First Week of Lent

The Wedding at Cana is my favorite text because there is a lot of humor in it. There's humor in a mother approaching her son and telling him to do something without ever actually telling him to do it. There's his pouty resistance to his mother's non-demand while she completely ignores him and paints him in a corner. There is humor in a raucous wedding reception where the people are so "lit" that the wine has run out. And, for me, it's particularly humorous that there's this huge, beautiful secret of which only a few people are aware.

Those people include Jesus' mother and the select servants who help him pull off the miracle that inaugurates his ministry. Servants are normally meant to be inconspicuous, so I wanted to focus on the servant who goes to the chief steward with a cup full of what, as far as he's concerned, is water.

If Jesus—whose ministry has not started, so there haven't been any wonders associated with him yet—tells you to fill jars with water and draw from the jar to give to the chief steward, what is going through your mind at that moment? I invite the viewer to focus on this servant and all his curiosity and expectation, and think of a time when you were surprised by something God did. What actions preceded the miracle? Did it make sense? What did you know, and what was hidden from you? What "secrets" might God be keeping from you now as God works clandestinely on your behalf?

—Rev. T. Denise Anderson

Loose mustard seeds are nearly impossible to contain. They drift and scatter with the slightest breeze, asserting their own unruly will much like the mustard plants themselves. The mustard plant, dismissed as invasive weeds by some, is cultivated for healing and nourishment by others. Even now, after completing this piece, I am still finding stray seeds in my laundry, my car, my hair.

"They tried to bury us; they didn't know we were seeds," a line attributed to Greek poet Dinos Christianopoulos, has become a rallying cry for separated families along the Mexican-American border. More than a century earlier, Toussaint Louverture—the formerly enslaved commander of the self-emancipated army of Black cultivators in Saint-Domingue (colonial Haiti)—voiced a similar belief upon his deportation and imprisonment in France: "You have done no more than cut down the trunk of the tree of Black liberty. . . It will spring back from the roots, for they are numerous and deep."

From the Corn Mother of Indigenous myth to African women braiding okra seeds into their hair as they were forced from their homelands, many of our ancestors understood the power of carrying life in its smallest form. Seed-carrying is an act of faith. These tiny, unassuming specks hold the audacious hope that wherever we go, we already have what we need to take root and flourish in strange and foreign soils. May our faith and our hopes be just as audacious, resilient, and uncontainable as the seeds which hold the fruits of our faith.

—Carmelle Beaugelin Caldwell