Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign this is Sundays with Bishop Ken.
Thank you for sharing some quiet time with the Lord for the next several weeks. Our guest reader is Deacon Eric Bissette, a permanent deacon of the Diocese of Rochester, New York. You may recognize Deacon Eric as a regular reader on the Little Books app.
Let's listen now.
[00:00:39] Speaker B: A reading from the Holy Gospel according to John.
There was a wedding at Cana in Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. Jesus and his disciples were also invited to the wedding.
When the wine ran short, the mother of Jesus said to him, they have no wine. And Jesus said to her, woman, how does your concern affect me? My hour has not yet come.
His mother said to the servers, do whatever he tells you.
Now. There were six stone water jars there for Jewish ceremonial washings, each holding 20 to 30 gallons.
Jesus told them, fill the jars with water. So they filled them to the brim.
Then he told them, draw some out now and take it to the head waiter.
So they took it. And when the head waiter tasted the water that had become wine without knowing where it came from, although the servers who had drawn the water knew, the head waiter called the bridegroom and said to him, everyone serves good wine first, and then when people have drunk freely, an inferior one. But you have kept a good wine until now.
Jesus did this as the beginning of his signs at Cana in Galilee and so revealed his glory, and his disciples began to believe in him.
The Gospel of the Lord.
The Scriptures are down to earth in describing the love of God for us.
Some might even say they are earthy.
They describe God's love as warm, vibrant, flowing with affection and emotion.
In our efforts to preserve God as someone set apart, we have tended to make his love more abstract, more dignified, more otherworldly, and we have robbed it of much of its flesh and blood.
Today's scripture calls us back to reality. It gives us God's version rather than our version.
God reveals how he loves, especially in the person of His Son, who in today's gospel becomes the joyful host at a party, sharing wine with his good friends.
It's important for us to believe in and experience God's genuine love for us.
We must sense that he cares about us, worries about us, has time for us, directs his affections towards us.
We use these human terms in describing God's love, but those are the kinds of human terms that God Himself used when he gave us his inspirited words.
There are many directions you could go in discussing this today, particularly in light of this gospel. I would like you to think about God's Providence.
Sometimes we think about God's providence as though it meant God engineering and manipulating lives so that good things happened and bad things were prevented. That really isn't what providence is all about.
Of course. God could direct people's lives so that there were no accidents, no sickness, no tragedies, no sin. I have spoken about how parents could do the same thing with their children.
Parents could make sure that their children never did anything wrong or never got into an accident.
All they would have to do is lock them in the back room.
If God were to take over the direction of human lives in this way, he would take away our freedom.
Instead, God leaves us free and gives us the gift of His Providence.
His providence is his promise that his love will be there at every point in our lives.
God has promised that his love will be full and overflowing always.
That means it will be there in sickness or in an accident, or in failure, or even in evil. That is our own fault.
That is the gift of God's Providence.
His love will be there in a quantity that far exceeds any failure or evil that we could produce.
His love is capable of pouring itself over, enfolding, absorbing any situation in human life again, even if it's our own fault.
That's the love of God that is available and promised to us.
That's the meaning of today's gospel.
By the best calculations, Jesus produced 125 gallons of wine. That's far more than would be needed even at the largest Polish Italian wedding.
It's deliberately extravagant because God wants to demonstrate that his love will be lavished upon us and that it will far exceed any human problem.
As you recall, at the multiplication of the loaves, the evangelists make a point that there was plenty left over.
What we have to learn to do is believe in a love like that. We have to accept God's love in that fashion.
As we go through each day, we should know that at each point in our lives that kind of love is there.
We have to drink from that. Well, share that good wine.
[00:06:22] Speaker A: Thanks for joining us today.
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We will begin our Lenten journey with the Little Black Book beginning March 2, the Sunday before Ash Wednesday.
Sundays with Bishop Ken is produced by Little Books of the Diocese of Saginaw.
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