Come and See
Sermon preached at Midway Hills Christian Church
Season of Epiphany
January 16, 2005
John 1:29-42
There is an old Sufi parable that goes like this:
Mulla Nasrudin was outside on his hands and knees below a lantern when a friend walked up. “What are you doing, Mulla?” his friend asked. “I’m looking for my key. I’ve lost it.” So his friend got down on his hands and knees too and they both searched for a long time in the dirt beneath the lantern. Finding nothing, his friend finally turned to him and asked, “Where exactly did you lose it?” Nasrudin replied, “I lost it in the house, but there is more light out here.”
This is the second Sunday of Epiphany. Epiphany is a season in the life of the church that often gets lost between the grand dramas of Advent and Lent. Its themes however are important ones in the life of discipleship—themes of light and journey. Themes of looking and seeing.
John’s gospel, as Bill pointed out a few weeks ago, is such a different gospel from the other three. We saw that instead of shepherds and angels and a manger and an inn, John’s nativity is cosmic—the logos, the Word made flesh, came to dwell—literally, came to pitch a tent—among us. And that Word was the light of all people. The true light that enlivens everyone.
John is an Epiphany gospel. He moves quickly from the coming of the light, to discipleship. The last half of the first chapter is about the call of the first disciples.
In our text for today everyone is looking. All of Israel is looking for the Messiah, people even ask John the Baptist if he is the Messiah. Upon seeing Jesus John says to his disciples, “Look! Here is the Lamb of God!” And when two of John’s disciples hear this they followJesus.
Notice that they haven’t been called by Jesus yet, they haven’t become disciples/followers of Jesus yet. At this stage of their journey they follow Jesus because they are looking. Jesus knows it. He turns to them and asks point blank, “What are you looking for?”
This Epiphany story addresses/exposes the most basic of all human questions. “What are we looking for?” We live in a culture in which people are desperately looking for something, someone to fill their longing. We engage in all kinds of activities and distractions to quell the restlessness in our souls. This looking manifests most often in consumerism. We consume goods, people, jobs, experiences, even spirituality itself in an effort to fill this gnawing, growling emptiness in our souls.
The names we choose for our recreational vehicles speak volumes about this looking. Listen to some of the top names people choose for their boats: Serenity/ Escape/ Odyssey/ Obsession/ Fantasia/ Hakuna Matata (No Worries).
We even try spices to fill the void. Chili Pepper magazine reports that Americans are turning to spices and sauces like never before. One spice company’s logo reads: “Life is too short to eat boring food.” The names of some of their hot sauces include: Sting and Linger, Dave’s Insanity Sauce and… Religious Experience, which comes in Original, Hot and Wrath.
St. Augustine has said, “Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee.” In each of us there is a space that only God can fill. The answer to Jesus’ soul searching question, “What are you looking for?” can’t be brought home from a shopping mall, or found in a hot sauce.
What are you looking for? Imagine Jesus asking you that question. No matter how long any of us have been followers of the Christ; there is the need I believe to always hear him ask that question. Our restlessness really never goes away. The God space in us is never completely filled. That is the nature of discipleship: the more of Christ we have the more we want. Looking is a condition of discipleship that brings us to Jesus over and over again.
The two disciples in John’s gospel respond to Jesus question with another question: “Teacher where are you staying?” It is a question that opens them to a life changing invitation by Jesus: Come and See. Jesus invites them to where he is staying and they remain with him. It is in that staying, that they SEE Jesus is the Messiah. And at least one of them can’t keep that seeing to himself. Andrew goes and gets his brother Simon Peter and brings him to Jesus.
So our looking changes to seeing. The life of discipleship is also about seeing in a new way. The longer we stay with Jesus the more we are invited—challenged—to “come and see.” See the world in a different way, to see ourselves in a different way.
Tomorrow is the observance of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday. When Jesus asked Dr. Martin Luther King to come and see, King had no idea that the place would be the inside of a Birmingham jail. In 1963 King was part of the civil rights protests being staged in that city, and was among 54 marchers who were arrested on Good Friday and thrown in jail for violating an injunction against “parading, demonstrating, boycotting, trespassing and picketing.”
Dr. King was singled out for isolation and denied the chance to make phone calls to his lawyers. He had no mattress or linen, and was sleeping on metal slats. And yet, over that Easter weekend, deep in solitary confinement, down in what was called the “hole,” sealed off from his fellow prisoners and the outside world, Martin Luther King was staying with Jesus.
It was while he was locked up that King wrote one of the most significant Christian documents of the civil rights movement: his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” Surprisingly, this letter was addressed not to abusive police officers or racist politicians, but to a group of liberal, white clergymen who were urging people to withdraw from the demonstrations, which they called “unwise and untimely.”
In his letter, King challenged those clergy to a new way of seeing. In response to their criticism that his marches were “untimely” King told the white clergymen that “we must use time creatively and forever realize that the time is always ripe to do right.” He pointed out that “it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say ‘wait.’”
King went on to write:
I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block is not the Whit Citizen’s Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice, who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice, who constantly says, “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action.” Who paternalistically believes that he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom.
Just as looking is a lifetime characteristic of discipleship, so is seeing. We are continually being asked, invited, challenged to See. To See the dynamics of oppressive systems and structures in our society. To See how our privilege can blind us to the ways we are complicit in those systems. To See people who are different from us as our brothers and sisters in Christ. To See our own prejudices.
Are we willing to be disciples, not simply to become familiar with the teachings of Jesus, but to follow Christ and hold fast to him? As disciples, our hearts, ears, and eyes can be transformed to see the world from a different perspective. Christ invites us to Come and See the Divine Presence in creation and the environment.
· Christ also says Come and See as we open the newspaper and read about yet another feminine, disaster, drive-by shooting, bombings, or attack.
· Christ invites us to Come and See as we receive a message that a beloved friend or family member is facing pain
· And Christ calls out “Come and See” as we consent to make the journey into our own soul, confronting our own shallowness, old wounds that still need healing, and the creative ways we choose to wear blinders.
That Seeing is always borne forward by a desire to know, to look for where God is and finding that it leads us to the Light of the World, who lodges in the very center of our being.
Epiphany. A season of light and looking and seeing.
The day after those two disciples of John had spent the afternoon with Jesus we are told that Jesus decided to go to Galilee. He found Philip and said to him, “Follow me.” Philip was from the same home town as Andrew and Peter. Philip found Nathaniel and said to him, “We have found him about whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus son of Joseph from Nazareth.”
Nathaniel said to him, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”
Philip said to him, “Come and See.”