When the Wine Runs Out

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on The Second Sunday After the Epiphany by the Rev. Holly Huff, Deacon.

Today we meet Jesus out in public for the first time in John, at a wedding where the wine has given out just as the party gets going. “They have no wine!” the cry goes up. There is emptiness and openhandedness and poverty here. The well has run dry, the bottom of the barrel has been scraped past the point where’s you’re serving up splinters—self-reliance and self-subsistence are fresh out of stock, due to problems in the global supply chain, the last reserves have been cleared out, even of dust bunnies, and there is nothing left, zilch, zero, nada. “We have no wine.”

We come to ourselves like the prodigal son in a place of poverty and lack. We’ve run out. Our finest efforts, all our strivings over and over to be good enough, smart enough, faithful enough, successful good-looking admired respected—eventually these projects of the small self fearfully trying to earn love run themselves dry. The wedding party is just getting underway, all fruition and fulfillment, but it sounds like a superspreader event to me and we here have been exhausted, you and I have gone through all we had to give. We’re tried everything, called up and out and run through every inner and outer resource we might turn to in a crisis, and like that woman with the issue of blood, audacious enough to reach out for and tug on the hem of God’s cloak—who “spent all she had on physicians and grew no better but rather grew worse”—all our attempts to fix the world have showed themselves insufficient inadequate and have depleted what little energy remained. 

We have tried to fix it, to allay the anxiety that looms up to shadow the future. As we are left with no choice but to confront the present reality of the climate crisis—no longer a problem looming for the future but very much with us now, choking the present under an uneasy green-brown snake belly haze of inversion, we can’t breathe. We have no wine. 

We can’t breathe, under the stranglehold of racism, a knee to the neck of the one Body. Systemic injustices so cancerously embedded in our society one wonders if we can ever cut out the rot and have anything left to live. Doctor, can you save this patient? Can these bones live?

The literal doctors are tired, too, of course: even as the coronavirus has shifted—the current variants thanks be to God are milder on most who are vaxxed and boosted—but even now our hospital ICUs are full of healthcare workers running on fumes and caring for patients who can only breathe with the rattling help of the ventilator.

This all sounds rather like bad news, and rest assured I do take my medication. But before anything is bad news or good news, it is simply news: life, the world, our lives and the truth of it as we find it. Reality, unadorned by illusion, is the only place we can live safely, the place preceding nostalgia and fantasy, all our obfuscating layers of “like it” and “don’t like it”. It is the open place where God can meet us, while we’re still far off. The truth right now is we have no wine. Our cups are empty. And only in seeing that emptiness may they be filled.

The collective exhaustion we are undergoing is, if you’ll forgive me the word, unprecedented. Back in March 2020 we dug into inner reserves we didn’t know we had, braced ourselves with good cheer, learned how to use Zoom, followed the news with interest, applauded for heroes, adopted puppies, started baking bread and generally buckled down for a bumpy ride—bumpy but short. We geared ourselves up for a discrete crisis, a break, and then, we hoped, a return to normal so-called. 22 weary months later, here we are, and showing the wear, bedraggled, wrung out, not the same people we were before. And not all of us are here—we have lost people in this parish, in our families and workplaces and schools and extended communities, and that grief too takes its toll. We dug into those inner reserves, summoned up strength to meet a crisis and then had to keep digging, and keep digging, keep digging and as the months have turned into years many of us, most of us, are coming up empty-handed at this point. The creek ran dry. We’re all out.

My hope is not to afflict you with hearing it all rehearsed this way. We’re already feeling it, so let’s face it—and let’s revise those stories we’ve been telling piecing together these past two years to include the truths of depletion, exhaustion, and emptiness. And of course there have been strange and marvelous and strangely marvelous developments in this time period too, “gifts of the pandemic” dare we to call them—topsy-turvy fruit-basket upset moments of blessing that roll our way like so many apples and oranges and pomegranates spinning in chaos as if hit by an 8-ball to knock sideways into our weary selves, throw us off balance and bless us. 

Blessing meets us in the dust, the dry places, the desert, among empty wells, parched sand washes, overturned bottles and cracked wineskins. Blessing meets us when the wine has run out, when at the end of all our power and all we’ve attempted and tried for and planned and stockpiled and cached away—we find ourselves empty-handed. There blessing pours itself out on us. 

A Shaker hymn expresses this in a simple prayer: “Lay me low, where the Lord can find me / Lay me low where the Lord can bless me.” Blessing meets us in the dry places, when we are laid low and run dry. I’d say it’s less about where the Lord can bless us so much as where we can receive blessing, the state of heart and mind where we are freed to depend on God as a little child, as the sparrows look to God for their food, as hungry Israelites wandering in a desert place, wondering whether God can set a table in the wilderness, yet waking each day to manna, the miracle of daily bread, the bread of heaven, new each morning, just outside the tent door. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled.” Only an empty glass can be filled.

“They have no wine,” Mary, our icon of total surrender and openness to Reality with a capital R says. This surrender, laid low and empty-handed is no world-weary resignation edging into nihilism but she shows us a confidence and trust. “Do whatever he tells you.” “Do whatever he tells you.”

Imagine the servants, drawing up those gallons of water—water which is all they have yet what good can it possibly do? They can’t serve that to the gathered guests. Do they feel silly or hopeless or confused? Or perhaps they are fully present to this task, even though they don’t see how it may fit with the whole—when they fetch water, they aren’t thinking about fetching water or griping about fetching water or even fantasizing about the water becoming wine somehow but when they fetch water, they fetch water. Work has its own integrity, without needing to aim our action at achieving external ends or prop up some fiction of identity, holding stories about who we are up as a shield against the emptiness we experience as a threat.

In 1966, in the middle of the Vietnam War, as Napalm became a household name and protests raged seemingly without effect, Jim Forest, Orthodox peace activist and author who passed away this week, wrote a letter to Trappist monk Thomas Merton. He was asking for advice, some sort of “spiritual irrigation.” Forest was in a “bleak mood,” anguished and hopeless as the war worsened, stunned by the devastating lack of care for human life. How to go on in such emptiness? How to work without false and brittle hope yet without despair? Merton responded in what has since been titled “A Letter to a Young Activist,” and these words can speak to us now:

“Do not depend on the hope of results. When you are doing the sort of work you have taken on, essentially an apostolic work, you may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results but on the value, the truth of the work itself. And there, too, a great deal has to be gone through, as gradually as you struggle less and less for an idea, and more and more for specific people. The range tends to narrow down, but it gets much more real. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationships that saves everything.

…The big results are not in your hands or mine, but they do suddenly happen, and we can share in them, but there is no point in building our lives on this personal satisfaction, which may be denied us and which after all is not that important.

The next step in the process is for you to see that your own thinking about what you are doing is crucially important. You are probably striving to build yourself an identity in your work, out of your work and witness. You are using it, so to speak, to protect yourself against nothingness, annihilation. That is not the right use of your work. All the good that you will do will come, not from you but from the fact that you have allowed yourself, in the obedience of faith, to be used by God’s love. Think of this more and gradually you will be free from the need to prove yourself, and you can be more open to the power that will work through you without your knowing it. … The real hope, then, is not in something we think we can do, but in God who is making something good out of it in some way we cannot see.”

(Merton, Letter to a Young Activist, https://jimandnancyforest.com/2014/10/mertons-letter-to-a-young-activist)

What Merton and Forest and the Shakers and Mary and these servants at the wedding point us to is the alchemy of consecration. The wine has run out, and all we have is water. If we bring what we have, just as it is, paltry though it may be, to Jesus, he will bless it. “What can I give him, poor as I am?” Bring yourself, yes, poor as you are. Bring whoever we are, however we are, however we feel, to Jesus, and he will bless us, is blessing us. Water into wine. That’s Eucharist, and it happens not just on Sunday but in every moment, every circumstance we can “present [ourselves] as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God.” We can give our lives to God as our offering, empty or dry or laid low though they may be. As the widow’s mite, we “cast in all our living”, do the work we have been given to do in this moment, and entrust it to God who will transfigure it and us. 

This is the first miracle: our lives broken and blessed and given back to us. Bread and wine, loaves and fishes, and those ordinary meals, too, a hurried lunch before heading back to work, a cup of tea, inching through the drive-through at Café Rio, or slicing apples for grubby little hands, each just as holy as the wafer pressed into your palm. Emptiness makes space to receive, and in that space the glory of the Lord is revealed and all flesh shall see it together. Fruition and fulfillment, given as a grace. We are nourished and sustained in the desert. And God’s banquet feast is gathered around a long, long table, with good wine overflowing and a seat for every weary soul. 

How priceless is your love, O God! *

your people take refuge under the shadow of your wings.

They feast upon the abundance of your house; *

you give them drink from the river of your delights.

For with you is the well of life, *

and in your light we see light.