2021-01-18
Brooke Strong
This service was livestreamed due to COVID-19 restrictions.
Sermon Text
Scripture: JOHN 1:43-51
Mary and I are renovating some bathrooms in our house. Well, we’re not actually doing the work—the house would likely fall down if we did! While we’re still in the midst of construction, we’re so happy with the way things are progressing. And if it weren’t for the pandemic, once these bathrooms are finished, in our excitement, we would likely want to show them to friends and neighbors, indeed to all of you. “Come and see our new bathrooms,” we might well say.
If you’ve done house renovations, or gotten a new dog or cat or hedgehog, or planted new rose bushes, who could be surprised if you told the people you love about it, and enthusiastically invited them to “come and see it.” Maybe you want to show off some new furniture or share a new painting you’ve created, or have your spouse come see the TV series you’re bingeing. Come and see—that’s what we say when we’re excited about something and want to share it. It’s fun. And for so many of us, things are better when you share them.
Maybe twenty-five years ago, Mary and I were visiting Block Island off the coast of Rhode Island. I went into a bookstore while Mary waited outside with our two small sons. While I was in the store, a singer’s voice came over the sound system. Her voice was unfamiliar to me, but absolutely mesmerizing. I went to the person at the register and asked whose music they were playing, and they told me it was Eva Cassidy, a captivating folk, soul, blues singer who had recently died of melanoma at the age of thirty-three. I went outside and said to Mary, “Come in here a minute and listen to this singer.” Essentially “Come and see.” And we have been entranced and moved by Cassidy’s music ever since.
Or maybe it’s something bigger, something more significant. You’ve just qualified for the state championships, or you’ve gotten the part you wanted in the school musical or your photograph has been accepted into the art show. “Come and watch the meet,” we might say; or “Come and see the musical”; or “Come and see my photo.” Maybe after years of study, you’ve just earned a new degree. “Come and see my diploma,” we might say; or “Come and see the commencement ceremony.” Or maybe, after years of dating, you decide to marry the love of your life. You want your family and friends to “come and see” the one you’re set to marry. It’s a big deal, and you want to share the occasion.
One of the strains of COVID is that that’s exactly what we can’t do—share these fun and significant events and accomplishments and moments with the people we love. And that can be a huge loss. During this extended pandemic, we can’t say “Come and see.” So there’s much less sharing, and showing people what matters to us. No new restaurants to invite our friends to. No new concerts to attend together.
Near the beginning of John’s gospel, shortly before the episode we just heard, the first two disciples, Andrew and Simon Peter, ask Jesus where he’s staying, and Jesus answers “Come and see” (1:39). Then as the call to follow Jesus of Nazareth comes to two more disciples, Philip and Nathanael, a snarky Nathanael asks Philip if anything good can come out of Nazareth. (This is a little like a local football fan asking if anything good can come out of Ann Arbor or Pittsburgh.) And Philip responds to Nathanael’s sarcastic question, using the same words Jesus has spoken the day before, “Come and see” (1:46).
Philip wants Nathanael to come and see Jesus. Whatever Philip has seen and valued in Jesus, he wants Nathanael to see it, too. He wants Nathanael to know what he himself has come to know in only the nanosecond of time he has spent with Jesus. Come and see.
It’s noteworthy what Philip does, and, just as important, what he doesn’t do, when he talks to Nathanael. What Philip doesn’t do is harangue his friend. He doesn’t tell Nathanael that he needs to see Jesus to keep from going to hell. He doesn’t tell Nathanael that there are any particular requirements he has to pass if he wants to come into Jesus’ presence—there’s no need to quote scripture or show off some moral report card or demonstrate that he’s been “born again.” There are no oughts at all in what Philip says to Nathanael. Only a gentle and kindly offer. That’s it. Philip knows that will be enough: come and see.
So much of the religious landscape in our time involves passing judgment on the faith of others. We see antisemitic signs among the mob at the Capitol. We see Muslim bans. And even, and maybe especially, among Christians, we see litmus tests galore: have you been saved; if so, how; what’s your stance on any number of social and political issues?
Philip is totally uninterested in any of that. He doesn’t care in the slightest whether Nathanael passes some sort of muster. All Philip cares about is that Nathanael encounter the Light of the world. All that matters to Philip is that Nathanael know the depth and richness in his life that Philip has already discovered in his own. That’s it. Evangelism isn’t browbeating or pressuring or scaring someone into accepting some doctrine or other. No. Evangelism, that scary word in mainline Protestant circles, is essentially about serving a figurative meal. As D. T. Niles once pithily put it, “Evangelism is just one beggar telling another beggar where to find bread.” If we’re coercing in any way, we’re way off the mark. If, instead, we’re inviting and embracing and showing—if we’re sharing bread—then we’re very much on target.
The problem in churches like ours, though, is probably not that we’re pressuring people into faith. The problem is much more likely on the opposite end of the spectrum—that we don’t really know how to share the faith we do have. There are lots of possible reasons for our inability or unwillingness to do this. Maybe we’re embarrassed to affirm any sort of faith in this increasingly irreligious culture of ours. A clergy colleague of mine, when someone at the gym asks what he does for a living, says, “I’m in philosophy.” He doesn’t want people to think he’s going to put the squeeze on them. And I suspect, like many of us, he doesn’t really know how to talk about his faith in an inviting way.
Or maybe we don’t share our convictions with others because we have more doubts than faith, and don’t want to go too far out onto a limb in talking about spiritual matters. We don’t know what we think about all the doctrines of the church, so we avoid the subject entirely.
Or maybe we don’t talk about such things because we just don’t have a way to put the sublime into words. It’s hard enough to describe a rainbow or a sunset or the smell of a newborn baby’s neck. It’s harder still to tell someone what it means to adore your beloved. And if it’s so difficult to do those things, how in the world can you possibly convey what it’s like to be smitten by God?
If Philip has misgivings, though, he doesn’t show them. Instead, he finds the perfect tack. He doesn’t cajole, he invites. He doesn’t threaten, he welcomes. He doesn’t lay out the tenets of a creed, with the expectation that Nathanael will sign on the dotted line. He just says to his friend, “Come and see.” Just as you might say, “come and see the Grand Canyon,” “come and see van Gogh’s ‘Starry Night,’” “come and see Eva Cassidy,” so Philip says to Nathanael, “come and see” Jesus.
My fear, in the contemporary church, and my deep suspicion about why churches all over are shrinking, is that we no longer really know how to encounter God’s luminous mystery, what the theologian Rudolf Otto a century ago called the “numinous.” Otto coined a Latin expression for God, the “mysterium tremendum et fascinans,” or in English, the “fearful and fascinating mystery.” We spend precious little time, it seems to me, attending to that mystery. Instead, the primary ways we have of talking in church are by using one of three kinds of important but still lesser languages, the languages of ethics and of doctrine and of church business.
So, for example, with our children, rather than use language of mystery and holiness and light and awe, we tend to use moral language: don’t hit each other; share your toys; be nice. And we convey to our children that this was essentially the entire substance of what Jesus was about. We lead them to think that faith can be reduced to how we treat each other. Ethical language: by itself, not particularly grace-filled.
Or another way we have of framing things: in some corners of the church, doctrine is the dominant language: what dogmas do you adhere to? Virgin birth, or Jesus as the only and exclusive way, or a particular notion of the meaning of Jesus’ death— what we call the atonement—these become the pass/fail test by which people are admitted to the club or not. Doctrinal language: by itself, not particularly transcendent.
And for others of us, what consumes our thought and conversation when it comes to religious matters is the organization itself. What do our bylaws say; should there be term limits; how should we be staffed; what foods should we serve at coffee hour; are the carpets clean? Organizational language: by itself, not particularly revelatory.
So we need to affirm that ethics, God-talk, and church organization all have their place. They’re all important in our journey as followers of Christ. Of course the way we deal with each other matters hugely. We are witnesses, in this culture, to the near vanishing of a sense of how to treat each other. We disagree with each other loudly and harshly. We demonize and scapegoat our supposed enemies. Whole segments of the populace go off the rails in anger, as happened in Washington on the Feast Day of Epiphany. To treat each other the way we so often do is to tear down our common fabric. And, it must be said, it’s to forsake the ways of God. So, yes, we want to teach our children to share and not to hit each other.
Doctrine matters, too. Finding words that express what we believe about God is a way of helping us grasp some of the numinous grace of the Holy One. As one of Federated’s staff members said recently, the church didn’t err when it wrote its creeds; it erred when it stopped writing them. In other words, it’s an ongoing and vital process to try to try to understand something of God’s ineffable mystery.
Church structure and order, too, can enhance our common life. They can prioritize values and streamline processes.
All of these things matter. It’s crucial that we act civilly and that we seek to understand our faith and that we have a church structure that allows our ministries to shine forth. It’s just that none of those things—ethics and doctrine and what we call polity—are really the core. None of them are enough to engender in hungry and searching people any deep sense of what grounds them and settles them and holds them when things are going badly. Philip isn’t telling Nathanael how to act or what to believe or how his synagogue should be organized. He’s telling Nathanael that there is One in whose heart they both live. As the ancient hymn puts it, we are all begotten of the Parent’s heart. We do ourselves no favors if we restrict our understanding of faith to morality or dogma or organizational matters. No. We need to know that never are we left to ourselves. We need to know that in God alone our souls rest (Psalm 62:5). We together need to know the peace that surpasses all understanding (Philippians 4:7), that very peace that leads us to inhabit the dream so eloquently articulated by Martin Luther King, Jr, that dream of unity and sharing and joined hands. That’s what fills us in our deepest longing.
When Brother David Steindl-Rast was a young man, he worked for a summer tending sheep in the Austrian Alps. His experience there was part of what led him, eventually, to become a monk. Because what he found in the mountains, he also found in his vocation as a contemplative. He says that, in both places, what he was able to do was to “listen deeply into silent space” (i am through you so i, p. 52).
This, in a sense, is what we’re beckoned to, as well. When Philip tells Nathanael to come and see, he’s not asking him to become a monk. I suspect what he’s inviting his friend to do is to pay attention to what’s most crucial. He wants Nathanael to “listen deeply into silent space,” and to come and know the One in whose arms he is always held. He wants Nathanael to encounter the One in whom, as the story says, earth and heaven meet. He wants Nathanael to join him in living out that transcendent and holy dream of togetherness.
This is what I want you to see. It’s what I hope you want me to see. And this is what those untold billions who are yearning and longing most need: to know the One in whom all things come together; to encounter the One in whom earth and heaven meet; to hear, first and finally, the benediction that is offered to them and to us all: we are God’s beloved. In us God finds delight. That’s what we most need to know. And it’s what we are beckoned to show to others. Come and see.