Poured out for Haiti
Psalm 36:5-10; John 2:1-11
“How priceless is your love, O God! Your people take refuge under the shadow of your wings.”
Last week, I announced that I would be preaching about spiritual gifts today, but some things have happened between last Sunday and this morning, and God sometimes has a way of telling us that we need to change our plans, no matter how well thought out. One of the ways that God uses to get our attention is when we encounter the same person, or idea, or thing multiple times in a short period, seemingly coincidentally—and that is what happened to me while planning for this sermon. I had looked at the readings for last week and this week some time ago, and decided that I would preach two sermons on the Holy Spirit, so I wasn’t planning to talk about today’s Gospel reading at all. Now, Pam and I sat down to plan the music for this service a few weeks ago, and it was Pam’s idea to use the music in our hymnal with Jewish roots for nearly all the hymns in this service, in honor of the wedding at Cana, which was of course a Jewish wedding. When I told Pam earlier this week that I wasn’t preaching about the wedding at Cana, she looked a little disappointed—that was sign number one. A day or two later, I happened to be reading a book, and the author referenced the story of Jesus changing water into wine—sign number two.
On Tuesday night, we received the word about the earthquake in Haiti. By Wednesday morning, reports of the full extent of the destruction had begun to reach us, and we heard directly from Fr. Kesner Ajax, who visited us here at Christ Church two years ago. It was when Fr. Kesner reported that the Episcopal Cathedral in Port-au-Prince had been reduced to rubble that I knew for sure that a sermon on spiritual gifts would have to wait. Because, you see, the walls of the sanctuary of Holy Trinity cathedral in Port-au-Prince were painted with the most amazing, brilliantly colored murals of biblical scenes, but these biblical stories were painted in a distinctly Haitian style, with Haitian people and with elements of Haitian culture—clothing, tools, customs—woven seamlessly into the paintings as a way of saying that the biblical world and the Haitian world are one: the days of Jesus are today, just as real for Haiti as they are for ancient Israel. These murals were national treasures—exquisite examples of Haitian religious art. I was in that Cathedral, looking at those murals just this past September, on our mission team’s first day in Haiti—a Sunday—and for me, the most beautiful and powerful and moving of those paintings was the mural depicting today’s Gospel story—Jesus’ miracle at the Wedding in Cana of Galilee. When I heard that the Cathedral had been destroyed in the earthquake, and I realized that no one else would ever see that mural of the Wedding at Cana, I knew that God wanted something different from me in this sermon than what I had planned.
The Russian author Dostoevsky wrote of Jesus’ miracle at the wedding of Cana that “It was not people’s grief, but their joy Christ visited. He worked his first miracle to help human gladness.” By sustaining the wine at the wedding, Jesus allowed the celebration to continue when it might have been cut short for lack of the cup of gladness. But isn’t this a strange and alien story for us to hear today, of all days, when the suffering of Haiti lies heavy on our hearts? Do we not need Jesus to visit our grief now and the grief of an entire nation? What is there to celebrate, when destruction has erased the Wedding of Cana from the walls of Holy Trinity Cathedral? What need is there for wine, when the people of Haiti are desperate for the water that Jesus started out with? Our hearts cry out: “Turn it back, O Lord, and give them the water to drink!”
The joy of the wedding feast does not fit our mood or our circumstances, and it might be completely out of place, if it were not for the ambivalence that marks Jesus’ mood in this Gospel. Jesus is reluctant to work this miracle, he is not ready to give the sign—when his mother tells him that the party has run out of wine, he says to her, “Woman, what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come.” Jesus knows that as soon as he gives this sign, as soon as he does this wondrous thing, his feet are set on a path that will lead him to his hour. That hour is the hour of the Cross, the hour of his death. The road that begins in Cana of Galilee is the road that ends at Golgotha—the wine that Jesus gives to the wedding feast is forever linked to the wine poured out from his body when the spear pierces his heart: “This is my blood of the New Covenant, which is shed for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins.” Even in the joyous celebration of the wedding feast, there is a whiff of desolation. Our lives are rarely marked by a pure and unadulterated joy—they are a mixture of celebration and sadness.
But the reverse is also true, that joy and hope can linger and remain and grow, even in the most desolate and seemingly desperate times. When Jesus is hanging on the Cross, the life nearly gone from him, sensing that he has been abandoned by the God he has called Father all his life, he cries out, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” It is a cry that we can imagine echoing through the streets of Port-au-Prince today. But on Jesus’ lips, this cry is more than a sign of desolation—it is a quotation from the 22nd psalm, the first line of that most piteous and heartbreaking of the songs of Israel. The psalm goes on, “Why are you so far from my cry and from the words of my distress? Oh my God, I cry in the daytime, but you do not answer; by night as well, but I find no rest.” That is how the 22nd psalm begins, but I want you to hear how it ends, because the rest of the psalm could not have been far from Jesus’ mind. After rehearsing many unanswered pleas for God to save, the psalm takes a turn, declaring faith in God despite the certainty of death for the sake of the future. The final verses of the psalm end, “My soul shall live for God; my descendants shall serve him; they shall be known as the Lord’s for ever. They shall come and make known to a people yet unborn the saving deeds that he has done.” On Jesus’ lips, the desolate cry of the 22nd psalm is a statement of faith and hope, a cry from the heart that although God may not spare us from the time of trial, there is a future for the peaceable kingdom, there is a hope for generations yet unborn.
The God we worship is not a remote and distant God, sitting in the heavens passing judgment from afar. The God we worship, the God we remember today in our holy meal of bread and wine, is the crucified God, the God who has taken the pain and suffering of the world onto himself, and poured out his blood for our sake. The God we worship today is the risen Lord, the God who overcomes Death. Our God encompasses all things, from the joy of the Wedding feast to the suffering of the Cross to the triumph of the Resurrection. Our human lives are a mixture of these things—joy and suffering, desolation and consolation, and the lives of the people of Haiti are the same, even today. They are lives of faith and hope, even today.
You do not need to believe my word alone about this--I want to share you testimony from Haiti. These words are taken from an e-mail sent to us by Suzi Parker, a Presbyterian missionary who with her husband John is running the guesthouse in Leogane that Christ church’s team stays at when we are going to Lazile. That guesthouse was seriously damaged in the earthquake—John and Suzi’s apartment was destroyed. Suzi writes, “At night we sleep in the yard behind the hospital where the bandstand was. It has fallen, as has the Episcopal school. There are two to three hundred people who sleep in that field at night. They sing hymns until almost midnight, and we wake up to a church service, with hymns, a morning prayer, and the apostles’ creed. The evening sky is glorious. In the field, there is a real sense of community. I have never understood joy in the midst of suffering, but now I do. The caring I have seen, the help we have received from the Haitians, the evening songs and prayers are wonderful. The people will survive, though many will die. Please pray for us. And pray that we and the hospital can be of help to the people here.”
The psalmist says that in God is the well of life, and in God’s light we see light. But sometimes we do not see the light, sometimes all we can see are the shadows and darkness, and we have only the memory of what it is to see God’s light. Sometimes God hides. And in those times, having faith and hope means trusting that the shadows falling on us are the shadow of God’s wings covering us to protect us from a greater darkness, for there is no shadow without a light somewhere to cast it. I pray that this is so for the people of Haiti and for the people who are traveling to aid them—people of great faith and hope. “How priceless is your love, O God! Your people take refuge under the shadow of your wings. Continue your loving-kindness to those who know you, and your favor to those who are true of heart.” Amen.
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