It is not about wine, this miracle at Cana. We cannot reduce it to a parlor trick. “Did you see that? How did you do it? I wish I could change water into wine. Then maybe I’d be invited to go somewhere.” Notice that he did not work this miracle and then say to his disciples, “Now, go and do likewise; you will be the hit of the party.”

No, this is a story that dramatizes Jesus’ power to transform, to change something, or more importantly, someone, from one condition to another. Think of the word, to “trans-form,” to change form. The glory of Jesus that is revealed at the wedding feast in Cana, claims John the gospel writer, is his power to change things, to change lives.

Now, from the ethereal to the mundane; Brit Hume, the television opinionater, made an on-air plea for Tiger Woods to abandon Buddhism and take up Christianity because it will make him a better person . . . presumably, like Governor Mark Sanford, or former Senator John Edwards, or Member of Parliament Iris Robinson of Belfast, who has emerged as the modern-day incarnation of the iconic Mrs. Robinson of “The Graduate.”

Of course, Tiger Woods must clean up his act and straighten out his life. He has emerged as a colossal disappointment and profound embarrassment. But, to besmirch an historic religion with millions of adherents around the world and to suggest that to change religions is as easy as switching from Cheerios to Corn Flakes, simply to divorce one religion and embrace another one, and “voila!,” everything is going to be right, is magical thinking. Like “abracadabra” at the wedding feast.

Christianity is not a self-improvement course but instead a radical revisioning of oneself as we stand under the judgment of the divine arbiter of all that is right and good and true and just and merciful and beautiful. It is emptying oneself of all egotism and vanity so that we might be filled with new life, new purpose, new hope.

Becoming a Christian is not facile and not instantaneous. I remember back in college that there was an aggressive student ministry group that would confront others crossing campus and say, “If you just pray this ‘Jesus prayer’ with me you will be saved and your life will be changed. It is very simple and won’t take long. Here is the prayer on this card. Just pray it with me.” Magical thinking.

Transformation is not magic; it is a process by which God works within us to make us more loving, more forgiving, more righteous, purer. Can we imagine that – being purer human beings?

Augustine in the 5th Century symbolized the Christian experience as a journey, an anxious one, oftentimes, in which we do not find rest until we find it in God’s presence. A millennium later Martin Luther saw Christianity not as a commodity handed to us by the institutional Church, but only if we played the game by the Church’s rules. Rather, it was something we each must apprehend as we study the scriptures for ourselves in our own language, working out our salvation with “fear and trembling,” as Paul had written.

Two centuries later John Wesley developed a kind of “anthropology of faith,” a pathway for Christians that was normative, what most people experience. At least, it was what he had experienced and by projection assumed that most others did, too. His brother, Charles, wrote hymns about each stage, and that is what we find in our hymnals.

The hymns are not arranged alphabetically, or chronologically, or according to composer or poetic meter. The superstructure of our arrangement of hymns is Trinitarian. We start with hymns that give glory to God, the “Triune God,” that is, in historic terms, God of the three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Then, we have hymns about the grace of Jesus Christ, followed by a section on the power of the Holy Spirit.

This follows very much the pattern of the creeds of the Church. Our hymnal could be thought of as the Apostles’ Creed set to music. There are two more categories of hymns that reflect what is in most creeds – the community of faith, hymns about the Church, and finally, hymns about things to come, “a New Heaven and a New Earth.”

It is under the section of “The Power of the Holy Spirit” that we find the outline of Wesley’s story of faith, the journey, the working out of salvation. There is nothing magical or facile here; it is serious, all-consuming business.

Christian faith begins even before we know it. It is God’s grace that awakens us to our need for something more in our lives. It causes that ill-defined dis-ease that not all is well with life. The invitation of “prevenient grace.” That leads us to repentance. When we more clearly see how far we have fallen from the glory of God, as the scriptures say, we are chastened. We are humbled. We turn to God, the meaning of “repentance,” and ask for forgiveness.

God grants it. That is the whole purpose of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ – to show us in understandable human terms, not in abstract theological propositions, but in flesh-and-blood reality, how enormous is God’s love for us. It is a love that justifies our existence. We do not have to prove ourselves to God, we only have to accept God’s love for us, unmerited love for us, and get on with life. God wants us to live freely, to know the abundant life Jesus promised us.

That leads in our journey to a new lease on life; we become a new creature, transformed. There is new energy, new clarity, new purpose. We can let go of the old and welcome the new. And that, says Wesley, is where the journey really begins. Everything up to this point was meant to get us going. Now, how are we going to live our lives? How are we going to value the day, this day, which God has given us? How are we going to serve others? How are we going to change the world?

The idea is that we are to mature as Christians. Paul wrote to the first generation of believers that the apostles had fed them milk in their infancy of faith, but now the apostles were going to serve solid food. It only makes sense that if we consciously chose to become a disciples of Jesus, let us say, twenty years ago, that we ought to be a more mature Christian now than then, that our lives ought to be lived more coincidentally with what Jesus taught, that we ought to be more “holy.” It was what John Wesley termed “going on to perfection.” He never claimed that he got there himself; he only wanted to be sure that we never stopped along the way, content with thinking that we already had arrived. Charles Wesley wrote about it in the fourth verse of the hymn we will sing this morning, “Finish, then, thy new creation; pure and spotless let us be./ Let us see thy great salvation perfectly restored in thee;/ changed from glory into glory, till in heaven we take our place,/ till we cast our crowns before thee, lost in wonder, love, and praise.”

Changed from glory into glory, going on to perfection, a life-long process.

So, if we have come here today and we do not know why except that we have a vague dissatisfaction with life, that there has to be more to it than this, then we are in the right place because those are the first promptings of God’s work within us.

If we have come here today because we bear a heavy burden of guilt and regret, then we are in the right place because we are surrounded by others who know how we feel.

If we come here today because we seek forgiveness, then we are in the right place because God’s love for us is all around us – in the hymns, the prayers, the scriptures, the sermon, the windows, the people with whom we sit.

If we come here today because we yearn for a new lease on life, we are in the right place because if we leave our sins at the altar and accept God’s love, we can leave like children with a lightness in our step. We are “born again.”

If we come here today because we want to grow in faith and live lives more fitting as disciples of Jesus, then we are in the right place because we find courage in the community of others who want to bring justice to our society, mercy to our culture, and peace to our world.

I saw the movie, “Frost/Nixon” this week, the dramatization of the historic interviews of Richard Nixon by David Frost after Nixon resigned the presidency after committing crimes which he finally acknowledged in the last interview. I was reminded of a key Watergate felon, Charles Colson. Colson was the special counsel to Nixon who was the most despicable among a dishonorable cast of characters. John Dean, one of his fellow conspirators, called Colson “brutal, cruel, and vicious.” That is a friend talking; imagine what an enemy might say. Colson is the one who said that he would walk over his grandmother to get Richard Nixon re-elected.

Colson went to prison with all the others, except for Nixon, and Colson had a jail house conversion. So did most of the others. You know, “I have given my life to Jesus and I am a changed man. So, let me out.” But with Colson it has proven to be different. It took. That was almost forty years ago, and ever since Colson has been working as the leader of a jailhouse ministry across the country called “Prison Fellowship.” Now, there are some that complain that it is coercive and manipulative, that it takes advantage of a “captive audience.” But there is evidence that some peoples’ lives have changed, that there has been a transformation, as is evident in Colson’s life.

He is sort of a reluctant example for me because I still despise what he did to America and today he holds some social views that I find wrong-headed, but I think transformation has happened in his life . . . not magic, not instantaneous, not as simple as choosing a new cereal, but progressive and abiding.

I called our seven-year old grandson Friday night and said, “Karl, I need help with my sermon. Tell me about the transformer toy that you have, the one that is a truck that you can change into a robot.”

And Karl said, “It takes time to transform something, actually. You take the vehicle and move all of the little parts so that you can rotate major sections of it, but be careful not to pull the parts all the way out. It is really hard to re-attach them. And once you have changed everything, you have a robot. When it is in action, it is pretty cool.”

Maybe it is Karl who should be advising Tiger Woods, not Brit Hume. “It takes time to transform something, actually. When it is in action, it is pretty cool.” The transformation God can work in us through Jesus Christ is pretty cool, even cooler than changing water into wine. But it takes time. We are here today because we are Christians in process. May we take courage from being fellow travelers along the way. Amen.