Do Whatever He Tells You

 John 2: 1-11 

The Wedding at Cana

2 On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. 2 Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. 3 When the wine gave out, the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine.” 4 And Jesus said to her, “Woman, what concern is that to me and to you?[a] My hour has not yet come.” 5 His mother said to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.” 6 Now standing there were six stone water jars for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons. 7 Jesus said to them, “Fill the jars with water.” And they filled them up to the brim. 8 He said to them, “Now draw some out, and take it to the person in charge of the banquet.” So they took it. 9 When the person in charge tasted the water that had become wine and did not know where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew), that person called the bridegroom 10 and said to him, “Everyone serves the good wine first and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the good wine until now.” 11 Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee and revealed his glory, and his disciples believed in him.

MESSAGE “Do whatever he tells you”  

On Monday, December 5th, 1955, the Montgomery, Alabama chapter of the NAACP held a mass meeting at the Holt Street Baptist Church, with as many friends, colleagues, and neighbors from the Black areas of Montgomery as they could reach in attendance. The reprehensible treatment of the Montgomery Bus Line toward its Black passengers had reached a crisis point, and there was ample support from the community to take the risk of a boycott to force change. A respectable, organized leader with excellent public speaking skills would be needed to rally the people, methodically plan and execute the protest, face off with the bus line, law enforcement, and other angry White people, and keep the movement going even in the midst of despair. The NAACP believed a pastor from one of the Black churches would be perfect, but most of the Black clergy they knew had been burned by previous attempts at standing up to Jim Crow laws, and were wary of trying again. However, a 26 year old Baptist minister from the Dexter Street Church was new to the area, excellent at the microphone, and didn’t much care what other folks thought of him. Twenty minutes before the mass meeting at the Holt Street Church was supposed to start, the NAACP asked this young pastor, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., to whip up a speech that would propel the movement forward, and thus, that night, the Montgomery Bus Boycott officially took off, with Dr. King at the reigns.

I know that this isn’t a wholly unfamiliar story to many of you. The younger folx here learned this stuff in school, and the more seasoned among us might have even read about this in the paper when it was going down. But with tomorrow being the day set aside where we remember Dr. King, I always find it illuminating to retell the stories of his work. We recognize King in pictures, we know his voice if we hear a recording of it, and a lot of us can quote one or two sentences from his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. But the man did a whole lot more than talk and inspire. He challenged, he visioned, he dared, and he spent a whole lot of time in jail, receiving death threats, and being tracked by the government as a radical. We love him now, but it’s worthwhile, especially for people who have skin that looks like mine, to take a hard look at the causes for which King died, and then to think about where we are now, and where we, as a society, could and should be. That’s how we really honor King’s legacy.

In the same weekend that we remember King, we take a look at this story about Jesus from John’s Gospel. This is a story of Jesus’ first public outing after recruiting his initial round of disciples. And it was an outing to a pretty common event: a wedding. Jesus was even hanging out with his mom. Just a normal weekend. Until it wasn’t. The party was going great until a snafu that threatened to kill the joy for everyone: the wine ran out! It was an ordinary problem that a reasonable person would expect to publicly shame the newlyweds and their families. How could that possibly be avoided? It was just the way things were.

In shocking everyone by creating barrels of new, excellent wine out of tap water, Jesus proved three things: 1, that we can trust his capacity to help us, 2, that just because we see something as normal doesn’t mean it can’t be changed, and 3, that when the Holy drives us to action to help someone, we do whatever he tells us.

The spirit, complimented by the nonviolent resistance methods that King had learned from his mentors, kept King going in this protest, which we can look at as his first major, public move. History remembers who ultimately won this battle, but we risk forgetting that it was not an easy victory. The boycott lasted for thirteen months. Though Black folx made up 75% of Montgomery’s bus riders, local ordinances required that the first ten seats in the front of every bus be reserved exclusively for White passengers. Black passengers were only allowed to sit in the middle and rear portions of the bus. If a White person boarded, and needed a seat in the middle section of the bus, the driver would demand that any Black passengers sitting in that row get up and move back so they wouldn’t be sitting next to the White passenger, even if this meant that they’d have to stand for the remainder of their ride, on a bus that had empty seats available. The drivers also required Black passengers to get on through the front door, pay their fare, then get off and get back on through a second door in the back of the bus, so a Black person would never walk past a White person while looking for a seat. Many unscrupulous drivers would collect the fare from the Black passengers, make them get off under the pretense of reboarding through the back door, and then immediately speed off, leaving them stranded and ripped off. A driver named James Blake once pulled this stunt on Rosa Parks, and she vowed to remember his name, tell her friends, and never ride with him again.

On the day of Parks’ infamous arrest, she had found a seat in the very first row of the middle section, the closest a Black passenger was allowed to sit to the front of the bus. The rows behind her were full. A White man boarded the bus, and when the driver yelled for everyone in her row to get up and move back, Parks realized, to her horror, that it was James Blake driving the bus. She refused to be harmed by him twice, and even though everyone else in her row gave up their seats, she refused to get up. She was arrested, and fined $10, with an additional $4 court fee.

Though there were other Black folks who had been arrested for the same act of civil disobedience, King put forth Parks’ case as the one to use as the public example of the injustice of segregation, hoping that the story of a Grandma getting arrested would incite the community to protect all the vulnerable among them. And it did. As the boycott stretched on, Black folx who could walk to work and school did, as the buses rattled down the street past them empty. Black taxi drivers offered rides to Black passengers for the same fare they would have paid for the bus. Folx who had cars arranged a network of carpooling, an endeavor that many White people in the community happily aided with. The bus company retaliated and took legal action against King, and the court system ordered him to end the boycott or go to jail. He chose jail, and spent two weeks there. The bus line hoped arresting King would intimidate him into compliance, but instead it emboldened the community even more to continue the boycott until their demands were met: courteous treatment of all passengers regardless of race, first come first served seating on all buses, and the hiring of Black drivers. As the boycott gained national attention, folx from all over donated money to pay for the bail and court fees of those arrested because of the boycott, as well as all kinds of alternative means of transportation, ranging from excellent quality shoes, to bicycles, to horses and buggies. Y’all, imagine riding a horse and buggy down an urban street. These guys were committed.

Ultimately, on December 20th, 1956, the ruling of Browder v Gayle took effect, a case decided upon by the US Supreme Court, who ruled that bus segregation was unconstitutional. This victory launched Dr. King into national celebrity status, and propelled the Civil Rights Movement forward, with many losses, but many important gains, most notably the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, both passed in 1964.

Now it’s 2025. Dr. King has been gone for nearly 60 years, a number made even more sobering when you consider that he only lived to be 39. The country is in a vastly different place than it was in his life, especially with respect to racial equality. Yet, we still live in a country where a Black woman only earns 66 cents for every dollar earned by a White man. We live in a country where I have never worried that if I get pulled over by a cop I’ll get anything worse than a ticket, but my friends of color fear for their lives. We live in a country where Black folx make up 13% of the population, but 20% of those living in poverty. We have a very, very long way to go. But there’s abundant Good News, as revealed to us at the wedding in Cana: we can trust Jesus to help us even when the odds are very bad, just because something is “normal” for us doesn’t mean Jesus can’t change it, and our Savior will drive us, over and over, to the service of our neighbor, because, in the words of King himself,  the arc of the moral universe may be long, but it always bends toward justice. So when the call of Jesus compels us to stand up against something we know is wrong, we do whatever he tells us.

Amen.