‘SCOTTISH WIDOWS’

14th. January 2001

REV J. W. BLAKEY

CHAIRMAN OF THE DISTRICT

Can I just repeat what I said earlier on in our service how very glad I am to be here at Rise Park. I am glad to be in this part of the world and to be settling in and feeling very much at home here. An example of that is that these last two days Anne and I went to the North East to be with our children, various odds and ends that need doing, they are in the middle of their late twenties but you will appreciate that children are always children, yes they still need their mum and dad. So we went and it was when we came back last night, we arrived at about 9 o’clock last night, and as we were just coming into the end of our street we both said, unprompted, ‘oh, its nice to be home’ and so that’s a good sign and that’s how it feels, very much at home. Although there are many things I do not know, many places I do not know about, its good to feel part and parcel of the place and to learn and share with people who I have started to get to know and some who I don’t know but hopefully soon will. So it is that feeling I have after 4 months of being here. Its lovely being here and to share with you and I hope the links get stronger and the friendships grow.

Can I just say again in case anyone doesn’t know, my origins and therefore my accent is from the North East of England. It may be a little stronger to day than it was on Friday because I say I have spent two days there. I did give the referee at a certain football match some benefit of my advice yesterday and so my accent may be a little broader today, so it just saves you wondering through the sermon what is that accent if you didn’t already know, so you can go to sleep in peace now.

‘Scottish Widows – the pension you can trust’. You’ve seen that advert haven’t you. Just lately I have seen it on the television, on the sides of buses, from my morning paper, it seems to be everywhere. There is that attractive woman’s face, peeping out from this black velvet cape. I really would be very interested to know if she was actually Scottish and if she actually was a widow. It doesn’t seem to matter does it because the advert and the image get the image across, and if we found out, well I don’t know everybody here, but I suspect if most of us found out she was neither Scottish nor a widow, we wouldn’t be overly perturbed because the image that is portrayed is that this is a firm you can invest your money in in safety. I don’t have any shares in them or anything like that, its just the image that is presented.

Just hold that thought in your minds for a minute and turn to the story from the gospel – the wedding at Cana in Galilee, where John tells us Jesus turned water into wine. To me this seems to be a totally unnecessary miracle. I can understand Jesus healing the sick, giving hearing to the deaf and sight to the blind, I can understand that, but why just use his powers to help out at a party – a wedding party at that. It just doesn’t seem absolutely necessary, it doesn’t seem to fit in to the whole feeling of Jesus ministry.

I ask myself could it be that John in his Gospel has resorted to the Scottish Widows idea – that is get the message over is the most important thing. I don’t know, I simply raise the question, but in order for us to be clear in our own minds, to make our own minds up lets look at the story. A few things about it, first lets look at the whole background of this wedding. Jesus and his disciples were invited to it, we hear that, along with Mary. In fact Mary seems to have had something to do with the whole arrangement of it. Could it have been a relations wedding. Cana was only a mile or so from Mary’s home, Jesus’s home. Who knows. It seems that Mary and Jesus knew an awful lot of people at this gathering.

Another thing to note is that Eastern weddings were and still are very different from ours. There was no reception at a hotel and a disco at night so you could boogy the night away. Nothing like that. The bride and groom stayed at home for a whole week. They were treated like royalty and people came and went bringing them gifts and advice. As people came and went they got their cake and their wine and went on their way.

So its in these circumstances that the wine ran out at a crucial stage, wine being one of the main symbols of hospitality and upset Mary who asked Jesus to do something about it. Jesus’s reply seemed quite stern. ‘You mustn’t tell me what to do. Don’t you know my hour has not yet come’. I can’t help feeling that it wouldn’t be that unkind, I can’t help feeling that there is an inflection in his voice as he says that. You know well this last weekend if one of my children said to me ‘Da…d’ you know there’s a favour coming, or if they say ‘Dad’ I know I have embarrassed them or if its ‘Father’ well its beyond the pale. It depends on how you say something as to how it is received. It could be, I am only suggesting, it could be that Jesus said ‘Oh mother, I have hardly got started yet, and here you are asking me to do this’. Whatever, Mary insisted and went up to the stewards and said ‘do whatever he tells you’ and this resulted in there being plenty of wine.

If this is the Scottish Widows principle that John is putting forward, from it John is stressing that Mary felt a confidence in Jesus that was beyond question, that whatever he did, all would be well and I feel that through this John is pushing that point. At the end of this story v 11 of Chaper 2, John says ‘ Jesus performed the first of these signs which revealed God’s glory and helped his disciples believe and I think that’s the punch line for want of a better phrase. Jesus did this to reveal God’s glory and help his disciples believe. Put their confidence in him.

In this story there is a confidence in his presence which is a tremendous thing.

There’s a story told of a certain Methodist Minister who went in to a hospital ward to visit one of his members who was quite ill. The lady was in bed and looked terrible when he got there and she stretched out a hand, held the Ministers hand and said would you pray with me and the Minister did, a strong powerful fervent prayer. After the prayer was over the Minister looked at the lady and she looked better, she looked improved, in fact she proved this by pushing back the bed clothes swinging her legs out of bed and started to take a few tottering steps. In a minute or so these tottering steps got stronger and she started to jump and skip and sing and dance in the middle of the ward, in the middle of this dancing, this lady threw her arms around the Minister, kissed him on the cheek and said thank you, thank you. Well he said his goodbyes he went out and when he got in the car, in the car park, he looked up to heaven and said ‘Lord don’t you ever do that to me again’. He prayed fervently but did not expect anything to happen.

Now, I am not suggesting that all we have to do is pray fervently and something will happen automatically, I am not suggesting that, but I am saying that people, you and me, so easily forget that we are, in our lives, in the presence of the Almighty and we can expect great things to happen. We have a right to have a confidence in his presence. When things are troubling us, when we’ve got something on our mind, what do we do, perhaps we go to a friend and chew it over. Perhaps we go for a walk in the park or somewhere, if you are like me you go in the garden and have a dig and cut the grass. It gets it out of your system and puts things in perspective. One of the last things, if its not the last it is not often the first, one of the last things we think about is remembering the presence of God. That we can be confident in his presence that is with us. There is an old legend and it is just a legend, which tells of the days when Jesus was a baby in Nazareth, and when people felt tired and down and frustrated they would go and say – let us go and look at Mary’s child and they would go and look and receive peace and calm. Well it’s a story but the message is there isn’t it and I understand that the whole impression that John the Gospel writer wanted to give through this story of the Wedding of Cana, whatever was right about the story, the whole impression was that Jesus performed the first of these signs which revealed God’s glory so that John could impress upon people, we could have confidence in his presence.

Sometimes one of the biggest stumbling blocks to the progress of the Church is that we lose the sense of God’s presence, it sounds impossible but it’s a fact. We feel that being part of the body is too big a job for us being part of the body of Christ. Especially we say in this generation. Especially we say here at Rise Park. Especially because there are not as many of us as there use to be. Especially at our age. Especially…….

Even though Mary couldn’t understand what Jesus was about totally, she knew that she was in the presence of God and that he would lead, and in this miracle we see the first of the signs which revealed his glory, and each one of us here needs to be more confident every moment of every day of that presence. We need to be more confident in his power too.

A friend of mine once went and booked himself for a concentrated course of driving lessons and he started in one of these driving simulators, you know an exact model of the car in a big room, He got in and all the controls were there linked to this screen which took him through motorways and country lanes and everything, and as he went through the gears and the driving wheel and everything else, it was just like driving the real thing and he picked up the rudiments very easily and he seemed to be away. He was delighted. He told me about this after he had spent a couple of days doing this and the next day he was going out on the road. Well when he took an actual car on the road, he fell to pieces. The theory was fine, the practice he felt very shaky. The problem was he had the ability to do it he just couldn’t translate it in another atmosphere. He had the power.

When John Wesley had his heart strangely warmed I don’t think it was a dramatic conversion experience, it was a realisation that he had the power. When people like Wilfred Grenfell applied for volunteers to help him in his missionary task, he couldn’t offer them a great salary, he couldn’t offer them luxurious conditions but he offered them the time of their lives that day if they committed themselves to it would have the power. John is saying in his Gospel we, Christ’s body, have the power.

One further thing about this miracle of Jesus that amazes me – the water that Jesus turned into wine, 6 stone jars we read, they held 20 to 30 gallons, that’s over a 1000 bottles of wine – by gum that’s some party. It seems amazing the amount. I am just following the Scottish Widows principle. I get the feeling that John is underlining the fact that when God does something he does it in abundance. He gives more than we deserve. He gives not just the right measure but there’s more than enough to go round. John is saying I believe, you have the power, more than you know and that power is to be trusted and that power is something in which every single one of us can have confidence. So that means, I believe, if we take this seriously, and we do, that as we go about our daily work, our daily duties. As we leave this place and get involved in all sorts of things, there will be things that won’t be right. There will be people that won’t have done what they should have done. We ourselves might have got things wrong or not done something. There may not be as many people turn up to do something that we think there should be, but in everything we are God’s people. We are Christ’s body. We are the Kingdom, His process, His way and Jesus reveals God’s glory to each of us and if we follow, as we follow Him, and all the way in which he directs then we shall see the results.

So let us get our sleeves rolled up, stuck in to that which he has given us so that the glory of God will be revealed here and everywhere that we are.

May God bless us

Amen.