Sermon for the Second Sunday after the Epiphany, Year B, "Come and See," John 1:43-51

 Sermon 1/17/21

John 1:43-51

Anything Good? Come and See

As I’ve been home on break this winter, my Mom and I have been watching the sitcom How I Met Your Mother. We’ve seen it before, but it is just something light and relaxing and kind of mindless we can watch together. There’s an episode where one of the characters, Marshall, is worried that his job as a lawyer for a large bank is at risk. His friend and co-worker Barney tells him that he has to find something that no one else does that he can offer that will make him indispensable at work. It doesn’t seem like bad advice, does it? Make yourself necessary, irreplaceable. Have a skill no one else has. Of course, since it is a sitcom, Barney means that Marshall should come up with some “extra” talent like being the guy at the office who runs the fantasy football league. But the gist of the advice is: make sure there’s something that you can do that no one else can do, and then you have security in your position. Have you heard advice similar to that before? I have. I’ve even given advice like that. One of my brothers works at a bank, and he consistently gets ranked highest in production - he’s accomplishing more everyday than the others on his team. And I’ve told him how good that is, because whenever he takes a vacation day, they really miss him and can’t wait for him to get back. It’s good for them to know how much they need my brother, what a valuable employee he is, I think.  

On the other hand, I’ve been thinking about my path to ordained ministry, and how my childhood congregation and pastor nurtured me as I was exploring my sense that God was calling me to become a pastor. I think some of you have met my childhood pastor, Bruce Webster. Bruce was the pastor of my childhood church, Rome First United Methodist, but he retired last year from Kirkville UMC not too far from here. Bruce was my pastor when I was in the process of discerning my own call to pastoral ministry. I had a lot of ideas, and not a lot of experience. When I look back at that season in my life, when I was exploring and figuring out what God was calling me to do, I’m struck by how willing Bruce was to share with me. He shared his wisdom and knowledge with me, but he also shared his authority and his status. He shared the pulpit, letting me preach often. He took me on visits with him. He let me design and lead the youth group retreat. He invited me to meetings and introduced me to the other clergy in the community. And he always encouraged me, affirmed me, and built me up. He never once made me feel like what he was doing as a pastor was something I wouldn’t be able to do too. He never tried to project part of his work as off limit or beyond my understanding. Instead, however he could, he invited me into the work that he did, and shared what he knew so that I could learn and grow. That’s a different kind of model than the advice in How I Met Your Mother, or advice we might hear in some other settings, the advice that says it is best to make sure everyone knows that you can do something no one else can do, isn’t it? I realize the contexts of say, my brother’s bank and my childhood church are a bit different. But I’m struck by the different ethos that favors sharing wisdom and power with others over getting ahead and securing one’s own position first. 

I was thinking about these things - how we do or don’t share our wisdom and knowledge, our power and authority, as I turned to our scripture text for today. Our passage today is a scene from the Gospel of John. We’re in chapter 1, and we pick up as Jesus is calling some his first followers. In our scene for today, he first calls Philip with a simple “Follow me.” And then Philip in turn finds his friend Nathanael and says, “We’ve found him! We’ve found they were writing about in the law and the prophets: It’s Jesus of Nazareth!” But Nathanael is skeptical: “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” I’m not sure what our modern day equivalent is - what neighborhood exactly comes to your mind, but it’s like Nathanael says, “Can anything good come out of the wrong side of the tracks?” Philip just answers, “Come and see.” If we’d read a bit earlier in this chapter, we see that Philip is just modeling the example of Jesus. When Jesus called his very first disciples, and they asked him a question, he responded in the exact same way: “Come and see.” Nathanael does indeed “Come and See,” and Philip takes him to meet Jesus. Jesus seems to know Nathanael already - to know Nathanael’s heart, and in response, Nathaniel also realizes who Jesus really is. “Rabbi, you are the Son of God!” he proclaims. “You are the King of Israel.” In response, Jesus promises that as a disciple of Jesus, Nathanael will witness even “greater things” than Jesus being able to look into his heart. He’ll see heaven opened - the boundary between earth and heaven traversed. 

“Come and see.” These words that Philip shares with Nathanael, words that are an echo of the way that Jesus called his friend disciples, are words that reflect the ethos of Jesus’ ministry. We worship Jesus as God’s own child, God in the flesh, fully human but fully divine. And yet, over and over again in the gospels, Jesus is invitational, ready to share his power and authority, his wisdom and knowledge. Even though Nathanael is skeptical and dismissive of him at first, Jesus already wants to show Nathanael what the power of God can do - not something he holds over Nathanael, but something he intends to share with Nathanael. And that doesn’t just happen in this scene. Over and over, Jesus tells his disciples and other followers, and even those who are just in the crowds listening to what he has to say that they can do just what he does and more. If you want to dig a bit deeper this week, I encourage you to flip through the gospels and make a list of times when Jesus tells his listeners that he’s inviting them to receive and use God’s wisdom and power in some way. On the other hand, we see the other religious leaders - the priests and scribes and Pharisees with whom Jesus interacts - always appearing anxious that somehow their power is slipping away. They’re more like the example from How I Met Your Mother. They can only feel safe and secure if no one else can do what they do. That’s not the way of Jesus though. “Come and see.” Jesus invites us to be part of his mission and ministry - not just as someone that he’ll direct and order around. His way is to make us co-laborers in the reign of God, sharing wisdom and power so that we too can share the good news of God’s grace that transforms the world. How about us? Are we willing to share what we know of God, what we’ve learned from following Jesus? Are we inviting others in - to our lives, to our worship services - virtual or otherwise - to our ministries, to our communities? Or are we holding on tightly to our power and authority, afraid that sharing will mean that our position isn’t safe and secure? 

Our gospel text brings up another question for me too. Sometimes we’re holding on too tightly to our power and status and knowledge. And other times, we’re convinced that others don’t have anything valuable to teach us, no wisdom that is important to us. Who do we assume has nothing to teach us? At first, Nathanael is tempted to believe that someone like Jesus - someone from Nazareth, something that for Nathaniel clearly means some “low class, ignorant, unqualified person” couldn’t possibly know anything. His first response suggests that he believes that there is nothing he could have to learn from a person from Nazareth. He discounts Jesus because of where he’s from, assuming that Jesus doesn’t have anything worth sharing. When do we act like Nathanael, and about whom? 

This coming semester, I’m going to be a teaching assistant for a class that uses some tools offered by Wikipedia - students will learn how to edit and contribute to articles on the online encyclopedia. I’ve been pretty impressed so far with the training modules I’ve completed. You can’t just add any topic on Wikipedia. A topic has to be notable - and to be notable, a topic has to be documented by several independent, reliable sources, like books or academic journals. But Wikipedia is also aware that these requirements, meant to increase the accuracy and usefulness of articles, also results in what they call “content gaps.” Content gaps are important topics that end up not getting covered, or not covered as thoroughly on Wikipedia as they should be. And Wikipedia realizes that there are more content gaps when it comes to topics related to women, or topics related to people of color, or other minority and marginalized groups than when it comes to topics about men, or white people, or people in power, because the minority groups have had less access over time to traditional publishing, or traditional academic positions, than others. So, are marginalized populations and their individual and collective wisdom truly less “notable”? Wikipedia knows the answer is “no,” and is working to address the problem, though imperfectly. How about us? Who have we written off as not “notable” enough to learn from? What individuals or groups are we overlooking, sure that “nothing good” can come from them? 

Tomorrow is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and I’ve been thinking about his concept of the Beloved Community, adapted from Josiah Royce, which King spoke about and wrote about often. His vision resonates with me as a vision of the Kingdom of God, or the kin-dom of God. Sometimes when we say “Kingdom of God,” we think of God as King who is all powerful and rules over everything. There are ways in which that is true, of course. But Jesus tries to show us that the way God reigns and rules is a bit different than we’d expect. God reigns through sharing everything - knowledge, wisdom, power, and authority, in really radical ways. In fact, God even share’s God’s self with us in the person of Jesus. So many folks have used the term kin-dom to help us think about the way God draws us in - “Come and see.” That’s what I hear - the kindom of God on earth - when I read about King’s Beloved Community. He wrote, “The way of acquiescence [to evil] leads to moral and spiritual suicide. The way of violence leads to bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers. But, the way of non-violence leads to redemption and the creation of the beloved community.” “I do not think of political power as an end. Neither do I think of economic power as an end. They are ingredients in the objective that we seek in life. And I think the end of that objective is a truly brotherly society, the creation of the beloved community” And “the end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the Beloved Community. It is this type of spirit and this type of love that can transform opponents into friends. It is this type of understanding goodwill that will transform the deep gloom of the old age into the exuberant gladness of the new age. It is this love which will bring about miracles in the hearts of men.” (1) Dr. King, whom many have dismissed and do dismiss as having nothing valuable to teach because of the color of his skin, gives us a model for the kindom of God, the Beloved Community, that is shaped by a God, by a Savior who shares in everything with us, wisdom and knowledge, power and authority, compassion and grace. In turn, we don’t need to cling so tightly to our status and power either. God’s reign grows not when we store up for ourselves, but when we build each other up in love. Can anything good come from such a strange kindom that turns things so upside down and inside out? Jesus says to us: “Come and see.” Amen.  

1. Quotes from https://thekingcenter.org/about-tkc/the-king-philosophy/. 

Sermon, "Voices from Prison: John the Baptist," Matthew 11:2-15, Mark 6:14-29

Sermon 7/8/18

Matthew 11:2-15, Mark 6:14-29

Voices from Prison: John the Baptist

We almost didn’t hear about John the Baptist today. Last week, as I started thinking about Jeremiah, and about this whole sermon series really, I realized that most - not quite all but most - of the people who we read about who are detained, jailed, or imprisoned in the Bible are people whose law-breaking included some form of speaking up, speaking a truth, speaking out that was not allowed, or seriously not appreciated by the leaders of the day. Remember, Jeremiah was imprisoned multiple times for saying things that the King didn’t want to hear - namely that the war would fail and the King himself would be captured. Well, John the Baptist also ends up in jail for speaking out in ways that the King does not want to hear, and I was worried I would have two sermons in a row on the very same themes. But as I started digging in more to the text last week, I felt the real message I wanted to share was about God’s redemption and our struggle to accept it for ourselves and others.

That leaves us free to talk about John this week, thankfully, and spend time with one of I think the most fascinating figures in the Bible. We have two texts today that focus on John and his time in prison. In our first reading, we find John in prison already, and Matthew tells us that he has heard “what the Messiah was doing.” What Jesus had been doing was teaching, sharing parables, healing, and sending out disciples to do the same, announcing the good news: God’s reign was at hand, here on earth right now. So John sends his disciples to Jesus to ask, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” Remember, when John was doing his own preaching, when he kept talking about this coming Messiah, he kept describing someone very different than Jesus seems to be. John talked about the wrath to come. He described a Messiah arriving with a winnowing fork, ready to separate good and bad, tossing what wasn’t needed into the fire. And then Jesus arrived showing compassion at every turn, spending time eating with them, visiting in their homes, showering people with love. John needs to ask: Are you really the one? Or is someone else, someone with a little more fire and brimstone going to come along soon? I think this question is critically important for John. He’s in prison. He can’t do the preaching and calling for repentance that he had been doing. But if Jesus is the Messiah, as John hoped, then it is ok. His task is complete: he prepared the way. If Jesus is not the Messiah, then being in jail is not something John can endure, because his work would not yet be done.

Instead of answering directly, Jesus describes the results of what he’s been up to. He says to John’s disciples, “Go and tell John: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.” Jesus’ words are practically lifted from the prophet Isaiah describing a messiah, and so John can be comforted: Jesus is the one, even if he has not arrived quite as John was expecting.

Once John’s disciples leave, Jesus talks about John to the crowds. He calls John a prophet, likening him to Elijah, a most-revered prophet. John is more than a prophet, Jesus says. He’s the one who announced the way of God’s salvation in the Messiah. No one is greater than John. But, Jesus says, “The least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.” What a verse - powerful and confusing! See, John marks the transition from one time to the next. All the prophets were setting the stage for the arrival of God’s reign on earth. But with Jesus, God’s reign on earth is here, and what we can do knowing that we live in God’s kin-dom right now is even more wonderful than the work of the prophets.

Then, in our reading from Mark, we hear how John ended up in prison in a flashback scene. King Herod is hearing reports about Jesus, and some of the reports suggest that Jesus is really John the Baptist, back from the dead. Indeed, Herod, who ordered John’s execution, believes this too. John was in prison for very publicly criticizing the king: Herod had married his brother’s wife, Herodias, after Herodias divorced him. This was not allowed according to the law of Moses, and for someone as important as the King to blatantly disregard the law was setting a very bad example, and just further illustrated how Herod was nothing more than a pawn for the occupying Roman government, not a spiritual leader for Israel. If it hadn’t been this particular bold speech, though, something else John said or did would have landed him in prison. John stirred people up, and the leaders didn’t want anyone causing unrest, anything that might challenge their power and authority.

Still, Mark tells us that Herod is taken with John. Herodias wants him put to death, but Herod protects him. Herod knows that John is righteous and holy. He’s confused by the ways John calls him and others to repent and change their ways. A man who is as ostensibly successful as Herod feels like they’re doing everything right, and to be told in fact they need to change everything is not welcome news. But, Mark tells us, he likes to listen to John nonetheless. Then an opportunity comes for Herodias to get rid of John at last. At his birthday banquet, his stepdaughter comes and dances for the guests, and in thanks, Herod promises her whatever she wants. Working with her mother, she seizes the opportunity, and asks for the head of John the Baptist. Herod, we read, is grieved, seeing too late the trap that’s been set. But, he’s made an oath in public, and he can’t - won’t - refuse it. A guard goes to the prison, and beheads John.

Do you think John believed, given his time in prison, and whatever moments he had to reflect on his impending execution, that raising his voice was worth it? That he would have spoken out still, given the chance to do it again? Why do you think John felt so compelled to speak things that had such potential dangerous consequences? Are there issues or events or people who would inspire you to speak up or speak out in ways that might be dangerous? Risky? Maybe your words might not land you in prison, but they could still have consequences, for your friendships, your job, your standing in the community. When is speaking up worth it?

It is risky still sometimes, speaking up and speaking out. We take warranted pride in in this country in the right to free speech. This 4th of July week we might be thinking about the law-breakers whose acts of protest and stirring words laid the foundation for the revolution that formed our nation! Their words and actions had big consequences, didn’t they? We prize free speech. But, we also have a history that shows there are limits on just how that speech can be delivered. Thankfully hate speech can have consequences - sometimes limits are needed. But I’m thinking of protest actions - from our quest for independence, to movements for women’s rights and Civil Rights, to people today who are marching to bring attention to causes for justice.

Throughout the course of history there’s been a tradition of prophets and political prisoners speaking from prison - writing letters, sharing messages. We’ll be hearing about the apostle Paul next week, and some of our scriptures in the Bible are letters that Paul wrote while in prison. I find Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail to be one of the most powerful pieces of writing there is. You’ll notice in your bulletin worksheet a link so that you can read the whole thing. King was writing particularly to white clergymen in Birmingham, because they had refused to support his cause in the Civil Rights movement. They agreed, in theory, with his quest for equal rights, but they didn’t like his techniques. They didn’t feel like King needed to break the law, or encourage others to do so, to achieve their aims. If they were just more patient, they argued, change would eventually come without all the “upset.” King responded with this letter.

He writes, in part: My Dear Fellow Clergymen:

While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities "unwise and untimely” … I think I should indicate why I am here in Birmingham, since you have been influenced by the view which argues against "outsiders coming in." … I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the prophets of the eighth century B.C. left their villages and carried their "thus saith the Lord" far beyond the boundaries of their home towns … so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town... Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly…

Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily…We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was "well timed" in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never." We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied." …

I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws … I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all." …

And now this approach is being termed extremist. But though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Was not Jesus an extremist for love: "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you." Was not Amos an extremist for justice: "Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream." Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel: "I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus." Was not Martin Luther an extremist: "Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise, so help me God." And John Bunyan: "I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience." … So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love?” (https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html)

Prophets, it seems, are not fans of lukewarm responses to injustice. John the Baptist was definitely an extremist for the cause of Jesus. Are we? I ask us again: What issue or event or person would inspire you to speak up or speak out? What is it, who is it that is so important that you would break some rules, or at least push at some boundaries, suffer some consequences? As we look at John the Baptist, speaking boldly to share the message of Jesus, I’d like to suggest some guidelines that might help us discern when God is calling us toward risk-taking action.

Sometimes, we know it is time to speak up when we see injustice because God won’t leave us alone! When you find that you’ve seen the suffering of others, and you just can’t get the images, the stories out of your head, God may be urging you to speak and act. When God answers your prayers by putting before you again and again ways that you might get involved in advocacy and action, when you find your heart stirred, when you feel yourself responding with that gut-churning compassion that always moved Jesus to action, God may be urging you to speak and act.   

Sometimes, we know it is time to speak up and take action when we realize that we might have a unique platform. When our voices can amplify voices of people who aren’t being heard, we might have a responsibility to take risky actions and speak up against injustice. I think about our United Methodist history, when women were first given the right to be seated as delegates to General Conference, our highest decision-making body. Before they won that right, men had to speak up for the rights of women, because women had no rights to a voice there. The men who were delegates had a platform that the women did not, and so the responsibility to speak up for what was right was on them. How can you use your voice to amplify the voice of others?

Sometimes, we know it is time to speak up and take action when the risk to us for speaking up is discomfort, or being disliked, but the risk to others when we don’t speak is life-threatening. Is our discomfort when we have to speak up boldly more important than ending injustice? No. I’ve told you before that I’m a conflict avoider. I struggle with this. I want everyone to get along, and let’s be honest: I want everyone to like me too. But does that mean I shouldn’t say things that might be hard to speak or hard to hear? My discomfort is less important than the suffering of others. We know it is time to speak when by speaking up we’re embodying the commandments to love God and neighbor. As much as Jesus recognized John the Baptist as the greatest of prophets, we who find our place in the reign of God have more potential power, more potential greatness, when we’re workers in embodying God’s reign on earth. With our place in God’s heart secure, how can we but speak up for truth and justice? Friends, let us be bold. Let us use the power, the voice God has given us. Let us speak the values of extreme love we know to be true through our life-saving relationship with Jesus Christ. Maybe there will be consequences. There always are, when we speak and act, and when we stay silent and still. But Jesus, the one we waited for, has come, and is with us always. Let speak and act in his name. Amen.   

Question: MLK Jr. Day

Are you doing anything special to celebrate MLK Jr. Day today?

Bishop Woodie White's annual letter to Martin Luther King Jr.

Every year since 1976, now-retired Bishop Woodie White writes a birthday letter to Martin Luther King, Jr. I always look forward to it, and this year have especially been curious about how Bishop White would capture the historic election of Barack Obama to the presidency. Answer: with great joy! Here's the letter, take a look.

All Saints Day

Today is All Saints Day. I don't ever remember celebrating All Saints Sunday when I was growing up. (I apologize to my former pastor for forgetting if we did!) But in seminary, we always had an All Saints-themed worship in chapel, and the church I served as youth pastor also had a day to remember those in the congregation who died during the previous year. When I started serving St. Paul's, I introduced an All Saints Sunday celebration. My first and second years were filled, it seemed, with deaths of long-time faithful members, and I think as a congregation we were grieving for the collective loss, and I hoped an All Saints celebration would be a way to give voice to our community grief.

This year, we have just a handful of folks who've passed away that are directly related to the congregation, though one loss is very recent and very difficult - a young mother, who died after a battle with ALS, which is just a horrific disease. But regardless of the numbers, I find it a meaningful time to reflect on who we've lost, why we loved them, and how we might wish to live in a way that we too could be so loved.

I think we, perhaps as an American society, perhaps just as human beings, do interesting things to history when people die. What one has been and how one lived and what one did during their days on earth don't always have a lot to do with how we remember them. This is essential, merciful, grace-full, forgiving, and sometimes troubling all at once. Human beings have a wonderful way of forgetting history, and sometimes this is extremely detrimental. On the other hand, things that seemed so important to remember, to hold grudges over, to tally up when someone was living can seem pretty trivial in light of our mortality. Perhaps, hoping that others won't hold all of our bad deeds, no doubt readily accessible to our own minds, against us when we're gone, we're anxious to forgive and forget when others pass.

My youngest brother and I got in a conversation about these sort of things the other day. By conversation, I mean argument. But it was ok - Todd and I have similar personalities in a lot of ways, and we're both stubborn, and we take some sort of strange pleasure out of arguing topics to the point of ridiculousness. Anyway, we were talking about Todd's plans for the future. As an actor, they are ever-changing. He was dreaming about opening an 'institute' for the performing arts, and thinking about naming buildings and things after all the people who influenced him. I, knowing some of these influencers, mentioned my surprise at some of his choices. So many flaws among some of those he named. Do you honor such a person? Where do you draw the line? I had in mind a particular person from the area who died in a way we consider 'heroic', but who I knew to be a not nice person in some significant ways - abusive to women, for example. Yet, he's memorialized around these parts - is that smart? What does that say?

Or, for another example: Martin Luther King, Jr. A man with flaws, serious flaws. A man who moved millions, continues to move people. But, he's held up so high as a cultural icon that we easily ignore the harder, challenging things he said, worked for. One of my favorite poems about MLK, by Carl Wendell Himes, Jr., says: "Now that he is safely dead / Let us praise him / build monuments to his glory / sing hosannas to his name. / Dead men make / such convenient heroes: They cannot rise / to challenge the images / we would fashion from their lives. / And besides, / it is easier to build monuments / than to make a better world."

There is something about making people into saints that takes away their power to really touch us, because as soon as we 'saint' them, we make them something we don't think we can become. We make MLK's dream unrealistic, because we know we're no MLK.

And yet, I'm not sure we can help but make heroes of those we admire. When I was in junior-high, I regularly kept a 'hero-list'. I will confess to you that I a bit(?!) arrogantly consider myself hard to impress, so the list was pretty hard to get onto. But I can remember today almost everyone whose name graced the list, and I remember how and why they got there. A couple teachers, a classmate or two, some family members, people in the arts, even an inspirational speaker that came to speak to us. I like to think they gave me something to work for, a model to be like, to try to be like at least.

Ah, the end of the post, and no clear conclusions. Somewhere between cynicism and hope...