
Mass readings for the 2nd Sunday in Ordinary Time:
Isaiah 62.1-5 Psalm 96.1-4, 7-10 1 Corinthians 12.4-11 John 2.1-12
In today’s gospel we have a crisis. It’s a wedding, and the wine’s running out – so, hardly end of the world stuff, but a drama nonetheless. For the wedding couple and their families, its a looming social disaster that will take some time to live down if it is not averted. Jesus, just beginning his public ministry, isn’t keen to pull out the big guns of doing miracles; but his mother calls upon him, and despite his reservations, he responds. And I know many of you have heard this before, it’s in this passage that we have the last words of the Blessed Virgin recorded in sacred scripture, and they are: “do whatever he tells you.”
It’s the applicability of those words I’d like to consider – do whatever he tells you. I’ve made mention of this before, there is a sense of crisis today that goes well beyond the personal, the familial, although boy, there’s a lot of crises in the lives of individuals and families today – there’s a sense of our culture, our civilization is running out of, what? Something, but whatever it is, we are a depleted society that may not be up to the challenges quickly coming upon us.
The short answer is, ‘yes, do what he tells you.’ And don’t worry about whether it’s going to work or not.
Consider the problem of the wine. What’s the obvious solution? Go and get more wine. Go to the neighbours, find the local wine merchant, even if it is his day off, and pay whatever he asks to get a delivery.
But what if this is a poor family that’s hosting the wedding feast, and they can’t afford it? Well, then Jesus can do a much more straightforward miracle than changing water into wine – he can conjure up a bag of money to pay for more wine. And, indeed, I imagine that when the servants approach Jesus for instructions, their expectation was that he was just going to give them money to go get some more wine.
No, Jesus tells them to go fill up those water jars; which, were I one of the servants, I would be asking myself how that was going to be of any help for the situation. And yet, this is where the miracle happens. I do as he says, I get the water; and then, there is wine. Good wine. Great wine, and in abundance.
Getting back to the matter of societal crises, the loss of confidence in Western civilization, I think we need to be clear about something: telling people they need to go to Church to save Western civilization isn’t going to work. It’s as effective as telling a child to eat his carrots so he won’t need glasses – my mother told me as much, and I got my first pair of specs when I was twelve.
Indeed, we get a lot of people, intellectuals, but also everyday folks, who think they can restore all those good values, fix up the foundations of our society, by other means. They volunteer with secular organizations to nurture their sense of charity, they give speeches praising western, if not Christian, values, they send their kids to religious schools (including the publicly-funded Catholic schools), they talk up Christianity as an ethical system better than others, but it’s all done devoid any real faith – that is, it’s all intellectual, all up in their heads; and they assent to Christianity only insofar as it makes sense to them; only insofar as it doesn’t clash with their modern values centred on liberalism, sexual liberation, democratic theory, capitalism, etc. And we know, Christianity may be a very rational theological system, but it’s founded on something that most definitely requires faith beyond human reason: it requires an absolute faith in Christ as the son of God, and in his resurrection. And that’s stumbling block for many, even those who are nominally Christian, who have a Catholic baptism certificate.
The tough slog of the Christian revolution begun two thousand years ago is that civilizations are not made, or transformed by fiat from above, by an act of collective human will. We can’t decide to be westerners, we just are. We are subject to powers that influence us well beyond our understanding or appreciation. St. Augustine well understood how weak we actually are, how little our will figures into any of our decisions. That’s why, when it comes to our personal salvation, he says its all down to God and his grace, and our tiny contribution that comes in our surrender to him, to at last saying, your will Lord, and not mine. And if we haven’t surrendered to God, we have given in to something else and so, live our lives at its direction. So, to take our cue from such figures as St. Therese de Lisieux, we need to be obedient in the little things, to please God in the everyday. And this will begin to filter up through the muck and dreck of our degraded, debauched culture that one culture critic said could be reduced to two things: Disney and pornography.
This past fall the Erasmus lecture was delivered by an Orthodox writer, Paul Kingsworth.

The lecture is an annual address sponsored by the journal on religion and public life, First Things. Among those who’ve delivered this address over the last 35 years were the eminent Jewish Rabbi, Benjamin Sachs, Timothy Cardinal Dolan, celebrated Protestant scholar N.T. Wright, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger who became Pope Benedict XVI. So, it’s something that deserves and gets some attention, if only for a week or so, and then the world moves on.
Kingsworth argued that Western civilization is dead; and that’s a good thing because it makes resurrection possible. We can look at the state of it and agree; so much of our culture, especially touching life issues, is anti-Christ. So, what will be resurrected cannot be what we’ve been living the past two hundred years and more. And that, frankly for many, is frightening. We may not like the state of things, but we’re used to them.
And by the way, it’s not ridiculous to say the West is dead. Study the letters and writing of people living in the western Roman empire between the years 480 through to 550, and you have don’t get any impression that they thought things had changed much. The conventional date for the fall the western empire is 476 AD when the last emperor was deposed. That’s right in the middle of that period which was fraught with military, political and economic crises. But the outward appearance of things didn’t change that much: the aqueducts still stood, the roads still all led to Rome, and so on.
Are we today, overly fascinated by technology, so fixated on our cell phones, that we haven’t realized what’s been happening in terms of the essence of our society? How can our civilization be dead if the WiFi still works?
How many people can explain just why our civilization is here, what is its purpose? And if the only answer is to make things to consume, the spiritual hollowness of that understandably leaves a lot of people emptied of enthusiasm for it. Heavens, we know that lately our political leaders across the West have been unable to articulate a reason for their national communities to exist. Why Germany? Why France? What is the point of the United Kingdom? As for Canada, we’ve lately heard from our topmost leader in a television interview giving the negative and disappointing answer that we’re Canadian because we don’t want to be American. I know there’s a way better answer than that; and it doesn’t involve disparaging our neighbours to the south.
That better answer will come to us if we begin doing what Jesus tells us to do. When Christ directs the servants to fill the water jars, while we know what’s happening, they certainly didn’t. Turning water into wine wasn’t anticipated, but that’s what made of it a miracle. They did as they were told, and the wedding was rescued.
As much as it would be good to share stories of the pastoral experiences I have; I would not embarrass those concerned, but I speak truthfully when I say I have had some inspiring conversations with many parishioners who have come to share their struggle to be faithful with me. They want to do what Jesus has told them to do. They are doing the work of breaking free of this world and its thinking, to enter the kingdom of God, to be citizens of the heavenly city even as they continue in their lives here on Earth. And they truly are walking by faith and not by sight; they are working for the kingdom, not for what may come of it in terms of definite results, tangible rewards in this world, but for what Christ would affect for us all.
If we tithe to God our money, our time, our talent, will that restore Western civilization? Will our worship and daily prayer resurrect it? This is Dundas, not London, Paris, Moscow, Beijing or Washington D.C. – but we will be doing what we’ve been told to do. And from that making a community, and in turn a culture, and if we know our biology, it’s from a healthy culture that good soil is made, and in turn, from it good things grow. And if what we do in our day to day lives is in obedience to God, while it may seem to be little more filling up water jars when we know its wine that’s being asked for, what will be drawn from out of those jars will be wine. And wine, if you know your anthropology, is a hallmark of civilization. And while the West was pretty good, there’s a better vintage on the way.
Amen.