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Wedding at Cana, John 2:1-11
Mustard Seed Matt 13:31-33
Last summer, we lost our pup Clio who we had had since we lived in Mexico. Clio was a special dog for many reasons but one of my favorites happened when she was about a year old. Some of you have heard this story.
We took Clio every where with us—to indigenous villages, coffee shops and it was in a shelter run by Quakers that one of the residents looked at her and told me, “your dog is too fat.” Tu perrita esta muy gorda.
“No! I replied, who says that!? She’s not fat, I just had her at the vet and she’s a healthy size!”
“Si, esta gordita,” he told me, “She’s chubby. She’s pregnant.”
“Impossible!” I huffed, “she’s still a puppy and hasn’t gone into heat!” I spun around left.
Clio got moodier and moodier and I began to fret. A nagging worry began to tap at me: what if she’s pregnant. We decided to take her to a small hole-in-the wall vet up the mountain for a check. Thankfully, the vet was immediately reassuring:
“Your dog’s not pregnant” the vet told me, smiling warmly, “this is a psychological pregnancy!” I looked at him with a desperately weak smile.
“She has developed sympathy placenta,” he explained confidently, “and she may actually birth it.” I felt like I was a kindergartner. I nodded, wide-eyed. “If this continues,” he patted my arm reassuringly, “bring her back a couple weeks, I’ll give her a special shot.”
I drove home dazed. Google later confirmed this was a true possibility and I relaxed into the reassuring knowledge that all was well. In fact, I became something of an expert on psychological pregnancies, myself after that.
Several weeks later, Omar was boarding a plane to head home to the states for a week and I was getting ready to leave for the final day of a retreat I was leading. Clio was hunched over her bed in the living room and as I stood there, coffee in hand, studying her a small puppy slid out. We stared at each other. I almost dumped my coffee on the floor.
I called Omar on the phone and screamed—"it was real!!! The pregnancy was real! What do I do!?”
“I’m on the plane!” he hissed back, “we’re taxiing! Like on the runway!”
“What do I do!!” I wailed.
“TAKE TO VET!” and he hung up.
I went to a different vet this time. The one in the fancy plaza with the store where they sold gluten-free bread.
After shaking hands with the vet who had responded to my early morning emergency call, I smiled wildly, nervously, “just check her out,” My ears were starting to hurt from all this smiling. I paced the waiting room like a caged tiger.
After confirming the worst. This vet also patted my arm. He told me her labor was just beginning. I flinched.
“Take her home,” he explained to me sternly, “and to put her in a corner with some sheets. She’ll know what to do.”
He steered me kindly toward the door. On my way home, I called the young adults, “It was real!” I wailed to them. We cancelled the final day of the retreat, they all came over, and we kept vigil for 23 hours…while Clio birthed 11 puppies.
My first thought was “this can’t be happening.” Then it turned into “what am I going to do with 11 puppies!?” (For the record, we were not supposed to have any dogs in our apartment and it was already tense trying to hide a hundred pound Rottweiler.) Then there was the expense: what was this going to cost!? What would people think of me! To say this was an inconvenience was an understatement.
I am a fairly steady person, but I was wildly all over the map in this moment.
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A compass aligns itself with the strongest magnetic field around it. Usually, that’s the earth, but if you put a small magnet nearby, the needle starts to swing toward it.
Worry is like that. It pulls our imagination towards worst-case scenarios and all of the sudden, we’re living inside these disasters that haven’t even happened. Cynicism pulls us too. It trains our imagination that hope hurts too much and that it’s better to expect disappointment than be surprised.
Sometimes, it is logic or control—if I can’t map it, explain it, or diagram it, there’s no way I’m trusting it. (Hello, water into wine? Not possible.) And our imagination whittles down to just what we can manage.
And if we’re not careful, as these magnets pull at us, our whole sense of what could be has atrophied and narrowed and the joy that God intends is held at bay.
This cramped feeling of bracing for the worst is exactly the room Jesus walks into at Cana: The wine has run out, I imagine everyone running around, dishes flying, yelling, it was a disaster. Running out of wine at a wedding wasn’t just a bummer, it was socially humiliating. The family’s honor was at stake.
The servants are pulled by fear—hide the problem! Gah, Fix it, now! save face! Everyone is panicking. That is, everyone except Jesus and arguably Mary. She calls her son into the moment. He changes the barrels of water to fine wine and his ministry begins--not with 40 days in the desert in this version of the gospel--but with explosive, shocking joy.
While everyone was managing shame and worry and bracing for the worst, Jesus quietly took everyone to joy.
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What is it that keeps us from believing that God can surprise us and take us to joy?
The same magnets that pull at us were pulling at them. Worry that something would crumble. Cynicism that forces us to adjust expectations. Or control: an inability to logically map it out or believe it.
There are more reasons that pull us from trusting that God can surprise us. But there’s a common thread tying these together. When it’s worry, it is our imagination that has gone off the negative deep end. When we’re cynical, it’s our imagination that is fiercely protective (don’t you dare disappoint me.) When we’re rational, it’s imagination that’s too narrow, too controlling and restricted.
Mystery is beyond all these categories.
The good news is that even when these magnets of worry or cynicism or shame or fear are screaming loud and pulling at us, the good news is still louder.
And it’s exactly in this moment of panic and despair that Jesus makes wine. No one there at the wedding had the kind of faith that was going to move a mountain. Maybe they just a mustard seed’s worth of hope. Just enough to fill the jars when Jesus told them.
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Several months before Clio had puppies, I had lost a pregnancy. It was awful. Wouldn’t it just be perfect if I could say right now, that Clio had the puppies and then, suddenly, I became pregnant (yay!) That didn’t happen. After the loss, I was magnetized by worry, fear, grief, and so many things. I was used to protecting my heart, lowering expectations, and keeping my hopes narrow and controlled. I was shocked (shocked) with what happened when Clio had those pups. It was so bizarre and delightful and we had 7-8 weeks of unmitigated joy and delight with those puppies in our house. My favorite puppy was the huge boss-queen pup that we named horchata.
Yes, it was chaotic and ridiculous and hilarious, but also awesome and shocking and healing. Joy didn’t fix everything, it didn’t undo what we had lost, but it burst into the room and stayed there along with the grief.
In Cana, the wine doesn’t appear because the hosts get their act together. The wine fills the barrels because Jesus steps into their panic. They are magnetized by shame and worry. Jesus is magnetized by generosity and abundance.
God moves towards us into rooms of panic and shame. Into worried rooms and cynical rooms and suspicious hearts. And God’s magnetic field is stronger. She quietly makes wine.
In both my story and in the story of the wedding at Cana, we didn’t expect joy. I was rolling with my grief and holding everything close. But joy showed up anyway. (11 times). I couldn’t control it or explain it
I could only laugh and receive it.
Grace interrupts our boring, mundane little lives and, as time goes on, grace reshapes us. After that evening in Cana, the disciples are changed, and as the years go on they’re transformed. Their imagination of what is possible stretches.
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That night at the wedding, the servants didn’t create the joy, the good news was that it came despite the fiasco of running out of wine. The good news today is that joy comes to us, takes a seat at our table, steps into our panic and surprises our plans. At first, we shake our heads in disbelief that it happened, but then as that joy rumbles around inside of us, we learn to live as if it might happen again…. We learn that God surprises us. And we throw our hands up in the air and shake our heads in wonder at this living and holy mystery that will not let us go.
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