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Epiphany is about seeing. It's about what we see and how we see. What do you see when you see a table? What do you see when you see a human being or a church congregation? What do you see when you see water? What do you see when you see water turned into wine? St. Paul looked at the young church in Corinth, and he saw people with many gifts. Looking at the church one way, Paul saw a group of quite ordinary people, a congregation of wise teachers and counselors and miracle workers and prophets. He saw a group that was ordinary in their factiousness as well, ordinary in their vanity, ordinary in their argumentativeness, ordinary in their boastfulness and jealousy, with lots of them quite proud of the fact that they possessed spiritual gifts that they thought were better than the gifts of others, proud of their belief that they were more right than other people, superior. But when Paul looked at them in another way, when he looked at them in their redemption in Christ, he saw something different, not a group of individuals at all, but one body, the Body of Christ himself, a new creation in the world. "Each of you has lots of gifts," he wrote to them, "but remember that you are one body, the Body of Christ. And it is one Spirit, the Spirit of Christ, who has created you and given you your gifts. It is the body, not yourselves, that you serve." How is that possible? How is it possible to look at a group of people and see a body? I look out at this congregation, and I see a hundred and fifty or two hundred different people, but I don't see any body that all of us make up. Not with these ordinary eyes, at least. But through the eye of faith, through the eye of faith in Christ made manifest in the world, St. Paul could see—and you and I can see—the reality of the Body, the reality of the Church, the reality of Jesus and his Bride made one flesh in faith and hope and love. "Faith is the substance of things hoped for," the apostle tells us, "the evidence of things not seen." The eye of faith is like the eye of the poet; it sees beneath the surface of things and assures us that what the optic nerve may not be able to see is nonetheless real and substantial. The eye of faith is like the eye of the Creator. In the beginning, the Spirit of God hovered over the formless void. The Spirit brooded over ordinary water, which was without form or shape, and saw something more than churning water, saw more than tempest. And the Spirit hovered over the waters, and he brought order from the seething chaos and gave it shape and form. That's what creation is: the giving of shape and form, the bringing of something out of nothing, the taking of formlessness and giving it a body. And creation's name is Poetry. From the Greek noun, poion, Creator; from the verb poiein, to create. God, Creator, looked out on the shapeless void, and Creator brooded over it with his breath and "poeted" the world. The eye of God saw something without form—ordinary water—and saw in it the possibility of something more. It was as Shakespeare later said: The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,Creator's imagination looks at things—even common, ordinary things like water—and sees in them a truth and a reality that's not apparent on the surface. And then he takes up his pen. Creator exhales his warm, moist breath and gives the reality his imagination sees a local habitation, a place to be, and a name. He creates for the world something new out of something old, something extraordinary out of something ordinary; he names a shape and an order where no shape or order was seen before his imaginative eye caught it and expressed it and formed it. "What is man?" Loren Eiseley asked. "What is man but a way that water has of going about beyond the reach of rivers?" And ever since I first looked at us with Eiseley's poetic eye 35 or 40 years ago, I have never been able to see human beings disconnected from rivers and oceans. I have never been able to see us disconnected from the damp of humus, disconnected from that moist, organic soil into which, in the beginning, Creator breathed to give us a local habitation and a name. There is more to us than meets the physical eye. "What is real?" the Greeks asked centuries ago. Is reality only the tangible world of the things we can see and touch, only the tangible world of particular wooden tables and metal chairs? Or is there a reality behind the world we see with our eyes, an unseen reality that holds what we see and touch together and gives it meaning? "There is only what we can see and touch," some said. But Plato said that particular tables and chairs are not as real as the Form of table, not as real as "tableness," the Idea of table which lies behind each and every specific table and makes it a table. "Tableness" is the reality, the Idea which every particular table partakes of in the materials which we call wood or metal or plastic. "Not so!" cried Diogenes. "The particular wooden table is the only reality, because I can see a wooden table with my eyes and touch it with my fingers, but I cannot see or touch the Idea or Form of a table." "Very likely that's true, for you," replied Plato, "because for one to see a particular table, all one needs are eyes, which you have, Diogenes. But to see an Idea one needs a mind." One needs imagination and faith. To see what's behind the world of things—to see what's behind the world of particular tables and chairs and dogs and cats and grass and trees and men and women, to see what's behind weddings at Cana in Galilee and at the Chapel of Our Saviour, to see what makes a couple of ordinary people one flesh, to see what makes a congregation of ordinary, difficult people one flesh, a Body of faith and hope and love, to see beyond the world of physical things into the fundamental reality that lies behind it—you need the eye of the Poet, the eye of the Creator himself, the eye of imagination, that eye that can image forth order and shape and meaning where none is apparent to the optic nerve. God took nothing in particular, ordinary water, the chaos of the deep that had no shape, and he imaged forth from it, created from it, "poeted" out of it, something in particular, and gave it a local habitation and a name. "The heavens and the earth, wild beasts and fish," he named them. "Man and woman," he named us. A shape and a form, an orderly body he gave us, a cosmos he gave us, with the greater lights to rule the day and the lesser lights to rule the night, and his servants man and woman to rule the beasts and the fowl. Shakespeare and Eiseley and all the poets understand this divine act of creation, and they seek to share in it. From this side of the Creation, they look at us human beings and see more than arms and legs and noses. They see human heads that are more than something to hang a hat on. They see God's act of poetry: ordinary water made to swoosh about beyond the reach of rivers in the shapes of men and women, ordinary water given life and meaning through the imagination and Spirit of God. What do we see this morning when we see water and wine and a wedding at Cana in Galilee? It's possible, I suppose, to see only an ordinary miracle worker and an ordinary miracle. It's possible to see only a wonder-worker who can make wine in the fastest possible way to save a failing party at the last minute, a "fox-hole" kind of God, a "God-when-you're-in-a-pinch" kind of Jesus who dazzles the crowds like a TV evangelist. But St. John sees more. John sees a sign, a sacrament of creation. He sees a sign of something more, a sign of greater things to come. He sees a Jesus who tells his mother that the shortage of wine at a wedding is not his concern, because his hour has not yet come, the hour of his glory, the hour of creation, the hour of his death when the really creative glory of God will be revealed. Frederick Niedner sees more as well. "At every wedding," Niedner says, "we wait for the moment when we witness a bride and groom vow faithfulness to each other 'until we are parted by death.' We think when we hear these words, or even more when we speak them ourselves, that death [is far away, that death] will come to visit much later, at some far distant boundary of a marital union begun today with [the] promise [of youth]. "But death is already there. It comes to sit with us at the beginning, else there is no glory," Niedner counsels, "no gravity to the marriages we make by giving ourselves to each other," [no death to self for the sake of the other]. We do a weighty thing when we commit to sharing most intimately with one partner the brief and precious life each of us gets on this earth. Few of us see the full truth of this, however, until we reach that inevitable moment [of death] we named in our vows. "Where is the climax of a couple's life together?" Niedner asks. "At what point can they see the glory of their union? It's not likely to be found in the swooning that leads them to marry, nor even in the act we call consummation. Does glory come finally in the fulfillment of family? Or in the peace that comes when the nest empties? "I believe I have witnessed the moment when marital glory reveals itself," he says. "It appeared during the dark of night in a dining room converted temporarily into a hospice center. My father lay in a bed there, dying, while I spent nights on a couch nearby and kept watch. Several times in that last week I awakened to see my mother standing over Dad in the dim light. She had not risen from sleep to perform some ministration. She simply stood for long minutes looking tenderly down at this sleeping man with whom she had shared more than half a century. I closed my eyes and kept still. Children are not supposed to watch their parents' most intimate moments. "But I wondered. What filled Mom's mind and heart as she pondered the face, the body, the person with whom she had spent her life? [It was] the whole of their life together, I think. The full weight and glory of their marriage now became clear. All they would be together in time and space, the gift they could offer the world as one flesh, had grown to fullness and been offered up. All that remained was to let it rest in God's hands. "John's Gospel says that Jesus revealed his glory in the first of his signs at a wedding in Cana, and his disciples believed in him. The narrative doesn't tell us just how much of that glory the disciples saw or understood at the time of the wedding, for as Jesus explained to his mother, his hour had not yet come. "In the parlance of John's Gospel, his hour was the time of [his death], the crucifixion. In that hour Jesus would take his own bride and his glory would be revealed. For now, out in Cana, the disciples and Jesus' mother saw and tasted a new, fine wine that would revive a failing feast. Glorious though it was, however, it was only the beginning. "Shortly after the wedding, John the Baptizer announced another wedding, one at which he would serve as best man, while the Messiah whom John proclaimed would have the bride and be the bridegroom. [Shortly after that], Jesus arrived at a well at midday and met a woman. Many of his forbears had done the same, but each of them had left with both a drink and a wile. Jesus came away with neither. "[But] another day came when Jesus asked for a drink, again precisely at midday. ['I thirst' are the words we hear from the Cross.] This time he received it in the form of sour wine, and with it he took to himself his bride—the whole world of us, whose sins he bore by uniting as one flesh with us. With his mother and the beloved disciple watching, Jesus' glory was fulfilled even as he himself declared, 'It is finished.' "How fitting that Jesus' glory should commence its epiphany at the wedding of an anonymous couple in out-of-the-way Cana. Like Jesus' life and work, our marriages share in the same irony—the full weight and glory of each appears only when death comes to part the bride and groom. "Outside space and time"—beyond the scope of the optic nerve—"the Lamb's high feast takes on eternal proportions, as we see in the Revelation to St. John (21:1-11). Adorned in bridal, baptismal white, the new Jerusalem reunites with her groom and they rejoice forever. Death can come no more to part them. "Here in the realm [of the visible] where death still appears at every wedding and sits silently through our feasts, we continue sharing the wine that Cana's guest brings to our table. Sometimes that wine is sweet and wondrous beyond all imagination. At other times the wine proves sour. We sip it from a sponge like those that the hospice people bring for times when the lips dry up and crack. "Both drinks, however, come from the same cup, the one we share with the Bridegroom who takes us as his own for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, and in whose arms we shall rest when death comes to close off all our other stories. Accordingly, we dress even now in wedding attire. We drink his wine and give our hearts away in the breathtaking risk of believing—a form of falling in love really. "Then others see his glory in us, a glory poured like new wine into old stone jars. Especially, I think, when we take our last sip from a sponge, the glory of Cana's guest appears and, through the long night of waiting, shows a way toward hope." ("Glorious Promises," in Christian Century, December 20, 2000) And the question for us today remains: What do we see when we take the bread and drink the wine at this Eucharistic feast this morning? Just ordinary bread and wine and the same old ordinary, difficult people? Or do we see the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen? Do we see the sacrament of a marriage, the tokens of our marriage to each other in faith, our marriage to Jesus and each other, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health? Do we see our Beloved, his body broken and poured out for us "unto death"? Do we see the Body of Christ, where, together, with Jesus and each other, "we drink his wine and give our hearts away" in the breathtaking risk of faith—a form of falling in love really, a way toward hope? In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. |