How can we make real change happen?

This is a question I find myself asking, sometimes in desperation lately.

How can we make real change happen?

And not just change for the sake of change, but change for the good.

Our Gospel today is a story of change. It is Jesus’ first miracle, the changing of water into wine.

But what does this mean for those of us who aren’t able to perform such a miracle? Reflecting on this Gospel, I am reminded also of the slow work of God through each of us, about how each of our calls is to make Earth a bit more like heaven, slowly.

We may not be able to change water into wine instantaneously, but through persistence and care, we are able to take grape seeds, plant them in soil, use water and sunlight, nutrients, to create grapes, and pick those grapes with our hands, put them into barrels and make wine. Our own tiny miracle, creating something wonderful from something simple- it just takes us a little bit longer than it took Jesus.

In our second reading today, we get this beautiful glimpse of the Holy Spirit, and I want to highlight some of the lines from this reading:

“There are different kinds of spiritual gifts but the same Spirit; there are different forms of service but the same Lord; there are different workings but the same God who produces all of them in everyone. To each individual the manifestation of the Spirit is given for some benefit.”

There is something freeing in this idea that we have all received different gifts from the Holy Spirit. I do not need to be good at everything. We have specific gifts that lead to our specific vocations.

These lines from the second reading remind me of the social change wheel, a model that shows the wide variety of ways that social change happens - different spiritual gifts mean we have different talents to bring about social change. The wheel depicts many methods, and how all those methods work together to create an ecosystem of change: you need all elements of this wheel to get long lasting real change. Some of the elements on the wheel are advocacy, philanthropy, mutual aid, deliberative dialogue, volunteering, voting, community building, economic development. Maybe one of these is something you’re already involved in, maybe one is something that you want to explore in the future.  

I love the social change wheel because it helps me to see my own gifts more clearly. The thought of being around large crowds at a protest always makes me anxious, and I also feel a sense of guilt for feeling not comfortable entering that space often. But protest is only one element of the wheel and maybe not where my talents lie. And instead of sitting in the guilt of what I can’t do, the wheel helps me see how social responsibility, community building, and deliberative dialogue are spaces where my talents can be used and are needed. I invite you to google the social change wheel once you are done with this video and notice where your talents and gifts can best be used.

Thinking back to the Gospel we get this image of the Wedding at Cana, and I think this is a story I’ve been hearing since my childhood. Today I want us to focus in on one small part of the story, the relationship between Mary and Jesus.

The story opens with Mary noticing a problem. The wedding has run out of wine. A problem that she sees that Jesus can change, that Jesus can fix. Now Jesus’ response is one that confuses me sometimes, that I have trouble wrapping my head around. He says woman now is not the hour, why are you asking me to do this. And Mary is not thrown by this answer, she does not step back, she does not apologize, rather she says to the workers, listen to what he tells you to do. Despite Jesus’ rebuke, Mary keeps moving forward and Jesus does what his mother initially asked him to do.

Now Mary is someone that I have a hard time wrapping my head around. I feel like we get so few glimpses of her in the Gospels that I don’t exactly know who she is. And I was sharing this with a coworker recently and he shared a similar sentiment but then mentioned that in his theology class recently, they talked about Mary as teacher. If Jesus is this person who brought radical new ideas to the faith and radical new ways of being, what is it like if we see Mary as the one who initially brought these ideas to him? Jesus had to learn it from someone. What if we think of it as from Mary?

This really opens up my imagination. We get this one view of Mary as mother to Jesus at the Wedding at Cana. I begin to picture other moments of Mary as mother. I picture Mary, Joseph, and Jesus sitting around the dinner table, Mary venting to Joseph about the hypocrisy of the Pharisees and seven-year-old Jesus taking that in and remembering it later on. I picture Mary and adolescent Jesus walking along the streets, passing a beggar and Mary expressing her sorrow and noticing and caring about that person and Jesus noticing and internalizing that as well. All these tiny moments that informed Jesus’ ministry, that subsequently inform who we are as Church today, that all stems from who Mary was.  

So how do we make real change today? We do it in community. We listen to our elders, the Marys in our lives, who remind us of the gifts we have been bestowed by the Spirit and we continue to slowly chip away at the slow work of the kingdom, doing our part with our specific gifts from the Spirit to make earth just a bit more like heaven.

Amen.