Home for the holidays in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, on a quiet Christmastide morning, a young man rises early to make sticky buns. He makes a triple batch with extra pecans. He likes sticky buns that way. This is before the man had children and learned that children do not like nuts on stuff, even on sticky buns.

But this story takes place years ago. These sticky buns were made before the kids were made. These buns were the kind that make your mouth water. The man’s mother and father and his brother and sisters, his wife, they would all enjoy them with breakfast.

The man’s father gets up to take another sticky bun. He wants to melt the dab of butter he’s put on top of it. And there, at the Amana Radar Range, he makes the kind of mistake a man makes when he has forgotten himself. Enjoying his family, the father forgets himself, forgets his wife’s instructions on how he is to use the microwave. And he is detected.

The mother says, “Oh Bud, that’s not how you do that!”
The father’s countenance falls. “Oh Ann” he pleads, “this is too how I do it. And what difference does it make?”

[The mother takes the cup of coffee out of the microwave, places a napkin over the cup, sets a saucer beneath the cup, and puts it back in the oven.]
“The difference,” she says, pointing her finger, “is that I’m a perfectionist and you’re not!”
“You’re right, Ann. You’re a perfectionist and I’m not. And that’s why I married you and you married me!”

This is as quick-witted as any repartee between Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby or in Holiday. His father’s retort sounded like something Mr. Grant might have said to Irene Dunne in The Awful Truth.

“That’s why I married you and you married me!” the father said, hopping an inch up in the air as he said it. He put the exclamation point on the sentence not the way you do when you are angry. He put the exclamation point on his sentence the way you do when you tell the punch line of a joke.

The father tries to wrap his arms around his wife. He tries to kiss her. She is vexed, not ready to quit a fight she knows she cannot win. She gives up in his arms and gives in to his kisses. And the young man who did not yet have children laughs so hard he spills his coffee.

Here’s some of the homily I preached at the wedding of Evan Robert Ellsworth and Kristin Signy Torok, 31 May 2008 at All Saints Episcopal Church, Pasadena, CA. Based on John 2: 1 – 11.

Three days earlier John the Baptist had looked at Jesus bar-Joseph and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” One would think Jesus would head for Jerusalem or Rome, to the centers of power. Instead, John the Evangelist tells us that on the third day Jesus is at a wedding in Cana of Galilee. Mark in his gospel writes that following his baptism Jesus went straightway into the wilderness. Breathless, Mark was in a hurry to write his account. John is not in a hurry. Jesus headed to the wilderness soon enough. Before he did he first went to the wedding of a friend.

The bride and the groom wanted Jesus and his mother at their wedding. John vouchsafes to tell us nothing more about them, except what happened when the happiness of their wedding was threatened. The wine ran out. The teetotalers and the gentlemen who prefer bourbon among you, the ladies who like their beer, might think, So what? But that would fail to appreciate what wine means to the Jewish and Christian imagination. The first thing Noah did when he got off the Ark was plant a vineyard. Jesus commanded his disciples to drink wine poured out in remembrance of him.

Mary says to her son, “They have no wine.” Consider this woman. She never had a fairy-tale wedding. Why? Because she is his mother, and thus above all mortal examples the very picture of what discipleship looks like and sounds like. “Be it done unto me according to thy word,” she had said to the Archangel, our Lady bearing not just in mind but in her flesh the Dayspring from on High.

“They have no wine,” she says to him. In New York City she’d be called a noodge. And Jesus replies with strange words. “Woman (γυνή he always calls her, not μητέρα, except at the very end when he speaks to her from the cross), what has that to do with me? My hour has not yet come.” Now’s not the time. Jesus is never in a hurry in the gospels. Have you noticed that? He receives word that his friend Lazarus is dying and he does not hop the first train back to Bethany and Lazarus dies. Jesus is on time. It’s just not our time he’s on but the Father’s. We forget that. He never does.

Mary knows a thing or two about being on time with the Most High. And she says something loud enough for Jesus to overhear. Speaking to the servants she says, “Do whatever he tells you.” It is an echo. It echoes something he had heard three days before at the Jordan, when the heavens opened and a voice said, “This is my beloved son. Listen to him!”  Do whatever he tells you. That expression of trust from the woman acquainted with heaven touching the earth, who showed him what being on time with the Father looked like, that word coming from her apparently told him that actually now was the time. He tells the servants to fill the jars with water. And Jesus turns the water into wine.

It is Jesus’s first miracle, and it may seem to us utterly gratuitous. He does not bring someone back from the dead. He does not heal someone of a grievous disease. He does not put to rights some grave injustice. Instead, he makes delicious wine for people who have already been drinking and who are in no shape to appreciate it. Of all the things Jesus might have done, why spend a miracle — the first of only seven in John’s gospel — merely to protect the joy of a couple at their wedding? Couldn’t he find something more important to tend to?

The answer to that question is No. Apparently not. The Most High attaches a significance to marriage that places the highest hedges around it. If we’re surprised to hear that it is only because we’re amnesiac. We’ve forgotten the immensities that arch over a man and a woman when they start a family, even as they do so standing at an altar consecrated to that act of self-giving that makes all things new.

7 January 1945
Dubrovnik

Darling Laura, sweet whiskers, do try to write me better letters. Your last, dated 19 December received today, so eagerly expected, was a bitter disappointment. Do realize that a letter need not be a bald chronicle of events; I know you lead a dull life now, my heart bleeds for it, though I believe you could make it more interesting if you had the will. But that is no reason to make your letters as dull as your life. I simply am not interested in Bridget’s children. Do grasp that.

[Evelyn Waugh, in the British Army, to his wife]