Timing is important. What’s the most important part of telling a good joke……timing.  Timing is important in jokes, and it’s important in sermons.  Until I figured out the 2.45 second delay between the live stream video and audio, my sermons looked like old Bruce Lee movies. Timing is important in conversations.  Zoom meetings have unexpectedly shown us this. The slight delay in talking and hearing causes train wrecks that we have all been a part of. I was just recently on a Diocesan zoom call where two people kept waiting for the other and then talking over each other, four times, before the loop was broken.

Timing is everything; whether telling a joke, communicating, or successfully navigating through life, and bad timing can get you in a lot of trouble. Which is what makes the wedding at Cana, in today’s Gospel reading, such a scene. The timing goes all wrong, but it is easy to miss, because the Gospel simply says that they ran out of wine, on the third day of a wedding.  No big deal to us—but in this time and place—running out of wine isn’t a little embarrassing, it’s a disaster. Wine isn’t just a social lubricant, it’s a sign of the harvest, of God’s abundance, of gladness and hospitality. So running short on wine, is running short on blessing. Timing is everything, and the wine has run out before the wedding has.

–This Sermon is based on Rev. David Lose’s sermon “Learning to Tell Time”