Don't Drink the Water

by The Rev. Paul S. Nancarrow

This sermon is based on John 2:1-11. Click here to listen to an audio version.

It's good to be home! I must say I feel a little like "the flying rector" — last Sunday gone to Honduras, here today, next Sunday gone to Diocesan Council — but after that, I promise, there'll be a good long stretch of Sundays when I'll be home. And it is good to be home.

One of the first things I enjoyed about being home, when Lee and I got back to the Rectory just after midnight on Thursday, was getting ready for bed and brushing my teeth with tap water. I know it seems silly to fixate on such minor details, but being able to use the tap water after a week of doing everything in a cup felt like an enormous luxury. You see, when we are in Copan, we have to be very careful about eating and drinking local stuff. The water in Copan is pretty clean by global standards; but even clean water has some microorganisms living in it; and the microorganisms there are different from the microorganisms here; and since our bodies are not accustomed to them, the microorganisms there can make us pretty sick. Any of you who have travelled in the third world know what I am talking about. So when we are in Copan we have to make sure we do everything with bottled purified water. We lug big bottles of agua purificado up to the worksite; we only eat at restaurants that use purified water for cooking and washing up; the hotel provides a water cooler from which we get pitchers of purified water for all our needs inside our rooms. We don't even eat fruit from a streetside seller that might have been washed in local water, because the risk of getting sick is just too great. And that's why, at the end of the workday, sitting around the pool at the hotel, we would relax with a nice cold beer: because the beer comes in bottles, and we know that it is pure. (Okay, that was one of the reasons we'd end the day with a beer...)

It occurred to me one day that drinking beer because the water wasn't safe was actually something that put us in touch with a way of life in the ancient world. Archaeologists have found that the ancient Sumerians and ancient Egyptians brewed tremendous quantities of beer, because the water wasn't safe, and brewing the water into beer purified it enough to make it drinkable. In ancient Israel they preferred wine over beer; but for them the principal was the same: the alcohol in the wine would kill the germs, and that would make it safe to drink. In fact, it was common practice to mix wine and water: ancient wine was very strong, and not very pleasant tasting, not like the more delectable wines developed in modern times; so in the ancient world, you mixed wine and water because the water made wine less nasty, and the wine made the water less dangerous. Being careful with our water in Copan made me appreciate more practically a fact I knew about the history of the ancient world.

And that experience in Copan made me read our Gospel passage today with an understanding I've not had before. Having had to remind myself not to drink the water made me appreciate more what was at stake when Jesus turned the water into wine.

For years, I have taught and preached that, of all the miracles of Jesus, this is the one miracle Jesus does just for the joy of it. In the wine miracle, no one's health is at stake, no one's life is on the line, no one is possessed by demons, no one is endangered by a storm, no one's being is at risk — the wine miracle is the one miracle Jesus does for no other reason than to show forth the joyous abundance of God's love. That's what I have taught about this miracle story for years.

I was wrong.

People's health is at stake in this story, because the water Jesus told the servants to put in those six stone jars was iffy at best, dangerous at worst, in any case a risk to drink — and if the party had gone on under those circumstances, every single guest would have been endangered, every single guest stood a chance of getting sick. When Jesus changed that water into wine, he was in fact keeping everyone at that wedding in good health. This miracle is not just about abundant joy, but it is very much about health and well-being and getting saved from sickness. Being in Copan has helped me see that now.

And of course the really wonderful thing about this story is that the bodily concern for not getting sick and the spiritual revelation of joyous abundance are not two separate things. I mean, no one was forcing the people to drink that water. If the wine ran out, and the water wasn’t safe, the bride and groom could have simply declared the party over and sent everybody home. It would have been embarrassing, yes, but it wouldn’t have been the end of the world. When Jesus changed the water into wine, he did it so the party could continue, he did it so the fellowship and the hospitality and conviviality could go on, and could grow, and could become in the minds and hearts of the guests more than just a party, but could become a sign, an outward and visible signification of the goodness and generosity and abundant joy of the Kingdom of God. After all, using a wedding feast as a symbol of God’s Reign was an old tradition in Jewish thought — we see it in our first reading today — and by allowing the feast to go on without anyone getting sick, Jesus gave the people not just idea of the symbol in their minds, but the experience of the symbol in themselves. By allowing the feast to go on without anyone getting sick, Jesus allowed those guests to know God reigning in their midst. The miracle of health and the miracle of joy are one and the same.

And that's the part of the story my eyes were really opened to by being in Copan. Too often, I think, we fall into the trap of thinking of the work we do for the body and the work we do for the soul as two different things. We get a little caught up in Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and think that we must see to the needs of the body first, see to food and drink and shelter and clothing; and afterwards, when the primary needs have been met, then we can turn to secondary things like prayer and spirituality and beauty and music and conviviality and joy. From time to time I have met churchpeople deeply committed to social ministries, who seem to think joy is a luxury they cannot deserve, who don't seem to feel they're being faithful unless they have some injustice to be outraged about, some wrong to which they can oppose their righteous anger. From time to time our Honduras mission has been criticized, because we go to Copan to build church buildings, and there are those who feel we ought to be doing something more practical, like a medical mission or a clean-water project or building houses for people rather than houses for worship. Sometimes we feel we must work to meet people's bodily needs first, and we can get to all that spiritual stuff later... if people want it of us.

But what our Gospel today tells us is that that kind of gap between bodily and spiritual just isn't real. Creating conditions of bodily well-being opens up a spirit of abundant joy, and creating occasions of spiritual abundance helps to sustain the body's health, and God's Reign is epiphanized in both. The houses of worship we build in Copan are usually among the largest buildings in the small communities we go to, and that means they also serve as community centers, classrooms, clinics when a medical team visits, meeting places when the village needs to get together — those buildings serve social needs along with the spiritual. Medical studies show that prayer and meditation and contemplation and music, such as we have here at Trinity, have positive bodily health benefits; and I have seen how the bodily feeding ministry we do at Noon Lunch has opened into a spirit of gratitude and groundedness and renewal of hope in many of our guests. The spirit and the body are deeply intertwined; and the example of Jesus in our Gospel today shows us how we can minister to both.

Jesus changed water into wine as a proclamation of God's will for our physical well-being and our abundance of spiritual joy. Having to be careful about drinking the water in Copan helped me see more clearly the intertwining of that gracious gift. May God grant you occasion to know the gift of bodily well-being and spiritual joy as well. Amen.