Despite my reputation for telling and playing jokes, you may be surprised to know how difficult I find it to watch comedy programmes. You see, for me, what the audience falls about laughing over, is, well, normal life. Frank Spencer built a Wendy House in a small room and then couldn’t get it out – Graham rebuilt a motorbike in our second storey flat. And I rode it down the stairs to get it out. Demolishing the front door and various of the landlady’s fixtures and fittings on the way. When Marilyn wrote about my exploits and sent it to a women’s magazine for possible publication it came back with a note saying that comedy should aim to be closer to real life and they wouldn’t publish something so obviously untrue.

The Bible has its own fair share of unbelievable stories. If your appetite for scandal and family intrigue has been exhausted by East Enders and Brookside then can I refer you to the story of King David. Apart from a bit of giant killing and a musical output to rival Andrew Lloyd Weber most of us don’t know much about him. But read the story in the books of Samuel and you’ll discover a bandit, a warlord, a cheat, a multiple adulterer, a murderer and a quite hopeless Father. He packs more affairs into his life than the whole cast of East Enders could manage in a millennium. He sleeps with his friend’s wife and then has his friend killed to stop him finding out. His son rapes his daughter and he does nothing about it. He casts off wives and disowns children faster than most of us change our wardrobe.

I’m trying to imagine the average vicar’s reaction if such a man were to come and ask to be married. And have you been married previously? Once or twice. Well, actually, I’ve lost count. I see. So, you’re divorced then? Umm, probably. But not from all of them! And of course the mistresses. The mistresses?! Well, I had quite a few – a few dozen that is, but I don’t see them no more. Oh, good. Not since my son slept with them all. All? Yes, and in public too.

At this stage I’d suggest he should speak to the Rector. I’m not sure that the Rector wouldn’t suggest the Rural Dean.

But David does not come to see the vicar; he goes to God.

One thing I’m fairly certain of is that God is not an Anglican. You see, this God who gave us a book of rules, the principle ten of which are on the wall behind me, this God who will one day judge us and David against those rules is the same God who turns up at a wedding. A wedding that’s gone disastrously wrong. Perhaps two hundred people with no wine. Not the most auspicious start. Imagine the bride’s mother. Or her father’s acid comments. Now Jesus could have sent his Mum down to Tesco’s for a few extra bottles. He could have miraculously changed a gallon of water into wine. But, no. He changes enough water into wine to fill nine hundred bottles. They must have got completely paralytic, smashed out of their skulls. Few of them would remember anything of that day other than the truly almighty headache they suffered. I love the way Jesus used the vessels intended for ritual cleansing to carry the source of this irreligious merriment – what the church people would have made of it I shudder to think.

This is the God who pronounced judgement on the vagabond David. Go through the ten commandments and the story of David systematically exposes him as guilty on all ten counts. In the story, he rightly suffers the consequences of those actions. And of course God utterly condemns him as any right-thinking person would. “He is not fit to be King.” I can see the tabloid headlines now. Compared to David, Sophie, or any other victim of today’s press, is an utter angel.

Actually, God says this of David “He was a man after my own heart.” More than that, God chose David to be the ancestor of both Mary the Mother of Jesus and of Joseph her husband.

The love and forgiveness of God is utterly overwhelming, generous beyond measure. It is the love that paid the ultimate price that we celebrate in the communion. It is the love of the cross. It is the love that God desires us to carry into all our relationships and most especially marriage. As we love and serve one another, as we put our lover’s needs before our own, we walk the way of the cross and discover the love of Jesus in our marriage. And it is the love that he offers and longs for us to offer to those for whom the wine has started to run out, or for whom the bottle has been broken by death or divorce. Nine hundred bottles’ worth of love. Drink deeply of that love for you and share it generously with those around you.

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