(for Jane Culver and Jim Walt)

When’s the last time you went to a Sunday morning wedding?

Heck, when’s the last time you went to any wedding and didn’t feel you had to bring a gift?

Something’s going on, something differentand new. But, hey, it’s a new year. Why not break the mold? 2009 is so “last year.”

Jim and Jane came to me a few weeks ago and said they wanted to move their wedding date up. They’ll still have a party a few months from now, but they won’t feel overwhelmed by having a ceremony the same day!

So here we are, celebrating beginnings – a new year, new decade … new life and opportunity offered to us every week and every day through Jesus Christ. In addition, as something more than a sermon illustration, we get a real-life wedding – in church on a Sunday morning, no less.

I can’t speak for you, but it is a first for me.

In biblical parlance, weddings are the perfect sign of a fresh start – not only for the bride and groom, but for everyone who shares the occasion. Weddings create a covenant between two people – a bond of fidelity and trust between two parties. In scripture, that covenant extends to God, and to all of God’s people.

So Genesis 2 says, “a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife, and the two become one.” (The next verse says, “they were both naked, and were not ashamed.” But we won’t push it. I’m just glad we’re not biblical literalists.)

Centuries later, prophets viewed weddings as a sign that the messianic age was at hand. The day of God’s salvation had arrived.  For Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Hosea, the bond between Israel and God was like life partners pledging themselves to each other – though one was often fickle and the other always faithful.

The parables Jesus told continue that theme. His stories linked wedding banquets to the kingdom of heaven. In one, ten bridesmaids trim their lamps and wait for the groom to arrive. In another, a king brings people off the streets and out of alleyways to the marriage of his son after the invited guests refuse to show up.

Festivity, promise and human responsibility blend together in these depictions of marriage … and images of life as it will be when the Messiah appears.

Even the book of Revelation gets in on the scene. The second-to-last chapter of the Bible says, “I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband.”

It’s a vision of the bond between heaven and earth at the fulfillment of time; a picture of God’s love for humankind, rivaled only by the love of two people for each other on their wedding day.

No wonder Jesus picks a wedding as the time and place to enact his first sign!  Turning water into wine – at a wedding – is the ideal way to connect beginnings (his beginning!) and God’s presence in the world. It shows that God is at work in him to do a new thing … even as Jane and Jim are doing a new thing today with and for each other (and for all of us).

Jim and Jane understand that they are called to be new and different people with each other in marriage than they were in the past. They make promises, knowing that God in Jesus Christ allows second chances after past disappointments.

We join them with second chances and beginnings of our own as our calendars fall open to a new page and new year. For us too, their marriage and God’s work of beginnings permits us to start over. Because God makes and keeps covenants with us, we are able to start over time and again in our relationships, activities, other endeavors.

For Protestants in general and Presbyterians in particular, marriage isn’t a sacrament, as it is for Roman Catholics. But events at Cana tilt us in the direction of Communion, which we will share a little later. So there is a sacramental dimension to the wedding at Cana.

The same gift given by Christ in his first act of ministry is given again in his final act before dying. Wine!

Only, there in the Upper Room, the impact is greater. When he says, “this is the new covenant in my blood, shed for the forgiveness of sins,” he not only joins two people to each other, but binds all believers to God and to one another.

The upshot of this is that joy and gladness increase. The thinness of the past gives way to the prospect of abundance for the future, just as surely as the thought of wine running out at a wedding is reversed by six gigantic jars suddenly holding 20 or 30 gallons of wine apiece. The possibility of new and genuine beginnings becomes a vivid and visible reality for all people.

The messianic age, foretold by the prophets, now gets underway. Though Jesus tells his mother, “My hour has not yet come,” the reality is that a new day has begun.

His dying and rising still wait in the future. The end of human suffering and misery is not yet accomplished. But the wedding at Cana reveals that God is close by. In Jesus of Nazareth, a new day dawns for Jane and Jim, for everyone here … and for all whom God calls into a covenant of love between heaven and earth.

So the calendar opens on yet another year.  Resolutions are made. Embarrassments are forgotten; old grudges, discarded.

A couple gets married. Bread is broken, wine poured. Sins are forgiven, and a feast of gladness, enjoyed.

Christ is still with us, and a covenant restored … between Creator and creation.

And all things are made new.

To the glory of God.