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Church – Together

St. John’s Lutheran Church
19 January 2025 + Lectionary 2c

John 2:1-11; 1 Corinthians 12:1-11
Rev. Josh Evans


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Here’s something you might not know about me:
I play Dungeons & Dragons.

And by “play” I mean:
“stumble my way through every campaign session like I know what I’m doing.”

While I’m far from a Dungeons & Dragons expert, I do know this:
Teamwork and collaboration are key.

In any adventuring party, it’s important to have a good mix of character classes – from trained fighters and cunning rogues to skilled healers and expert spellcasters, and everyone in between. The diversity of skills and abilities is crucial for the adventures, tasks, and combat that lie ahead – and you quickly learn to rely on the skills and abilities of your fellow adventurers to make it through – together.

***

When we think of the miracle stories in the gospels, we tend to focus on the action of Jesus alone – the one “performing” the miracle – whether it’s healing, feeding, or even raising someone to life. But in this first miracle story – the first of seven such stories called “signs” in John’s gospel for what they tell us about Jesus’ identity and purpose – there’s a crucial detail we miss if we only focus on the action of Jesus.

Notice how the story begins:
“The mother of Jesus was there…”

John specifically mentions her twice in his gospel – once here and once several chapters later during the crucifixion. That inclusion at pivotal moments should pique our attention: This is important!

Jesus’ mother becomes the catalyst for this story.

She’s the one who notices there’s no wine left, and she’s the one who approaches Jesus to do something about it. It sort of makes you wonder: Does she know something that everyone else doesn’t yet?

Whatever the case may be,
this story seems to highlight more than a miracle of abundance.

This is a story about relationship and dependence.

There is no traditional nativity story with shepherds and angels in John’s gospel. Instead, it begins with a semi-cryptic, poem-like prologue about “the Word [who] became flesh,” whose identity John ultimately reveals as “the only Son, himself God, who is close to the Father’s heart…” – though perhaps a better translation would be “close to the Father’s breast,” conveying the intimacy of a parental relationship and the utter dependence of a newborn child on their parents.

That’s chapter one.

Then, only a handful of verses later in the very next chapter, we meet the mother of Jesus. John never calls her “Mary” – but I don’t think he forgot her name.

Instead, I think John is trying to make the link explicit: Jesus is dependent on both his parents, his heavenly Father and his earthly mother. Taken together, these two chapters function as Jesus’ origin story.

From that perspective, the story that follows is a story about a relationship between a mother and her son. Without his mother’s role in this story, Jesus might have never known about the hospitality crisis at the wedding. Without his mother’s insistence that her son do something, there might have never been a so-called “miracle” story at all.

In other words, Jesus needed his mother – this relationship 
in order to live into his identity and calling.

***

In Dungeons & Dragons, an adventuring party of exclusively fighters and barbarians would become pretty useless pretty quickly without a cleric or a druid to cast a healing spell when someone goes unconscious. And without the fighters and barbarians, well, “good luck!” to everyone else, I guess. Believe me: I know.

It’s a truth that transcends the realm of fantasy roleplaying games:
We need each other. We need the community.

Because it’s never up to any of us by ourselves.

***

In his sermons and other writings, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., commemorated this past Wednesday on our calendar of saints, often spoke of the “beloved community” as a community born out of the principles of nonviolence and transformational justice-seeking love. In biblical terminology, we might call this the “kingdom of God” – the same kind of community Jesus was building.

Like any good community organizer, King understood
that building the beloved community was not a solo effort
but one that required collaboration.

After all, even Jesus had his mother
and his (at least twelve but probably more) disciples.

The work of transformational justice-seeking love that King and his fellow civil rights leaders so passionately strove for, that Jesus and his disciples strove for, is the work to which each of us is called in our baptism, as our liturgy reminds us: “to strive for justice and peace in all the earth.”

Or in the words of this congregation’s Reconciling in Christ welcome statement, which we reaffirmed just over a year ago: to commit ourselves “to confronting and dismantling all systems of injustice and oppression in all we do and say.”

It is important work – and it can be overwhelming work –
especially if we think it’s ours to do alone…

…and yet, we know, it is our work to do – together.

To remind each member of God’s beloved community:
You matter. You belong. You are loved.

That doesn’t mean we will always get it right.
We will mess up – together.
We will fall short – together.

And we will continue to work – together –
striving for the beloved community of the kingdom of God – together.

Paul didn’t tell the Corinthian church community that they were each expected to be it all and do it all. Instead, Paul reminded them that there are varieties of gifts, each given out by the same Spirit, for the common good.

None of us is expected to be it all or do it all.
That is why we gather, week after week, as a church community.

We need each other in order to live into our calling.
We need each other to live into the fullness of who we are created to be.
We need each other to be able to share God’s extravagant love with the whole world.

It’s not all up to us by ourselves. And that’s okay.

We are church – together.

303 Sand Creek Road (street)
P.O. Box 5085 (mailing)
Albany, New York 12205
518.465.7545

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