Four Kegs of Wine, an Impromptu Seafood Picnic, and Seven Spoiler Alerts: John’s Theology of Miracles

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When it comes to sports stories, I have what I call ‘the wife test.’ The ‘wife test’ is when a sports story gets so big and so surreal that I think it would be interesting enough to explain it to my wife…who really isn’t that interested in sports that don’t involve our favorite member of “The Blue Kitties.”

 To pass the ‘wife test’ a story has to transcend sports, it has to connect with the basic themes of what it means to be human.

A few things have passed the wife test…Shilling’s bloody sock …Armstrong’s cycling ban…it’s not a long list...but last year was expanded to include Tim Tebow.

For those of you who don’t follow sports, here’s the ‘wife version.’  Tim Tebow, was one of the most outspoken Christian college athletes in recent memory.  He used to write verses on his eye black...

...and entertainers made a living out of his admission that he was a virgin.

 But most experts thought that even though he had won the Heisman trophy for the best player in college football, he simply didn’t have the skills necessary to succeed in professional football…In particular, they argued that professional quarterbacks routinely find it useful to say be able to throw a football, which he was famously bad at.

But despite his weaknesses, around the middle of last season he ended up starting for the Denver Broncos who were terrible and everyone had counted out…and then something weird happened…the team started to win.  But not just win…they reeled of a sting of an improbable last second come from behind wins...It was so dramatic that week after week literally seemed like was scripted…like every week was the last 3 minutes of a Disney sports movie.  It was uncanny.

I remember watching the end of one of these games in the gym…and the Broncos were badly behind when I got on the treadmill, and I thought, well this is the week it finally ends and we don’t have to hear it any more…and when I got off the treadmill there was Tebow and his team celebrating yet another win as time expired. 

And no one really knew what to make of it.  I was talking about this with a friend of mine this week and he told a story about how one of his skeptical friends sent him a text after one of these wins that read “OK, I believe in God now.” 

It was weird.  Listen to how Chuck Klosterman (who would not self identify as a person of faith) described his experience of watching one of these games:

The score was deadlocked at 32 and the Broncos were kicking off with 1:33 remaining…Did I believe Denver would win? I shouldn't have. Minnesota was getting the ball with multiple timeouts. It'd been the better team for most of the afternoon…Yet I believed Denver would win.

My reasoning?

I had no reasoning. And I did not like how that felt, even though I'm trying to convince myself that it felt good

The story culminated with the Broncos improbably making the playoffs where Tebow threw an 80 yard touchdown (that, in fairness, he only threw about 20 yards) on the first play of overtime to beat heavily favored Pittsburgh team. 

But after the game, the Twitter started buzzing because it turns out that Tebow (the guy who regularly wrote John 3:16 on his face during games in college) threw for a season-high 316 yards and set an NFL record with 31.6 yards per completion.

Now, here’s my question.  Was any of this miraculous?  Was God a Denver Bronco’s fan…and if so, is he cheering for Paton Manning now, or is he a Jet’s fan this year (…and wouldn’t that be a fundamental problematic for a good God).  I think Klosterman got to the heart of this… 

I doubt many Christians believe that God is unfairly helping Tebow win games in the AFC West...However, I get the impression that especially antagonistic secularists assume (that the belief that God is making him win) infiltrates every aspect of Tebow’s celebrity, and that explains why he's so beloved by strangers they cannot relate to.

But I think this all gets at an important misunderstanding between Christians and skeptics…as well as a fundamental misunderstanding among Christians…what the heck is a miracle anyway? 

What are our criteria to declare something a miracle?  If something improbable happens to a Christian, is that automatically a miracle?  How improbable does it have to be before we get to call it a miracle?  Or does it have to be impossible before we call it a miracle?  What if something improbably bad happens to a Christian…is that a miracle?  And then there is the question of importance?  Can something as trivial as football be the arena God’s miraculous intervention, regardless of the probability? 

I think most of us are pretty confused about what miracles are and how they are supposed to function.  But as I studied the book of John this summer, while many of us in this room tonight were asking God for some pretty big stuff, it became clear to me that I knew one person who is not confused about what Miracles are or how they are supposed to function…the author of the book of John.

So tonight, I just want to do a little sequel to my John 2 talk, and briefly pose one question to our text…

What’s the deal with miracles?

What is a miracle, and what is it for?  And how does that affect how we ask for or expect them?

To tackle this question, I want to look at how John uses stories of miraculous intervention throughout his book to tell the story of Jesus…

So let’s start by looking back at the water to wine passage in chapter 2 that I talked about a couple weeks ago.  If you recall, Jesus was at a small town wedding…and his mom comes to him and tells him the hosts have run out of wine.  Now, the exchange between Jesus and his mom is a little cryptic and a lot hilarious.  I mean, why does Mary come to Jesus with this problem…and why does she have so much confidence that he has the resources to fix it.  You have got to figure that even if she doesn’t fully understand who her son is, living with him for a few decades has made her confident in his resourcefulness. 

And so even though Jesus expresses respectful hesitance she acts like she doesn’t even hear him…and tells the caterers to ‘do whatever he tells you.’ 

And…Jesus rolls with it…he tells them to fill some big jars with water and, before anyone knew it, those jars contained about 4.5 kegs of really good wine.  But if you think much about it, this is kind of weird, for a number of reasons…but here’s the one that I thought about all summer:

Running out of wine would have been embarrassing…it would have brought shame on the family…the situation was sub-optimal…but surely it was not the most desperate situation in Israel or even Cana that day.  It defies our miracle math…IF the purpose of miracles is to make things better.

Or take another of the signs that shows up a little later in John…the feeding of the 5,000.   I mean you are trying to tell me that in Roman occupied Palestine the best use of Jesus’ magic talents at that moment was to host a big seafood picnic.  Surely the grumbling tummies of a crowd that had skipped out in work to go see the crazy preacher (which is what passed for entertainment in an age before youtube or hulu) was not as pressing as the horrific oppression or illness that ravaged the ancient world.  It defies our miracle math…IF the purpose of miracles is to make things better.

You hear this all the time…why would God care about your petty crap when there are other things he’d certainly be more interested in.    Like why would you pray about your test you have understudied for when dozens of people died this week in escalating Gaza violence.  And that is a reasonable question…if the purpose of miracles is to make things better.   

But miracles are not meant to make everything better…they are signposts of reality…they are signposts that point our attention to a parallel, truer reality...that is in the process of breaking through.  They don’t tend to fix terrible situations…they tend to remind us of God’s presence and care in the midst of those situations…and remind us that the dark details of the world we see around may seem like the final reality...it may seem like darkness wins…but it isn’t and it won’t. 

To understand the impact of the water-to-wine event you have to realize that even though the wedding in John 2 was a celebration…it is a celebration under duress…it was a wedding occurring on the backdrop of Roman oppression.  So in that way, the wedding in Cana in John 2 is kind of like the wedding scene in Braveheart. 

People were dancing and enjoying themselves… forgetting for a day that they were ruthlessly owned by the most powerful empire the world had ever known before rulers tended to debate abstract ideas like ‘inalienable human rights’…they drank and laughed, but at any minute the stark reality of their Roman overlords could break through and remind everyone, that everything is NOT ok.

This miracle wasn’t fundamentally about running out of wine…it was a sign to those who were trying to celebrate under a shroud of fear that Rome might own you now…but liberation beyond your wildest hopes is coming…and its coming through Jesus.  

And this turns out to be the basic argument of John’s whole book.  Now, I know that John who wrote the story of Jesus we are working through this year, and other beloved sections of the new testament…sometimes can just seems kind of adorable.  He talks pretty but can seem simple…even naïve. 

Sometimes you just want to pat his little head when he starts rambling on about love and love overcoming the world and flowery stuff like that. 

John is like someone you meet at a party who is affable, likeable and kind…and you thoroughly enjoy the conversation, but leave feeling like “that guy is adorable…but I’m not sure he gets how the world works.”  And then the next day you go to an lecture on campus on string theory by a Nobel Laurite and when the speaker steps to the podium you realize…it’s the guy you met at the party.  And you realize not only does he understand ‘how the world works’ better than you do…he got really unique insight on how the world works…and yet, he still says stuff like ‘love overcomes the world.’  That is the experience I had studying this book.   John isn’t some back woods yokel who got his hands on a crayon and started scribbling a quaint story…he is a theologian and artist.

Let me try to lay out some of what he does for you.  You might have noticed a few weeks ago that John starts out this book with an oddly familiar sentence.  Listen to how he opens the book:

“In the beginning was the Word …All things were made through him...”    

Is that familiar?  Does that remind you of any other famous opening sentences?  How about:

 “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” Genesis 1:1

His opening words are an exact match of the opening words of Genesis. John starts out the story of Jesus in a way that parallels the beginning of the story of everything.

But that turns out to be really important key to understanding the whole the book…starting in chapter 2.  Look with me at verse 11:

2:11 This, the first of his signs, Jesus did at Cana in Galilee, and manifested his glory.

You see, in the story of the miracle in John chapter 2 John doesn’t exist by itself.  John initiates the sign counter…he starts up a kind of miracle odometer…which ticks again in chapter 4 (which Peter will walk us through in a couple weeks).  Look with me at 4:54:

4:54 This was now the second sign that Jesus did when he had come from Judea to Galilee.

then he stops counting…but we’re not supposed to.  By initiating the sign counter he is letting us know that we might want to just go ahead and keep on counting.  And how many signs do you think there are àSeven!

Do you follow this.  John opens with a verse that parallels the opening of Genesis, and then tells the story of Jesus around the framework of seven signs which most commentators agree are John’s way of arguing theologically and artistically, that there is a parallel between what God did in creation and what is unfolding in Jesus…

…the way John tells the story, Jesus has come to do more than say a few wise things, or to start a rebellion, or even to just to die for sins…he has come to re-order reality… turning creation itself upside down…he is setting a trajectory that will undo everything terrible, unjust and sad… and it begins with seven acts of RE-creation…that culminate in Resurrection…

…and in that context, it begins to become clear, this miracle is not about wine, it’s not about refilling the glasses of some wedding guests who have already drained the host’s kegs…it is about the dramatic act of cosmic remaking that is just getting started at this little wedding in an unremarkable town…

It is a signpost of a truer reality…And John underlines this perspective with the language he uses to describe these seven startling acts that Jesus performs.  I took the time to count, categorize and plot the words he uses throughout his book to talk about these things, and found something kind of surprising. 

He doesn’t even use the word miracle…he prefers the words like work and, especially - sign.  Because both of those words have the connotation of being about something bigger than the acts themselves…signs point to something beyond themselves.  A sign is never there to direct attention to itself.  That would be stupid… and a waste of tax money.  A sign that attracts attention to itself is characterized by dysfunction. 

And this makes more sense of the way John wraps up the story of the water to wine.

2:11 This, the first of his signs, Jesus did at Cana in Galilee, and manifested his glory.

Glory is funny word that doesn’t carry the juice in our culture that it used to…partially because we have subjected the word to abuse…we have treated the word badly…

...but I think that in part, we are all culturally just too ironic and clever to care about or even believe in anything as substantive and grand as glory or duty or honor or holiness…but all that verse is saying is at this moment, Jesus tipped his hand…and we see, he’s holding aces…like seven of them…he’s foreshadowing what this whole thing is about and where it is going. 

___

Now those of you who have been part of this community for a while know that we have had a pretty dark few months. 

Sarah Johnson mentioned it a few weeks ago, but at the beginning of the summer one of our friends suffered a sudden bout with severe mental illness and then one day in June she walked away from the clinic she was being treated at and didn’t come back…she just disappeared. 

In the weeks that followed, members of this community spent countless hours, sacrificing sleep, grades, time with family and taking some non-trivial safety risks handing out flyers in tough neighborhoods, walking into homeless camps in the woods and trudging through the American River Parkway in the middle of the night. 

Now we have not talked about this much up here since school started, I think, in part because we want to move forward and I think in part because we want to be hospitable to new students who aren’t carrying these events around with them.’ But this was our life for weeks.  And I know that for some of you Linnea and the horror of the search and the hurt of her absence are still very much part of your daily existence. I know I still think about Linnea every day, and I had exactly one conversation with her. 

We looked and prayed and asked God for a miracle.  Some of you prayed harder than you have ever prayed…and literally never wanted God to do something more.  And then, near the end of the summer, during a large search effort, her mom found her body in the Sacramento green belt.  And that…that sucked.  And then, it got worse…and more confusing…the next day we learned that her mental illness had grown so severe that she had actually taken her own life.  We had asked for a miracle and it felt like what we got was worse than we had feared. 

But at the memorial service Linnea’s mom said something really wise and lucid and, in my opinion, was a succinct, poignant summary of John’s theology of miracles.  At one point in her words to the hundreds of people who had gathered she said something like this:

“We didn’t get our big miracle…but all along the way there were signs, signs that we were not alone”

What’s the deal with miracles…THAT is the deal with miracles! 

The purpose of signs isn’t to make things all better…we live in a beautiful but broken world…a planet that is full of wonder and terror...and belonging to Jesus is not some sort of force field that will protect you or the people you love from that.

The purpose of miracles isn’t to make things all better…that’s the purpose of resurrection…that’s the purpose of God’s the project of re-creation that he initiated with his covert invasion of our world in Jesus…which he inaugurated by making some wine at a small town wedding and which he assured by defeating death itself. 

As John sees it…to the point that he structures his book around this insight…the signs that Jesus did then…and the signs that occasionally and surprisingly punctuate our lives now…are reminders of his intention not only personal salvation…but a total second-creation…to remake the broken world.

The purpose of signs is to redirect our attention on hope that is really hope. 

You see, God’s plan of liberation and renewal that breaks through in Jesus is bigger than we often give it credit for…it is not only about saving our souls…or whisking us away to heaven from a doomed world…it is not about God giving up on his creation and just saving us from it…When the reality of God’s kingdom breaks through it will be a total remaking.

The wine is not about wine…the fish is not about fish…for John, each of these are sequential steps pointing to a bigger reality…resurrection…and the breaking through of God’s rule…a reminder that what you see is not all there is…that liberation is coming…and its coming through Jesus.

I feel like when we get a hold of a theology of ‘signs’ closer to that, it changes our expectation of what ‘counts’ and we start to see that God is punctuating our lives with signs declaring a truer reality than our broken world, a text like this starts to make more sense.  A sign doesn’t have to dramatically alter the laws of physics it just has to startle us out of the impoverished assumption that this world is the realest reality.  I feel like Peter Berger, a professor of sociology at Boston University, kind of gets at this in his book ‘a far glory’.

“Reality is haunted by (an) otherness which lurks behind the fragile structures of everyday life. Much of the time the otherness is successfully held at bay, seemingly domesticated or even denied, so that we can go about the business of living. From time to time we catch glimpses of transcendent reality as the business of living is interrupted or put in question…” Peter Berger – a far glory

That is what signs are for…they call BS on “the fragile structures of everyday life”…and remind us that reality is haunted by a transcendent otherness…that is breaking through in Jesus.

Signs do not fix things, they remind us that the fix is coming.  And even when they do offer a measure of fix…the fix is always temporary.  Even the culminating sign in John…the resurrection of Lazarus…wasn’t a solution.  Lazarus found himself re-dead again in a couple decades, max.  Even the resurrection of Lazarus wasn’t a actually real solution…it was a sign…of something actually real and actually a solution.

Let me wrap up with a little story.

The week my grandmother died, we didn’t pray for a miracle.  My grandmother was sick and old and just a few months before she had just lost her only child (my dad) in a car accident that happened while he was driving home from visiting her.  She didn’t want more days on this earth and we didn’t ask God to give her more.  But as her death followed my dad’s death in close succession, our family was in a dark season where the forces of death and chaos were pressing hard on us.  The day of the funeral, I remember I was on a business trip in Jefferson City, Missouri, and I caught a flight to western NY after work, and drove through the night.  And it was a standard funeral, though it was smaller than I expected.  I remember realizing at that funeral the older you are, the fewer people show up at your funeral.  It struck me that the more funerals you attend, the smaller yours will be.  But that day, something happened that always dominates my memories of it.  My grandfather had given my grandmother a plant many many years earlier…and a close family friend said it hadn’t bloomed in 10 years..but on the day of the funeral it suddenly flowered…for one day.  

It was a small thing…easily explained by natural causes.  But I have always kind of thought of that flower as an ‘instance of punctuating beauty,’ a sign that the gritty, fallen, broken natural realities of car accidents and old age and mourning lost dads and dead sons are not all there is to this world.

We tend to want Jesus to fix things when we ask him to intervene supernaturally, to alleviate some sort of suffering.  But Jesus’ signs are about ‘revealing the glory of God.’  They are instances of punctuating beauty that are symbols of the truth that even though this life is hard and kicks our butts on a regular basis, and that the powers of decay and death will eventually have their victory over all of us and those we love…THAT IS NOT the FINAL reality.

They are a Spoiler Alert. 

They remind us how the story ends…

…it ends resurrection and re-creation. 

Death and decay lose. 

Jesus wins.

When Jesus Mixes the Drinks (John 2:1-11)

John 2:1-11

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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

…every time Stanford has laughs at one of his own jokes…drink…and if he’s the only one…drink again 

…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: 

http://www.fluevog.com/code/?w%5B0%5D=item%3Atyler_thomas&p=1&view=detail&colourID=3630

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.

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.”

[2] http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/10/03/obama-vs-romney-which-presidential-debate-drinking-game-is-right-for-you/

[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