The “steadfast love” of God is a central theme in the Bible. Meditating on God’s “steadfast love” anchored our ancestors whenever chaos, terror, and insecurity intruded. It can comfort us now when things feel unstable and unpredictable. Today’s readings invite us not only to receive the abundant and steadfast love of God, but to love steadfastly and abundantly, letting God’s love flow to us and through us.

On this weekend, the legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr invites us to carry forward a shared dream for a society that is just, equitable, and inclusive. Let us as we gather for worship, set an intention to let God’s love flow to us and through us so that all may thrive. “The Glorious Opportunity” is based on Psalm 36:5-10 and John 2.1-11, and preached on January 16, 2022

A long time ago, someone prayed the words of today’s psalm:

“Your righteousness, O God, is like the mighty mountains.”

Despite the challenges they and their world faced at the time, those who cherished this prayer sensed that there was a universal foundation of rightness, justice, wholeness and wellness, an eternal essence, a sacred substrata that doesn’t depend on any human being to create it, maintain it, or advance it. It’s bigger than any human being, bigger than all human beings.

This rightness, or “righteousness,” was as real, durable, and unbreakable as Mount Horeb, Mount Fuji, Mount Kilimanjaro, and the essentially eternal range of great mountains we, in California, call the Sierra Nevada.

“Your righteousness, O God, is like the mighty mountains.”

More recently, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr said the same thing but used these memorable words: “The arc of the moral universe may be long, but it bends toward justice.”

You cannot break a mountain. If you try, over time the mountain will break you. So it is with “righteousness,” with justice. Injustice may seem to prevail for a time—even a long time—but the mountain will eventually win.

For us, living through our age, this is welcome news, isn’t it?

The ancient prayer also says that:

“GOD’s judgements are like the great deep.”

The phrase is another way of praying the same truth.

There is a divine justice that’s as deep as our oceans, even deeper. Human beings are puny explorers of that Deep, we’re essentially strangers to the depths of GOD. Just as we pollute the oceans and foul the waters of life, just as we take from its treasures and give nothing back, so we do the same with “the moral [center of the] universe”—GOD’s justice and righteousness. We pollute what is just. We foul what is right. The powerful take from the poor and give little back. But we all came from the ocean depths and, so, we shall also return to those depths. The Deep things of GOD will claim us, conquer us, and GOD’s justice will prevail.

For those of us who long for GOD’s justice now, for a better world for all, that’s good news, isn’t it?

We may not live to see all we want to see, but it will come. Justice always comes. It’s the way the universe is made. For, as the psalmist prays,

“your steadfast love,” O GOD, “extends to the heavens,

your faithfulness to the clouds. . . .

you save humans and animals alike.”

GOD’s love is steadfast. GOD’s faithfulness is firm, resolute, unfaltering, indomitable. And it is for all—no one and nothing excluded.

Here in the Bible, “love” is so much more than romance or affection. To speak of the love of GOD is to speak of the Eternal Power that holds all things, and that Eternal Power, in the words of Dr. King, “bends [all things] toward justice,” toward all that is good, beautiful, healthy, equitable.

For those who love GOD and all that GOD desires for the world, that Eternal Power feels loving, protective, caring, nurturing, and compassionate. But for those who oppose what GOD desires for the world, the “righteousness” and “justice” which is the moral foundation of the universe, GOD’s love is not warm or protective; it is a fierce and terrible force working on behalf of the oppressed, ignored, and beleaguered.

But let’s not speak of those who oppose GOD today, those who work to create an unjust world, those who will pay for it in the long sweep of history. Let’s not encourage anger or hatred; let’s not give space to the small-minded scarcity-mentality that characterizes so much of our social and political world.

Today, let’s meditate on the counter-force that is at work around us and in us and through us—that counter-force, that divine and indomitable desire for “righteousness” that’s destined to bring what’s good and just, beautiful and equitable to all people, even to those who don’t want any of it. Today let’s meditate on the abundance of GOD, on joy and delight—for there are mountains and oceans, forests and fields of abundance all around us, there is a depth and breadth, and height and length that, if embraced, can bring a joy and delight to enough people to turn the tide from evil and toward “righteousness.”

This last week, I gathered several different groups around a meditative reading of parts of this psalm: a men’s group, a prayer group, our staff. With each group we practiced a long-standing technique of spiritual and prayerful reading of sacred texts like this. We were careful not just to read the lines of the psalm with our minds, but to listen with our bodies and souls for what GOD might whisper to us.

I wonder what might have piqued your interest today when the psalm was read.

“How precious is your steadfast love, O God!

All people may take refuge in the shadow of your wings.

They feast on the abundance of your house,

and you give them drink from the river of your delights.”

“precious”

“steadfast love”

“refuge”

“feast”

“abundance”

“river of delights”

“you give them drink”

“you give them drink from the river of your delights”

These are some of the words and phrases and images that seemed to call out to those who sat with this text this week, listening for GOD’s message to them.

Maybe these words called out to you too.

As we sat, listening to a few lines from this ancient meditation on eternal things, we realized that in these ancient words, GOD is inviting us to break from the worry and hurry that too often characterize our lives, to step away from the suspicion and the fear, the scarcity and the struggle of the world, and taste, instead, abundance—to drink from the fathomless river of GOD’s delights.

We realized that, in times of stress and strain, the complex problems loom large and the simple pleasures of life run scared—they seem to hide away, intimidated by the large, loud, serious, and often scary things. One of you said that you don’t feel it’s ok for you to drink from the river of delights. When you taste a little pleasure, you feel guilty: “How can I indulge in pleasure when so many people are suffering?”

I’ll bet a lot of us feel that way.

All this talk of abundance, feasting, and some vast-river-of-divine-delight can feel unreachable to a lot of us, possibly even irresponsible, maybe hopelessly utopian.

I get that. A “feast” of goodness, a “river of delights”—and the dream that such a stream of GOD’s “steadfast love” could lead to a society characterized by goodness, beauty, generosity, and equity—all this seems terribly illusory, fantastical, and disconnected from reality.

That critique holds true, the vision is disconnected from reality, unless there is a deeper reality—the parallel reality we call “GOD.”

In our reading from the Gospel According to John we have another witness to this deeper reality. This time the witness is not a prayer but a story. And like the prayer, the story invites us to drink from GOD’s abundance when scarcity is all we seem to know.

Here’s the essence of the story:

Jesus has gone to a wedding at a village in the Galilean hill country. It’s a lovely party. Family and friends have celebrated the love and commitment of two young people. They’ve prayed GOD’s blessing over the couple. They’ve prayed that their love will run deep and wide; that it will be steadfast, enduring, and able to triumph over every challenge. But during the reception, the dancing and merry-making have put a strain on the host’s resources. The wine is running out. Obviously, this is symbolic. Wine, in the Jewish tradition, like our own, is a symbol of joy, pleasure, delight. There’s a psalm that says GOD gives us wine to “gladden the human heart” (Psalm 104.15). In the biblical book, the Song of Songs, wine is said to nourish the love between two persons; it’s a symbol of the spiritual vitality of their love: of delight, pleasure, ecstasy.

So to run out of wine is not only a problem for the party, it spells disaster for the newlyweds. A bad omen. Running out of wine here symbolizes those times in all our lives when we realize we’re in trouble, our resources are thin, and the fear of scarcity is taking over.

So, aware of the crisis, Jesus’s mother says to Jesus, “Hey, the host didn’t buy enough wine. I know you can do something about that.”

Jesus says, “Mom, no! Come on. I can’t just throw a little magic dust on the empty bottles and fill them up again. That’s too ordinary a miracle. It’s not my time yet to reveal my power. My power’s for bigger things. And this is just a little village wedding. Nobody important is here. Let them write a bad review of the caterer on Yelp. No, mom, not now.”

But the storyteller shows us that Jesus’ mother is as clever as she is confident. She says to the servants, “Do whatever my boy tells you. That’s him over there. You’ll see, he’ll come around.”

And he does. Jesus eventually turns water into wine. He turns the water of life into the wine of love. And when the servants carry the wine around to everyone at the party, they say, “This is unusual. At parties, the host always serves the best wine first to impress us, then when the wine’s taken its effect, we get the cheaper wine. But at this party the wine just gets better and better!”

“At this party, the wine gets better and better.” Jesus’ mother is a symbol of what we can do. We can lean into the abundance of GOD, the river of GOD’s delights. We say, “We know GOD will come around.” And, trusting in the abundance that’s all around us, we love, no matter what, and when we love, miracles happen.

“Jesus did this, the first of his signs,” the Bible says, “in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him.”

There are so many reasons to believe that the world is hard, that resources are scarce, that we won’t get what we need unless we push to the front of the line and take what we need before someone else does; so many reasons to believe that money is power, that power is privilege, that privilege presumes inequality, and that inequality means that injustice is just the way things are. There are reasons to believe that it’s a dog-eat-dog world, that hatred, violence, and injustice win.

But I refuse to follow that line of thinking. I hope you do too. It leads down a desperate and destructive path. To believe those things would mean that many people will not only fail to thrive, but our race will not survive. To believe such things is contrary to what Jesus reveals about the nature of GOD and the nature of the universe.

GOD is “steadfast love,” the Eternal Power that holds all things together, bends all things toward what is good, beautiful, healthy, and equitable. And the universe is a realm of limitless abundance; we don’t have to live according to the ideology of scarcity; we can instead, feast on abundance and drink together from the fathomless river of GOD’s delights.

So, let’s do at least these two things:

First, let’s believe that there is a love that runs deeper than the deepest ocean, higher than the highest mountain. It is “steadfast,” abundant. There are mountains and oceans, forests and fields of abundance all around us; there is a depth and breadth, and height and length that, if embraced, can bring joy and delight to enough people to turn us all from evil and toward “righteousness.”

And second, let us serve this mighty, vast, and universal love. The servants at the wedding simply did what Jesus told them to do. “Fill up the jars until they are full of the water of life,” Jesus said. “Then draw out the wine of GOD’s love and carry it to every guest.” Martin Luther King once said that “We have before us the glorious opportunity to inject a new dimension of love into the veins of our civilization.”

“The glorious opportunity” is before us.

It is not only ok to drink from the river of GOD’s delights; it is necessary now. For pleasure creates pleasure, goodness fosters goodness, beauty engenders beauty. And as that river flows, so does justice.

Let us grow still and pray . . .

This morning I invite you into a prayer I wrote last summer and use each day, many times each day, especially when I feel the constricting fear of scarcity creeping in—when I’m afraid I don’t have enough, I won’t be enough, when the news cycle brings me down, when someone I care about is struggling. I call it my “Abundance Prayer.

I invite you to pray it silently with me, repeating each line in your mind as you hear me pray the simple words. May these words wrap the abundance of GOD around you, around those you love, and around everything in the vast, yet troubled world, and help guide us all into the “glorious opportunity” to turn the water of our lives into the wine of joy.

May your abundance, O God,

limitless and free,

flow toward me,

and around me,

within me,

and through me.

And may all I love

be blessed,

abundantly.

Amen.