12.03.06 Steve the Wedding at Cana - being 'table people'
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St
James 12.03.06 The Wedding at Cana being 'table people'
What
kind of a people are we, we Christians?
People
of 'the way'... 'I am the Way', said Jesus. .... (what Christians
were first called) - a pilgrim people
Jesus
people - 'follow me' - along the way of being God's people
- here and now, and moving ever onwards, finding our way through our
limitations, our imperfections, our prejudices, our
insecurities....and also moving ever onwards, finding our way by
discovering our outrageous gifts, talents, abilities, and beauty. A
pilgrim people in search of a promised land, where 'being' will be
life as God intended. That promised land is what we try to image in
our lives, our decisions, our priorities, and importantly here in our
offering of worship.
Because we aspire to meet with, and express the mystery that is God, we are (in common with other religious communities) also a 'ritual people'. In our common celebration of the eucharist we enact ritual and use symbols that help us to reach what is beyond ourselves and which help to put us in touch with the divine love that we believe infuses our world. In his belief that ritual is the primary means by which people make the transition from the profane to the sacred world and experience group identity, the seminal sociologist Durkheim stated clearly that the process is dependent on the group dynamic of assembled participants:
...rites are ways of acting that are born only in the midst of assembled groups whose purpose is to evoke, maintain, or recreate certain mental states of those groups E.Durkheim, Elementary Forms of Religious Life (London: The Free Press, 1995), p.9.
Indeed, in reviewing society's abandonment of the institutional church, the eminent theologian Michael Northcott wrote some 13 years ago:
Not enough attention has been paid to the significance and function of ritual, collective performance and celebration as the means of legitimating and making real the spiritual quest of Christians..... Christian ritual needs to be reconstructed in such a way as to re-engage with the cosmic and the natural, with the seasons and the passage of time, with matter and spirit, the psychological, the political and the social, realising the ritual power of Christian ceremony to transform human life in the context of modernity. Michael Northcott, New Age Rites: The Recovery of Ritual, in The Way, (London: July 1993), p.189.
That is why in our ritual gatherings this Lent, we are using this central, round table as the principle symbol of our pilgrimage together. We had a conversation at Vestry this week about the symbolism of the separated sanctuary and the cross. The cross of Christ is, of course, the universal symbol of Christ's death and resurrection a brutal symbol that of a execution device, (the equivalent for us of a gallows or an electric chair imagine how bizarre it would be to have a model of one of those on our wall or on our communion table) and the cross is the reminder for us (be it on the wall of the sanctuary, or on a chain around our necks), of the ultimate act of love - of Jesus' giving of his own life - and of our belief, derived from ancient Judaism, that this was a sacrificial and cosmic moment of atonement for humankind's continuing inability to live faithfully, compassionately and justly as God intends.
[I'm reminded of hearing, years ago, the apocryphal story of the person going into the jeweler's shop in Glasgow and asking for a pendant cross. 'Oh yes', says the junior sales assistant, 'now, are ye want'n a plain wan or wan wi a wee man oan it?']
And yet, we know that Jesus, who was apparently well aware of his terrible fate, when he gathered his friends for the last time, didn't say 'hang crosses, or wear crosses to remember me'. And when he said 'eat this bread and drink this wine to remember me', it wasn't merely convenient, parting hospitality. It was actually a final symbolic enactment of the image that he offered over and over again as the one that best defined the nature of the relationship between the creator and creation and between God and all God's creatures. This image of the shared table, of hospitality, of the feast , is perhaps the principle image found in the story and teaching of Jesus. This image, that Jesus left us with, and which we enact each week, is what we are exploring in our reflections and in our ritual this Lent. That is the significance of this table-cloth with your name on it (please do add your name if you weren't here last week that's an important part of the symbol an invitation to the table that is never limited). And this is why we are coming to the table to receive communion on these Sundays.
Over these next four Sundays in Lent we'll be reading stories from John's Gospel about symbolic acts of table fellowship from the life of Jesus. Can I recommend to you, as recommended to me by Carol, Jean Vanier's (founder of the L'Arche community) Drawn into the Mystery of Jesus through the Gospel of John (DLT, London: 2004), to which I'll be referring today and at the early morning meditations.
We've read this morning in John 2:1-12 about how the first thing Jesus does with his new disciples is to take them to wedding feast. That is where the adventure of their pilgrimage begins (not at theological college, or in the desert) but at a place of joy, of reunion, of family, of friends, of community, of singing, of dancing, of jokes, of laughter........here is the starting point of the spiritual journey. It is, principally a celebration of love. Jesus has come principally, says St John, to celebrate, reveal, and deepen love.... hugely important symbolism it tells us so much about the nature of things..... and about what God is like, if you like.
Jesus' mother seems to be there more as a helper than as an invited guest. The hosts are 'black-affronted' (as the Broons might say) because the wine has run out, and in a complex weave of the relationship with his mother (who knows all about everything that makes him both ordinary and special), and his own sense of beginning his journey, we have the story of Jesus beginning his ministry with this symbol-laden turning of water into wine.
The first symbol is of abundance an incredible quantity hundreds of litres of fine wine a heady symbol of God's continual pouring out of love to us. But for Vanier, the most important way in which the Wedding Feast symbolises the Kingdom of God is that Jesus comes to renew all things to change our broken humanity into a new humanity, just as he changed water into wine. It is a response to the deepest thirst in us, says Vanier our desire and need to love and to be loved. A need that is played out in our often fragmented attempts to form committed relationships. So many of us are caught up in the struggle to establish and maintain relationships so many are caught up in a terrible loneliness a feeling of not being loveable. The ways in which our culture is over-sexualised is a response to that need.
In leading us to the wedding feast as the starting point of the spiritual journey Jesus invites us to a celebration of love, where the waters of broken humanity are changed into the new wine of his community.
Religion is not just 'serious' business, doing good, learning theology, carrying out our duty, separating ourselves from greed. The heart of the religion of Jesus is relationship, celebration and communion in the joy of love. We human beings are made for celebration. Isn't the eucharist the place of such celebration, communion and togetherness? Vanier p.61
Around Christ's table we enact, proclaim and celebrate the abundance of God's love, and God's welcome to all of us which reveals the value and importance of each person most importantly those who are more fragile, more vulnerable because they are young, or old, or disabled, or broken in some way by their circumstances.
In the Lent Diary I've suggested that we intentionally invite folk we don't know so well here, or other folk we have come across that are on our hearts, to eat with us in Lent. It would be appropriate and right, to think of this as a holy thing a sacred moment of celebration, joy, friendship, and companionship along 'the way' - a sacred act that is close to the heart of God, and of Jesus his Son who reached out to us in the very same way indeed, an imaging, or heralding of the greater hope of the celebration that is to come.