A good friend’s son died two weeks ago.
I received a text from him asking if we could talk…so as soon as I could, of course I called him.
His wife, also a close friend, answered his phone for him and said that he was taking out the trash…”even in these times”, she said, the “trash needs to be taken out”
Point well taken…she was making a “single-story life ” statement.
Things of great permanence and spiritual magnitude are in play right alongside the most mundane of human experiences…like taking out trash
…and we all know that can feel weird at times.
If you have ever been in a situation where the larger issues of life are at play…the loss of a loved one, a staggering medical diagnosis.
It’s part of the reason that when our family or friends lose someone we cook them meals, clean their homes, mow their grass.
But it is not just that they are too busy…but it can be hard to do the normal in those situations.
Most people tend to separate life in their minds at least, into the normal and abnormal…regular and spectacular…secular and sacred…there are lots of ways of stating it.
This is to be expected…it’s hard to live as spiritual/physical hybrids.
But the idea that reality, our lives themselves are divided…as I have said many times, into downstairs and upstairs…two separated stories…if embraced as a worldview is harmful.
Many live, as if there is a downstairs…the really real world…the world of normal human life…jobs, food, cars, grass to mow, illness, and physical pleasure.
Then there is the Upstairs…the not really real world…The world we inhabit here at church, Easter, Christmas, spiritual sounding ideas, bible verses that make for good funeral talks and sermons but have no bearing in the downstairs “really real world.
This way of living became most profound here in the west in the rise of the modern age…where there was a firm line drawn between faith (the not real world) and fact (the real world)
Now in the postmodern world it is expressed through the belief that there is no ultimate fact…it’s all your truth.
But people still live with two these stories…the upstairs (my faith), downstairs (my facts)
And they can talk about upstairs beliefs and values all they want…but if you see how they live, you know what they believe is really true about the world.
You see this in the words and lives of our two leading presidential candidates, they both practice this kind of two-story living.
This past week president Biden was called a cafeteria Catholic by the DC archbishop…because he takes what he likes from the faith and leaves the rest.
And former president Trump regularly takes the parts of the faith that are convenient for him and leaves the rest.
They both attempt to separate the world into the upstairs (faith) and downstairs(fact) and they are largely representative of the country they both hope to lead.
Of course, there are those who believe there is no upstairs, faith is all illusion, wish thinking, fairytale…they are a minority group in America called Atheists.
Faith is the opiate of the people (Karl Marx), it is collective neurosis of the people (Sigmund Freud), it is the greatest source of evil for people (Chris Hitchens)
They are right in one sense…there is no upstairs, but they wrong…there is also no purely material downstairs…reality is a single story…it consists of the natural and the supernatural.
God is Lord over all of the cosmos.
There is no false divide between faith and fact, secular and sacred.
It can feel strange to plan the funeral for a son, then stop and take out the trash…but that is the world as it is.
As Christians, who take biblical reality seriously…we do the hard work to live a single-story life…but to switch metaphors…we have to navigate a kind of two parallel track life.
We take out the trash…we can see it, smell it, we need to do this to have physical health.
AND
We mourn the loss of a son…we cannot see him, talk to him, but we know because of the gospel he is alive…we must believe what is real to have spiritual health.
We don’t separate reality into parts…but we do have to maintain a balance.
Humans have struggled with this balance for a long time.
Christians have had to work to keep a balance in regard to the Bible…the Bible is not merely a human book, and God did not toss it down from heaven…God spoke through humans using their humanity, but it is fully his word…both things are true
Christ is fully God, and fully man…both things are true.
Salvation is of the soul, but our final hope is a resurrected body, salvation is for all of who we are…we will not be going to be spirits haunting heaven…but embodied beings in a new heaven and earth.
In chapter 1, John began his gospel…with “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made, without him nothing was made that has been made…the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, we have seen his glory…the glory of the one and only.
Epic stuff…cosmos creating God/man…has come to dwell with us.
Today we are in John chapter two.
Let me just read the first few verses.
On the third day a wedding took place in Cana of Galilee. Jesus’s mother was there, 2 and Jesus and his disciples were invited to the wedding as well. 3 When the wine ran out, Jesus’s mother told him, “They don’t have any wine.”
John, you started with the Cosmos creator, Word became flesh…you ended the chapter with “You will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man (that Messianic title from Daniel, and that epic vision of Jacob’s ladder)
Spiritually powerful, mind-blowing stuff.
Now you are giving us whiplash…I mean, we turn to chapter two, and we get… a wedding.
I get it, weddings are important…but come on…in the beginning the Word created the cosmos…now, straight away…we have gone to a wedding?
And it gets worse, Jesus’ mom is concerned because they ran out of wine…and she wants Jesus involved in this kind of petty stuff.
Mary, you were there…the angels, the shepherds, the kings, the star…all that.
You know Jesus has bigger things to be concerned with than this.
I’m being facetious.
Couple reminders:
- John is not writing a mere historical biography…though it is historically factual.
He is writing a gospel, what is a gospel?
A kind of biography with the purpose of belief leading to eternal life.
But these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God,, and that by believing you may have life in his name. 20:31
- 2. Another reminder, John picked, very carefully, what he would tell in his gospel.
And there are also many other things that Jesus did, which, if every one of them were written down, I suppose not even the world itself could contain the books that would be written. 21:25
So, John is very intentional in the selection and the placement of his text…what he writes and the order in which he writes…keep that in mind.
I read a biography of Dwight Eisenhower by historian Stephen Ambrose a couple of years ago.
It was 608 pages long…pretty long book
But he lived 78 years…to read all about his life would take more than 78 years…there were so many things happening in and around him…it would take many times his lifetime, just to read the story of his lifetime.
So, Ambrose had to be very selective to tell the story of Eisenhower that he wanted us to understand.
John, unlike Ambrose, was inspired by the Holy Spirit…what we have is the material from Jesus’ live that he wants us to have, so that we will respond in faith to the Lord Jesus.
Jesus, his mom, and the first disciples were at a wedding.
There is a lot here in this storyline.
Not the least of which, this blows up the idea of a two-story life.
Jesus was not an ascetic… a loner, living in a cave…or the like 5th century Syrian ascetic who lived on a pillar, 50 feet off the ground…for 37 years.
He often withdrew from the rush of human activity to pray…but he fully engaged with all aspects of human life.
He is at a wedding…I’m confident he wasn’t brooding in the background…grumbling about petty human affairs.
He is the one who invented marriage…this was his idea.
How we do weddings is our idea…but marriage is God’s.
Celebration is built into his design…though that celebration varies by culture.
*When I was a young man I thought the celebration of a wedding was extravagant (and it can be that) …but I grew up and I now understand the importance of markers and celebration for key events.
Weddings…mark one of the most important of all human events.
You can be sure, Jesus was fully engaged, fully enjoying the whole thing.
Let’s go on.
4 “What has this concern of yours to do with me,, woman?” Jesus asked. “My hour has not yet come.” 5 “Do whatever he tells you,” his mother told the servants.
6 Now six stone water jars had been set there for Jewish purification. Each contained twenty or thirty gallons. 7 “Fill the jars with water,” Jesus told them. So, they filled them to the brim. 8 Then he said to them, “Now draw some out and take it to the headwaiter.” And they did. 9 When the headwaiter tasted the water (after it had become wine), he did not know where it came from—though the servants who had drawn the water knew. He called the groom 10 and told him, “Everyone sets out the fine wine first, then, after people are drunk, the inferior. But you have kept the fine wine until now.” 11 Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee. He revealed his glory, and his disciples believed in him.
Okay, with our two interpretive lenses in place, let’s think about this:
-He is writing so people would believe and have life
-He is very selective in what he writes
What do we have here?
Look at verse 11.
Jesus did this, the first of his signs…He revealed his glory, and his disciples believed in him
This is the first of his signs (there will be a total of seven in John’s gospel).
It was a miracle; he superseded the natural order.
He didn’t use the standard process for making wine.
Normally: You plant a vine, grow and harvest grapes, extract the juice, let the juice ferment.
All this by the way is natural and normal…but the process itself is supernatural in design and origin.
Jesus set up this entire process.
So here he skips some steps and goes straight to wine…but it is no parlor trick.
Miracles are signs…signs don’t exist for themselves they point to something greater.
The greater thing all of the Lord’s signs pointed to was himself, his work to save us.
In this making of wine, he revealed his glory and eventually his disciples would believe in him.
They believed in him to a point here…but they would not fully believe until his full glory was revealed in the cross and resurrection.
Why did John write this down as the first sign?
We would conclude that there are bigger things than an embarrassed host at a wedding who has run out of wine.
We can’t rank the signs that way…or we are missing the point of them.
Later he will heal the sick, the blind, even raise the dead…now those are real signs!
If you see a sign that says, Grand Canyon ahead…You don’t say, “Wow, now that is a great sign!” and then turn around and go home.
The size of the sign is irrelevant…what the sign signifies is the point.
Lazarus was raised from the dead…and at the time, it would have seemed more important than miraculous wedding wine…but Lazarus died again.
What was most important was what Lazarus being raised from the dead signified.
That Jesus is the Lord of life.
So, why did John choose this sign, the wedding wine?
Not because it just happened to be first on the Lord’s calendar, he could have skipped it and written about a healing…he skipped other things the Lord did…he couldn’t tell them all.
Because it was a very important first sign to tell the story he wanted to tell of who Jesus is so people would believe.
Based on several factors we won’t get into…it is likely that Mary was a widow by now and so Jesus was the elder son taking care of her.
He was fully man, but he was a sinless man…she would have good reason to trust him, she knew him well.
So, she asked her son to help…but Jesus responds with a mild correction.
Jesus calling her “woman” was not derogatory…he will use that same word when he addresses Mary from the cross.
He uses that word because it fits his response…he is very serious and wants her to understand something important.
“Woman, what does this have to do with me? My hour has not yet come.”
His response is not rude, but it is given as a kind of mild rebuke.
What is going on here?
“You are my mom, but I am the Lord…I have a determined purpose and timeline…my hour has not come yet.”
So, she can no longer view him merely as her son and she has no inside track with him in what he does and doesn’t do.
This may be part of that “sword” that would pierce her soul, Luke wrote about in his gospel.
He was my son, now, he is to be my Lord.
Over and over Jesus will say, “My time (hour) has not come yet”
He will only change his message when he is in his last days and the time has come for his death…which will then lead to his resurrection and exaltation.
Then, he will say, “My time has come.”
This is what the signs all point towards.
His first followers only saw all of this in a final perspective looking back on what they had seen along the way.
At the end of the Lord’s work…life, death, resurrection, glorification…they fully understood the point of it all…in retrospect.
So, knowing his mom’s heart and mind…She sees Jesus as her son, and he has been a good one…now she needs to see him for the purpose for which he has come…so he gives her a mild correction.
She responds well…She doesn’t try to coerce, or manipulate…”I’m your mother, and this is important to me, if you really loved me.”
None of that nonsense.
She wisely says to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.”
Many see this statement as a kind of transition for Mary to Jesus as Lord.
But what she says has proven to be good advice for the ages…”Do whatever he tells you.”
What are we to make of all this?
It is important that the first sign was a wedding.
God instituted marriage…performed the first wedding in Genesis 2.
Paul writes that marriage is a living picture of Christ and the Church.
Revelation speaks of the future return of Christ as including a wedding feast of Christ and the church.
Pastors will sometimes mention at a wedding ceremony…that the Lord’s first miracle was at a wedding…giving great importance and credibility to marriage.
This is a good and accurate point.
The importance of marriage in Scripture cannot be denied, but we cannot end there.
In the age to come there will be no marriage as we know it…so this is a temporary construct.
What this marriage sign points to is the new covenant that Jesus is going to inaugurate in his life and death.
To this point, John leaves a couple of other clues as to why he selected this sign to be included.
The Lord used water from Jewish ceremonial stone Jars, used for purification rituals, as his raw materials for making the wine.
John is pointing us in the direction of the tie in between the Old Covenant and its ceremonies and rituals that in themselves could not bring us new life.
In the New Covenant the old ceremonial laws are done away with…Jesus has fulfilled the law for us…we only need to believe in faith and act in faithfulness.
In addition, John indicates that Jesus produced an abundance of wine…more than that they would have needed.
He is reminding us of the Old Covenant prophecies that pointed forward to New Covenant realities.
‘In that day the mountains will drip new wine, (Joel 3:18)
This abundance of the New Covenant, the Kingdom to come…is revealed in this miracle.
CONCLUSION
There are two separate but related biblical constructs that we must understand and keep in our minds if we are going to live with balance.
I want to address them together this morning…I have addressed them many times over the years but not side by side to show how we can become confused and imbalanced.
- The first is the biblical reality of a single-story life.
There is no downstairs world of facts and upstairs world of faith/fiction.
Though life often runs on twin tracks…sorrow and joy, spiritual and physical, life and death…it is a single world…it is all our Father’s world.
Christians fall into imbalance when they try to separate their lives into component parts.
One is a spiritual over physical imbalance
To try and detach from the world around you.
To isolate from the culture, you live in.
To dimmish the impact and importance of the physical body.
Detachment from the world, in an attempt to be more “spiritual”
The other is the physical over spiritual imbalance
I’m saved, I’ll go to heaven when I die so it doesn’t matter what I do with my body.
Here, you have professing Christians who have no problem with sex outside of marriage, or not being a part of a local church, or who live with unresolved anger, unforgiveness…I could go on.
In the biblical balance…every part of who we are belongs to God…now and forever.
So, Jesus celebrates a wedding, but the physical marriage is not all there is…there is much more.
That particular marriage and that couple were super important, it mattered to Jesus to be there…but it is not all important, that marriage is now over
What mattered the most was the gospel…and a faith and faithfulness response.
In his wedding attendance and miracle we see Jesus living a single story life.
- The second important biblical construct to keep in balance is that the Kingdom of God is already here in part, not yet here in full.
So, Jesus showed the already abundance of the Kingdom in the wine, he provided more than was needed.
But that wine ran out, that couple have long since died.
This was a picture of the future kingdom, but that future kingdom is here in part, not full.
It is already and not yet experienced by us.
The two errors here are:
- The kingdom has come in fullness already…full abundance is mine for the asking or demanding.
If I have enough faith my life is going to be free of trouble and full of everything good thing I desire.
If I really were a Christian, I would not struggle
- The Kingdom is entirely future…I must suck it endure now; I will only experience the goodness of God when I am dead.
The first error leads to imbalanced, non-resilient and ultimately disappointed Christians.
The second error leads to imbalanced, non-resilient and perpetually disgruntled Christians.
The Balance is…I am already living in the kingdom…in this I greatly rejoice, though now, I will suffer grief in many trials.
Single Story Life: Jesus is Lord of everything
Already/Not yet Kingdom: His reign is already revealed in part, not yet revealed in its fullness.
The wedding sign points to all this:
Jesus attends a regular wedding, attends to a practical need, and it is a sign pointing to something bigger.
Jesus introduces the abundance of the Kingdom…but the full abundance is yet to come.
As a follower of Christ, we must hold these tensions in place.
- Jesus is Lord of all of your life.
-Your salvation is not merely in order to escape hell when you die, it is for you to live a life for his glory now.
-He must be Lord of what you watch on TV and online, what you say, what you put in your body and do with your body, what comes out of your mouth, what you do with your time and money.
When you sin…when you fail to make him Lord.
Confess…because he is the Lord…we want to live in that reality experientially.
- As you do, you will experience Kingdom life now. He will bring his goodness into your life now. You can expect it, you should look for it, you will experience it.
-But you must not think that the fullness of the kingdom is already.
-You will suffer. You will experience loss and you will see the goodness of God in the land of the living.