January 19: the Second Sunday after the Epiphany
Well, it’s the season of new year’s resolutions. Who here made a new year’s resolution for 2025? I have a complicated relationship with new year’s resolutions, because I think it is often just a great way to set yourself up for failure and disappointment. Usually, our resolutions are too big and unrealistic, when in reality, we make changes through small, slow steps. For instance, we say we will go from being a couch potato to running a marathon. But, instead, what might be more attainable and joyful would be to say that you will move more in 2025.
The resolution that I wanted to set before myself this year was to party more. I had already been hoping to make more time for new and old friends this year, and then I read an article the first week of January titled “Americans Need to Party More.” It began by naming the epidemic of loneliness in our country, a reality that has been named an urgent public health issue by our surgeon general. Data shows that Americans are lonely and isolated, statistically having fewer friends they can call than the previous decades, less time with those they love than ever before, statistically less parties, but more anxiety, more hopelessness, more sadness.
People feel this on differing levels, some perhaps not at all and others perhaps to a crippling degree, but none of us are immune. As I have gotten busier with work and spending time being a mom, I’m finding that all of my time is scheduled with things I “have to do” and that doesn’t leave any time to schedule random, frivolous parties, and the community and conversation and joy that comes with it. Things have started to feel so serious and so busy in life, and of course this is just a part of life, but this year, I want to be intentional. This year, I’ve resolved to still find time to party.
As this article, “Americans Need to Party More,” had been bouncing through my brain, of course this week’s Gospel pops up the week I’m scheduled to preach. God shows up in the funniest ways. Here we have a story of Jesus, the first public act of his ministry in this Gospel, and he is partying it up. Jesus, his mother, and his disciples are invited to a wedding, which was perhaps the biggest kind of celebration in those times. Not just a 4- or 5-hour affair on a Saturday evening but a dayslong event, the biggest party you’d ever seen. And the food and the wine were expected to be flowing, night after night. And there Jesus was, in the midst of this big old party, and there Jesus was, supplying the wine when it had run dry, and there Jesus was, unabashedly living into the joy of community. He didn’t stay home from the party so he could be pious and in prayer; he didn’t reject the celebration because of the potential for debauchery. He showed up to the party and he became the life of the party, the source of the overflowing wine.
Here in John, just the second chapter of the gospel, Jesus’ first public act as the incarnate God is to enter into something as ordinary as water at a wedding feast and transform it into an abundance of wine for everyone and then some. Scholars have calculated that he made about 1,000 bottles of really good wine, way more than they would need. Because that’s the kind of God revealed in Jesus Christ. Not one who denies himself the joys of this world, not one who wants to be isolated and alone and starved, but one who finds joy in gathering with friends, one who sanctifies the act of being together, one who himself supplies the drink of new life with more than enough to go around, and who also wants us too to know the deep beauty of a good party.
The kind of partying I’m looking to do more of this year is, of course, not a multi-day wedding extravaganza or even just having lots and lots of people over to my house for lots and lots of food. And, obviously, I am not talking about anything nefarious here, either. Rather, I’m asking God to help me be open to having folks over more routinely, even amidst a busy season or a messy home. I’m admitting to myself that if I continue to say “We’ll have them over once things calm down and the house is put together” then I will end up never having another soul enter my home and will deprive myself of the goodness of being with other people, the beauty of a good party, that which Jesus himself showed us how to do.
However, the article I mentioned earlier helped me realize that I really don’t have to go far in looking for a good party. The article said, “You can’t just show up on a Sunday and find a few hundred of your friends in the same building.” And it hit me: that’s exactly what I do. That’s exactly what we get to do on Sunday mornings. Week after week, we get to come here, see a few hundred of our friends. Week after week, we have the opportunity to experience the beauty of a community that comes together. We get to show up and come around this table, God’s table, and party. We come together and feast, knowing that Christ himself will provide the bread and the wine. And we never have to worry about it running out, the wine will never run dry, because each week we find that there is always enough and more than enough to go around.
Because, when Christ is invited to the party, when Christ is the center of the party, he takes the everyday and he sanctifies it. He meets us in this meal, with whatever or what little we have left, and turns it into the miracle of overflowing wine, the abundance of joy, and grace, and new and unending life. Friends, it is genuinely a joy to get to see you all here in this place, and to join you in song and praise and prayer is such a great gift in my life. As our culture is increasingly isolated and hopeless, we combat it by being together and proclaiming the hope found in Christ and his Church, in this bread and this abundance of wine.
And better yet, our celebrations here are mere glimpses of what is to come. What we do here is just a foretaste of the final wedding feast to come. The one in which God’s people are completely restored to Godself. Where we are freed completely from the epidemic of loneliness and the sorrow of isolation and we are joined once and for all, in full communion to Christ and one another. What a celebration that will be! And until then, in this new year and in this eucharistic feast, let’s party. Amen.
The Rev. Kilpy Singer