How do you know when you’ve had enough?
This is a good question for both good things and bad things. Let’s start with some day-to-day good things: How do you know when you’ve had enough ginger-molasses cookies? This seems like a light, easy example to begin a discussion of what it means to have “enough.”
But of course even ginger cookies are fraught with complications and controversy. Thousands of people out there think they know how much food is enough – for us, for you, for me. Marketers tell us our bodies need their products. Body-shamers tell us to avoid so-called “guilty pleasures” entirely. Most everyone suffers from harmful messages driven into our consciousness by our food-fixated, divisive, image-conscious popular culture.
One of my nieces has bravely pushed against all the disordered messaging about the food she likes. She simply listens to her body about the nourishment she needs – nourishment in all its forms. Nutrition? Sure, of course. But we have evolved as a species to enjoy the pleasures of food, the delights of an abundant family dinner, the bliss of a sugar cookie with our morning coffee. And these are nourishments too. These are among the things we truly need. My niece teaches me to decide for myself whether I have had enough of these good and life-giving things.
We sadly learn early in life to ignore the cues that we had when we were born, the cues my niece has rediscovered. Babies eat when they’re hungry. It really is as simple as that. Babies can naturally tell when they’ve had enough. But later in life, knowing when you’ve had enough; knowing what really is enough; knowing what we all need to do so that all of us have enough: these are profound, complicated spiritual matters.
I often have access to plenty more than I need, a lovely abundance of cookies for my morning coffee, lots of food and drink in easy reach, and honestly, plenty of money and power, too: what truly is enough of these blessings? And if I have to share these blessings with you, does that change what truly is enough for me?
(It does.)
And how do we know when we’ve had enough of the bad things? Not all family dynamics are good. Not all workplace situations are good. Obviously, not all political structures or governments are good. When do you say, “I’ve had enough! I’m out of here!”? Substance-abuse interventions are a way of saying you’ve had enough: you, your friends, your family gather around a loved one and tell them you have had enough of their untreated substance abuse. You love them, you want what’s best for them, you’ll be there for them down the hard road of recovery — you haven’t had nearly enough of them — but you’ve had enough of the intolerable destruction and suffering.
Enough. It’s an intriguing concept. It’s hard to define. It’s a matter of discernment, of wisdom. Determining what is enough can shape (and sometimes ruin) an individual life; it can form (and sometimes deform) a community; it can bring a whole people together so that everyone is nourished, but it can also start a war.
Today we hear once again about a wedding, a famous one: the wedding at Cana, attended by Jesus and his mother. It is this wedding that has me banging on about the topic of having enough. A wedding: a lavish, splendid celebration of joy and gratitude. A wedding: a solemn, mountaintop moment when a couple deepens their commitment to each other, and the whole community is transformed. A wedding: a whole village celebrating abundance, about having more than enough, even in a year with disappointing crop yields. A wedding: a cosmic metaphor for God’s relationship with humanity.
When I was attending my own wedding, it was back in the days when I believed I had not yet had enough wine to drink. (One of my favorite ways to gently tell someone I’m an alcoholic is to say, “Oh, none for me, thanks. I’ve already had my lifetime supply.”) Back then, I didn’t think I had had my lifetime supply. I hadn’t yet had enough of both the good and the bad of alcoholic beverages.
Andrew and I chose a wine for our reception that came from the Walla Walla appellation, in southeast Washington. We had been there two or three times by then, by the fall of 2003. We would go on wine-tasting trips and marvel at the wondrous fruit drawn from that land, cultivated and crafted into wine by ingenious artisans.
We would walk into a tasting room and I would rejoice: the delightful yeasty aroma! The gleaming granite countertop! The sparkling glasses and cheerful host and colorful maps of the region! It was so much fun. It felt luxurious. Surely there was enough for everyone there — enough even for me there.
And so it was only natural that we wanted our friends and families to hold aloft glasses of robust, red Walla Walla wine to toast our union, to celebrate that momentous day when, in the words of our departed friend Susan Cherwien (who was there with us that night), we became “two souls entwined.” A grand celebration.
And this is the location, this is the spot, this is the place where God in Jesus appears and does something wondrous: right here, at my wedding party, at all wedding parties, at all celebrations that usually rely on wine, on festival drink, to proclaim and celebrate something essential. We are attending one of those celebrations right now, in this room.
A wedding is not just a bash, a happy day, a hilarious night out. Two people are changing, right before the eyes of everyone in their village, and that means life is about to rise up again in that village. More children? Often enough, yes. But other forms of life, too. For Andrew and me, we celebrated the life that was about to rise up in decades of us contributing to our communities as a new household, a new family, a new dwelling down the lane with smoke curling up from our chimney.
But back to that one particular wedding, the one at Cana in Galilee. Jesus is actually a latecomer to the biblical idea of a wedding as a metaphor for God’s renewal of the earth, God’s reconciliation with the people, God’s abundant presence here, God’s loving, healing embrace. Long before Jesus, the prophet Isaiah sang, “The Lord delights in you, and your land shall be married. For as [two young people are married], so shall your builder marry you, and as the bridegroom rejoices over the bride, so shall your God rejoice over you.”
But what will happen if, in the middle of this celebration of newness and transformation and fulfillment, what will happen if we run out of wine?
It is this very crisis that vividly puts us on the guest list at the Cana wedding. Surely we have felt this anxiety: that we aren’t surrounded by abundant blessings, that our pantry is nearly empty, that we have run out of wine. This is how “not having enough” can start a war. There is not enough rain. We have emptied our grain silos. Our schools lack funding. Our wages aren’t rising with inflation. When the mother of Jesus says, “They have run out of wine,” every human being can relate. Even fabulously wealthy humans run out of things: they run out of good friends; they run out of good health; they run out of self-respect and serenity as they live large while others go begging.
The mother of Jesus perceives this crisis (she doesn’t miss much), and she quickly engineers a solution. She brings Jesus into the problem. Against his resistance and skipping the part where she would ask permission to take over, she tells the servants to listen to her son. In this work, she becomes something of a forerunner of the Messiah, a prophet announcing the One who is to come. There won’t be enough! So she calls upon Jesus to restore the abundance of the land. When she says, “They have run out of wine,” this is a biblical lament: this is a profound complaint, a rage prayer to God, appealing to the highest Source for salvation.
And then we, in turn, raise this lament. We pray every week for the whole world. In a few moments, after some solemn silence, we will stand together, lifted to our feet by the Good News we have just heard; we will call to our minds and hearts the Church, all nations, this community, all who suffer, and all who have died; and we will say to God, we will sing to God, we will lament to God, this urgent plea: They have run out of wine.
And then we will gather together here at this Table, and when the wine is poured, the abundant wine, the hundreds of gallons of wine Jesus creates at Cana, the wine he served on his last night with his friends, the wine of Paradise that we will all drink together, alcoholics and normal drinkers alike, on that Great Gettin’ Up Morning — when this wine is poured today, we will … take a small sip. (Or if you’re me, you won’t even do that, because a sip is too much wine for me!)
A small sip. Not a sloppy gulp, not even a quenching drink. Just a sip. And why just a sip? Well, if we sing our abundant thanks to God for God’s abundant blessings, and then gently, carefully, and gratefully taste just a sip of those blessings, then, finally, joyfully, wondrously, everyone, everyone in the whole world will have enough.
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Preached on the Second Sunday after the Epiphany (Year C), January 19, 2025, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington.
Isaiah 62:1-5
Psalm 36:5-10
1 Corinthians 12:1-11
John 2:1-11