A sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church
11 January 2026
John 2.1-11
On the third day there was a
wedding in Cana of Galilee,
and Jesus was there.
That is how this story begins.
Not with a sermon.
Not with a confrontation in
the temple.
Not with a declaration of
doctrine.
It begins with a wedding.
With people gathered to
celebrate love and community,
to eat and drink together,
to mark a new beginning in the
midst of ordinary life.
John’s Gospel opens not by
drawing us away from the world,
but by immersing us in it.
The Word becomes flesh and
pitches a tent among us,
and the first place that
presence is revealed
is not a sacred precinct but a
village celebration.
This matters because it tells
us something essential
about where God chooses to be
found
and how God chooses to act.
This wedding is not a
decorative backdrop for a spiritual lesson.
It is the place where the
first sign happens.
The place where glory is revealed.
The place where the trajectory
of Jesus’ ministry begins to take shape.
Weddings in the ancient world
were communal events that lasted several days.
Hospitality was not a
courtesy; it was an obligation.
To host well was a matter of
honour, and failure was public.
Which is why the crisis at the
heart of this story is not trivial.
Because the wine runs out.
And this isn’t merely an
inconvenience.
It’s a moment of potential
shame.
The celebration risks turning into embarrassment.
The promise of joy begins to
unravel.
And perhaps that is why this
story resonates so strongly.
Because it names a human
experience that is deeply familiar.
The moment when what we have
turns out not to be enough.
When resources run low.
When expectations outstrip
capacity.
When the appearance of abundance gives way to anxiety.
Not enough wine.
Not enough money.
Not enough time.
Not enough energy.
Not enough volunteers.
Not enough hope.
John doesn’t tell us why the
wine runs out.
He doesn’t invite us to assign
blame.
He simply names the lack.
And that lack becomes the site
of revelation.
Notice too that Jesus doesn’t
notice the problem at first.
It’s his mother who sees what
is happening and names it.
She says, ‘They have no wine’.
She doesn’t theologise the
problem.
She doesn’t offer solutions.
She simply tells the truth about the situation.
And Jesus’ response is
unsettling.
‘What concern is that to you
and to me?’
‘My hour has not yet come.’
What’s he getting at here?
In John’s Gospel, the ‘hour’ is
always the moment
when love is revealed most
fully through self-giving.
That moment still lies ahead in
the gospel narrative.
And yet, something happens
here.
Not the fullness, but a sign.
Not the end, but a beginning.
Rather than arguing, Jesus’
mother turns to the servants and says,
‘Do whatever he tells you.’
Those words are deceptively
simple.
They’re not a guarantee of
success.
They’re an invitation to trust.
An invitation to act without
knowing how things will turn out.
And the servants duly respond.
They fill six stone jars with
water.
These jars aren’t neutral
containers.
John tells us they are used
for the Jewish rites of purification.
They belong to a system of religious practice
concerned with ritual
cleanliness,
with
boundary-keeping,
with the maintenance of purity.
Which means that what happens
next is not just a miracle.
It’s a reorientation.
The jars associated with ritual
purity
become the very vessels of
transformation.
The water associated with
cleansing
becomes wine associated with
joy.
The practices designed to
maintain religious order
are repurposed to sustain
communal celebration.
This is not an attack on piety.
It’s a reframing of it.
John is not suggesting that
ritual is meaningless
or that spiritual discipline
should be discarded.
But he is showing us that when
piety becomes an end in itself,
detached from compassion and
justice,
it no longer serves the life
God intends.
As Jesus turns water of ritual
purity into wine of shared joy,
we see a shift in emphasis.
From religious maintenance to
transformative compassion.
From personal observance to
the flourishing of the community as a whole.
This is not a rejection of
holiness.
It is a deeper expression of
it.
The servants draw from the jars
and take the liquid to the steward.
Somewhere between obedience
and offering,
the water becomes
wine.
And not just wine, but good
wine.
Wine of such quality that the
steward is astonished.
Everyone else serves the good
wine first,
and then the inferior wine
after the guests have had too much to drink.
But the steward remarks with
astonishment
that the bridegroom has kept
the good wine until now.
This moment is often
sentimentalised,
but it is profoundly political
and theological.
It disrupts the assumption that
decline is inevitable.
It resists the narrative that
says the best is always behind us.
In the presence of Jesus, the
future presses into the present.
Abundance is not deferred to
some distant fulfilment.
It appears here and now,
in the midst of ordinary life.
But notice something else.
The steward doesn’t know where
the wine comes from.
And neither do the guests know.
The credit goes elsewhere.
And the sign is almost hidden.
Only the servants know.
Only the disciples see and
believe.
This tells us something
important
about how God’s reign takes
shape in the world.
It doesn’t always arrive with
recognition or applause.
It often comes quietly,
through acts of service,
through faithful
participation,
through transformation that
sustains life
without drawing
attention to itself.
John tells us that this was the
first of Jesus’ signs,
and that through it he
revealed glory,
and his disciples believed.
Glory here is not spectacle.
It’s not dominance.
It’s not religious display.
It is rather the revelation of
God’s life-giving presence
at work in the world.
And belief here is not
intellectual assent. It is trust.
It’s the beginning of a way of
life shaped by that revelation.
This is where the story presses
into our own discipleship.
It would be easy to read this
as a private miracle.
A domestic intervention.
Jesus quietly fixing a social
embarrassment.
But John will not let us stop there.
The transformation of water
into wine
is not only about individual
generosity.
It is about the shape of God’s reign.
It is about the movement from a
religious system
focused on purity and
boundary-keeping
to a community shaped by compassion, abundance, and shared joy.
And that movement has
consequences.
If the first sign takes place
not in a temple but at a wedding,
then the life of faith cannot
be confined
to private or communal
spirituality alone.
If the jars of purification are
repurposed for celebration,
then piety cannot remain
detached
from the material conditions
of people’s lives.
As Jesus turns from ritual
purity to transformative compassion,
so we are called to complement
piety
with kingdom-focused social
action that brings heaven to earth.
That is not an optional extra.
It is woven into the fabric of
the gospel.
Personal prayer, communal
worship,
and shared devotion matter
deeply.
They shape us.
They attune us to God’s
presence.
But if they are not accompanied
by a commitment to justice,
to dignity, and to the
flourishing of communities,
then they fall short of the
vision revealed at Cana.
This story invites us to ask
not only how we practise faith,
but who benefits from it.
Who is protected from shame?
Who is sustained in moments of
scarcity?
Who gets to keep celebrating?
The abundance Jesus brings is
not hoarded.
It circulates. It is shared.
It sustains a whole community.
That has implications for how
we understand the church.
The church is not called to be
a container of religious purity,
carefully guarding its
boundaries.
It is called to be a site of
transformation,
where the resources we have
are offered, repurposed,
and multiplied for the sake of
life.
That kind of church does not
withdraw from the world.
It stays at the table.
It pays attention to where the wine is running low.
It refuses to accept scarcity
as inevitable.
It trusts that obedience, even when costly,
can become the site of
unexpected abundance.
For a community like
Bloomsbury, this is not abstract theology.
It is lived reality.
We are a church shaped by
worship and by public engagement.
By prayer and by organising.
By scripture and by
solidarity.
At this point, it is worth
naming a habit of mind
that many churches, often
unintentionally, fall into.
When we talk about our life
together,
we frequently begin with what
is missing.
What we no longer have.
What has declined.
What resources feel stretched.
What energy feels depleted.
That way of speaking is
understandable.
It is often rooted in honesty
and care.
But it can quietly shape our imagination
in ways that limit our faith.
Sam Wells describes an
alternative approach,
sometimes called Asset Based
Church Development.
It is a way of seeing that deliberately begins
not with what is lacking,
but with what is already
present.
Not with absence, but with gift.
The theological conviction
beneath this approach is simple but profound.
God has already given the
resources needed for faithfulness now.
Not necessarily for every
future we can imagine.
Not for every ambition we
might carry.
But for the calling that is actually before us, at this moment, in this place.
Seen through that lens, the
wedding at Cana looks slightly different.
The problem is real. The wine
has run out.
But Jesus doesn’t conjure
something from nothing.
He begins with what is already
there.
Stone jars. Water.
Servants willing to act.
A community still gathered.
Ordinary elements, easily overlooked.
The transformation does not
bypass those assets.
It works through them.
The water does not become wine
in spite of what is present,
but because of it.
The jars are not a failure of
the old system.
They are repurposed.
The servants are not powerful
figures.
They are faithful
participants.
And the abundance that
emerges
is rooted in what the
community already has to hand.
This is not a story about
scarcity being magically erased.
It is a story about gift being
recognised and reimagined.
That matters deeply for how we
think about church.
If we begin only with what we
lack,
we will always be tempted to
believe
that faithfulness depends on
acquiring something else.
More people. More money.
More certainty. More energy.
More influence.
But the theology revealed at
Cana suggests something different.
It suggests that God is
already at work
with the resources that are
already present.
The question is not whether
we have enough,
but whether we trust that what
we have
can be offered, filled, and
transformed.
That applies not only to the
church as a whole,
but to each of us as
individuals.
So often we approach God with
an internal list of deficiencies.
Not spiritual enough. Not
brave enough.
Not organised enough. Not
resilient enough.
The gospel doesn’t deny our
limitations.
But it refuses to let them
have the final word.
God does not wait for us to
become something else
before calling us to
faithfulness.
God works with who we are, where we are,
and what we already carry.
At Cana, no one is asked to
create wine.
They are asked to fill jars
with water.
The miracle belongs to God.
The obedience belongs to the
community.
Asset based faith is not
complacent.
It doesn’t deny struggle.
It simply begins from a
different place.
From gratitude rather than
anxiety.
From trust rather than fear.
And when we begin there,
something shifts.
We stop asking only what we
have lost,
and start asking what we have
been given.
We stop measuring ourselves
against an imagined past or an ideal future,
and begin attending to the
calling of the present moment.
That is where transformation
begins.
The temptation is always to
treat spirituality as private
and activism as optional.
But the wedding at Cana refuses
that separation.
Here, holiness looks like joy
sustained.
Faithfulness looks like
embarrassment avoided.
Glory looks like a community able to keep celebrating
because someone acted.
The servants don’t perform a
miracle.
They don’t understand the full
significance of what they are doing. \
They simply do what they are
told.
and in doing so, they
participate in the revelation of God’s reign.
That is a profound model of
discipleship.
We are not asked to control
outcomes.
We are asked to be faithful
with what is in front of us.
To fill the jars. To carry the
water.
To trust that transformation
is possible
even when we cannot yet see
it.
And the best wine comes later.
Not because history inevitably
improves,
but because God’s future is
already pressing into the present
wherever love takes shape.
This is realised hope.
Not postponed salvation.
This isn’t a promise that
everything will be fixed elsewhere.
But a conviction that the life
God desires for the world
is already being enacted,
sign by sign, act
by act,
community by
community.
At the end of the story, the
wedding continues.
The celebration goes on.
The crisis passes.
Most people never know how
close it came to disaster.
Grace often works like that.
Quietly. Generously. Without
recognition.
And perhaps that is the final
invitation of this text.
To trust that when we align
personal devotion with public compassion,
when we allow our piety to be reshaped
by the demands of love and
justice,
heaven edges closer to earth.
May we be a people who notice
where the wine is running low.
May we be a people who are
willing to fill the jars.
May we be a people who trust
that abundance is possible.
And may we discover, again and
again,
that the glory of God is revealed not in separation from the world,
but
in the transformation of it.
Amen.
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