Sermon for the Second Sunday after the Epiphany
“And the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee”
This, too, is an epiphany. This, too, is something transformative. “Be ye transformed by the renewing of your minds” as we heard last week from Paul’s letter to the Romans and so here too is a Gospel story that is utterly unique and which speaks profoundly to the mystery of human redemption. It is really a story of transformation not just of water into wine but of our humanity into community with God, captured best by a word coined by Dante precisely about the great wonder of Christianity. Trashumanar – transhumanized – becoming who we are in the sight of God and by the power of his redeeming love.
Perhaps no story speaks more directly to the real wonder of the Epiphany. The real wonder of the Epiphany is about what God wants for our humanity. The real wonder of the Epiphany is that our humanity finds its greatest truth and greatest happiness in communion with God. The mystery of the Epiphany is a kind of marriage, the communion of God and man which is the basis for our communion with one another. It is not by accident that “this beginning of signs,” as John puts it, happens at a wedding.
“Let me not to the marriage of true minds/ admit impediments,” Shakespeare says famously in one of the better known of his sonnets. The idea of marriage as metaphor continues to have a strong hold on our minds and hearts almost to the point where there is only metaphor and nothing to which it attaches. The language of “impediment” in Sonnet 116 refers to the service of The Solemnity of Holy Matrimony in The Book(s) of Common Prayer, identifying what might stand in the way of the union of “this man and this woman” in “the holy estate of matrimony.” The service identifies the objective reasons for marriage as a state of life and, even more, as a state of sanctified or holy life, meaning that it concerns our relationship with God, with matters of eternal life. As a consequence there are impediments, things that stand in the way, things that belong to the disorders and confusions of our loves and our lives.
