiphany Sermon

I had a wonderful opportunity to preach three times this Sunday at Argyle UMC! It was a blast! I preached on the Wedding at Cana and Epiphany. In the early church Epiphany was the second most celebrated feast day (after Easter, of course) and the Wedding at Cana was one of the most frequently read stories in worship on Epiphany. Below you will find my outline for this past Sunday's sermon. Following the sermon we had an offertory and then we celebrated Holy Communion. I set-up two stations of votive candles with tapers and invited the congregation to light a candle of thanksgiving for where God's glory had broken into their lives in 2008.

Epiphany Sunday 2009
The Wedding at Cana
John 2:1-12

I. Explain Epiphany
• Christmas Decorations are still up and it’s January!
• Epiphany Sunday: the Last Sunday of the Christmas Cycle and the first Sunday of the Epiphany season
• In the early church this was the second most important feast day (the first being Easter)
• It’s important to not skip Epiphany because during the Epiphany, we celebrate more than just the birth of a baby.
• We celebrate the fact that the light of God, Jesus Christ, has made God’s love and God’s gift of salvation available to everyone and to all nations! No one, for any reason, is excluded from the opportunity to experience God’s incredible love and amazing grace.
• The early church loved, during the celebrations of Epiphany, to read in worship the story of the Wedding at Cana because in the story Jesus revealed his glory in the Gospel of John for the first time, his inaugural act, as it were!
• I’d like to share that story with you this morning. Before you hear this story, let us pray:

II. Read the Story
• What an incredibly rich story!
• We find Jesus and his disciples, along with his mother out at a big community event: a wedding!
• Jesus decides, after telling his mom he wouldn’t, for some reason unknown to us, decides to manifest his glory through making wine.
• And the wine: wow! We are not talking about two bottles of wine off the lowest shelf here! I did the math and, assuming 30 gallons, Jesus’ created 151.4 bottles of the best wine, that’s 12.5 cases in our time.
• The amount and quality of the wine is significant because, in the words of Gail O’Day, “in a culture of scarcity it represents the shattering of the boundaries of the conventional world, and the disciples become willing to entertain the possibility that this boundary breaking marks the inbreaking of God!”
• This miracle of turning water into wine, and into incredible wine in great abundance at that, shows us how deep and wide the grace of God is!
• And it also foreshadows for us how the world will be transformed though God’s amazing love and grace through the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus!
• The miracle reveals God’s glory!

• It is also fascinating that, outside of the disciples, the only people who see the miracle and understand it for what it is are the servants, not the wedding party, not the host, but the servants.
• It reminds me of the Nativity Story: the first people to see the baby Jesus were the shepherds and not the wise men.
• Throughout the Bible, God chooses to be revealed in the most unexpected people and places. God most often chooses to reveal God’s glory to those on the margins of our societies.
• I wonder, if God continually chooses to be revealed on the margins of society, where would we be most likely to encounter the living God today?
• This question is worth considering, for it has significant implications.

III. Irenaeus
• But before you do that, I’d like to introduce you to a hero of our faith: Irenaeus.
• A pretty important guy: he was theologian/bishop that was born somewhere in the second century (between 115-142) in what is now Turkey, he was the second Bishop of Lyons France, and his teacher, Polycarp, was a student of John the Evangelist (the beloved Disciple), which means, Irenaeus was two generations removed from Jesus.
• Irenaeus is also important because he was one of the earliest champion’s of including what we now call the canonical Gospels in the Bible (which had not yet been formed in the way we have it now)
• “The glory of God is a human being fully alive!” Write it down in your notes.
• This is something to think about on this Epiphany Sunday, as we celebrate God’s glory being revealed through Jesus Christ, and then, through us!

IV. Becoming “fully alive”
• As followers of Christ, we are called to be fully alive, fully human, in order that we might become vessel’s for Christ’s glory to be made more and more manifest in us.
• So what does it look like, to be fully alive?
• Obviously, because God made us as beautiful and diverse creatures, we all look different when we are fully alive.
• But, I think we can see three areas that come of out the story of the Wedding at Cana that can point us in the right direction to becoming more fully alive.

1. Community (we are not meant to be alone)
• We are made for community! God does not want us to be alone
• It is not possible for us to become who God made us to be by ourselves. We have to do it together.
• There is an important concept that comes from Africa that can teach us in this matter.
• Ubuntu it is not really a translatable concept in English but it basically means, “I am because you are.”
• In other words: a person is a person through other persons (identity through community) the only way I can be all I am made to be is if you can be all you can be. If you are not fully you, than I cannot fully be me.
• We see this concept at work throughout Jesus’ entire ministry.
• Jesus calls each of us to work for the dignity and humanity of all people
• We must fight against the things that dehumanize others. We must fight against extreme poverty, torture, abuse, terror, and pandemics.
• In essence, by applying ubuntu to our lives we seek to follow the words of Jesus’ inaugural act of ministry in the gospel of Luke, where Jesus stood in the temple and preached the following words: Luke 4:18-19
• We are more fully alive when we are in community and when we are serving others.
o How can you be more engaged in this community in 2009? Join the choir, get in a Bible study, work with the children, go with the youth to the Martin Luther King Center in Denton. Get involved!

• Where is God calling you to serve this year? Maybe it’s working with AIDS Service of North Texas, or Spirit Horse, perhaps it’s working at Argyle food bank, maybe you are being called to advocate for peace and justice with your elected officials.
• How is God calling you to embrace your life by serving others?

2. Faith
• We see in the Gospel story that the disciples “believed.” The root for the word “believe” in Greek in this passage is pisteuo (pist yoo’ o) which means, “to place confidence in.”
• The disciples were placing their confidence in Jesus. These men, with the exception of John, the beloved disciple, would go on to eventually give their lives for Jesus, the one in whom they had placed confidence and trust.
• When we place our trust in something larger than ourselves it dictates how we live, and how we act.
• What are you placing your confidence in this year?
• In many respects that’s challenging question!
• How can we become more fully alive by contemplating what we place our confidence in?

3. Creative Practices (these give life)
• We need to embrace practices that give us life.
• For each of us these practices are different!
• Jesus made wine because it was necessary but also because wine can be a symbol of the celebration of life! Psalm 104 tells us that God gave us wine to gladden the human heart.
• Life-giving practices for some of us include cooking for others, or baking, or making music, some of you probably quilt; I think of our awesome banner team that is making beautiful new banners for our new sanctuary that will point us towards God.
• For some of us life-giving practices include working on your short game, or writing poetry.
• What do you do in your life on a weekly basis that is creative and enriches your life?
• The very first thing we learn about God in the Bible is that God is creative. We are made in God’s image and therefore we are inherently creative beings.
• I challenge you to find something in your life that you can do on a weekly basis to help you become more fully alive, because, the glory of God is a human being fully alive!

Community, Faith that leads to Action, and Creative Practices are just a few of the things that help us become all that God has made us to be.

These things help us to claim the rich abundance that God has provided for us in the midst of times that are filled with talk of scarcity.

One of the practices that we have as a faith community is that of Holy Communion. As we celebrate it, we experience community, for we do it together! We experience faith, in that we put our trust in Jesus. And even if we can’t, we can still come up and receive God’s grace and our neighbor can proclaim our trust for us until we can claim for ourselves. And, we experience creativity in the music being played, the juice that was made for this meal, the liturgy, and the bread that was baked for this moment, we taste, we touch, we smell, we hear and we experience creativity.

Friends, we are called to celebrate a God who has intervened on our behalf! We are called to celebrate a God who continues to show light in the darkness. A God who has saved all that he created and a God who desires each and every one of us!

During the offertory time I would invite you to consider where God’s light has shown in your life this previous year. And, if you feel so moved, I would invite you to take a taper, and light a candle of thanksgiving to God for how God has been at work in your life.

Sisters and brothers, we are blessed: though we are broken, God will make us whole. Though the world can be filled with darkness, God’s light cannot be overcome. Though we may struggle with one another, God has given us the ministry and the power to be reconciled. God love us! Friends, God is good: all the time, all the time, God is good. Amen!