Let Me Tell You a Story...

Sermon Reflection || Year C: Second Sunday After Epiphany

I didn’t write a sermon blog for last Sunday for a couple of reasons: (1) I didn’t have time, (2) I didn’t really know what I was doing until the last minute despite writing the sermon a week before, and (3) the internet at church went out towards the end of my sermon, so I didn’t really see the point of trying to salvage the recording.

But this week was different, and I want to talk about why.

Sermon—December January 20th || Year C: Second Sunday After Epiphany

Sermon Text

Video

Reflection

Leading up to this sermon, I ran into the idea of “Water to Wine” so many times. It was in two of the books I read for graduate school. I watched a two-part video series on a “Water to Wine hermeneutics.” And Scot McKnight published a Substack article on this very story.

On a side note, the video series linked above led me to read one book and purchase two others: On Christian Doctrine by Augustine (I would suggest reading Book 3: chapters 5, 10, 11, 12, 15, and 22), Sider: Erasmus on the New Testament, and Erasmus on Literature.

Anyway, reading about John 2 from these sources, plus the ones I typically consult, led to a rich experience of the text. Instead of just reading the text, my normal sources, and writing a sermon, it was as if I lived and breathed this beginning of the miracles of Jesus.

I felt like my son and daughter must feel when they play with Play-Doh: pushing and pulling, squeezing and rolling, tearing and mashing. Then start all over and do it again. This is how much fun I head with the text for this week!

And I think this came out in the sermon.

The main idea of all of this is that we now live in a water to wine world. What we thought mattered actually matters less than unity and joy and new beginnings. Who we thought were excluded by our attention to detail and ritualistic perfection are actually welcomed guests to the party. We see in a new way thanks to this inward transformation.

Creative Process

The creative process began by simply the need to write a sermon for last week’s post. I wasn’t especially excited about this particular text because I felt I had done an adequate job in presenting it in the past, but once I began to meditate on the wedding in Cana of Galilee, the words began to flow and the punchlines came to me without any effort on my part.

Then, it was as if every book I read, every video I watched, and every conversation I had last week somehow contributed to this sermon. While I had originally planned to walk through the text slowly, only paying attention to one of the layers, I realized that I couldn’t just do that. Instead, I wanted this to be a lesson in a new way to see each other, God, and the text. I wanted to demonstrate the layers of John 2, which speak to the layers in every text.

But how could I do this without confusing everyone by constantly jumping between layers? I figured the best way to do it is to tell the story three different times, each time emphasizing a different aspect of the text.

So I used the phrase “let me tell you a story” to signify the switch from one layer to another. As the sermon would progress, the deeper we would go.

It was honestly a lot of fun.