You remember kicking the dirt as you paced in the yard back and forth, the feeling that you were the second born and all the responsibility of running the family business would pass on to your brother while you would first spend time under your father’s yoke and then your brother’s.

The message of this story is twofold; that God wants us to be free from oppression, enslavement, and suffering, us being all of God’s people; and that further, we escape death through our faith and repentance in Christ.

And in that giving up, find yourself in the mystery of God’s love; not whether you deserve that love but ponder where in that love you will frolic, where in that love you will find joy when the resurrection comes and Easter arrives.

Our faith does not mean we get to escape all those things, good and bad, that make our human selves that which they are, imperfect, irrational, fragile.

The temptation to stay in this place, this room, this church, where we can be constantly refreshed, forgiven and be in companionship with each other, with people we love is real and must be overcome.

For we are to descend those stairs or that ramp outside these doors just as Moses descended his mountain to share God’s law and just as Elijah descended his mountain to share God’s word and just as Jesus descended his mountain to walk this earth as the Son of Man.

And yet I wonder if the help we provide sometimes, the help I provide sometimes, would take a different shape if the hunger I fed was my mother’s hunger; if the person to whom I gave a blanket would have been given a warm bed if it was my brother exposed to New England’s winter freeze.

In this sermon we hear so much about blessings and woes and yet it is in the in between, on this level place along with Jesus and along with each where we find ourselves in this story.

Because Jesus has blessed us with an abundance of gifts, no one person is called to do it all but together, together we have the capacity to lift our full nets and feed those hungering for a kinder world, a more just world.

Our story does not end with a fading away but a return to life; our story is one of miracles and overcoming; our story is one of a victory of life over death.

Anyway and in whatever scenario got them there, the Jesus of Nazareth family and his disciples were gathered for a wedding and ready to celebrate, to wish the newly married couple good wishes, to feast at the banquet, and to drink wine and sing songs and dance to the music of the centuries, the music of love, the music of permanence, the music that is the soundtrack to every such celebration in every form it takes throughout the centuries, in this age and before.

And I wonder especially if these times, these times of pandemic, of declining church attendance, of growing disbelief in God and lessening faith in institutions, I wonder if we are now in a similar era of promise, of hope being the substance of things unseen.