Just one more week. Seriously, one week from tomorrow morning, this freeking election will be over, and maybe, just maybe I can open my facebook for a few months without it making me sad…without my liberal friends and my conservative friends saying terrible things about each other…
I mean is anyone else ready for this to be over. I was hanging out with several work friends the day after one of the debates and one of them told us that he had watched the whole thing all the way through. Another one of my friends kind of looked at him weird and asked: “On purpose? How did you pull that off?”
His answer…”Gin, lots and lots of gin.”
(Yeah, you know you’re old when your friends don’t drink PBR anymore but drink sophisticated stuff like gin).
But it turns out a lot of people have been mixing politics and alcohol. A few weeks a debate drinking game meme popped up on my feed…where you drink every time the candidates use catch words or signature phrases like “let me be clear” or “obamacare”. [1]
But when I tried to google it I found out that there were so many of these that Time ran a feature called “Which Presidential Drinking Game is Right for You”, [2] where they featured no fewer than 9 attempts to translate the debates into liver damage and brain cell loss.
My Personal Favorite Rule?
“Drink and dance Gangnam Style if any candidate mentions gun control.”
Actually, sometimes I feel like College life would make a pretty fun drinking game
…every time Ryan says ‘Dude’…drink
…every time Zach illustrates a talk with a 49ers story…drink
…every time Stanford creatively re-imagines the pronunciation of one of these words (Question, Christian, Egypt)…drink
…or Dan says “Now what is the point?”…drink…and if he also moves his hand like he’s knighting someone in the front row while he’s saying it…bottom’s up.
Anyway, ‘Now what’s the point?’ (hand motion)… From Jim Belushi to Hank the Tank, alcohol is part of the College narrative.
And part of Christian discipleship on a campus has to include figuring out how to interact with an alcohol fueled culture. It is a complicated question that a lot of Christians wrestle with…and then we turn to John chapter 2…and Jesus does not appear to be particularly helpful…
Because, there Jesus is, making wine. And not just a glass…he makes 50-55 gallons…which in a unit of measure you might find more intuitive, works out to ~3.5 kegs.
And I feel like this whole story poses an obvious question…WHAT? Seriously, What? What the heck is going on here? What is the deal? I have so many questions...but I feel like the obvious question that emerges reading this story in general is something like:
How do the Scriptures in general and this passage in particular help us negotiate the alcohol soaked culture we find ourselves in? Well tonight I want to look at three ideas from this text and the scriptures in general offer to help us think about our relationship to campus drinking culture:
First, you need to recognize that :
I. Jesus is neither a Prude nor a Libertine
You see, there are a few passages of the Scriptures that people who don’t read the bible like to cite[3]…and this is one of them. [4]
The simplistic theological deduction people make when they invoke this narrative goes something like this:
Jesus made wine = Bring on the Jell-O Shots (QED)
But the really surprising thing about John chapter 2 is that Jesus turns out to be neither a prude nor a libertine.
You see the chapter opens with a picture of Jesus and his friends at a party. It’s a pleasant, gregarious scene. And then, they run out of wine, which would have been deeply humiliating to the family…and as Dan pointed out to me would have complicated the groom’s relationship with his new in-laws for years to come. And Jesus has compassion on this guy’s social predicament and makes a bunch of wine…really good wine.
But chapter 2 is really interesting, because there is a really stark jump cut between this gregarious compassionate scene to what comes next…look back a chapter 2 with me as I read just a bit further (starting in verse 9):
9 When the master of the feast tasted the water now become wine, and did not know where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew), the master of the feast called the bridegroom 10 and said to him, “Everyone serves the good wine first, and when people have drunk freely, then the poor wine. But you have kept the good wine until now.” 11 This, the first of his signs, Jesus did at Cana in Galilee, and manifested his glory. And his disciples believed in him.
12 After this he went down to Capernaum, with his mother and his brothers and his disciples, and they stayed there for a few days.
13 The Passover of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. 14 In the temple he found those who were selling oxen and sheep and pigeons, and the money-changers sitting there. 15 And making a whip of cords, he drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and oxen. And he poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables.
Just as we catch Jesus making wine, just as we make the point that he is no prude, just as we are ready to suspect him a libertine…some sort of pot smoking Berkley hippy who wears Birkenstocks and one of those knit caps that covers his balding ponytail and listens to a lot of Grateful Dead…and is really into Jonathan Livingston Seagull or the Fountainhead, depending on what kind of libertine he is (it’s election season, I need to give equal time to both kinds of crazy), John does a hard jump cut to a very different picture. To the point that I thought about titling this talk…
The incredible thing about these two narratives that John juxtaposes in his second chapter is that it is as if he is saying…whatever little picture you have of Jesus in your mind…whether it is the mild mannered miracle worker or the virulent champion of justice…that little picture you have of Jesus…it is going to need to get a lot bigger. Whatever you think he is…he’s more than that.
You see, Jesus may be the life of the party, but he does not lack moral seriousness. He is the image of God, and so we find in him, side by side in these two stories, enjoyment of creation and people and anger at those who distort his creation intent.
And so the picture we see in John 2 is that Jesus is neither a prude nor a libertine…and with respect to alcohol in particular he neither condemns wine nor does he unreservedly permit it…Which puts him in line with the rest of the scriptures: Which leads us to our second big idea:
II. The Scriptures paint a Tensioned Picture of Alcohol Characterized by Celebration and Caution
To put Jesus’ action in context we need to do a very brief biblical theology of alcohol. There are no fewer than 240 references to wine alone in the Scriptures…not to mention references to beer, fermented drink, and drunkenness. And they can all roughly be organized into two overarching categories: Celebration and Caution.
First, there are several types of references to alcohol that celebrate it as a good gift from God.
First: Celebration
1. First, there are dozens of verses that list wine as one of the things God gives as part of agricultural blessing. This is actually the primary context in which the Scriptures refer to alcohol. Check out Psalm 104:
Psalm 104:14-16
14 He makes grass grow for the cattle,
and plants for people to cultivate—
bringing forth food from the earth:
15 wine that gladdens human hearts,
oil to make their faces shine,
and bread that sustains their hearts.
Second:
In other words, you were supposed to share with the religious professionals
Deuteronomy 15:14
Supply them liberally from your flock, your threshing floor and your winepress. Give to them as the LORD your God has blessed you.”
3. Alcohol was an accepted part of mandated religious festivals:
Deuteronomy 14:26
“Use the silver to buy whatever you like: cattle, sheep, wine or other fermented drink, or anything you wish. Then you and your household shall eat there in the presence of the Yahweh your God and rejoice.”
One of the things I feel like people miss out on in the pedantic detail of the Old Testament is that a lot of those pages describe the festival character of Yahweh worship. Israel’s God mandated huge and frequent parties. Even a cursory reading of the Hebrew Scriptures reveals that Yahwehism was pretty freeking fun.
4. Jesus
But wine wasn’t just part of first testament mandated religious observance…it is also central to Christian symbology and worship.[5.5] What is the central worship event Jesus left his missional community…hint, it wasn’t singing. It was a corporate sacred meal that included bread and…wait for it…wine.
When you superimpose this reality with John 2 and the well known gospel references that Jesus hung out with drunks…and ate in their houses…we see that Jesus wasn’t afraid of a little fermentation.
But, that is not the whole story. There is a second category of passages that deal with alcohol in the Scriptures. And these urge:
Caution
1. Narratives of drunkenness gone very badly:
Noah – Genesis 9:21 “When he drank some of its wine, he became drunk and lay uncovered inside his tent”
Now you have to respect Noah’s commitment to drinking. It’s not like he could just go down to the 7-11 post flood an pick up a couple 40’s. The text said he planted a vineyard. That is some advanced planning for getting drunk.[6]
Listen…in our undergrad you could live in the dorm all 4 years…and I did. So I am acquainted with drinking stories. (public service announcement, if you are going to get so drunk you puke, please DON’T EAT CORN…my least favorite part of getting up early to study on Saturdays was the floating corn kernels in the sink…every Freeking Saturday for 4 years…there were corn kernels floating in my sink while I brushed my teeth.) And I’ve seen and heard bad drinking stories…stories of personal injury and humiliation. I had one written [7] and I cut it because it was just too crass…even for me. But I’m sorry, you are just not going to one-up the bible on bad drinking stories. You see, Noah is not as bad as it gets.
Lot - Genesis 19:32 “Let’s get our father to drink wine and then sleep with him and preserve our family line through our father.”
You see, this is one of the ways the scriptures instructs: by narrative counter example. For example, there is no law against polygamy…but every where it occurs in the scriptures it goes catastrophically poorly. Same thing with alcohol:
And in this way, the Scriptures treat drinks like wives. One is a great thing…but too many and things start to get complicated. [8]
2. Alcohol can undermine relationships and productivity. (Wisdom Lit)
Proverbs 20:1
“Wine is a mocker and beer a brawler; whoever is led astray by them is not wise.”
Prov 23:19
“Listen, my son, and be wise,
and set your heart on the right path:
20 Do not join those who drink too much wine
or gorge themselves on meat,
21 for drunkards and gluttons become poor,
and drowsiness clothes them in rags.”
3. There appear to be some ways to serve God that do not mix well with drinking:
A voluntary, temporary vow of association with a special ministry team…most famous example: Samuel (Jud 13:14)
Numbers 6:20
‘If a man or woman wants to make a special vow…as a Nazirite, 3 they must abstain from wine and other fermented drink…”
4. Pauline ethic:
Ephesians 5:17-19
17 Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the Lord’s will is. 18 Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit,
Alcohol makes us more of what we are…the question is, is more of you a good idea? Part of the Christian quest involves working really hard to combat our darker tendencies and make more room for the spirit to expand places for love and kindness and other things that don’t come real naturally to us. Sure you might not be in a ton of danger or making really bad choices with your safety or sexuality (or not)…but you could also choose incautious words that could wound people and complicate relationships.
Romans 14:21
“It is better not to eat meat or drink wine or to do anything else that will cause your brother or sister to fall.”
I don’t have time to go into Paul’s full theology of Christian freedom. But Dan and I were exchanging e-mails about this last week and he summarized it pretty well:
“Scriptures allow for wise enjoyment. But again, for any enjoyment to be wise means that it has taken the spiritual well-being of other people with deadly seriousness.”
You see, alcohol isn’t a special kind of thing…it’s just a thing, like any other thing, like romantic affection, visual media, facebook, politics, string cheese or gamma functions…it is not forbidden not unreservedly permitted.
It is good but has weird negative feedbacks with our brokenness…it is a gift that we can distort and transform into something thin and sad by exploitation and use outside of wise protective boundaries.
And so a Christian theology of alcohol is precisely the same as a Christian theology of all things that are good…but potentially damaging. There isn’t really an easy answer of total restriction or total license…Jesus is neither a prude nor a libertine…and you shouldn’t be either. The Christian ethic for all things is wise freedom. You get to exercise freedom in proportion to your wisdom. And you enjoy good things within the boundaries that they were meant to be enjoyed.
Let me wrap up this point by telling you about one of my closest friends, Tyler Thomas. OR for our purposes lets pull a Don Miller and call him, my friend Tyler the winemaker. I met Tyler several years ago while he was getting his second graduate degree here at UCD’s Viticulture program which is perennially the #1 wine making program in the nation. He made these little grape sensors that measured the pressure exerted by a growing grape…which is the first thing I thought of when I saw this:
Anyway, my friend Tyler the winemaker, lives in Napa now and is a big shot winemaker (cool picture) adding to the list of my friends that are way cooler than me…oh, well, at least there is Dan. And actually, he is kind of a big deal…recently, out of the blue, a shoe maker liked his wine so much, they named a shoe after him. That’s right, a shoe:
Now Tyler is a smart dude into the hard scientists, but he is also something of an artist. When I asked him why he got into winemaking because it requires a unique mix of scientific and art…technical craft and artistic endeavor…so he thinks it makes perfect sense for the first public act of the creator of the universe that to dramatically make something useful and beautiful..something that brims with both scientific wonder and aesthetic wonder. It is the perfect first fruit or appetizer of a new creation that is just starting to break through.
Anyway, Tyler loves wine. To him, wine is craft and agriculture and art. And as part of his job and passion, he goes to a lot of work functions were people are totally smashed. But he’s not. And that is of the ways he declares the Kingdom is to enjoy the good that God gives without slipping into distortion. He inhabits a drinking culture as neither a prude nor a libertine…but with wise enjoyment.
This is like the relationship talks…students want me to spell out a bunch of rules…and I can’t, because God doesn’t. Christianity doesn’t work that way. Following rules for their own sake is useless in our worldview. But the scriptures do offer guidance to craft a wise life of love and worship…like, hey, getting drunk is a pretty terrible idea. Jesus offers the principle of wise enjoyment with a measure of self skepticism. Personally, I have a one drink policy. I think my work buddies appreciate that I will have a beer with them when we play poker or go out after a soccer game. It is an act of care.
But I pass on the second round…and the third…and, well, you get the idea. Some of the older students in this community decided that the Scriptures’ call to respect the laws of your land (as long as they do not violate your conscience or the gospel) meant they didn’t drink until they were 21. I think there is a lot of wisdom in that.
So what do the scriptures teach about Alcohol? A tension between celebration and caution that should manifest as wise, cautious, enjoyment. But back to the passage, there is one more detail that I’d like to linger over to round our reflection.
You see, finally, this story unsubtly asserts that when it comes right down to it…it really is in our interest to, as Mary says in v 5:
III. “Do Whatever He Tells You.”
Note: I totally re-wrote this point just before the talk. see the MP3 if you are interested.
You see this passage taps into my experience of every party I’ve ever been to.
You see this passage taps into my experience of every party I’ve ever been to.
The way Tim Keller puts it: The wine always runs out…the party is almost always disappointing.
This passage taps into a fundamental human experience things we look to for happiness and fulfillment whether secular or religious never really deliver…with one exception. Jesus!
For those in the know, those who understood what happened…the quality of the wine was not the point. The story moves the attention away from the wine to the wine maker. No one in the know just goes on drinking. Because for those who know what just happened, the fact that great wine was served to drunk people was not the most interesting thing that just happened.
And that is really the heart of a Christian theology of alcohol…or anything really. If you are looking to excuse self interested behavior, you’ll be able to. But Jesus isn’t about rule following for its own sake. The way Christianity works is that Jesus gets our attention…and suddenly, 3.5 kegs of great wine aren’t the point. And this is what Christian’s call ‘faith’…something the text says that the disciples began to experience that day when it say “And the disciples believed in him.” It is to realize that Jesus understands reality and me more intimately and more exhaustively than I do. And if that is the case, Mary’s comment [10] starts to make sense
2:5 “Do whatever he tells you”
Once you start to come to terms with who Jesus is…once you, in the language of this passage, “believe in him”…It fundamentally changes the alcohol question…and every other question of human behavior. I want in on this thing he’s doing. Jesus is more interesting, more beautiful, more compelling than any of the good things I could over use to try to find meaning or diversion. And so, when it comes to behavior details like if and how much I’ll drink…I’m inclined to ‘do whatever he tells me.’
____________
[1] Seriously, how could they have foreseen, “Big Bird”, “Binder of Women” or “Every time Obama looks like he is about to fall asleep.”
[3] Brother’s K Passage
[4] Others include “don’t judge” and the shellfish passage in Leviticus.
[5] I was talking to a friend who is planning to go into the ministry about this…and his response was…dude, when I’m done with school, I need to go to a church that is Biblical.
[5.5] Where it is a symbol both of joy and of wrath.
[6] This is a Driscoll bit.
[7] …my friend found one of his friends passed out buck naked in a bathroom stall one morning with the contents of his stomach and bowels still in toilet….with his arm…
[8] Ester trusted God, but she also waited for Xerxes to ‘have a few’.
[9] I hated cutting this, but it just didn’t fit.
Mary has so much confidence in this young man’s resourcefulness (despite a total lack of resources) that she tells the servants ‘trust this guy, he’ll fix your problem.’
…which means that Mary treats Jesus like he’s the wolf in Pulp Fiction. You have no idea how he’s going to fix your problem…but you have total confidence that he will. You’ve got to believe that having the creator of the universe come around on the Sabbath for dinner had become pretty useful. You can almost see the list waiting for him on the table.
You see, after the wolf showed that he can handle stuff…Vincent was willing to do what he said…they believed in him. They trusted that he knew what he was talking about and that they would do what he said even if it was counter intuitive.
[10] One of the confusing aspects of the English translation is when Jesus calls his mother ‘woman.” Bruce – “The English word ‘woman’, used thus in the vocative, carries with it the flavor of disrespect which is not present in the original.” Suggests something like ‘dear woman’ or If he was from the south it would be ‘madam’ and if he was old English ‘my lady’[1] – it is a strange thing to call his mother, but not a pejorative or dismissive term – the point is that that if she wants him to do something ‘messianic’ that she needs to recognize the complexity of their relationship – she is not drawing on the relational capitol that comes from her being his mother, but from him being her creator
