The Life of the Party

John 2:1-12

The Wedding in Cana is one of my favorite stories in scripture--possibly even more so now that I home brew and have some understanding of the long, and what I believe to be sacred process of coaxing fermentation of sugars in fruit juice or wort to become wine, cider, or beer. I also love it because it is such a clear example of how Jesus was a momma's boy. And it is a permission giving story for us Christians: this life we are grafted into with our baptism is not exclusively austere and devoid of joy of fun but a life that also involves fellowship and celebration—having some wine at the party!

While I would never encourage any kind of unhealthy excess of getting drunk on alcohol--you still might notice that no where in this passage does Jesus peer judgmentally at the people at this wedding who are all, at this point, pretty drunk. I actually wonder if alcoholism was common among most people during this time in human history at all--not because brains back then wouldn't have become addicted to substances, but because of how precious something like wine likely was.

Now a days we can buy wine (and most other alcohol) really cheaply at a given store. One sign of a poverty stricken neighborhood is the presence of many liquor stores on street corners, in fact. Industrial processes have made the production of cheap (arguably bad tasting) alcohol widely available almost anywhere. But in Jesus' time? There were no massive vineyard operations with industrial fermentation operations like we might see now. There were no logistics that would have made wine easy to travel across long distances, especially when roads were often the places where bandits roamed.

I think we can safely assume that the wine prepared for this wedding was grown and vinted locally. And that the wine was incredibly precious. Something that would have only been reserved for high and holy days like passover, or for significant life events: like weddings. So imagine how wasteful drinking wine to excess on a night where nothing significant was happening would have been! Perhaps the very, very wealthy might have fallen prey to addiction to alcohol--but it seems like it would have generally been quite rare.

This makes the wine giving out in the wedding at Cana far more of a catastrophe than the story might let on to our modern ears. For it likely took one to two years for the wine they drank that day to be ready. And also growing season for the grapes to be grown. Then hand harvesting, and hand (or maybe feet) pressing. But here comes Jesus who, with a simple "request" from his mother, transforms water that otherwise would have converted gentiles into jewish proselytes into wine. In so many ways, Jesus was the life of the party. Is the life of the party.

Do we remember to have joy in our lives as Christians? Or do we set our faith aside when it comes to having fun? Throughout my life, having fun is something that, unless that fun was incredibly boring, might have been a reason for the church to shame me. For some of us, we might not give ourselves much permission to let loose and have fun. To relax. We, as a people are overworked, and that is due to a phenomenon many sociologists call the "protestant work ethic."

Perhaps the first of Jesus' miracles in the gospel of John could remind us just how important joy and fun is alongside the vital work and witnessing of suffering our faith calls us into.

We are going to dig deeper into this story on Sunday. Join us!