I like to make pickles.
The top shelf of one of our kitchen cabinets is cram, packed full of crystal clear, empty glass jars. There are several sizes, pint, quart, two quarts all lined up and waiting for the summertime.
As they are filled up with different kinds of pickles, relish and chow-chow, the jars empty out of the cabinet and move into the pantry.
It is a slow moving drama as those pickles are eaten up. The pantry steadily empties back out and the cabinet fills up once again with bright, clear glass vessels, waiting, waiting.
Empty jars.
Have you ever felt like that? An empty jar?
Suddenly you are all used up? Like a wedding party that has run out of wine?
Someone used to be there and is now gone?
I imagine we are all empty at some point, perhaps even most of the time.
Trying to find something to fill up that emptiness.
Six empty jars, big jars holding twenty or thirty gallons, say around 150 gallons total.
They were empty. They are filled with water.
Then they are full of wine, gallon after gallon, after gallon, after gallon, after gallon, after gallon of good wine.
Suddenly the party that had run dry was flooded by an extravagant over abundance, too much, way too much
That pantry that was running out is suddenly overflowing with pickles galore, the shelves sagging, stacked up, piled up and tumbling into the kitchen, watch where you step.
What just happened?
Who can explain it?
How do we make it make sense?
It was just another day, another day of not enough, another day of running out, another day of grab and take, another day of scarcity in a finite world, another day of entropy, of things just slowly dying out, cooling off and going dark, the slow decline to absolute zero.
It was just another day of life as we know it, and suddenly guess what? We were wrong.
The glass is neither half full nor half empty. The cup runneth over.
What has changed?
We have been given a sign; a manifestation of what is really true.
Jesus begins his ministry, not by busting up a wild party, but by reigniting a fizzled out celebration. One hundred and fifty gallons of wine! Those guests will never leave now, that wedding part will just go on and on! They have moved in for good!
We have been given a sign; a manifestation of what is really true.
We now see the real world, a world of not just more than enough, but way too much.
God is just too much, immoderate, unbalanced, extravagant beyond reason or sense, unexpected, full of surprise, unpredictable, out of control, good gracious!
Jesus begins his ministry, God has come to town, moved in, fullness has overflowed into our emptiness.
And we are invited to believe and live in this new world.
It is a world of extravagant feasting, of inexplicable sharing and generosity, of ludicrous abundance.
This is who God is.
And Jesus is that fullness of God poured into a dying creation.
Jesus is where the world begins again and spreads outward, a new genesis.
The Gospel, the good news, is a proclamation of a new world beginning, an invitation to believe.
I wonder if after such an unusual event as the wedding at Canna if saying such words as proclamation and invitation are too moderate. They don’t quite catch the challenge, the over-the-top-ness of the whole the affair, the belligerent and gratuitous hospitality of God.
The Gospel is a dare.
Jesus is God daring us to believe and live in a world that is contrary to our experience.
Jesus is a double dog dare.
Pickles and wine everywhere…
Believe it.
Go and do likewise.