1.11.2026 - Sermon – written and preached by Leigh Rachal @ FPC Abbeville, LA

If John’s Gospel were a screenplay, it would begin with a wide lens camera angle.

Rather than easing us into Jesus’ life through family stories or familiar scenes,

John backs us all the way up before anything we would normally call history.

In the beginning was the Word.

Before light.

Before land.

Before life had taken shape.

John wants us to understand from the start that what he is describing is larger than the arrival of another religious teacher.

He is describing something that reaches into the fabric of creation itself.

That framing matters for how we hear today’s story.

At the wedding at Cana, we are witnessing Jesus’ first sign.

Throughout this Gospel, John doesn’t describe Jesus’s acts as miracles, but rather as signs.

Signs are meant to be read.

They point beyond themselves.

They reveal something true.

A sign shows you the direction you’re headed without taking you all the way there.

So this story isn’t simply about an impressive act.

It’s about what is being revealed.

John also tells us this happens on the third day.

That detail could easily be skipped,

but John doesn’t include it by accident.

In scripture, the third day repeatedly marks a turning point, or a miracle of sorts -

the moment when God acts in a way that opens up a future that had seemed closed.

On the third day of creation,

dry land appears and life becomes possible.

On the third day, Abraham reaches the mountain with Isaac

and discovers that death is not the final word.

On the third day, Jonah emerges from the depths

when survival had seemed impossible.

And, of course, on the third day, the tomb is found empty.

Again and again, the third day is the day when God’s action interrupts what human effort could not resolve on its own.

John has already taken us back before creation in the opening verses.

Now, with this first sign, he begins to show us that creation happening again. RE-Creation.

That helps explain why the setting matters so much.

This scene unfolds at a wedding.

A place of joy, relationship, and public celebration.

Nothing is broken at first.

No one is sick or desperate.

And yet something essential runs out.

The wine is gone.

In that culture, this would have been more than an inconvenience.

It would have marked the couple with lasting embarrassment.

Joy threatens to collapse quietly into shame.

Mary notices and brings the need to Jesus.

His response sounds abrupt to modern ears. “Woman, what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come.”

John isn’t portraying indifference here.

He’s marking a transition.

Jesus is stepping fully into his public ministry, and that ministry will no longer be governed by family expectation or social timing.

In John’s Gospel, Jesus’ “hour” always points toward the cross (not resurrection!).

It is the moment of the cross when Jesus’ identity is fully revealed.

Glory, in John, does not mean success or avoidance of suffering.

It means love given completely.

Jesus names that the hour has not yet come, and yet he still acts.

That tension tells us something important about God’s character.

God’s purposes unfold on a larger timeline, but human need is never ignored.

Jesus instructs the servants to fill the stone jars with water.

John tells us these jars were used for ritual purification.

They were part of the established religious life of the community,

meant to maintain order and readiness.

Jesus doesn’t discard them.

He uses what is already there and fills it fully. He full-fills their use.

And then the water becomes wine.

Not a small amount. Not barely enough.

There is an abundance, and the quality surprises even the steward.

This is not how things are supposed to work.

That surprise is part of the sign.

John is showing us that in this re-created world, God’s grace does not operate by the limits we expect.

Existing structures are not erased, but they are transformed.

What once served ritual obligation now serves shared joy as it was truly intended.

The steward never learns where the wine came from.

Grace often works that way.

Those who benefit from it aren’t always the ones who can explain it.

This brings us to today, the Baptism of the Lord Sunday.

Baptism, too, involves ordinary water carrying extraordinary meaning.

In our tradition, we are careful to say that the power of baptism rests in God’s promise, not in the water itself.

That promise does not depend on our memory, our age, or our understanding at the time.

Water itself helps make sense of this.

Scripture tells us that before anything else existed, God’s Spirit hovered over the waters of chaos.

Water moves. It cycles.

It changes form, but it doesn’t disappear.

The same water travels through clouds and rivers and oceans and bodies again and again.

When we speak of baptism, we are talking about being placed into an eternal movement of God’s faithfulness.

Whether we remember the moment or not, God remembers.

God remains faithful.

So when we renew our baptism today, we are not correcting something that was incomplete.

We are acknowledging a promise that continues to hold.

And from the water, we move to the table.

The wedding at Cana and communion belong together.

Both are signs of abundance.

Bread and cup come from the earth itself.

They rely on rain, soil, and time.

This table is not separate from creation.

It is creation sustained and shared.

This helps us see what John is doing across the Gospel.

John isn’t simply recounting the events of Jesus’ life.

He is describing a re-creation of the world.

In Genesis, creation begins with one man and one woman in a garden.

In John, the new creation begins with a wedding.

Community has widened.

Life has expanded beyond survival into shared joy and relationship.

And this story is pointing somewhere.

Throughout John’s Gospel, Jesus speaks of an hour that is coming.

When it arrives, it will take the shape of the cross.

That is where God’s glory is revealed.

Cana already gestures in that direction.

Wine is poured freely.

Joy is preserved.

In this story we see a generosity that refuses to let shame be the final word.

After this sign, John tells us, the disciples began to trust Jesus.

They didn’t suddenly understand everything.

They had simply seen enough to glimpse what kind of world Jesus was bringing into being.

That’s what signs do.

They don’t settle every question.

They invite trust.

Today, standing between font and table, we are invited into that same trust.

We are not simply remembering a story from long ago.

We are being situated inside it.

John’s Gospel doesn’t just invite us to admire signs from a distance.

It invites us to learn how to read them,

and to let them shape how we understand God, ourselves, and the world.

Over the months ahead, John will keep showing us signs.

Water that heals.

Bread that multiplies.

Sight given where there was only darkness.

Life spoken where death seems final.

None of these signs exist to impress.

Each one presses the same question:

What kind of world is God bringing into being through Jesus?

Cana answers that question in its own quiet but decisive way.

It tells us that God’s work of re-creation begins

not in isolation, but in community.

Not in scarcity, but in abundance.

Not by discarding what already exists, but by filling it until it becomes something more than it was before.

That matters for how we come to the font today.

We come not to prove our faith,

but to remember that God has already acted.

Long before we understood.

Long before we could name what we needed.

God’s promise has been moving toward us,

like water that never stops cycling through the world.

And it matters for how we come to the table.

We come trusting that what is offered here is not fragile or rationed.

We come believing that grace is not easily exhausted.

We come because this table belongs to the same God who saw a wedding on the brink of shame and quietly refused to let joy run out.

John begins his Jesus’ ministry here for a reason.

This first sign tells us what to expect from everything that follows.

It prepares us for a Messiah whose glory will not look like control,

but like love poured out.

A Messiah whose power is revealed not by avoiding suffering,

but by transforming it.

So as we move now to renew baptism and to gather at the table,

we do so as people learning how to read the signs.

Learning how to trust what they point toward.

Learning to believe that God is still at work, still creating, still expanding what is possible.

This sign does not close the story.

It opens it.

And we step into it together,

trusting that the God who once turned water into wine is still at work,

drawing creation toward a fullness we have not yet seen.

Thanks be to God. Amen.