“To the Ends of the Earth”

The Rev. Sandy Selby – St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Akron Ohio

2^nd Sunday after the Epiphany, Year C – January 14, 2007

Text: John 2:1-11

According to an article in Wednesday’s New York Times, Madison Avenue has declared this “the year of the penguin.” Two recent movies--“March of the Penguins” and “Happy Feet”--have helped create something of a penguin craze. Now we have a Club Penguin website for children, penguin logos on clothing, and a profusion of penguins advertising everything from Coke to Dawn dishwashing detergent.

Penguins have what a photographer friend of mine calls “the cute and cuddly factor.” We like to associate ourselves with their inherent playfulness, as anyone who has seen “Happy Feet” will attest.

While many of you were watching football on New Year’s Day, I was standing just off the Antarctic Peninsula on Paulet Island, home to 100,000 nesting pairs of penguins which, along with their chicks, add up to more than 300,000 penguins in a space of about three square miles. The sight, the sounds, and yes—the smell—of this proliferation of life in a relatively small space is overwhelming.

To be among the penguins—with their rolling gait, their elaborate feeding rituals and their playful and even bizarre behavior in and around the water-- is an occasion of pure joy.

While cruising on the Weddell Sea later that day, we saw on a nearby ice floe what one of our naturalists called “the Holy Grail of penguins:” an Emperor penguin, rarely seen by Antarctic tourists. Unlike other penguins we had seen, this Emperor was solitary. It walked to and fro, occasionally dropping to its belly and “tobogganing” across a vast sheet of ice.

Our guides warned us against projecting our own emotions onto penguins and deciding that they must be either happy or lonely or afraid. But it was hard not to do that as we watched this particular penguin, a juvenile who had just recently left the nest to set out on his own in the forbidding environment of Antarctica. To see this lone young Emperor penguin silhouetted against the incredible vastness of ice and sea and mountains, a wilderness the likes of which few of us had ever seen, was an experience beyond words. So beautiful, so poignant.

Being in the wilderness acquaints us with deep truths that are often obscured by the busyness and distractions of our daily lives. In this solitary penguin many of us saw a metaphor for both the promise and the vulnerability that each of us encounter in our life’s journey. Antarctica reminds us that all of us live in the tension of extravagance and fragility, abundance and scarcity.

Today we gather in the beginning of the liturgical season of Epiphany, the season in which we hear of how God’s glory is revealed “to the ends of the earth” in the person of Jesus Christ. John tells us how Jesus responds to a situation of scarcity in the inaugural event of his ministry. It’s a wedding, and they’ve run out of wine! Jesus responds by turning into wine the water reserved for ritual purification. Not just some water, but well over a hundred gallons of it!

In Hebrew Scripture, an abundance of good wine is a symbol of the joyous arrival of God’s new age. So the action of Jesus at the wedding feast at Cana is a sign that he represents the fulfillment of the hopes of God’s people and the inauguration of God’s promised salvation.

John calls the turning of water into wine not a miracle but a “sign” which points beyond itself to something else. The wedding party is transformed from an ordinary occasion into an extraordinary moment of revelation. What is revealed is the paradoxical way in which God is present among us in both the ordinary and the extraordinary, the extravagant and the mundane. From that creative tension come transformation and new possibility.

The voices of our culture teach us in ways both strident and subliminal to see the world through a lens of scarcity, telling us that nothing will ever be enough. Jesus shows us a world that is overflowing with abundance, a graceful world in which God’s creation is a gift to be treasured and shared, not abused and hoarded. A world that “shines with the radiance of Christ’s glory.”

The Collect for today, the 2^nd Sunday after the Epiphany, says that the radiance of Christ’s glory will shine “to the ends of the earth.” I was there last week, in Antarctica, and I can tell you that it does.