Staying Soft
Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren Pastor Katie Shaw Thompson – 1/16/22 Staying Soft – John 2: 1-11
In today’s story there was a wedding in Cana. Weddings then and now are about a couple getting married and often about so many other things, too. Whether consciously considered or not they might include a statement about a family’s values, economic status, honor in the community, and ability to provide hospitality. So, when the wine ran out, keep in mind, it wasn’t just the folks over-appreciating the free bar who would be disappointed. It might be a big mar on a family’s reputation in a culture where your family’s level of honor or shame was as good as actual currency.
Still, perhaps we could be forgiven for wondering if running out of wine is really such a big deal. As COVID cases surge astronomically, hospitals are stretched to capacity, and folks all over reach their breaking point of stress, grief, and finances, we might like to have such seemingly trivial problems as running out of wine at a wedding.
Yet, regardless of the particularities of the problem, I suspect most of us can relate to reaching a dead end, to running out of something we were counting on, to being worried, disgraced, and painfully disappointed. In such times, we may be tempted to give in to despair and to accept that the terrible way things are is the way they will always be.
Mary knows that’s not true. She sees possibilities where others see dead ends. She also faces the reality of this dead end. She doesn’t pour herself a big glass of water and with a nod and a wink pretend it's now very good wine. No, she’s real about the problem, and she finds the thing that she can do to help the situation.
We can do this, too, in the-wine-has-run-out, dead-end times of our own lives. We don’t have to accept that we have no way out of such situations. Despite messages that implore us to stay positive or count our blessings, neither do we need to pretend that real problems aren’t real problems or that our big feelings aren’t big feelings. We can, though, be clear eyed about the reality of suffering, and we can also be grateful for the gifts and possibilities that remain despite it. We don’t have to engage in either/or thinking, as though everything is bad or everything is good. Rather, we can lean into a both/and perspective on life (Footnote 1: In some Advent gatherings this past December, I brought up this article and the difference between “toxic positivity” and “tragic optimism”, which is another way of getting at what I am trying to convey here. Go to https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2021/0/tragicoptimism-opposite-toxic-positivity/619786/)
Yes, maybe we are experiencing deep grief. Maybe we are experiencing fear and uncertainty. Maybe there are challenges before us that are too much to bear alone. Yes, the pandemic is raging once again with dangerous and dispiriting consequences. We can take time to be with that. We can feel those feelings. With support, we can face the fact that all the wine has run out at this party or much, much worse, and we are not sure what to do next. And, and, and, and, then with support we can make it to a place where we can also experience gratitude for all that remains and for the possibilities that may yet come from somewhere unexpected.
In today’s scripture passage Mary trusts that she knows whose help she can call on to save the day for this would-be-disgraced family. She turns to Jesus, her son and miraculously, mysteriously, God made flesh. Their dialogue is scant in the story, leaving me to wonder whether more was being communicated than what was written down. Somehow she knew that Jesus could do something about it and would. “Do whatever he tells you,” she directs the servers. What he tells them is pretty weird. But they do it, and they are rewarded with something far better than they could have imagined.
It reminds me of my grandmother. When her husband, my grandfather, finally succumbed to lung cancer, she thought she’d never love again. They were married for more than 50 years and had four children together. It wasn’t as though she didn’t have any prospects. She declared herself offthe-market for good. She would tell me in laughing tones, though, about the men who called her up wondering if she’d like to go out with them.
In her own assertive way, she turned them each down flat. What nerve they had! She was sure that was not for her. But then there was this one guy who shyly came around. She had known him all her life, too. And he seemed okay–maybe better than okay. Before we knew it, this new man was a part of our family, and deep in their eighties, there were new wedding bells.
The whole family is tickled by this later-in-life love affair. She’s happy and I think it gives us all hope for good new chapters to come out of painful endings.
Yet, one of the things I admire most about my grandmother in light of her new marriage is that she never forgets my grandfather either. She never hesitates to talk about him even in front of her new love. He had his own previous love, too. They seem to know, in their hard-won wisdom, that the one love doesn’t negate the other. They seem to be able to hold their lifelong grief for their spouses passed alongside this new joy in their lives.
I marvel at them. I don’t know if I could do it. I’m pretty into the guy who’s in my life right now, and we’ve only been married for 15 years–not 50. But I want to learn how to soften my heart the way she did. I want to do it in other areas of my life where I need it now. I want to believe that this cold, hard, pandemic-ridden January is not how things will always be. I want to stay open to the possibility that the spring will come and with it good things I only now dare to imagine. I want to trust that God is in those good things, that like the spring that comes after the winter and like Jesus turning the water into wine, God makes a way out of no way, and I can trust that new life has a way of being born after every difficulty and ending.
I pray you will join me, too. We don’t have to harden our hearts, even in difficult times. Rather, we can stay soft, vulnerable, and complicated. We can feel our fear and our grief, and we can remember that we believe in that God who brings out the best wine just when we thought the party was over.
I encourage us to stay soft because that’s the way we stay open to the mysterious, miraculous beauty and possibility that our turning-water-into-wine God is bringing even now.
May it be so. Amen.
