January 19, 2025
Rev. Mary Erickson
Hope Lutheran Church
John 2:1-11
The Aha Moment
Friends, may grace and peace be yours in abundance in the knowledge of God and Christ Jesus our Lord.
“Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee… and his disciples believed in him.”
Jesus turned the water into wine. It was a miracle. But John doesn’t call it a miracle. He calls it a sign.
What’s the difference between a miracle and a sign? We call something a miracle when, by human standards, what happened just isn’t possible. Like, for instance, it would require a miracle for the Minnesota Vikings to win a Super Bowl. Just kidding!
You hear stories when someone has cancer. They have it bad. But then they go for a checkup. The scans reveal no sign of cancer. The cancer is just gone. There’s no medical explanation. It’s a miracle.
We had a miracle here in Eau Claire back in the year 2000. There was a man named Renay Poirer. Ten years previously, Renay was jolted in an electrical accident where he worked. When he came to, he couldn’t see. He went through schooling to be retrained as a physical therapist assistant. Ten years went by. He worked at Sacred Heart Hospital, and one day, he was on the 9th floor, the physical therapy floor. He was at the far end of the hallway, by the big windows overlooking the chapel below. Suddenly Renay felt an extremely sharp pain in his head. He grabbed his temples and then he just felt numb. Light flooded his eyes and he felt like he was floating. And then he realized that could see the chapel below him. There was no medical explanation for what occurred. He was blind and then he could see.
So that’s a miracle. It’s something that just cannot be explained. But a sign, a sign is something different. A sign points beyond itself. By calling what happened at Cana a sign instead of a miracle, John is indicating something even more compelling. This miracle is pointing beyond itself. It’s communicating something about Jesus, about who he is.
This miracle of the wine occurs at the very beginning of Jesus’ ministry. He’s attending a wedding with his mother and his disciples. They’re in the nearby city of Cana. Cana is about four and a half miles from Nazareth. At the feast, the supply of wine runs out. And somehow Mary finds out about it.
You can tell that Mary and Jesus have their own communication system. She tells him, “They’ve run out of wine.” She’s not just reporting news. The implicit message is: you need to do something about it. Jesus speaks fluent Mary. Her message comes across loud and clear. Jesus tells her that it’s not the time to launch his movement.
But Mary won’t be stopped. This is going to happen. Mary is determined! Jesus is going to take care of the wine situation, period. Mary tells the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.”
Jesus points to some very large stone jars used for holding water. He instructs the servants to fill them with water. They each hold about 25 gallons of water, so about 150 gallons altogether. How long would it have taken them to fetch all that water? They fill the jars right up to the brim.
Then Jesus directs them to draw out some of the liquid and give it to the chief steward. When they do so, what they ladle out isn’t water; it’s wine.
And this is the “aha moment” for his disciples. It’s the epiphany moment: this man, their friend, he’s something greater. Humans can’t do this; they can’t turn water into wine! Only God can do something like that.
The miracle of the wine at Cana points beyond itself. It reveals Jesus for who he is. It’s a sign. It revealed Jesus’ glory and led the disciples to faith.
Aha Faith Moments didn’t just occur then. We have them, too. At our church council meetings, we begin each meeting by sharing what we call “Glimpses of God.” Where have you seen God? Where have you seen the hand of God at work since our last meeting? Where have you seen a sign, something pointing to the wonder of God? We’re sharing Aha Moments.
The God moments we share frequently manifest some awesome event in nature, like a beautiful snowfall or the Northern Lights. Or they revolve around an event at church, like a Christmas Eve service. And sometimes they’re about a dire situation, like a health crisis, where all the pieces fell into place and the outcome was resolved. But sometimes they’re about a tragic situation: a death in the family, the wildfires in California.
Where do we see God? What signs of the kingdom are presented to us? I’d like to address a couple of facets in this story about the wedding at Cana and how they shed light on the grace-filled signs that are given to us.
First of all, the story tells us WHEN the wine gave out. It’s not “Oh, no! The wine ran out!” No, the wine was doomed to run out.
How true! Moments of joy and gladness, seasons of goodwill, vitality and health, they all are limited and vulnerable. The wine of life will run out. What do we do when the wine runs out? How do we respond?
You might say that each one of us has a false self. The false self believes in and relies on many false things. Somehow, it believes, we have control over all these good factors. Life and success and favorability, they’ll just keep going and going. And then when they stop, it’s like a slap in the face. We realize we had relied on a false conception.
But there is a true reality. Jesus is the way, the truth, the life. Mary knew what to do. She turned to Jesus. Friends, when our wine runs out, there is someone greater than all our moments of calamity and our failed assumptions. Our Lord is with us. He has promised to be with us through thick and thin. Call on him.
The second thing we learn from this story is the abundance which comes from Jesus. He supplied 150 gallons of wine! That was way more than what was necessary! Jesus didn’t skimp in any way. The same thing with the feeding of the 5000. There was more left over at the end than there was to begin with.
I don’t know about you, but for me it comes naturally to operate out of a mindset of scarcity. I tend to play things conservatively when it comes to my resources. I grew up in a family where resources were very tight. We darned our socks, we drank powdered milk because we couldn’t afford real milk. I wore hand-me-downs. I am very good at operating out of a mindset of scarcity.
We can think scarcely and operate stingily in many ways: sharing from our resources, stingy with our affections, our forgiveness of others. We can feel like there’s not enough love to go around, not enough affection. We can be stingy in our affirmations.
But the Kingdom of God commands us to operate from abundance, the abundance of God. God is faithful, and God will see us through. And God is supremely generous. God forgives – more than 70 times 7. God listens patiently and with full attention. God’s love will not run out. And God’s source of life is eternal. May we daily choose to live from this divine abundance. May our lives reflect this abundance.
And our final point, the wine steward in the story makes the telling remark, “you have saved the best until the end.”
This was the first of Jesus’ signs, turning water into wine. But Jesus saved the best sign until the end. His final sign is his resurrection. This final sign points to the fullness of his divine power. He is the author and giver of life everlasting. He is victor over all our foes and limitations. He supplies new life without end.
From his first sign until his last, we are blessed abundantly by these aha moments from our Lord and Savior.
