Epiphany 3C - "How Things Will Land"

1 Corinthians 12:12-31a and Saint Luke 4:14-21

She told The New York Times, that every time one climbs into a pulpit “you can never really tell how things will land.”1

The Rt. Reverend Mariann Edgar Buddle, Bishop of Washington D.C. could not have been more correct when she climbed into the Canterbury Pulpit of the National Cathedral last Tuesday morning and used that pulpit to confront the bully pulpit of national politics. 

To those of us steeped in the Christian tradition she wasn’t saying anything unheard of when she, in an understated tone that seemed to make what she was saying sound even more important, began by saying that all who were gathered there had come to “pray for unity as a people and a nation. Not for agreement political or otherwise ... a unity that serves the common good.  Unity,” she said, “respects our differences and to genuinely care for one another even when we disagree.  Because the culture of contempt that has become normalized in this country threatens to destroy us.”

Then she suggested that our unity could be built on three pillars. The first, “honoring the inherit dignity of every human being” by our public discourse, “refusing to mock, discount or demonize those with whom we differ.” The second pillar was honesty and the third was humility which when spoken to a roomful of Washington politicians and their lackeys, most of whom see themselves as potential candidates for the fifth face on Mount Rushmore, seemed to me to be quite a high hope.

Then she set her hopes even higher when she spoke directly to someone not forty feet away and reminded him that his office, his high office, called upon him to have mercy on the people who are scared now.

There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and Independent families, some who fear for their lives. The people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings; who labor in poultry farms and meat packing plants; who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals. They…may not be citizens or have the proper documentation. But the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes and are good neighbors. They are faithful members of our churches and mosques, synagogues, gurudwaras and temples. I ask you to have mercy ... on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away. And that you help those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands to find compassion and welcome here. Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger, for we were all once strangers in this land.2

Mercy, humility, honesty, compassion, honouring the other.  Who could disagree with those goals?  They are the very same traits we try to instill in the students of Saint Luke Academy every day in every way possible.

For her efforts Bishop Buddle told The New York Times: “People were questioning everything from her character and qualifications to the state of her eternal soul, and as she good naturedly said “how soon I should get to my eternal soul, and whether I belong in this country.”3

When you get up to preach you just never know where things will land. Some people were gush and some people will gripe.  There will always be opinions from bravo to boring because, well, you just “never can really tell how things will land.”

I wonder if Jesus wondered the same thing when he got up to read on that day in the synagogue of his home town.

All eyes were on him. The local boy lector come home.

Imagine the drama in Nazareth: “He unrolled the scroll.” This would have taken some time – so is suspense building? It also would have been heavy, a physical challenge to unroll the thing to just the right location he’d chosen. Isaiah 61 is a text about being sent on a remarkable mission – and it’s about God’s people returning from exile.4

It is also Jesus’ mission statement.  It is what he was going to be about.  “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,” he says,

Because He has anointed Me

To preach the gospel to the poor;

He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted,

To proclaim liberty to the captives

And recovery of sight to the blind,

To set at liberty those who are oppressed;

To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.”

Then He closed the book and gave it back to the attendant and sat down. And the eyes of all who were in the synagogue were fixed on Him.”5

They weren’t so sure what he was up to and they weren’t so sure they liked what he was saying about himself but that is another story, for another preacher, for another time, like next week.

For today we have before us what those who follow Jesus are to be about — honouring each other, caring for each other, having a humble spirit with each other and most of all, having mercy on each other — just like the good Bishop said.

Because when we don’t do those simple things, other things begin to fall apart just like they did for Saint Paul’s congregation at Corinth.

You’d think that a church founded by such a prestigious pastor would be a perfect place, but it wasn’t.  The people of First Church Corinth managed to fight about anything and everything.

They fought over who was baptized by whom.  Was it Paul when he was Senior Pastor/Head of Staff or an interim whose name, over time, they couldn’t even remember?  And that baptismal battle was just in the first chapter!

It gets worse. To the point by, in only the fourth chapter, he has to warn: “Some of you have become arrogant..."6 “so full of themselves they never listen to anyone.”7

I’m loving his analogies.  What if the whole body were an eye, like Stuart in “The Minions.”  What if the whole body were a hand, like “Thing” on the Adams Family. No, says the great Saint, “If all were a single member, where would the body be?  As it is, there are many members yet one body.  The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you ...  If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.   Now you are the body of Christ...”8

Paul is asking the community in Corinth to think and act in a different way.  Regardless of what they are used to, despite of what is considered a reasonable way of being in the world, life in Christ calls for a new kind of seeing and knowing. It calls for each person to be cherished and honoured in ways that don’t just celebrate gifts but “value each person themselves.

“Christ calls the church to exemplify an ethic of mutual care and radical connection.  In this community, every member of the body belongs...”9

That means we are to work together in humility, and kindness, and mercy as a team overcoming our differences to work with each other.

What might that look like.  Let me give you a glimpse thanks to William Kristol, a conservative columnist, who takes us to an event at Madison Square Garden.  No!  Not that event but this one.

On May 8, 1970, Knicks center Willis Reed, suffering from a torn thigh muscle and not expected to be able to play in the NBA championship series’ decisive seventh game, hobbled onto the court as his teammates warmed up. Reed started the game, made the Knicks’ first two field goals, and inspired the crowd and his teammates, who proceeded to defeat the Lakers and secure the underdog Knicks the championship.

Willis Reed was a black man from Louisiana who’d attended Grambling, the famed historically black college. His teammates included Bill Bradley, a Princeton and Oxford-educated Midwestern banker’s son; Dave DeBusschere, a Catholic kid from Detroit; and Walt Frazier, who learned basketball on a dirt playground at his all-black segregated Atlanta school. The Knicks coach was Red Holzman, born on New York’s Lower East Side in 1920, the son of Jewish immigrants from Romania and Russia. That America is the America some of us see.10

That means we are to work together in humility, and kindness, and mercy as a team overcoming our differences to work with each other.

________________

1. Elizabeth Dias, “The Bishop Who Pleaded with Trump: ‘Was Anyone Going to Say Anything?,’” The New York Times, January 22, 2025, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/22/us/trump-bishop-plea.html.

2. Transcript of the homily delivered by Marann Edger Buddle at the Service of Prayer for the Nation at the Cathedral Church of Sts. Peter and Paul, The National Cathedral, January 21, 2025.

3. Diaz, loc. cit.

4. James C. Howell, “What Can We Say January 26? 3rd after the Epiphany,” James Howell’s Weekly Preaching Notions, January 1, 2025, https://jameshowellsweeklypreachingnotions.blogspot.com/.

5. St. Luke 4:18-20.  (NKJV) (NLJV= The New King James Version]

6. 1 Corinthians 4:18a. (NIV) [[NIV=The New International Version (Colorado Springs, CO International Bible Society, 1984)]

7. 1 Corinthians 4:18a (MESSAGE) [MESSAGE=Eugene H. Peterson, The Message (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2004).

8. 1 Corinthians 4:20-21 & 27a (NRSV) [NRSV=The New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition]

9. Charisse R Tucker, “Sanctified Imagination,” Sunday’s Coming Premium, January 20, 2025, https://mailchi.mp/christiancentury/sundays-coming-premium-words-of-stability-and-hope-19000253?e=58919ce9b9.

10.  William R Kristol, “The Ugliest Foot Forward,” Morning Shots, October 28, 2024, https://mail.aol.com/d/list/referrer=newMail&folders=1&accountIds=1&listFilter=NEWMAIL/messages/ABl-A1B2FdInZx-Qdg8PeIKN9IA.

Epiphany 2C - "So the Party Could Go On"

1 Corinthians 12:1–11 and Saint John 2:1–11

A priest friend of mine, who served an extremely wealthy parish on the far northwest side of Chicago used to always begin his first meeting with brides and grooms planning a wedding with the words: “Are you sure you want to go through with this?”

He was too good of a priest to suggest that they not get married or that the ceremony should not be in the church but he was issuing a warning about all the other events surrounding a wedding that they were getting themselves into.  

He was talking about the dresses and the tuxes.  He was talking about the flowers at church and banquet hall and the limousines that were required to prove that your family wasn’t on the dole.  He was talking about the rehearsal dinner, the wedding reception, and now the seemingly obligatory Sunday brunch that is expected to be provided the following day.

That’s what he was talking about when he asked the couple if they really “wanted to go through with this” and instead have a nice little wedding in the church’s beautiful chapel surrounded by family and close friends.

The couples never opted for that option.  Instead, they lived out the words of Spencer Tracy as Stanley Banks in the first “Father of Bride” when he looked straight into the camera and said to the audience: “I'll be honest with you. When I bought this house seventeen years ago, it cost me less than this blessed event in which Annie Banks became Annie Banks-MacKenzie. I'm told that one day I'll look back on all this with great affection and nostalgia. I hope so.”

The rest of the movie is given over to the craziness surrounding almost any but the smallest of weddings causing Tracy to remind the viewers: “Weddings are either confined to the bosom of the family ...or held in Madison Square Garden.”  

The Banks-MacKenzie wedding was clearly going to be of the Madison Square Garden variety causing Tracy to remark when they were going through hundreds of invitations that were all yeses. “Apparently Kay picked a day... ...when nobody within 400 miles has got anything to do.”

We’ve been to those kinds of weddings.  The kinds where, I at least, look around the room and say to myself, “This couple has more friends than people I have met in my lifetime.”  Jesus was at one of those weddings too.

It may not have been as crowded as the painting that appears at the top of this post and where in a painting by Italian Renaissance painter Paulo Veronese a barely identifiable Jesus is surrounded by what seems to be every single person in a village. 

That may not have been what it was like, but it probably was what it felt like.

Saint John goes to great pains to point out that not only Jesus was there, but his mother was, and to add to the crowds, even his disciples. This has always made me wonder who got the invitation. Was it Jesus? Mary? One of his disciples?  When they responded did they indicate not only “plus one” but maybe “plus twelve” or even more.

It doesn’t matter because apparently “nobody within four hundred miles had anything else to do on that day” and this wedding was not one that was going to be held in the bosom of the family but was a “Madison Square Garden variety.” 

Everybody who was anybody was there enjoying a celebration that was in its third day of a scheduled seven when something terrible happens. The wine runs out.

Social scientists tell us: “The fact that the family hosting the wedding has run out of wine threatens a serious loss of honor.”1 Were they too poor? Too cheap? 

It also causes no small measure of anxiety among the servants and especially the wine steward.  They must have gone limp when they discovered that the wine supply was not just low but that they were out.  This kind of miscalculation could have cost them their jobs.  This lack of wine would have cost both the bride and groom’s families their reputation in the community. This breach of hospitality would be talked about, remembered, for years.

But most of all, for those gathered the joy would be left out that wedding like air out of a balloon for wine was and is a symbol of joy.  “One ancient rabbi stated, ‘Without wine there is no joy.’”2

Mary notices and decides for whatever reason that her son, Jesus, can do something about it.  “She sees what’s amiss.  She perceives the high likelihood of scandal and humiliation brewing beneath a seemingly glossy surface.  If John’s account is trustworthy, Mary notices and registers concern before Jesus does.

I can’t help wondering exactly how Mary says it.  Quietly, urgently, after pulling her distracted son away from his friends, away from the music and the dancing, away from the servants working hard to hide their growing panic as countless wedding guests swirl obliviously around them.  I imagine Mary takes Jesus into an inner room, fixes his attention with a stern stare, and whispers the shameful news into his ear: “They have no wine.”3

Much has been made of Jesus’ response probably by scholars who didn’t have mothers.  For every one of us who had remember that at one time or another we have had to respond to an unreasonable request from our mother with “Is that any of our business...”4  Put a long “Mom” on his lips and all of us probably have said the same things to one or both of our parental units when they suggested that perhaps there was a problem somewhere that we could solve.  “Mom, that’s none of our business.”

Mary makes it his business.  In full mom mode she pays no attention to her son, and she goes to the servants and provides us with one of the greatest pieces of advice in all of scripture and perhaps literature: “Do whatever he tells you.”5

That’s great advice for that moment and for all time. Look at Jesus.  Read the words of Jesus. Follow Jesus and then “do whatever he tells you.”

The servants do just that. Looking around and wondering what this wedding guest is up to they do what Jesus tells them to do.  They fill up the water jars only to wonder and wait.  When the wine steward looks back at the jugs and tastes the wine a miraculous discovery is made.

Jesus does not just make a little bit of wine. He does not just do what he needs to do so they can get through the event without the hosts being embarrassed. No, John reports Jesus makes between 120 and 180 gallons of wine. The quantity screams abundance and extravagance. But ... what made this moment even more extravagant was not simply the quantity. Quality mattered too. Apparently the wine Jesus made was more like gallons of Chateau Margaux rather than gallons of Bota box Merlot.6

The sommelier, who has no idea where all this new supply has come from pulls the groom aside and asks in effect, what’s going on here.  “Everyone brings out the choice wine first and then the cheaper wine after the guests have had too much to drink; but you have saved the best till now.”7 

Imagine the relief.  On the face of the headwaiter who can keep his job.  On the part of the couple’s parents because they won’t lose face in front of their neighbours.  And most of all, on the part of all the party goers because this Madison Square Garden variety shindig can go on for a few more days.

This story is about a party that continues to this day and we are a part of it.  

Yes, I know we may not always feel like we’re at a party.

Sometimes we may feel as anxious as the hosts of the wedding, the servants and the wine steward over what might happen to us.  We may be literally worried about what tomorrow might bring and the day after that, and the day after that.  We might not only be worried for our nation, but about ourselves, our church, our world.  

We may be worried about how some in our wider families will recover from the loss of their homes, their loved ones, their livelihoods, because of the wildfires. 

There will be no quick solutions to any of these problems, but we will be on our way, on the right track, if we follow Mary’s advice and “do whatever he tells you.”

That’s the church’s job as it has been for the last 141 years in this place.  

As Dr. William H. Willimon, former bishop in the United Methodist Church reflected recently:

If you are a mainline protestant Christian ... it’s hard not to be nostalgic, to look back at our yesterdays as better than our prospects for lively tomorrows.  Yesterday’s wine was better than today’s, a lot better than tomorrows.

Trouble is Jesus Christ, the same one who produced the good wine at the end of the party in Cana in Galilee, keeps providing for us ... and insists on having the last word over our future.8

So, we come to the table and discover that the bread and wine at our little wedding feast has never run out.  We go forward, confident that Jesus may be indeed saving the best wine for last, for now.

We go forward know that the party will go on and at the center of it all, as our host, our gift, and our guest, will be none other than Jesus Christ our Lord.

So,  I say. Let the feast continue.

________________

1. Bruce J. Malina and Richard L. Rohrbaugh, Social Science Commentary on the Gospel of John (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2007), 66.

2. Brian Stoffregen, “John 2.1-11 2nd Sunday after the Epiphany - Year C,” John 2.1-11, accessed January 17, 2025, https://www.crossmarks.com/brian/john2x1.htm.

3. Debie Thomas, “They Have No Wine,” Journey with Jesus, January 13, 2019, https://journeywithjesus.net/essays/2053-they-have-no-wine.

4. St. John 2:4. (MESSAGE) [MESSAGE=Eugene H. Peterson, The Message (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2004).

5.St. John 2:5. (NRSV) [NRSV=The New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition]

6. Shannon J. Kershner, “Who Has Time for Joy.” Sermon preached at the Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago on January 17, 2016.

7. St. John 3:10.  (NIV) [NIV=The New International Version (Colorado Springs, CO International Bible Society, 1984)]

8. William H. Willimon, “Saving the Best for Last,” Pulpit Resource, Year C, 53, no. 1 (2025): 9-11.

 

Epiphany 1C - "Holy Family Outing"

Saint Luke 2:41-53

“There is a family drama now likely playing in a home near you.” 

Those words, “There is a family drama no likely playing in a home near you” were the opening sentence in this month's cover story of Psychology Today where the author went on to write: “It is the clash between the expectations of parents and the realities of their ... offspring in becoming, or trying to become, or feeling like, fully fledged adults."1

Every parent, every child, knows what it is like to be going through that very awkward stage between childhood and adulthood.  It is often accompanied by loud yelling, some screeching, perhaps accentuated with a little door slamming, and maybe even some storming out.

(At least that’s the way it was in my house as I was growing up and, try as hard as I might, I couldn’t get my mother to stop.)

I’m willing to bet that it was like this for you as you were growing up or raising your children as they were going through what Herman Munster tried to explain to his dear wife Lilly when their son, Eddie announced that he was going to run away from home.  

Herman wisely said: “It's nothing, dear. It's probably just another one of those adolescent cycles. I believe a child psychiatrist would refer to it as the ‘punk phase.’”2

It “is a family drama now likely playing in a home near you” because it is a tale as old as time.  It may well reach all the way back to, and beyond the pages of The Good Book and the story of the Jesus.

Once a hymn writer romantically extolled Jesus’ virtues suggesting that: “he is our childhood pattern; day by us he grew” because “through all His wondrous childhood, He would honor and obey.” So, “Christian children all must be, Mild, obedient, good as He.”3

Like it or not the childhood pattern as the ultimate example of childhood obedience breaks down in the little story of Holy Family dynamics that we have before us today.

I love this story about Jesus and his parents and am astonished by the author’s deep understanding of the human condition. Mary and Joseph were facing the adolescent years with a most unusual child, and yet we have only this one glimpse in scripture of that time in their lives.  The story is common and primal. A young, gifted boy is growing up and beginning to assert his independence against his parents.4

Times like that always make me smile and remember what I was told to do as a little kid if I got lost in the State Street store of Marshall Field’s where he worked.  My Uncle Herb’s first rule on becoming separated was that I was to “stop and stay”.

The theory behind this is simple: If two people are looking for each other it becomes like Brownian motion - two people just wandering around and perhaps even passing each other without either one knowing it.  If one just stops and the other does the searching all the searcher has to do is retrace his or her steps and allowing for a reunion to take place more quickly. 

This is exactly what this story about Jesus and his earthly parents is about. 

But before we dive too deep into this, I must warn you that I have read countless sermons and articles on this reading and most of them have missed how very human the whole business is while they focused on the divine.

The facts are simple.  Mary, Joseph, Jesus and a whole group of relatives, friends and Neighbours from back home are making their annual pilgrimage to Jerusalem in a first century tour group for the Passover.

The city is as crowded as Marshall Field’s used to be at Christmas and somehow, someway, Jesus becomes separated from his parents.  The text says only that he remained in Jerusalem but whether it was by accident or choice remains unclear.  What is clear is that the whole party was a day’s journey out of town before it was discovered that Jesus was missing.

Anyone who is a parent or who has ever been charged with the care of a child knows all about the mixture of fear and anger Mary and Joseph must have felt.  The overwhelming fear that some harm may have befallen their son mixed with the anger of a parent who says: “I hope he’s okay because when I find him, I’m going to kill that kid!”

That last option was not open to Mary and Joseph because of the divine nature of this story.  While they were frantically searching every wagon and asking every relative and friend if they had seen Jesus. Mary was remembering the visit from the solitary angel named Gabriel, the shepherds, and finally the multitudes of angels who hailed her son’s birth.

Joseph was remembering his visit from that same angel, and later, the wise men. All of his doubts must have come rushing back into his head, perfectly expressed in a song by Michael W. Card:

Father show me where I fit into this plan of yours

How can a man be father to the Son of God

Lord for all my life I've been a simple carpenter

How can I raise a king, how can I raise a king?5

I cannot believe that at this moment Mary and Joseph were serene people of prayer with hearts and minds at peace.  No, they were remembering, and they were worried because it was not just their son but the son who had been entrusted to them by God who was missing.

There is only one thing to do but make the long journey back to Jerusalem.  Two exhausting days of travelling and worrying.  Two sleepless nights spent tossing and turning.  Then another day searching in shops, and markets, and anywhere else they could think of asking everyone they had met if they had seen their son.  Frantically they searched for Jesus.

Finally, they try the temple maybe to look and maybe to pray. And when they do, lo and behold, there is their son sitting among the teachers asking questions and amazing eavesdroppers with his understanding.

Mary is not as impressed as the others and instead expresses her relief and frustration in one loaded sentence: “Son, why have you treated us like this? Your father and I have been anxiously searching for you.”6

Do you hear the guilt in that question?  It is almost as if she is saying:  “Why have you done this to us?  Why have you made us suffer so?”

Mary piles the guilt on in one paraphrase “Your father and I have been half out of our minds looking for you.”7  Now she is bringing Joseph into it.  “Its bad enough you have done this to me but look at what you have done to your father. You know he was never sure about this whole business in the first place and now you’ve made him a nervous wreck.”

This is real family dynamics at its best. Not just Holy Family dynamics but real family dynamics because all of us in this room have been involved in the same type of situations and conversations.

Every child who has ever stayed out too late or forgot to call home to tell his or her parents where they were or that they had arrived safely has heard, “We were so worried.”

And every parent has had to endure the kind of answer Jesus gives.  “Why were you searching for me?”8

You can almost hear Joseph, can’t you?  “Why? Why? I’ll tell you why! What did you expect us to do? Were we supposed to go home and wait for you to show up?  You’re twelve years old pal!”

To add fuel to the family dynamic fire that is now raging Jesus says: “Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house. But they did not understand what he said to them.”

And neither do we because we load so much theological baggage onto this encounter that we fail to see the reasonableness of his response.

What was he supposed to do, check into an inn? He was a little young for that and besides, his previous experience with inns and innkeepers had not been that pleasant.

No, when he was separated from his parents he headed for the safest place in town, the temple. Here is would be sheltered, secure, and cared for until his parents showed up.

This is the only story we have of Jesus between the time of his infancy to his adulthood. So, it leaves one to wonder why it, above all others, is remembered.

I have no proof of this, but I think that, as he grew, Jesus told this story to any who would hear to remind himself just how much his earthly family loved him. That even though his family may not have always understood what he was up to, or even approved of what he said or did, they still loved him enough to search every nook and cranny of Jerusalem until they found him.

And I think he told it to remind us that there wasn’t anything in this life that he did not experience.  He told it to remind us that now God knows that even the simplest of family outings can turn into disasters of frustrations and frazzled nerves. 

That is what Jesus taught at twelve and teaches still. There will be times when we feel like we have been left behind.  There will be times when we feel like we are living in a home where all sorts of family dramas are breaking out. But it is just there where Jesus has promised to be with us.

Jesus came to remind us that we are part of a family - his family confusing and confused; his wandering and wonderful family; his bemusing and blessed family - all wrapped up in the love of in Jesus, our Lord, who came to be family with us.

Jesus came to make a home with us and be family with us.

That is the best news for all of us who have ever been caught us in the same crazy family dynamics that the Holy Family was on their annual outing to Jerusalem and found that even in the midst and family drama that played out in our home Jesus is present teaching us that, if we let it, our love, and our capacity to forgive is bigger and stronger than all of our arguments put together.

________________

1. Hara Estroff Marano, “The New Grown-Up,” Psychology Today, 2025, 25.

2. Joe Connelly, Bob Mosher, and Norm Liebmann, “‘Herman’s Child Psychology,’” episode, The Munsters (CBS, September 16, 1985).

3. Cecil Francis Alexander, “Once In Royal David’s City.”  

4.     Craig  A. Satterlee, “Commentary on Luke 2:41-52,” Working Preacher , November 11, 2020, https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/first-sunday-of-christmas-3/commentary-on-luke-241-52.

5.    Michael W. Card, "Joseph's Song"

6. St. Luke 2:38b. (NIV) NIV=[NIV=New International Version (Colorado Springs, CO International Bible Society, 1984)]

7. St. Luke 2:46-48. (MESSAGE) [MESSAGE=Eugene H. Peterson, The Message (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2004).

8.    St. Luke 2:49. (NIV)