While I was preparing my sermon for this weekend I came across a neat quote from St. Augustine of Hippo about the miracle that Jesus performed at the Wedding feast in Cana:

The miracle indeed of our Lord Jesus Christ, whereby He made the water into wine, is not marvellous to those who know that it was God’s doing. For He who made wine on that day at the marriage feast, in those six water-pots, which He commanded to be filled with water, the self-same does this every year in vines. For even as that which the servants put into the water-pots was turned into wine by the doing of the Lord, so in like manner also is what the clouds pour forth changed into wine by the doing of the same Lord.

The more I meditate on that quote the more I’m taken with it.

I’ve been working up the last of a series of talks on Formation and Use of the Canon of Scripture and I’ve found myself reading about the hermeneutics of the Eastern Church – where everything in the Bible is to be seen as a form of Christ. (By this reading we should see Jesus in the actions of Moses – not Moses in the actions of Jesus as so many modern commentators seem to do.) I suppose this is where the idea for Rublev’s Icon of the Trinity comes from.

What if we conflate the idea of St. Augustine – that the miracle of changing water into wine is simply the natural “miraculous” process done in a flash with the Hermeneutical principle of the Eastern Church? Jesus acts within the bounds of the created order. If so then… might we look to find God in all the natural wonders of creation? eg: In sunsets and snowflakes, cats and chondrites, beer and brats (grin)?

Any rate – that’s become the kernel of my sermon. Epiphany is about discovering God, and in the changing of the water into wine, we see a hint of the every day miraculous manifestations of God all around us. Not a place I expected to end up when I started studying the passage on Monday