A Sermon after a Fire

 

Below is a sermon preached on January 9, 2022 at Christ the Servant Lutheran Church in Louisville, Colorado on the Wedding at Cana.
 

Good morning. I am Zach Parris and I am blessed to be your pastor on the campus of the University of Colorado. 

I am also your neighbor. I live here in Louisville, down on Dahlia Street. I feel compelled, as I have in nearly every conversation this week, to tell you that my family is very fortunate in that our house survived the fire, though it looks like we’ll be displaced for around a month because of ash and smoke damage. 

In these days I’ve been in conversation with my neighbors more than ever. During the fire we were constantly sharing information and screenshots of doorbell cameras. Once we were finally able to talk face to face, I noticed that most of the conversations with my neighbors began by talking about the things that we did or did not bring with us as we evacuated. 

My wife realized the night of the fire that she left the handwritten note from her late grandmother that describes how her grandfather gave her the accompanying sapphire brooch. 

On the other hand, the only shoes we ended up taking for our five-year old daughter were a pair of Crocs. Still, I want you to know, we managed to secure five unripe bananas. As of this morning, each one of those bananas is sitting on the kitchen counter of the home where we are now staying.

My family and I were also fortunate in that we had both taken vacation that Thursday. We had been driving around in the morning and saw the smoke. We were watching the news. We had time to pack. 

 

First and out of an abundance of caution (a useful phrase I’ve learned over the past two years), I set aside our “important documents” file folder. Slowly, we got out a bag and we began to leisurely put some things into it, just in case. 

By the time I took that bag out to the car, it was clear that things had escalated. The wind was howling. Ash and debris filled the air. Suddenly we were in a frenzy and had to identify the things that were important enough to fill our Volvo station wagon.

Every choice we made was a compromise. Everything we put in the car, took the place of something else that would not come with us. 

It was difficult and confusing. We kept getting into the car, buckling our seat belts, then remembering something we needed and running back inside. At one point, I got out of the car and ran all over the house looking for my wife to tell her that we had to leave, but I couldn’t find her. When I went back to the driveway, she was already in the car.

In the midst of all of this uncertainty and disorientation, we had to make the most stark of our compromises. At one point, I stuck my head in the car and told my wife that I needed to talk to her in the garage. 

You see, on Christmas Santa Claus brought our family a hamster. “Cherry Bear Jelly Bean.” As Hannah and I stood in our open garage battered by the wind and the debris, I asked, “Are we really taking the hamster?”

Now, I don’t want you to think me heartless, but we’d only had the hamster a couple of days and it’s cage is large. It's a multi-tier aquarium set-up that was going to take up a lot of space. Despite the delirium, I thought it a bad idea to put a loose hamster into our over-packed car. Early on, when we didn’t think we’d really have to leave, we told our daughter that, “Of course, the hamster would come with us, if we left.” Now we had to make a hard decision. 

My wife, blessed saint that she is, looked me right in the eyes and said, “We’re taking the damn hamster.”

And so, we compromised. Some things came out of the car, so that Cherry Bear Jelly Bean could come with us. 

…

The Wedding at Cana is a familiar and strange bible story. To understand what’s happening, it is helpful to have a bit of context. 

First, there is an implication in the story that the folks getting married and hosting the wedding are a part of Jesus’ family. The problem with running out of wine, the reason for Mary’s urgency is not that they wanted to keep the party going, but that not having enough food or drink for your guests at a wedding was not honorable. It was a shameful thing. 

In the ancient near east honor was more important than money. Losing honor had real consequences. If your family was considered shameful others wouldn’t associate with you. They wouldn’t buy your sheep or goats. Losing honor would hurt real people.

The problem for Jesus is that in all the gospels one of the pillars of his work is to overturn the honor/shame system. Jesus will go on to do all sorts of shameful things, like hanging out with tax collectors and prostitutes, in order to re-frame them as honorable.

In this story Jesus is stuck between a rock and a hard place. He’s come to reject the honor/shame system, but if he wants to protect his large and extended family, he’s gotta play ball. 

What Jesus does in this situation is remarkable. Caught between his ideals and the reality of the world around him, Jesus compromises. 

If Jesus’ ideals stand in the way of keeping people fed and safe, then Jesus will compromise them. That is remarkable and it is good news. 

…

As we have been reminded in these weeks, the world can be a cold and uncompromising place. Far too often, the world does not compromise for us or for our vision of life and love. 

A world where the love and life of God are senselessly denied is not the world God wants.

And yet, God compromises. God chooses to work in and among us in the world as it is, broken as it is. If the world will not compromise for us, God will. 

God demonstrates this not just at the wedding at Cana, but time and again. Since the beginning God has been calling miraculous creatures up from the dust and breathing life into them, and God will do that again.

We will drag our feet. The world will drag its feet. We will continue to live in a society that knowingly creates the conditions that spur on disaster. Even riding these weeks’ overwhelming waves of generosity, well-intentioned people will make mistakes as they try desperately to breathe life into us and into our community. We will make mistakes as we attempt to resuscitate ourselves. For these mistakes God will grieve, but then…God will take that deep breath that I hear Jesus taking before he stands up from the table and tells the servants to fill the stone jars with water. Then God will go down into the ashes and bring us back up out of them again. May it be so. Amen.