"When the Wine Gave Out"

Sermon preached by John C. Hall on January 4, 2009

Text — John 2:1-11

Before we can see good news in a situation, we often need to see what looks like bad news. At the wedding in Cana, they ran out of wine. But that led Jesus to turn the water into new wine.  And part of the miracle was that the second wine was better.

I’d like to use the miracle at Cana as a backdrop and metaphor for what the Church has gone through in the recent past. By “Church” I mean the whole Church in the western world — all of its branches and denominations.  By “recent past” I mean the last 400 years. In church time, that’s recent.

We all know that the influence and importance of the Church has declined a lot over the past four centuries. Let’s just consider what has happened here in New England, and Middletown.

In the mid to late 1600s, the life of this whole community was built around the church. You had to be a church member to vote. The church got its money by levying taxes on everyone, including non-church members.

For 17^th century New England Christians, most of what happened, good fortune and misfortune, was a matter of God’s approval or disapproval. Bountiful crops, good weather, ample rain, and survival were signs of God’s favor. Illness, storms, floods, crop failures, and death were lessons from God, or judgments from God. To be a respectable person meant to be a practicing Christian. Church attendance was technically required by law, although the requirement was hard to enforce.

In other words, the church was viewed as essential to civil society and people probably assumed that the church would always enjoy this high position. This architecture we have here today reflects that confidence in the church’s privileged place in the world for the indefinite future. As it turned out, the future wasn’t that simple or straightforward.

Different brands of Christianity sprang up. Of course, each one claimed to be the “true church.” There was a time, in the 1500s in Europe, when people killed each other, and burned each other at the stake over these matters. It was a very ugly time, and it revealed how misguided and dangerous religious conviction can be. Today, we are rightfully skeptical of any group that claims to be the one true church or to know God’s absolute will.

In the 1700s and 1800s, science emerged as a force in competition with religion. Darwin’s theory of evolution threw many people’s religious belief systems into crisis and generated a lot of confusion and debate about how to read the Bible.

So science and the breakdown of centralized religious authority led to secularism — viewing the world in non-religious ways. Secularism didn’t wipe out religion as some modern-day prophets like Harvey Cox predicted, and as many religious people feared. But it did lead to religious tolerance. It led to the separation of church and state. It led to a decline in the power of any single religious world view.

Many people still go to church and get a lot out of it. Christian ideas and Christian insights into human nature are very compelling. Christian communities can still have a very rich form of life. But these things don’t enjoy that privileged place they used to hold.

You can look at this general situation, and say “This is all sad. It’s a bad thing. The wine is running out, or it has run out.” It can feel sad for those of us who love the church — and I am one of those people. But that’s not the only way to see the situation.

What new wine is there?  What new thing is God doing in the world through these changes I’ve described?  

For Jesus, the new wine isn’t just a replacement beverage. The new wine stands for Jesus’ blood — the blood of his death. Jesus had to go through a lot for the sake of the new thing that came about through his life. And it stands for the spiritual drink of the Eucharist that unites us with the living Christ.

So, whatever God is up to, especially when it doesn’t seem to be going our way, we’re called to look for something good coming out of it, some new thing.

What we’re experiencing is this: God is changing the spiritual landscape.  It’s more complicated now. People don’t come to church automatically. They need to be invited. They need to be told they’re not required to check their brains at the door. They need to know that we’re not stuffy. They need to know we have a sense of humor.

This is why, when you go to our website the first thing you see is kids jumping up in the air and the next thing you see are dogs in church. We want to shake up people’s image of what a church can be like.

When it comes to getting people’s attention, and time, and loyalty, it’s a much more competitive environment than it ever was. It makes us look for new ways of being a spiritual community, ways that can attract more people.

But here’s the real dilemma. This is where it hurts. We can think of changes that would make the church more viable in the world. We’ve already thought of some, and we’re doing them, and they certainly help. African drumming, the Celebration Singers, and the Jonah Center are all new things that attract people to the church.

Unfortunately, most of those changes we can think of — the ones that would have the most dramatic impact — are things we ourselves resist because they’re expensive, or they take work, or they cause us to change how we do things. It’s always easier not to change. In fact, it’s easier to die than to change. So change comes very slowly. And not all churches make it. Many churches, even ones that are still open on Sunday morning, are spiritually dead.

This church, I’m happy to say, in spite of all our challenges and our shrinking size, is not dead.  It’s very vital.  We have a lot of spiritual, creative, and financial resources. There’s a lot of love here — a lot of wine in the cup.

But here’s the main point.  Whatever we do to remain vital, and financially viable,  we need to see ourselves and imagine ourselves more and more from the perspective of people who aren’t here. We know what we like. We like this. But there aren’t enough of us to sustain this. So we need to ask people who aren’t here, what kind of a spiritual community — if any — they would be drawn to.  And we should not be too narrow in our concept of what a spiritual community is.

Whatever we learn from asking people who aren’t here what they are interested in, we need to be more like that.

Already, we know quite a bit about people who are likely to come here. They aren’t looking for religious dogma, so we don’t have to shove anything down their throats. People are mostly looking for other people. They’re looking for people who care about the same things that they care about. They’re looking for a place to sing and celebrate.  They’re looking for inspiration. They’re looking for a way to make a contribution to a world with a lot of vexing problems.

And we have those things here.  That’s what we need to let other people know about.  That’s what we need to project.

God’s energy in the world has a creative side, and a destructive side. Wine gives out and new wine is produced.  Some forms of community life die and disappear.  Others evolve and get renewed.

We feel these challenges that we face are negative. We didn’t ask for them. They seem to get in our way.  But this is God calling us, even forcing us, to become a kind of new wine.

Come to the 2^nd hour on January 18 to hear what we can all do, an need to do, to attract more people who can share this rich and wonderful form of life we have together. And bring your friends to worship on January 25 when Aly Tatchol Camara will be with us again to lead us in an exciting service of drumming and dancing.