For a while back in the 70s, when people were first beginning to get serious about quitting smoking, there was a promising new therapy that tried to zig where others zagged.  

Most of the other approaches were about slow reduction. Learning to take longer between cigarettes.  Longer between puffs.  Cutting back in half-pack increments.  

Some of you may remember.  

Well, the approach I’m remembering didn’t bother with any of that.  

The key, they said, wasn’t slowly cutting back. 

The best way to quit smoking was actually to ramp it way way up—to smoke way more than ever—to light one cigarette off of another…walk around with your head in its own blue cloud for the entire day, become that person nobody wants to sit next to on a bus…all that…if that’s what it took.  

The idea was to reach the point where finally you knew you’d had enough.  

Enough.  

The thinking was that, on the other side of “enough,” the fundamental desire to light up would simply vanish.  

I have no idea if this actually worked for anybody.  

Even if it did, clearly, it didn’t work for enough people that it became a recognized solution.  

But it reminds me of the relationship between abundance – or overabundance, which is our word for abundant abundance – and its strange little orbiting moon, the notion of “enough.” 

Because it’s amazing how quickly what starts out as abundance, more than we could ever need or use, can turn into just enough…then barely enough…then not enough. 

The gravitational pull of over-abundance shapes the trajectory of “enough,” or of “enough” as the world understands it. 

The possibility of satisfaction and gratitude for where are and what we have—and of course, most deeply, for who we are—this can all be strangely hard to hold onto.  

I remember in elementary school, someone’s older brother actually told me (sternly) that if I ever encountered a genie who granted me three wishes, my last wish clearly had to be for three more wishes.  

It starts early.  

And yet Scripture indicates that God wants something very different for us.  

We see it in a story we often tell a little later in the year, when we remember the feeding of the 5000, particularly as Matthew tells it (Matthew 14:13-21).  

In that one, five loaves and two fish are transformed into a sign of God’s overabundance—a feast with leftovers.  

And yet the point is not that the VIP tent is gorging itself while the others get just a nibble. 

Certainly, this isn’t saying that we Christians are the ones who really belong in the VIP tent.   

The point is that God’s abundance translates into everyone having enough…andgratefully enjoying it.  

Finding nourishment in it.  

Matthew means that God’s abundance frees us from chasing the false things that promise to fill us, but which ultimately leave us more hungry – spirituallyfamished — than ever.  

John’s Gospel fundamentally agrees.  

Now, we should note that John’s story of the wedding feast at Cana does not have much to say about marriage.  

It’s no accident that it’s a story about a wedding that doesn’t bother to include the bride or the groom, toasts or dancing, details about the flower girl or where the happy couple is headed for the honeymoon.  

John trusts us to understand that this is not really about any of them or any of that.

His interest lies elsewhere, not in the wedding but in the wine.  

For him, it’s a story about what happens when Jesus arrives.

He might arrive at your wedding or your town or your job…wherever Jesus shows up to knock on the door of your heart.  

And what John wants to say is that, when that happens, epiphany is close at hand. 

Because to hear him tell it, God’s presence almost can’t help but turn nothing into something, the hum-drum into the glorious, the daily round into a life-defining encounter.  

Even left over water becomes the finest wine, and the emptiest of lives fills with holy business to be done.  

With lovingkindness to practice.  

With fairness and honesty and dignity to offer. 

With imagination and joy to seek.  

With peace to create.  

Isn’t that what fullness really is?  

That’s what it is to taste the vintage, as he understands it. 

And for all our searching, don’t we know that’s true?  

Because the heart knows when it’s finally home, just as a ship out in a storm finally reaches the safety of a harbor.

And it is enough.  

Which is not to say it’s easy. 

If you spend any time with Scripture, of course, you can plainly see that the disciples are works in progress at best.  

In these weeks when we are hearing again about their first encounters with Jesus, we can see that they’re caught in a strange tug of war between the restlessness that makes them drop whatever they’re doing to follow him, and the deep rest that seems to flow from him, guiding them into living the better way he shows that they (and we) might live.  

They don’t ever become perfect, and in some cases, it takes a long time for that better way, that trust in God’s “enough”, to truly sink in.  

A couple of weeks ago, I saw a quick reply to a longer article about AI that got to the heart of the challenge. 

“I don’t want AI to do my thinking and creating while I am busy doing my laundry and paying my bills,” the poster said.  “I want AI to do my laundry and pay my bills while I am busy thinking and creating.”

John might ask us to identify what is the holy work that only we can truly do…the work that requires what is best in us and teaches us to reach for even better…the work of epiphany for us and for our world. 

What would it mean to focus on that work – to make it the center of our attention and to put it at the center of our lives? 

It might finally be enough.  

And honestly, what could be more glorious than that?   

Amen.