Of Signs and Seeing in Troubled Times

 Sermon preached at Church of the Redeemer, Addison, January 19, the 2nd Sunday after Epiphany:  John 2:1-11

Grant that your people, illumined by your word and Sacraments, may shine with the radiance of Christ’s glory….

Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory…

The Collect of the Day gives us a lofty goal:  “that we might shine with the radiance of Christ’s glory.”  It reminds us of Jesus saying from the Sermon on the Mount:  “Let your light shine before others so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.”  It reminds me also of a saying, “Saints are people the light shines through.”

The Gospel reading this morning tells us there are two prior steps we must take before we can be a light for others.  First, we must learn to look for the signs.  And second, we must learn to see through them.

John calls what happens at the wedding in Cana as “the first of Jesus’ signs.”  John does not talk about miracles, he talks about signs.  There are seven of them in John’s Gospel.  Seven things Jesus does that reveal who he truly is.

So how do we do the first step, look for a sign from God?

The Collect we prayed points us in a particular direction. We are said to be “illumined by your word and Sacraments.”  The Sacraments are a kind of rehearsal for how to look for signs from God.

What is the definition of a Sacrament?  The Prayer Book says they are “outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace.”  What does that tell us? Two things, I think.

First, signs from God occur mostly in the ordinary stuff of life. And second, signs can be seen through to see the grace of God.

That means that we don’t spend all our time looking for signs from God in the other than ordinary, or the unexplainable.  Finding God in the unexplainable, and especially using the unexplainable to figure out who God is and how he works is often called “the God of the gaps.”  The impulse is to look at what cannot be explained—the gaps in our understanding—and say, “I’ve found God.”

I don’t want to say that we cannot find God in the gaps, but I do want to say that it is rare to do so.  God likes to speak to us in the ordinary.  Hence Jesus first sign in John’s Gospel takes place at a wedding and involves water and wine.  Yes, how Jesus turns water into wine is unexplainable, but “how” is not the main point of the story.

The main point of the story is to prepare us to look for God’s signs in the ordinary stuff of life, and to be able to see through those signs to the reality of Jesus and his revelation of God.

And that’s the second step. Step one, how or where do we look? Second step, having looked, how do we see?  Or probably better, what do we look for?

Back to the definition of a sacrament:  we look for grace, or any of those things we know we can rely on God for:  mercy, forgiveness, hope, love.

We look through something and see God.  Now that’ s not as easy as it sounds, because—and here’s the tricky part—what God wants to show us is often unexpected, a surprise.  Such a surprise might delight us, but it might also bring us up short, or, at first, disappoint us or even anger us.

Later in John’s Gospel comes the famous line, “You will know the truth and the truth will set you free.”  Some have added a phrase: “The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.”

We can’t look only for things we agree with or that are some fulfillment of a desire we have.  If we do this, usually sooner rather than later, the God we worship will look a great deal like ourselves.

Look for God in the ordinary, expect to see, often, what you do not expect to see (or, perhaps, do not want to see).

This has many ramifications for daily living.  I’ll point out one given the change we are about to experience with the inauguration of President Trump.

That people are deeply divided is a given these days.  That one side of that divide feels completely empowered by now is obvious, and many of us will find ourselves on the margins, politically and socially.

The tendency—whichever side your on—will be to increase what we have been doing for the last decade, and that is to seek the safety of like-minded people.  A certain amount of that is only natural.

But we can’t let ourselves do that all the time.  We must keep practicing on of the tenets of the baptismal covenant we renewed last week:  “I will seek and serve Christ in all persons loving my neighbor as myself.”

There’s a flip side to that work:  we must give opportunities for others to see Christ in us, a product of letting our life shine.

That is what gay and lesbian people did in The Episcopal Church.  When the majority of people wanted us to go away, we decided to stay.  And not just stay, we determined to tell our stories so that other people could see our ordinary lives.  And see God at work in them.  We did it so well that in the early nineties that one of the organizations that was against us being fully in the church issued a warning to all its members:  do not let them tell their stories.

Some folks in our community think they have one a great battle and are poised to win the war against a whole bunch of people they think are destroying the real American way of life, and the Christian religion.  Out job is to find ways to keep in relationship with them and not be quiet about who we are and the things we hold dear.  As I have always said as an openly gay priest, “They’re going to have to work hard not to like me or at least respect me.”

Now this means that we have to look for Christ in those who disagree with us also, and expect that there are ways that we need to change.

The only way I see to survive the next four years is to keep looking for and seeing God at work in others, and making ourselves available to be looked at and seen.  We have to trust God that he will be present in those attempts to see and be seen, because it is in the signs that he is known, as we practice each Sunday.