Here’s the bones of a sermon for two village churches for the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity 2024. The gospel text is John 2:1-11 in which Mary makes her voice heard. Women have had far less “say” through the Christian centuries, and even now – a sure sign that there is no unity in Christian community.
This week is the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. It always begins on the 18th January, the date when we celebrate what God did with Saul, converting him from a zealous persecutor of Jesus’ followers, into someone who came to love them as his brothers and sisters.
It has been a special 8eightday period pf prayer each year since 1908 – co-ordinated by the World Council of Churches – the idea being that we pray “for the unity of the Church as Christ wills it, and in accordance with the means he wills” (Paul Couturier)
Our first call in our prayer for Christian unity is to lament that the lack of Christian unity. Christians remains divided on so many things. Churches remain divided. We rejoice when there is reconciliation, when we find the way to work together, but divisions run deep, hurting the body of Christ.
In the past our focus for prayer may have been the relationship between the denominations and those prayers have borne fruit. Or our hearts and minds may have gone to the troubles in Northern Ireland, as prayer for the Catholic and Protestant communities there.
But, here and now, what does disunity look like andfeel like to us? What is our experience of disunity? Materials for this year’s Week of Prayer have been gathered by an ecumenical group from Burkina Faso. They have invited us to join with them in a process of self-reflection as they consider what it means to love our neighbour in the midst of a security crsis.
We may be less vulnerable to acts of mass violence than in Burkina Faso, but many here live with the memory and/or threat of serious violence centred on issues of identity and belonging. There are also groups within communities who feel particularly vulnerable to violence. For them, prayers for Christian unity become urgent – that we discover the unity Christ wills in accordance with the means he wills.
There is no unity
as long as people are not free to be themselves,
as long as people are disrespected, or disabled or silenced by people more powerful than them,
as long as there are victims of abuse and the injustice inflicted on them has not been righted,
as long as people are frozen out, talked down, talked down to
because of who they are
because of the colour of their skin, because of their gender,
because they’re women,
because of their age (too young, too old),
because they’re gay, or haven’t had the right education
or because they are caught up in historic conflicts and they’re bound to one side or the other,
because of who we are.
Differences don’t have to lead to conflict and division. Differences can be the cause of great rejoicing. They are also the places where love grows.
There will always be differences. Our scriptures open with God celebrating difference in the creation stories with the creation of all sorts of life. He creates relationships by making man and woman. He loves what he has done. God doesn’t iron out differences.
We have a choice. We can love our differences, or we can hate our differences. When we hate our differences we can feel threatened, we can seek to control and manipulate, we can hide the truth of the other and finish up sowing seeds of division.
When we love our differences we rejoice in the gifts of others, we will see our differences as a blessing (even when there is disagreements among us). We will love that the world has so many different points of view, that there are so many different ways to understand things, that there is so much to learn, so much to discover.
Some of our media would have us afraid of our differences, as would the gossip on the street. Sometimes we have to put our hands over our ears on radio phone-in and instead tell ourselves what we hear from scripture as the heart of vocation – “do not be afraid”.
Day by day we make this choice, loving our differences, or hating our differences and thereby creating divisions and seeing life break apart.
One of the great divisions within society and within the church is the difference between men and women, the different ways they’ve been treated. We see this in the politics of the church – about who can speak, teach or lead. We see it in our scriptures. Men play a far more prominent role. They are more powerful and they have a lot more to say.
Yet, in spite of all the patriarchy, it is Mary’s voice that we hear in today’s gospel. She doesn’t say much, but what she does say is truly significant.
She says to Jesus, “they have no wine” and to the stewards, “do whatever he tells you”. “They have no wine” and “do whatever he tells you”. Just nine words!
It would have been no surprise that the wine ran out. Cana was just as poor a village as nearby Nazareth. The farming families there struggled to make a living while at the same time they were being heavily taxed – the Temple tax, tribute to the Roman emperor, and the tax they had to pay to Herod for his various vanity projects. This was a community of poor people.
Mary’s four words, “They have no wine” addressed to Jesus is as a prayer – a prayer trusting the one she is speaking to to be the one to answer the embarrassment of the poor hospitality which was all they could afford.
Mary can lead our prayer. We can follow her in spelling out to Jesus what concerns us. The lack of wine may not be our concern, but we may make similar prayers, such as “They have no food”, “They have no justice”, “they have no room”, “they have no one to care for them” – and her words “do whatever he tells you” becomes the answer to the prayer.
As we pray for Christian unity, as we note any temptation to hate our differences, and our inclination to demean those who disagree with us, we can make our prayer “There is no unity, there is only difference and division”. As we work our way through a PCC meeting, or face up to any resentment we may feel about how we have been treated by others we can follow Mary’s prayer, “there is no agreement”, or “there is no love”.
When we pray for Christian unity, we turn to Jesus and offer ourselves as the answer to the prayer of the church. There may be no unity, but we turn to the one we know to work wonders with difference, who loves difference. Paul sums it up: In Christ, there is neither Jew nor Gentil, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for we are all one in Christ. These are the wonders God works in our differences.
Luke describes the church in his Book of Acts. In the beginning he shows Jesus’ friends and followers all together in the room, men and women, devoting themselves to prayer, describing how the Spirit came on them inspiring them to speak in such a way that everyone was able to understand them in spite of their differences of nationality, ethnicity, gender and age. And then trhoughout Acts Luke continues to amaze his readers with the sheer diversity of the earliest church. There are men and women, strangers and foreigners, slaves, prisoners (and their guards), Jews and Gentiles, eunuchs. God loves the differences and builds his church from them.
The stewards in today’s gospel did precisely what Jesus told them to do. They filled six huge jars with water which turned to wine, far better than the first wine, the poor wine, the wine of the poor which is never enough. This water ran out as wine, as the wine which never ran out. The jars each held 20 – 30 gallons.. Just imaging – 120-180 gallons of wine – more than enough for this poor Galilee community to drink, make merry and celebrate the wedding feast. More than enough for the disciples to see his glory. More than enough for the church down the centuries to carry on drinking in the way that he told us to – drinking the cup of salvation.
In the midst of conflict and disagreement dare we trust ourselves to turn to Christ to love our difference? Dare we hope for as much as those wedding guests at Cana? Where there is no peace dare we hope for more than enough peace, peace beyond human understanding? Where there is no love dare we hope for so much love to make friends out of enemies and to build community with our differences as another sign of God’s glory?
John 2:1-11
On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. When the wine gave out, the mother of Jesus said to him, ‘They have no wine.’ And Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come.’ His mother said to the servants, ‘Do whatever he tells you.’ Now standing there were six stone water-jars for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons. Jesus said to them, ‘Fill the jars with water.’ And they filled them up to the brim. He said to them, ‘Now draw some out, and take it to the chief steward.’ So they took it. When the steward tasted the water that had become wine, and did not know where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew), the steward called the bridegroom and said to him, ‘Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the good wine until now.’ Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.
Grits and Grains 