II Epiphany - look for signs
The last of the collection of three 'Epiphany manifestations' is our Gospel text for this Sunday. These 'theophanies' form the liturgical observance of the Epiphany: the Magi following the star, the baptism of Jesus with the sign of the Holy Spirit, and now... that dream of bar owners everywhere, the wedding at Cana in Galilee, where water becomes wine.
It's also the day before our culture does its best to honor the legacy of Dr. King. Sometimes, Episcopal churches will read excerpts from King's 'Letter from a Birmingham Jail' - akin to reading the public letters ('Letter from a Roman Jail'?) from the early Christian communities in the midst of the liturgy.
While these two texts - John's telling of a miracle/sign at the wedding at Cana and Dr. King's public letter addressed to the wider church - are quite different, they have much to say to one another, and to us.
King's letter is addressed to the white, moderate, people of good will... and challenges them (me?) to perceive the call of the Church beyond the received, the comfortable, and the known. My inability to do that, he writes - my comfort with my known world - is actually far more of an impediment to justice and the inbreaking of the Kingdom of God than the active, obvious, stupid violence of the explicit white supremacists. It's a hard word, but a true one. And, like all truth, it sets you free.
John's Gospel is structured as a series of 'signs' all depicting people suddenly able to perceive Jesus as the manifestation and incarnation of Divine Will. The miracles and scenarios all open up something in the perception of the community -- Jesus does these things (from water-into-wine abundance parlor trick, to raising his friend Lazarus from the tomb), he says, so that 'you may believe.' Believe that he is who he says he is (in John's Gospel if not elsewhere!) not as an end in itself, but so that you may be able to see and step into that life-that-is-eternal, even now. Believing is seeing. 'Miracles' are really 'signs' for us to follow.
Oddly, even though the story is not about marriage, the Cana story is sometimes read at weddings. I mean, Jesus was at a wedding, so... hmm.
I grew up thinking that a wedding would not be for me anyway - I was a young queer boy in the 1980s. I loved weddings, but could not see myself in the collection of images I saw around me, in religious and pop culture.
Then came the Supreme Court's decision in 2015 to make equal access to civil marriage the law of the land. Suddenly I began to see images - icons, really - of this broader miracle: signposts along the way, pointing. They opened up - for many people - and enriched an understanding of what Christian marriage is. Not a big party with lots of wine, or a fertility rite, but a covenant made by two people and witnessed and blessed by the community, in various roles.
Many who had needed to see justice enacted before they could fully imagine it, or step into its promise, suddenly had more than ample opportunity to see, and believe, and imagine that this holy life has more possibility, '...more than we can ask or imagine,' as the Scriptures put it.
Those 'same-sex' marriages were a sign for the whole world that all was not as we had been imagining it, but was far stranger, richer, more beautiful than we had thought, and in a way that enriched every marriage. And, in a way that broadened the human imagination, itself.
Do we need to imagine justice before we can participate in its enlarging and enacting?
Dr. King calls us to an enlarged, more generous, more just imagination, following the One who always makes all things new, and who is the Sign along our way, pointing. And, the social, human-scale imagination is always playing catch-up with the cosmic scale of divine enacting and enlarging, bringing all things to fuller, abundant life.
Look for signs. Repeat the signs you have come to know and believe. Follow them, and believe, and find your life, your imagination, God's justice in this world and in every reality there is.