“When I was growing up, we would often go to my grandparents’ house in South Carolina for a week or so in the summer time,” begins Kristin Adkins Whitesides, pastor of First Baptist Church, Winchester, Virginia. She tells of how her grandmother fixed abundant meals, “a gracious plenty,” but saved the best for last, the homemade pound cake with handmade chocolate icing. In today’s passage from John 2:1-11, Jesus performs the sign of changing water into wine at a wedding feast. Whitesides says, “In the very first sign of who he is and what he is about, Jesus is showing us how the story will end. Not with suffering or shame. But with joy, abundance, and miraculous surprise. Like pound cake at the end of a meal when you have already eaten your fill.”
Manuscript available: click HERE