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“Joining God’s Party”

Scripture: John 2:1–11 (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/...) Friends, when the Apostle Paul would write to community of early Christians after a time of being away from them, he would make some accounting of what he had been up to, often to show how busy he had been, but especially to build up the zeal and excitement of the Christians in their love of becoming something new. I intend to do a little bit of that “accounting” in this sermon, as we also weave the scriptural thread of Jesus turning the water into wine at Cana. And I hope you will indulge me a little bit more of Advent, and a little bit more of Christmas, and a little bit more Epiphany this morning — even though we have passed through the hearts of these seasons, we have not been together since December 14 when we lit the third of five candles on our Advent wreath, so there is a little more light for us to share together . . . and I have a few lingering Christmas thoughts as we move into the next phase of the Christian year. The miracle of Advent is that God is preparing to enter the world in the form of a little baby which the angel Gabriel tells everyone is to be called Jesus. You may remember this angel Gabriel from the pageant prequel here at the church back on December 21 — Gabriel goes around telling expectant mothers like Elizabeth and Mary what to call their new babies. Another shoutout to our choir members who helped that special production of Luke’s gospel come alive. The miracle of my and Grace’s Advent was the waiting for the arrival of a little one as well— Rosetta Joan Palmer Lovett. No angel came to announce her name to us, and so over the months we whittled down a list to a few names, hoping that when the time came to meet this little human she would help us make this decision. This and other unknowns had helped us feel the fullness of inherent invitation of Advent to wait and anticipate the coming of Christmas. Sunday, December 14 was the date that things started to change — let’s go back to that day, like inviting Charles Dickens’s Ghost-of-Christmas-Just-Past to come and take us back four weeks ago. We were here in the sanctuary for a service of Lessons and Carols. The RI brass quartet played beautiful music and guest readers came to offer the festive scripture readings about the coming of Jesus, the Christ child. It was only 18 hours after two Brown University students — Ella Cook and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov — were killed and ten others injured. Many of us were very raw and shaken and tired and uncertain that morning in the midst of this still unfolding tragedy. Instead of lighting a candle of joy that morning, as originally intended, we lit a candle of hope — the motto of the state of Rhode Island and the proverbial anchor of our soul, as we searched for a solid foundation from which to worship that morning. And after the Lessons and Carols we went into Memorial Hall and made gingerbread houses with all sorts of candy, and played trivia games, and enjoyed conversation, and appreciated the ability to be a community together on a difficult day. I left church that day with a long list of things I was going to do at work at the church the next day. On my way home from church that day, I stopped to pick up groceries to make dinner, and I stopped at the hardware store to pick up plumbers putty so I could patch a little hole in our house’s sewer pipe. The little hole had been made the night before as a plumber tried hard to fix the bigger problem of what turned out to be a collapsed sewer line somewhere between our house and the street. That’s a bigger story for another time . . . But just as Mary and Joseph probably couldn’t tell the story of giving birth to Jesus without mentioning the stable and the manger and the barn animals, Grace and I won’t be able to tell the story of Rosie without mentioning that we couldn’t take showers or run a washing machine or use water freely when she was born, or for many days after. I had just finished patching the broken pipe when Grace’s water broke, and twelve hours later there was Rosie. Rosetta Joan is named for two of her great grandmothers, Rosetta Flanagan and Joan Lovett. We also liked the symbolism of the rose, which is a Marian symbol, meaning connected to Jesus’s mother Mary — and we have many special Marys in our life. And the name Joan is the feminine form of the name John, both derived from the Hebrew name “Yochanan” which means “God is gracious.” God is gracious indeed! The Gospel of John is my favorite Gospel story of the four. And I feel fortunate that the lectionary plan that we are following this year, from Genesis to Revelation, is going to be slowing down for a time to explore the Gospel of John from now until Easter. Today we heard the story of the adult Jesus, some thirty-years old, performing the miracle of turning water into wine. This s...