1-14-19 - When the Wine Runs Out

(You can listen to this reflection here.)

An Episcopal Church, running out of wine? It could never be. Yet I’ll never forget the Easter Sunday at a New York parish that shall remain nameless, when the Altar Guild inexplicably failed to put out enough communion wine. Alerted to this crisis while distributing communion, the Curate, who lived onsite, ran up to his apartment and fetched several bottles of Rioja, and no one was the wiser. Except that those seated in the back half of the 1000-seat sanctuary thought, not unlike the steward in this week’s gospel story, “Wow – they really get out the good stuff at Easter.”

Jesus, enjoying a festive wedding reception with his crew, had no intention of coming to the rescue when the hosts ran out of wine: On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. When the wine gave out, the mother of Jesus said to him, ‘They have no wine.’ And Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come.’ 

I love the way it says, “When the wine ran out,” as though it were a given that the wine would run out. It is often our experience in life that the good things don’t last, romance fades into the ordinary, abundance dwindles to “just enough,” and sometimes not enough at all. Yet the record of the New Testament – and much of the Hebrew Bible too – is that “running out” is never the end of the story. Things run out, and somehow more is found, oil and flour, wine and water, bread and fish, time and energy - even life.

Our invitation, in those moments when it seems the wine has run out, is to widen the lens and see where in the picture abundance might be found. Instead of getting paralyzed with fear or forlorn with despair, we can ask God to show us where provision is. We can pray for an infusion of hope, which fuels our creativity and openness to new ways of thinking. And we can share our concerns with people around us, and see what their perspective on the matter is.

One message of this funny story about Jesus at the wedding is that nothing is impossible where God is concerned. We don’t always know how things will be transformed, but the effect is that there is enough and more than enough. In my experience, the more we trust in that, the more often we see it manifest.

Wine may run out, but God’s grace never does. And more often than not, it turns out that someone has a stash of a good Spanish red nearby…

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