Come, Holy Spirit, and help us to dream holy dreams. Amen.
The passage that we heard known as the “wedding at Cana” is one of my favorite stories in Scripture. It’s such a rich passage with so many layers of meaning. Every time I study it, there is more Gospel grace and truth to encounter.
I suppose that I’m also fond of this passage because of when we typically hear it read. It’s the assigned Gospel text for the Second Sunday after the Epiphany in year three of our three-year lectionary. Since the second Sunday after January 6th falls in mid-January, this story about Cana falls near three dates of importance, two personal and one national. For one, my birthday is tomorrow and so hearing this passage read always brings to mind celebrations with friends and good wine. Secondly, this past Thursday was the fifteenth anniversary of my ordination to the priesthood. I was ordained on a Saturday and the Gospel text that we read the next day, my first Sunday as a priest, was this passage from John. So, the first time that I presided at the Eucharist was with this passage in mind.
As an aside, I’m sure I’d cherish being a priest anywhere. But I’m not a priest anywhere, I’m the priest at St. Luke’s Salisbury and I thank God for each of you and for this call. When Bishop Wandera was visiting from Kenya last weekend, after meeting with the Foundation on Saturday evening and the Vestry on Sunday morning, he told me how blessed I am to be serving with such dedicated and lovely people. And I very much agree – being your priest is such a joy and blessing.
And, the way the calendar falls, we usually hear this passage on Martin Luther King weekend, which I’ll say more about later – but I’ve always associated this passage with themes of justice and beloved community.
Ultimately, what the wedding at Cana is all about is the superabundance of God’s grace. It’s a story about abundance in the amount of the wine that Jesus provides. In our terms, it works out to about 65 cases of wine. And there’s abundance not only in quantity, but quality. The chief steward was impressed by how good the wine was. One of our identity statements here at St. Luke’s is that we come and see abundant grace, and this passage has an abundance of grace as Jesus saves the hosts from the embarrassment of running out of wine. It’s a reminder that when Jesus blesses us, it comes in abundance. There’s a line from Ephesians that says that God is able to do more than we can ask for or imagine; well, the wedding at Cana is a demonstration of that Gospel truth. Just as it’s a passage about abundance, there is an abundance of reasons why I love this story.
This idea of abundance and God doing more than we can imagine is what I want to focus on for the rest of this sermon, and really for the next six weeks until we get to Lent. The sermons will be focusing on our worship; sort of a “why we do what we do.” And to set the stage for this series, today’s topic is on the sacramental imagination. What do I mean by that?
Well, a sacrament is as one scholar put it, “when mystery becomes epiphany.” That is, in a sacrament, the reality and truth of God become known and tangible. Another way of understanding the sacraments is they are when God’s love meets our deepest longings as mediated through the common and everyday things of life: bread, water, oil, the love between two people. One way of viewing sacraments is that the whole world is sacramental. As Gerard Manley Hopkins said, “the world is charged with the grandeur of God.” And that’s true. God’s grace is everywhere and for everyone. That’s a very Anglican sensibility.
But it is also true that God has given us sure and certain means of grace that instead of having to discover or luck our way into, we can depend on to communicate this grace and love. These we call the Sacraments of the Church: Baptism, Eucharist, Anointing, Marriage, Reconciliation, Ordination, and Confirmation. Put simply, a Sacrament is when we participate in what God is doing that is beyond our ability to imagine.
And as far as what that word imagine means – it’s not about what we would call the “imaginary,” things that are not substantively real and only exist in the world of thoughts. No, imagination is how we perceive and navigate the world. It is the imagination that allows us to interpret a dollar bill as having economic power instead of it simply being a piece of paper to use as a bookmark. Using our imagination is the difference between physically being in this church and being aware that we are in this church. Imagination is how we understand our lives.
Putting these two ideas together, we get the sacramental imagination – the sense and commitment to the trust that God is on the move in world around us. As I’ve said before, it’s the idea of living in an enchanted world, a world in which every common bush is afire with God. And if that’s the case, just imagine what is possible.
This past week, I was having lunch with our Wardens and they both brought up a reflection from Forward Day by Day that they read this week. That’s a clear sign that the Holy Spirit wants it on our radar. In part, the reflection reads, “It’s easy to feel that the church has become somewhat peripheral to today’s world. Imagine how things change, though, if we realize that instead of the church, it is the world that is on the periphery! When we see the church as the center, the way Christ speaks and acts in the world, filling everything with the presence of Jesus, our perception shifts. Now, perhaps, we can see our weekly worship and the work we do within our congregations and in the world as central to everything.” That’s a sacramental imagination, and if we’re going to understand what we do in worship as anything more than customs and rituals, we have to tap into our sacramental imaginations to realize that worship isn’t about what we are doing, it’s about what God is doing in our midst.
This is exactly what the wedding at Cana story shows us – that there are transformations happening at levels that we might not be aware of, understand, or even think imaginable. But just as surely as that water was transformed into wine, Jesus is at work in the world around us. Relationships are being reconciled, closed hearts and minds are being opened, wounds are being healed, and death has been defeated in Resurrection light.
On that particular day, it was wine that they were running low on, but whatever it is that you are running low on, know that Jesus has an abundance to bless you with. Maybe you’re feeling low on hope, like you don’t have enough patience, perhaps you are struggling to forgive someone or yourself, it could be that you’re short on inspiration. Tell Jesus what you’re running out of and imagine the possibilities.
Admittedly, sometimes the blessing will come in places we don’t expect. No one expected the wine to show up in water jars. And I wouldn’t be surprised if a few people heard that they were out of wine and left, missing out on the whole thing. And don’t worry about how Jesus will bring salvation to whatever mess you find yourself in. The steward had no idea where the wine came from, but he knew it was worth serving and enjoying. I don’t know how God is blessing you with unexpected and unimaginable abundance, but I’d love to hear about it. It’s one of the gifts of Church, that we get to rejoice with one another. And in sharing these blessings, we strengthen our sacramental imaginations.
Now, there are a few things that we can do to cultivate our sacramental imagination. The world has a way of dulling our imagination, diminishing our hopes, and restricting what we think can happen. So it does take some intentionality to use our sacramental imaginations. There are four things that we can do to deepen our imaginations. The first is our attention. The French mystic and philosopher Simone Weil said, “Attention is the only faculty of the soul that gives access to God.” As simple as it sounds, our breath really is one of the best ways to open our imagination to God. Call it centering prayer, call it meditation, call it contemplation, call it whatever you’d like – but spending just 5 minutes a day focusing on our breath centers on our attention on the sacramental reality of God’s gracious presence all around us. And if you don’t have 5 minutes, take three deep breaths as a start.
The next way to cultivate our sacramental imagination is to wonder. That means put away the phone and the screens and let our senses entertain us. Paying attention to our senses is so important because the sacraments are tangible things to experience. We smell the oil of anointing, we taste the bread of heaven, we feel the water when we dip our fingers into the font, we hear the words of grace “the gifts of God for the people of God, we see the beauty of God in the faces of others and work of artists. As a practice of wonder that opens us to God, try intentionally noticing, and even writing down if you need to, five beautiful things each day.
Then there is gratitude, which might be the most important spiritual exercise there is. Gratitude grounds us in grace as we recognize that we are not the source of our blessings, rather God is. And because God is the source and not ourselves, it means that we don’t have to do anything to earn our dignity and belovedness; they are gifts from our Creator who loves us deeply. Maybe it’s keeping a gratitude journal, a prayer of thanksgiving each night before bed, or a prayer before meals – however we practice gratitude, we are deepening our trust that just as the water was turned into wine, that God is blessing us in abundance.
The fourth way to sanctify our imagination is through ascetism, the fancy word for abstinence, reserve, or austerity. Simply put, we live cluttered lives. Bishop Wandera reminded me of this when he was here. He noted, “In this country, you very much live by the calendar and the appointment.” And he’s right. Our lives and homes are so full of stuff that it can be hard to imagine anything beyond what we are inundated with. Living more simply, even if it’s just making a small change, opens us to more fully notice and receive what God is doing in our lives.
These practices of attention, wonder, gratitude, and ascetism are intended to deepen and widen our sacramental imagination, helping us to notice and participate in God’s abundance all around us. And doing this really is an act of the imagination; it’s about seeing the world in a deeper and different way. This is why our nation remembers Martin Luther King this weekend, because he had a lively sacramental imagination and he helped us to imagine things that were not yet imaginable.
Yes, King famously shared some of these dreams in his most famous speech in 1963. But I have in mind a 1967 sermon that King preached at the Riverside Church in New York on April 4, exactly one year before his assassination. The sermon was titled, “Beyond Vietnam” and was extremely controversial at the time, but that is to be expected, as prophets are often viewed that way. King said, “We, as a nation, must undergo a radical revolution of values.” That became a refrain in the sermon, that we need a revolution of values. King wasn’t using the language of sacramental imagination, but it’s precisely what he was speaking about – the opening of our hearts to new possibilities, the reorientation of what we believe is possible, the revolution against imaginations that are held captive by consumerism, violence, and division.
Over the next several Sundays, the sermons will continue to explore the liturgy, paying attention to what new things are being made possible through God’s grace. For now, consider where your imagination is captive and stuck. What things do you long for that seem unimaginable? Through the gift of a sacramental imagination, we share in abundant blessings of God all around us. Nearly 2,000 years ago, Jesus did this, the turning of water into wine, the first of his signs in Cana of Galilee and revealed his glory. But, it was the not the last of his glorious signs, thanks be to God.
