Human Relations Day
Back in the day when Johnny Carson was the host of The Tonight Show, they say he interviewed an 8 year old boy. The kid was on television, the story goes, because he had rescued two friends from a mine outside of his hometown in West Virginia. Johnny bantered with the boy, asking him questions about his heroics and his small town life. “Do you go to Sunday school?” When the boy said he did, the entertainer inquired “And what are you learning in Sunday school?” “Last week”, the answer came back, “our lesson was about Jesus turning water into wine”. The audience thought that answer was hilarious, and so did Johnny, but he kept a straight face. “And what did you learn from that story?” he asked the boy. It was apparent that he hadn’t thought about it that much. But then he lifted up his face and said, “If you’re going to have a wedding, make sure you invite Jesus”.

I walked into the student center at my Indiana college, just a few weeks after surgery to repair a ruptured disc. A friend that I had bicycled with through the Midwest was there, talking to a girl in black slacks with a distinctly un-Hoosier-like accent. She invited me over for cherry pie the next night and the rest is history. If I hadn’t walked in at just that moment, our paths might have never crossed. I was in the right place at the right time.
We made a big mistake. We came out East–me and the girl in the black slacks–and then moved back to the Midwest because my mother was ill.
Sundays after church, I’d drive to the downtown of the Ohio town we called Insanesville to pick up the only copy of the New York Times for miles around. One Sunday there was an announcement for funded graduate programs at Columbia in the education section. I gave it to my wife, she applied, and we promptly forgot about it. Until a crisis of our own intervened, and our lives turned upside down. Where should we go? What should we do? Then Columbia called with an offer, all expenses paid. It was the right place for us at the right time.
There’s a decades old song from the movie Country Strong called “Timing Is Everything” that goes like this:
When the stars line up
And you catch a good break
People think you’re lucky
But you know its grace
It can happen so fast
Or a little bit late
Timing is everything
St. John says that after his baptism, Jesus is at a wedding, so you know something bad is about to happen. Why? Because that’s what transpires at weddings–at least in my experience. I’ve had brides that melted down in tears. I’ve seen bridesmaids in their underwear. I’ve waited an hour and a half for the wedding party to show up. The right people always threaten not to show up and the wrong people will definitely show up every time.
But you’ve heard the story; they run out of wine. Jesus’ mom asks him to do something about it–should he pop out to the nearest convenience store? We called them “Pony Kegs” in Cincinnati. Pick up some Thunderbird at the Pony Keg? And Jesus says, not mom, not Mary, but “woman, my time has not come”. Wrong time. Wrong place. But she insists. St. John says it’s not a bottle or two of champagne that is created, it’s 180 gallons of wine. A half gallon each if 360 people showed up. Too much! One drink is too much for someone struggling with addiction. But maybe he’s thinking in the other direction: about the blamers, the finger pointers, the legalists who say wine is bad, parties are sinful, weddings are only for one man and one woman.
Have you ever felt that your time was never going to come? You’ve slaved away your whole life for others: when is it your time? You worked hard for years, why do you feel like you’re living from paycheck to paycheck? You’ve been to countless weddings, when will love come your way? How do we make the right time happen? Is it luck, or fate, or circumstance? Or is there a grace to the timing in our lives, like the songwriter suggests?
The closest person I’ve had as a mentor in the United Methodist Church was a diminutive Alabama preacher named Thomas Lane Butts. He was one of Harper Lee’s closest friends. One or two of you will remember that we asked him to speak at a revival series called “Wake Up, Westchester”.
Before I was born, Dr. Butts was appointed to a church in Mobile. The first person he met from Mobile told him, “We don’t want you. You have been to school up North and you are an integrationist. We have heard you are a communist sympathizer. We don’t want you at our church.”
A few months into his pastorate, Dr. Butts received three visitors from the Klan. It was tradition, they said, to walk into the church on the third Sunday of September dressed in their white hoods and robes, and put money in the offering plate. Then they would go outside, take off their regalia, and come back into church for the worship service. The pastor said that he probably couldn’t stop them, but if they did that, he would sweep up the money and throw it out the door after them. They never showed up.
But then Dr. Butts signed a petition to desegregate the Mobile city buses. His name ended up on the front page of the newspaper, along with a scathing editorial telling the pastors to stop meddling in matters that weren’t their business. That night, the Klan burned a cross in Dr. Butts’ front yard. The next night, one was burned in front of his church. The church members gathered and a vote was taken to “fire” Thomas. When that didn’t work, they stopped giving money to the church. The total budget was $8600 and Dr. Butts’ salary was $3600. Letters arrived telling him that they would come back to church and resume their donations if he would apologize and promise never to do anything like that again.
One cold February, Thomas was standing at a window in his office, trying to figure out a way to get back to Chicago, when a woman walked across the lawn. She asked to see the pastor and handed him an envelope and said it was a donation to the church. “Whose name can I credit this gift?”, he asked. “No one”, she said, “it’s anonymous”. Dr. Butts opened it and saw two bills with more zeros than he had ever seen on money: “Honest to God, I had never seen a hundred dollar bill.”
He couldn’t just put that kind of cash into the offering plate; someone would know something was fishy. So Thomas drove 60 miles to a town where he knew the banker and they broke it down into small bills. Then on Sundays, when the offering was received, Thomas would offer a prayer. And with every eye closed, he’d slip the cash into the plate. “That was the first time I ever laundered money”, he said. His anonymous angel came every Friday, bringing two to five hundred dollars each time. “If she hadn’t showed up”, said Dr. Butts, I would likely have left the ministry.”
Our faith, our religion, our walk, isn’t a way of exclusion and injustice and domination. It isn’t designed to provoke guilt and isn’t quick to assign blame. This generous faith–the generous grace of God–tells us that all imperfect people like us are worthy of love and acceptance. That God gives us more than we want, more than we deserve, sometimes, more than we need. This generous God allows us to be fully human in all of our joy and sorrow, in all of our stupidity and guilt, in all of our bungling and striving to be good. At the wedding in Cana, Jesus said, “Here’s 180 gallons of too much grace, and I made it just for you.”
The distinguished historian Taylor Branch, writes about a telephone call that Dr. King received late one night at the church parsonage. Spitting racial epithets, the caller said “we’re sick of your mess” and threatened the young pastor and his wife and baby. “We’re going to blow up your house and blow your brains out.”
King said he lost all hope. But a voice called to him and said you can’t call on your daddy for help. You can’t call your mama. You’ve got to call on a higher power. When he got down on his knees, he heard, “Stand up, Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness, stand up for justice, stand up for truth, and I will never leave you.”
We may not lead a civil rights movement, or win the Nobel Peace Prize, or speak on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, but this can be our time, the right time, for us to make a difference. We have been given a lot. 180 gallons worth of grace. It’s time we gave a little bit of ourselves and our abundance back. No guilt. No blame. Just pure grace.