You Will See Greater Things.

John 1:43-51.          (January 25, 2015)

I.

            It is now the day after the events we talked about last week, and the fourth day since John had that conversation with those emissaries from Jerusalem with which the gospel begins.  Jesus decides to go to Galilee, probably a couple of day’s walk from where they are, maybe 50 miles. 

            He has just called at least three disciples who are from Galilee, Andrew, Peter, and one who isn’t named.  Before he goes however he finds Philip, who is also from Galilee, and simply invites him to follow.  Philip may be the unnamed disciple Jesus met the day before with Andrew, which would explain his familiarity with Jesus and his quick response. 

            He goes in turn and explains to another man, Nathanael, that they have found the one written about in the Bible, specifically in the law of Moses and the writings of the prophets.  Philip must have known what John meant when he called Jesus the “Lamb of God.”  He was referencing passages in Exodus, Leviticus, and Isaiah, that is, the law and the prophets. 

            But it is interesting that when Andrew goes to Peter, he says, “We have found the Messiah.”  Then when Philip goes to Nathanael, he says, “We have found the one about whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote.”  The way we communicate the good news has to do be appropriate to both the speaker and the one being spoken to.  We have to speak authentically from our own experience and situation; and at the same time we have to speak to the other person where they are. 

            Andrew knows his brother.  He knows that the title “Messiah”, Anointed One, is something that has meaning for both of them.  They had probably discussed it many times.  And Philip apparently knows Nathanael well enough to know not to lead with “Messiah,” but with Scripture.

            This is important because we inside the church don’t always have a clue about how people outside the church hear what we are saying.  Even here in this gospel, if people don’t understand what “sin” is, or what a lamb signified in the Bible, then “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” is incomprehensible to them.  I mean, in advertising today, the word “sin” is a positive selling point!  It means edgy, sexy, risky, and fun!  It is something that only stuffy, clueless, judgmental, repressed, control freaks care about.  And in our experience, lamb is something you find in the meat aisle at the supermarket, and little else.

            If we invite someone to church by telling them we have found the Messiah, the Lamb of God who takes away sin, or the One written about in the Old Testament?  That’s probably not going to be all that effective.  Trust me on this.  What works is speaking from our own experience in normal language.  We’ll see this in chapter 4 with the Samaritan woman.  It has to be real.  It has to be authentic.  And it has to speak to something people already know they need.

II. 

            Even Philip makes an apparent mistake in his invitation to Nathanael.  He gives Jesus’ name and hometown.  He says the one to whom the Scriptures point is “Jesus, Joseph’s son, from Nazareth”.  So while Nathanael may have been willing to listen if it was just a discussion about the Bible, when he finds out that this is about somebody from Nazareth, he just scoffs.  “Can anything from Nazareth be good?”  Nazareth?  Seriously?  A town that full of pagans and foreigners?  Please.  Anyway, the Scriptures only talk about someone coming who is born in Bethlehem.  Not Nazareth, of all places.

            Everybody has their baggage.  For Nathanael, Jesus can be written off because he is from a disreputable place.  And it is the same with us.  We mention the name of Jesus, and people immediately associate that name with a lot of negative experiences they have had.  They assume that nothing good can come out of the church, just like Nathanael assumed nothing good can come out of Nazareth.

            So we have this weight of bad associations to slog through.  First there is the list of historical atrocities with which the church is associated: crusades, pogroms, inquisitions, slavery, the oppression of indigenous peoples, religious wars, witch burning, mind-numbing hypocrisy, corruption, divisions, and so forth. 

            Then there are the even more powerful barriers of people’s actual experiences of churches and church-people who did them serious personal harm.  The epidemic of pedophilia and sexual misconduct; the bigotry about gays; the rejection of divorced people; the ridiculous and selectively enforced rules; the deliberate and intransigent irrationality; the advocacy of flags and guns; the self-righteous cynicism… all of which leads people to scoff like Nathanael: “This Jesus Joseph’s son might be a good guy, but the fact that he comes from ‘Nazareth’, that is, the fact that he comes out of a place, an institution, that in my experience is rotten to the core, means he’s got two strikes against him to begin with, in my book.”

            To his credit, Philip does not then start to defend Jesus or Nazareth.  He does not indulge in the sin of Uzzah who thought he had to protect and save God.  No.  He doesn’t answer Nathanael at all, except to say, “Come and see.”

            Again with the, “Come and see.”  That’s what Jesus says when he calls his first disciples.  Come and have your own experience.  See for yourself.  Interact.  Share.  Have a conversation.  Feel something.

            And that is our invitation as well.  We can’t change somebody’s experience of “Nazareth.”  We can’t make them forget what happened to them or to someone they know.  We can only lead them to a new experience that will hopefully overwhelm and cancel out the former one.

III.

            But that has to happen!  The worst catastrophe would be if the Nathanael came and saw… and all his prejudices, trepidations, fears, and biases were confirmed.

            In the 1960’s the Presbyterian Church embarked upon an advertising campaign.  They hired a cool comedian named Stan Freberg, which would be like getting Craig Ferguson today.  And they produced these hip, wry, funny radio spots.  I still have my dad’s recording of them somewhere.  And they worked!  Young people decided to come and see what these Presbyterians are all about.  They came.  And they saw.  And what they experienced was a church still pretty mired in the hierarchies, bigotries, prejudices, allegiances, and attitudes of the 1950’s.  Few ever came back.

            If we’re going to ask people to come and see, we can’t then bring them to something that only reinforces their most negative stereotypes about us, the church, or even Jesus.  We can’t bring them to something that is boring, out of touch, hypocritical, judgmental, exclusionary, self-righteous, and cold.  Otherwise it will be “I came, I saw, I left, and I’m never going back.”

            Nathanael decides he will come and see Jesus, and while he and Philip are going to find Jesus, Jesus sees them coming.  And when they get closer Jesus exclaims with a smile, “Here is a genuine Israelite in whom there is no deceit.”

            Jesus uses the word “Israelite,” instead of “Jew”.  In the gospel the people termed “Jews” are usually the leaders of the establishment.  They tend not to come off very well.  “Israelite” is a more inclusive term, but it also literally means “one who struggles with God.”  It is the name God gave to Jacob in Genesis after Jacob wrestled with God’s angel.

            So when Jesus sees Nathanael, he sees someone who is really grappling with what it means to be a believer.  He is not pretending to be anything he isn’t; he is not putting anything over on anyone.  He has no pretenses to piety.  He is a true seeker who is dealing honestly with doubt and suspicious of easy, pat, rote, doctrinal answers, even to the point of cynicism, as evidenced by his opening snarky quip about Nazareth.

            But this is the first encounter of Nathanael with Jesus, so he asks Jesus, “How do you know me?”  Do we know each other?  Have we met?  How obvious is it that he is so non-deceitful?  When a stranger knows us it makes us uncomfortable.  We get defensive.  Especially when it is something we might consider flattery.  Our next question is, “Okay, what do you want?”

            I mean, he came with Philip and now he is seeing Jesus, and Jesus starts off with this glad-handing, buttering him up thing that preachers are infamous for.  It raises Nathanael’s suspicions even more.

           

III.

            Jesus answers, “Before Philip called you, I saw you under the fig tree.”  Jesus sees him.

            I found two places in the Hebrew Scriptures where the phrase, “under the fig tree,” shows up.  Both times it is a metaphor for peace, prosperity, hope, and security.  It refers to God’s coming deliverance and liberation, the image for which is when each family will live under their own fig tree and grape vine.  They will not be slaves or tenants on someone else’s land.  They will be home and sustained by God’s blessing symbolized by these life-giving trees.

            For the prophet Micah it means living without fear.  For the prophet Zechariah it means living without guilt.  When Jesus says he saw Nathanael “under the fig tree,” I think it means he had a vision in which he saw Nathanael finally safe, forgiven, free, and blessed; he saw Nathanael delivered of his fear and cleansed of his guilt.  He saw the true, real, essential Nathanael, finally home, “under the fig tree.”

            For the Israelites, which is the term Jesus uses for Nathanael, this liberation, forgiveness, cleansing, and protection used to be accomplished ritually every year in the Temple on the Day of Atonement.  The blood of a goat or lamb which was dedicated to the Lord, who was the true King of Israel, was spread and sprinkled all over the Temple as a way of recovering and reestablishing the membrane of life that connects the people to God and at the same time protects them from God’s awesome holiness.  Remember that blood was life.  If sin is separation from God, this covering of life took away that sin by reestablishing the connection between people and God.  And then the sins of the people were ceremonially placed upon another goat or lamb and driven away into the wilderness, back to the demon Azazel.  Thus in this ritual the people’s fear and guilt were taken away, along with their sin.

            When Nathanael now hears that he has been seen by Jesus as finally living happy at home “under the fig tree,” he suddenly experiences the forgiveness, acceptance, safety, blessing, and liberation this entails.  And he knows Who is the only One capable of accomplishing this.  Only the Son of God, the King of Israel, the Lamb, can do this.

            And Nathanael’s utter lack of deceit, guile, pretense, hypocrisy, even politeness and decency, his bluntness and directness, his brutal honesty and ruthless questioning, his ripping away all facades and his cutting through all self-serving spinning, applied first to himself, and then to everything else, that is, the very things and attitudes that might have brought him into all kinds of grief and trouble would be vindicated, and lifted off of him.  Taken.  Away. 

IV.

            The heart of Christian faith has always been an experience of forgiveness, freedom, release, acceptance, and blessing, that we then try and talk about and identify.  When Nathanael comes into Jesus’ Presence, I think he feels a quality of liberation like a heavy load of suspicion, doubt, and cynicism has been lifted off his shoulders.  Like dense blinders have been taken from his eyes.  To be so fully known and so completely welcomed is something so powerful and profound that only God could do it.  And since Jesus does it, therefore Jesus must be God.

            So Nathanael confesses, “Rabbi, you are God's Son. You are the king of Israel.”  You are the Lamb who restores my soul to God and who removes the consequences of my wrongdoing.  You are the One who sees me “under the fig tree,” in a place of peace, justice, righteousness, and life.  You are the One who sees and shows me my true self and my destiny.  You are the One in Whom I see who I truly am.

            The Lord Jesus is like a butterfly preaching to the caterpillars.  In him we see our future, if we will but assent and be who we were made to be.  He sees what only God can see, which is inside our heart, inside our spiritual DNA, as it were, to our truest and most real selves.  His light penetrates our darkness, and his life restores God’s life in us.

            I assume that at this point Nathanael is rather a mess, having just had his soul turned inside-out.  Picking him up perhaps, Jesus assures him, “Do you believe because I told you that I saw you under the fig tree?  You will see greater things than these!”  Do you trust me now because I revealed your true self and destiny to you?  You will see way bigger things.   

“I assure you that you will see heaven open and God's angels going up to heaven and down to earth on the Human One.”

            Literally, the words are “Son of Humanity” or “Human Son;” most translations say “Son of Man”.  But the point is that all these titles – Word, Light, Life, Lamb of God, Messiah, Son of God – all refer to the same figure whom Jesus now identifies with another title: Son of Man or Human One.  And they are all him.  And because they are all him, and because in him is realized once for all our true humanity, there is a sense now in which we also receive his life.  The channel by which God came to us may also be used for us to reach God. 

            The ladder, the way of the Lord that John comes to make straight, it works in both directions.  God becomes one with us; we may become one with God.  And the ladder is, as Jesus says, the Human One, the Son of Man, that is, himself.  He is God’s way to us; and he is our way to God.

V.

            Jesus Christ says to each one of us.  “I saw you under the fig tree.”  I saw you happy and healthy, blessed, free, and good.  Jesus’ vision of us is as forgiven, loved, healed, and whole.  He made us for life and joy.  Now it is up to us to live into that vision.  The world is not only a safe place, but a place where we can grow into our greatest potential, and realize the immense gifts God has given to each one of us.

            Then he says that we will see even greater things.  For our life extends and reaches beyond even that picture of redemption, release, and renewal.  We will see not just ourselves under our blessed fig trees, but the redemption, release, and renewal of the whole universe.  In him we will see behind the scenes, under the hood, as it were, to the schematics and blueprints of the way creation really works.  We will see that there is this permanent interaction and exchange between the Creator and the creation.  That all things are being held together in God’s love, epitomized by God’s living Word, Jesus Christ.

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What Are You Looking For?

John 1:35-42.  (January 18, 2015) 

I.

            It is now the third day since the story began with John’s affirmation to the delegation from Jerusalem that he is the voice crying in the wilderness to make straight the way of the Lord.  And it is the day after John testified about how he saw the Spirit descend on Jesus, causing him to identify Jesus as “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”

              John is standing with two of his disciples when Jesus walks by.  John looks at Jesus and exclaims: “Look, the Lamb of God!”  And the two disciples of John immediately follow after Jesus.

            When Jesus notices these two guys following him, he turns around and he asks them this basic question.  “What are you looking for?”  And he’s not just asking them this question, but he is asking us as well.  What are you looking for?  What are we looking for? 

            These are the first words of Jesus in this gospel.  And the Lord is saying that we have to get a grip on what we are seeking, what we are expecting, what we want and hope for, and we have to do that first, before anything he says or does is going to make any sense to us.

            Because very often what we are looking for will determine what we will find.  Until we are conscious of what we are looking for, we will not find the truth; we will just see what we want to see, hear what we want to hear, and have all our selfish agendas thoroughly affirmed.

            The important thing is that we recognize this at the outset.  We have to become conscious of what we are really looking for.  Once we see that, we will be better able to see as well when we are just feeding our own self-image, and reinforcing our own personal defense mechanisms, which means we are not seeing the truth at all.  We are only seeing what we want to see, not what is really out there.

            The first step in being able to see the truth is becoming aware of our own preconceptions, our prejudices, our blinders, our biases, our projections, and our sin – that is, our ego-centric, personality-driven way of looking at the world, and its devastating effects on the world.  And this is really hard to do.

            Because it is easy for us to hear Jesus as a kind of salesperson who is asking what we are looking for so he can get it for us.  As if he were in customer-service.  As if he were a genie granting us three wishes.  As if he were here to give us what we want, and if he doesn’t we will find someone, some other religion, some other provider, who will.  I mean, that’s our expectation as consumers.  We shop around for the best deal. 

            Ultimately, the things we are all looking for are good: we seek peace, security, freedom, happiness, health, good relationships, and we want these things for everyone, at least in theory.  The problem is that we can’t get there easily from here.  To get to these things requires a kind of transformation of our perceptions and our consciousness, and transformation means breaking our egos.  That’s why Jesus says we have to take up our crosses, that’s why so much of what he says is deeply challenging to our cherished self-image and our habitual ways of acting. 

            These things begin to emerge in our lives when we give up what we want, change what we are looking for, and reshape our desires according to what God wants.

II.

            The two disciples of John do not answer Jesus directly.  He asks what they are looking for, and they don’t say.  But to some degree it is obvious. They are looking for the One John indicated as “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”  They are looking for the forgiveness, freedom, and life implied by the image of the Lamb of God.

            What the two disciples do ask is where Jesus is staying.  They want to be with him where he is.  Jesus replies to them with an invitation, “Come and see.”  If we are looking for God’s living, saving Presence, we have to be in relationship with the Lamb of God.

            In order to find what we are looking for, what our hearts truly seek, we have to set aside what our egos have convinced us to look for.  We have to realize that what we are looking for cannot be simply provided like a commodity, measured out, packaged, and sold.  It can only be found in relationship, in community.  It is not information for us to hear or read; it is not a doctrine or a creed to be memorized; it is not something we can simply download to our hard-drives, or access from the cloud when we need it.  It is not an object at all; it is something to be experienced between people in interaction, in conversation, in coming to where Jesus is staying, seeing how he lives, and paying attention to what he chooses to rest in and surround himself with.

            The Greek word here gets translated as “staying.”  This word will become important in this gospel.  It is more often translated as “remain,” or “abide,” or “wait.”  John just used this word when he described the Spirit as coming down in the form of a bird and “remaining” on Jesus.

            This gospel is interested in what is stable, solid, grounded, and reliable, in a changing, chaotic, swirling, violent, and stormy world.  We stay, we remain, we abide, we sit, in those places where we find nourishment, like a bee or a butterfly sticks with the flower with the good pollen or nectar.  We do not get swept along by every fad, or bullied by every worldly power; we remain or stay freely with what feeds and enriches and empowers us.  We remain in the place where we find life and light.

            So the disciples aren’t just asking out of curiosity to see Jesus’ accommodations.  They want to know in what Jesus is grounded, where he has decided to sit, what Word he has immersed himself in.

            And the only way to know this is, as Jesus invites us, to “come and see.”  This is not theory; this cannot be communicated in words alone.  We must first come – that is we have to put ourselves in Jesus’ presence, we have to move out of where we were and relocate to be with him, we have then to stay with him in relationship, in the community he gathers.  And that is where and how and when we will see – that is, we will perceive and experience who he is and what he does.

III.

            The gospel goes on to tell us that “they went and saw where he was staying, and they remained with him that day.”  That means these two disciples are seeking the Lamb of God, the source of God’s life, forgiveness, and freedom.  They come to Jesus and in relationship with him they perceive the truth in which he is centered.  And they begin also to ground and anchor themselves in his truth and life.  They enter into community with him; they sit with him; they immerse themselves in his reality and identity.

            The Presence and charisma of Jesus is so visible and powerful that simply being with him, listening to him, having a conversation with him, immediately transforms these disciples of John into disciples of Jesus.  It is only the beginning of their journey with him; but it is the beginning.

            Near the end of the day, one of these two disciples, Andrew, goes to find his brother, whose name is Simon, to tell him “We have found the Messiah!”  They were looking for the Lamb of God; and they have found the Messiah.  And he brings Simon to Jesus.  Jesus takes one good look at him and says that from now on he is going to be called Peter, the Rock. 

            A rock is also an image of stability, immovability, solidity, and constancy.  A rock kind of embodies this idea of remaining, staying, waiting, and abiding.  This is not to say that rock doesn’t change or move at all.  But a rock does stand firm in the face of all kinds of tempests and storms.  In the other gospels Jesus uses the image of a rock as something steady and reliable enough to build a house upon, as opposed to the shifting and unstable sand.

            Peter does not end up being the absolutely solid rock; later in the gospel he denies Jesus three times.  But then he does receive forgiveness and Jesus still makes him the chief shepherd of the early church.  And that’s the thing: the Lamb of God is about forgiveness; forgiveness is the stability of God.  The renewing love of God seen in Jesus’ sacrifice of himself is the constancy of God in which God’s people remain, stay, rest, and abide.  The one thing we can absolutely depend on God for, is to love us infinitely.

            So we should not take all this talk of stony stability to mean that God is hard, harsh, unbending, or uncaring.  The Lamb of God is the One who gives up his life for us and gives God’s life to us.  The Lamb is about freedom, forgiveness, and life.  He is the Word, the light of the world.  He is God’s infinite love always being poured out.  It is that love that we can rely on always.  It is that love that never changes.  It is the constant stream of God’s being and goodness that is always flowing into the world, animated by God’s breath, resonating to the frequency of God’s Word, and thus becoming real.

IV.

            That pouring and flowing, that shining and glowing, that perpetual arrival and coming into the world means that God’s life is always spreading.  It is not confined to a few.  John has to tell Andrew and the other disciple; Andrew has to tell Peter.  The gospel itself is written to strengthen the faith of disciples, and encourage others to trust in the story of God’s coming into the world.

            Like these early disciples, we too are called to these three things: to look for, remain in, and proclaim the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, Jesus the Messiah.  This work is imperative, because the sin of the world is killing the world.  It is killing creation by greed, gluttony, over consumption, pollution, and distorting the delicate chemical balances in atmosphere and ocean.  It is killing people by war and injustice, torture and slavery. 

            We look for the Lamb as One among us, finding him in the world he made, indicated by the Spirit in nature.  We look for the One to whom the Scriptures point, especially in the prophets of whom the last was John.  We look for One who will baptize, who will immerse people and creation in tht energizing bath of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of love, who enlivens all things, and who connects all creation together, who is the breath and Wisdom of God bringing life to all.  We look for God’s Presence within and among and around us, in Jesus Christ, and in the things God’s has made.

            We remain in the Lamb by being “rooted and grounded in love,” as Paul says.  By taking upon ourselves his self-giving life, as a witness to the way God is always giving life to the creation.  We remain in the Lamb by our lives of forgiveness, gentleness, healing, peacemaking, and goodness.  We remain in the Lamb by gathering in his name into this community of peace, characterized by acceptance and welcome, honesty and courage, where we live the truth of God’s love with each other.

            And finally we proclaim the Lamb of God by our invitation to others: “We have found the Messiah!”  We have found in the world the Presence of the One who made, and is always making the world!  We have found the One who has the power to take away our human selfishness and violence, to wash us of our defiled and depraved hatreds and fears, and to free us from the chains of our addiction to destruction and disorder.

V.

            May our lives and our little gathering reflect and express these three values as we move forward.  May we find ways of organizing ourselves so that we are always looking for God’s saving Presence, always remaining steadfast in our trust of him, and always reaching out to welcome others with the good news of God’s love for the world revealed in his Son, the Lamb of God, Jesus Christ.

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Lamb of God.

John 1:19-34.  (January 11, 2015)

I.

            We have already met this man named John.  He is the witness, testifying to the light of God, who is coming into the world.  We heard about him last week when we read the Prologue to this gospel.  He’s very important.  But his importance is not so much about who he is, as it is about the One to whom he points. 

            Leaders of the Judeans send some priests to ask him who he is.  They want to stick him in a category.  I guess we always want to categorize people.  We want to place them in a defined box because it is much easier to deal with a box than with an actual human being.

            We still do this all the time.  We look at the titles, the associations, the education, the race, the looks and language, the background of people.  Then we can dismiss them as part of a category.  If we can argue with them about their faithfulness to the category, then we don’t have to deal with them as people.  So this delegation from the leaders wants to know who John is.

            They come with a convenient list of categories he can choose from, and they go down this list.  “Are you the Messiah?”  To that question, John says, “No.”  And the gospel here makes a point of reiterating John’s denial of this particular title.  “Are you Elijah?” they ask.  I mean, after all, he is baptizing in the same wilderness where Elijah had lived, and where Elijah had been taken up into heaven by God, accompanied by a fiery chariot.  In the other gospels they make a point of saying how John even dressed like Elijah.  But “No,” says John, “I am not Elijah.”  “Are you ‘the prophet’ from Deuteronomy 18:15?”  “Nah.” he replies. “I’m not that guy either.”  “Then who are you?” they ask.

            And then John recites some verses from the beginning of the 40^th chapter of the book of the prophet Isaiah, about how he is this voice crying in the wilderness, “Make the Lord’s path straight.”  We looked at that passage a few weeks ago, you may recall.  It is where the great prophet of the exile is proclaiming the homecoming of God’s people by talking figuratively about God blasting a highway across the desert from Babylon to Jerusalem.  It was the miraculous deliverance of the people.  And by referencing those verses, John is saying that he too is about announcing and preparing for a spectacular act of deliverance by God that is coming in the immediate future.

            Only here, it is not so much that the people will hit the road and process back home to Jerusalem.  It’s more like building a highway on which God is going to come tooling down to us.  The people have already been home for 500 or so years since the exile.  John’s point is that it’s not that the people are going anywhere, but now God is entering our world and our life in a new and very direct way.  The light, and life, and Word of God, is coming into the world.

II.

            The inquisitors from Jerusalem still really want to catch John on something because he is a distraction and is even perceived as a possible threat by the establishment back in Jerusalem.  They have to concoct some kind of rationale why they should warn people about him and advise them not to make the trip down to the river to get involved with him.

            “So,” they say, “if you’re not the Messiah, or Elijah, or the prophet, why are you ritually immersing people in the Jordan River?  Why are you baptizing?”

            John replies that immersing people in the Jordan will somehow reveal to Israel the presence of the One who is coming after him, who was also before him.  In other words, this is about being able to see the Son of God, the light and life of God, when he comes.

            In a sense, he’s kind of bringing people through this ritual of new birth, or washing, and the effect is to clear their vision so they can see what God is about to do.  Baptism is to wash away our shortsightedness and dissolve the obstructing cataracts, so we can see that “the true light the shines on all people was coming into the world.”  We can see the true Source of our life, which is the Word of God, God’s speaking the universe into being.  We come to see, in truth, that everything is filled with God’s Word and Spirit.

            I think John is trying to wake people up!  He is doing something unusual and extraordinary to them, hoping that this action will spark in them some profound sense of self-awareness, the end of which is that they discover that their true Father is God.  That is, their beginning, their origin, their truest identity, comes from the God who creates the whole universe by speaking the Word.

            Baptism brings people from one life, under the power of the flesh, the ego, the personality, and the imperial authorities ruling the world, to another life in which we know the Word, and light and life of God in the world.  It startles and jars us out of our complacency.  It is intended to shock people awake, and to open their eyes and so they can see the One who is coming into the world, who is already in the world.  Then people will begin to realize who they truly are, and whose creation this truly is.

            Baptism is a kind of second birth.  In our first birth, we came physically into the world, but we quickly fell into the bondage to the flesh, our ego-centric fears and desires, and the personality and political structures generated by this ignorance.  In our second birth, we awaken to a larger, deeper, higher presence of God in the world as our Father, our origin, our beginning, our Source.

            After we are baptized, even when it happens to us as infants, the idea is that we will be nurtured and loved into seeing our world from the perspective of children of God.  Therefore, we come to see that the world is a safe and well-stocked place designed for our joy and blessing.  We see the world as the place where God emerges to us in the goodness of everything. 

III.

            John admits that, at first, even he didn’t know who Jesus was.  He did not immediately see Jesus as the light, the Word, the Son of God.  I think that is a remarkable confession on John’s part.  It means that God’s light and life is still not readily identifiable.  Something else has to happen for us to see who Jesus really is.

            John says he was instructed by God to be open and awake and aware and actively looking for the signs of his arrival, everywhere.  It’s that character of openness and expectation, in which we know that God is here and we’re just waiting to see and welcome God into our lives, that has to be our attitude as well.  That’s what baptism is supposed to enable us to see.

            If we were blind and ignorant before, lost in the darkness of our ego-centric, personality-driven fears and desires, the shock of baptism is supposed to open us to new possibilities.  We are to have this attitude of looking for and expecting to find wonderful and good things in our world.  Instead of being dead “resources,” objects and commodities for our exploitation, creation comes alive again as a way to experience the Creator. 

            So the next day, John sees Jesus walking toward him.  And John does recognize him now.  Something remarkable happened in the meantime.  Jesus comes to John for baptism.  And when he emerges out of the water, a dove flies out of the sky and lands right on Jesus! John decides that this is the sign of the Holy Spirit that he had been told to wait for.  God tells John to wait for a sign of the Spirit; and the sign of the Spirit comes from creation itself, in the form of a bird.  A creature verifies and identifies the presence of the Word through whom all things were made.   The creation testifies to the presence of the Creator.  That’s what we have to look for.  That’s why our eyes have been opened in baptism.  That’s where we will see the Spirit: in creation.

            So now, when John sees Jesus, he declares to whomever happens to be there listening, “Look!  The Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!”  

            When John says that Jesus takes away sin, he means that Jesus removes the blindness, and ignorance on the part of people that result in selfish attitudes like greed, gluttony, lust, envy, anger, and the other sins, that, in turn, produce destructive and violent actions.  When we engage in these kinds of actions, we miss the mark, we err, we go astray. 

            Jesus removes the world’s sin by coming into the world as the light of God that illumines all things.  In him we see clearly so we don’t keep missing the mark, which is what sin literally means.  He becomes the mediator, the lens, the window, through whom we perceive accurately who God is.      

IV.

            When John calls Jesus “the Lamb of God,” he is drawing our attention to the three main passages from the Hebrew Scriptures by which Jesus’ disciples came to understand who he is and what he does.  The most obvious one is the Passover Lamb from Exodus, whose blood preserves the people from death.  Then there are the two goats of the Day of Atonement ritual in Leviticus: the blood of one is used to sanctify the Temple, and the other literally “takes away the sin” of the people when it is sent out into the wilderness to the demon Azazel.  And finally, there is the Servant of God in Isaiah, who endures violence on the people’s behalf.  “Lamb of God” means all this and more.

            Jesus Christ fulfills all these ways in which God saves, liberates, redeems, forgives, and delivers the people.  He comes to embody and enact and accomplish in himself, in the life of God extended into the life of the creation and people, the salvation of the world.

            The Lamb of God takes away sin by being himself the connection, the interface, the membrane, the open door between the Creator and the creation, between God and the world, between Spirit and humanity.  The Lamb reveals the Creator to be all about life and renewal and liberation.  And the Lamb does this by showing that the Source of life in the creation is the continual and constant self-emptying, self-giving, sacrificial offering of the Creator.

            This self-emptying begins when God speaks the Word through whom all things are made.  It continues when God sends the Word even into the dark heart of human ego-centricity and selfishness, even into the flesh, challenging it with his selflessness and sacrifice. 

            And it continues still when people wake up to the goodness of creation under the Fatherhood of our common Creator, and follow the Lamb themselves by giving of their own lives for the good of all.  Then we become the lambs and he becomes our Good Shepherd.  This is the way we love one another as God in Christ has loved us, when we give our lives for our friends, an act which makes everyone in the whole world our friend.

            Today we learn that we follow Jesus, not because he is so successful and powerful, and not because of his wealth and popularity.  But we follow Jesus because he is the One in whom we the true Spirit of the Creator is  revealed.  He is the One to whom the creation itself testifies, as seen in the dove.  He is the One who reveals that God’s love and goodness are being continually poured out and offered up, as we see in the Lamb.

            The Son of God is the Word of God, always coming into the world, always giving his life for the world, always giving his life to the world.  And we have that life, the very life of God, when we follow him by becoming lambs ourselves, and letting God’s life flow as well through us.

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Why Follow Jesus?

John 1.1-18.  (January 5, 2015)

I.

            Why follow Jesus? 

            Why be a disciple of Jesus Christ?  Why place your trust in him?  Why associate with other people seeking to be disciples of Jesus?  Why would we want to encourage others to join is in following Jesus?  Why is this more important than anything else in our lives?  Why is following Jesus a matter of life and death for us, and for everyone, and for the whole creation? 

            The Gospel of John is written to answer this basic set of questions.  It begins with the same words with which the whole Bible begins: “In the beginning.”  But the Bible isn’t offering speculation about some point in history.  This is not a scientific study of where matter and energy originated.  We are not trying to satisfy our curiosity here.  “In the beginning” refers to the basic foundational principles and realities and truth on which everything else is founded.  What is at the bottom of it all on which we can absolutely rely?  What is everything made of?  What am I made of?  Who am I, and what is my relationship to everything else?

            These are important questions.  They are the most important questions.  We all answer them for ourselves even if we’re not conscious of it.  Everyone alive has answered these questions.  We all have a basic understanding of who we are, what the world is, and what our relationship to the world is.  Each of us has an understand of what is “in the beginning.”

            Unfortunately, most of us proceed in life as if “in the beginning” was what we actually experienced in our beginning, our birth, when we were flushed out of self-sufficient climate-controlled paradise into a cold world where we were radically vulnerable, dependent, and needy.  Which means that what most of us have in the beginning is some sense of what we lost, what we don’t have, what we didn’t get, what we aren’t getting, what we need, what we lack.  And this happens no matter how perfect and attentive our parents were.

            Seeing the world as a dangerous, unsafe, threatening place, we will act accordingly mainly out of fear.  We will see and treat others as competitors and enemies.  We will try and grab as much as we can for ourselves by any means necessary because it could all get taken away.  We will connive and manipulate our world and the people in it in order to get what we need: food, shelter, comfort, affection, appreciation, respect, offspring, power, money, fame, whatever…. 

            Because we think this way, various other forces in our lives start to presume to fill up that emptiness and provide for those needs we experienced in our beginning.  It starts out with our ego generating our personality as a means of coping with and managing life in a hostile or indifferent world.  After that, we develop other institutions to depend on, like the State and the Market.  We depend on family, tribe, race, nation; we develop religious and philosophical loyalties.  And we come to rely and trust in those things in order to survive.

            Our existence collapses into the selfishness and violence, injustice and inequality, suffering and grief that now characterize the world as we know it.  

II.

            That’s the world the author of the gospel of John lives in as well.  In 2000 years not much has really changed except that now our ability to wreak havoc on the planet and people is exponentially greater.  And that is why following Jesus today is far more urgent than ever before in human history.

            The tragedy is that we got off on the wrong foot when we decided how to answer the question about what happened “in the beginning.”  If we decide that in the beginning was a disaster, and we spend our lives in emergency/crisis mode, trying to knit back together a shattered mess, then we will live like humans mostly live now.

            But what if we had a better understanding of what really happens “in the beginning”?  What if we were able to realize the truth, that our beginning was not a tragic loss leaving a giant hole that we have to fill by hook or by crook?  What if we are able to imagine instead that “in the beginning” is a loving Creator’s act of magnificent, spectacular, infinite blessing?  We have not been dumped into a desert of competition and scarcity, but we have emerged into a beautiful garden containing more than enough for everyone to live happy and satisfied lives.

            That is what the Bible says in Genesis.  In the beginning God starts talking and as God talks things happen.  The universe is made, ordered, set in motion, fully stocked, and blessed.  Human beings are spoken into existence as part of this precipitation or crystallization of God’s communication.  The universe is the living embodiment of God’s Word and breath, and we are born nestled and cherished and profoundly held by God in the supportive web of everything that God says.

            That story, however beautiful and true, is too abstract and theoretical for humans to completely get it.  Some do.  And the Hebrew Scriptures recount their stories.  But human fear and violence spawned a world of darkness and death that even twisted these good stories into fodder for their own greed, injustice, inequality, and ignorance.  By the time of Jesus the blessed and God-breathed Torah was thoroughly perverted into a tool for oppression by religious, economic, and political elites.

            God’s Word kept proceeding into the world, not just as crystallized in creation or in words written on papyrus, vellum, or paper.  The Word had to become uniquely present with, within, and among human beings; the Word had to become “flesh.”  The wall of separation between humans and God had to be dissolved.  God had to get into the twisted, distorted human heart. 

III. 

            When the text says that the Word became “flesh”, it doesn’t just mean that the Word became a material, living, human body, that the Word became the same meat, cells, sinews, tissue, organs, of which we are made.  It means that of course… but it could be argued that Genesis is at least implying that as well. When God speaks people into being the Word is also “becoming” human beings, just as the Word had already become animals, birds, fish, plants, earth, stars, moon, sun, and light.  But it means more than that.

            The gospel uses the loaded term, “flesh” for a reason.  The Apostle Paul uses the same word to talk about the force in human life that draws us away from God.  He says we may follow the Spirit, or breath, of God, or we may continue to be pushed away from God by the demands of our “flesh”.

            This has led to a great deal of destructive error over the centuries, where people thought God hated our material bodies, which had therefore to be punished.  But that’s not what “flesh” means at all.  

            “Flesh” is more like our word, “ego.”  Flesh is the power of selfishness, self-centeredness, self-righteousness, and self-sufficiency, that expresses our primal fear and sours into the violence and inequalities that characterizes sinful human existence.  Yes there is a physical element to it which is expressed in terms of sins like gluttony and lust.  But the power of the flesh is deeper than this; it is what leads us to such destructive behaviors.

            God is already present in us simply because we are part of the good creation.  But there is a part of us that we have shoved God out of, where we have attempted to build our own personalities without God, relying only on ourselves.  That is our ego, or our “flesh.” 

            That’s what God becomes in John 1.  It is imperative for God to become flesh because the power of the flesh – that is, these human, ego-centric, personality-driven, hyper-selfish, acquisitive, extractive, objectifying, destructive impulses – were, and are, in danger of wrecking the creation entirely.  This whole manufactured edifice of the flesh in our souls is the root cause of all the suffering in the world. 

            One of the great mottos of the early church is that “God saves what God becomes.”  God, in order to save creation, had to become a part of creation; indeed, God had to become that part of creation that was like a virus, infecting, distorting, and killing everything in its path, beginning with its hosts: us.  This is what Paul means when he says in 2 Corinthians, “God caused the one who knew no sin to be sin for our sake so that through him we might become the righteousness of God.”

            “The Word became flesh.”  “Those who believed in his name, he authorized to become God’s children.”   Another great motto of the early church is that, in Christ, “God became human so that human beings might become God.”  He became what we are so that we might become what he is.

IV.

            Because God takes on and becomes sin and flesh, God becomes visible.  “We have seen his glory.”  “It is God the only Son, who is at the Father’s side, [who] has made God known.”  The light dawns in the darkness.  Life sprouts in the realm of death.  If human sinfulness was like a virus infecting creation, Christ is like a virus infecting that virus.  He brings God’s radiant light into our darkest places.  He brings God’s breath of new life into our most decrepit, rotten, decomposed, and destructive places.  And he transforms them because he is the Word of God’s creativity.

            We know from the other gospels that Jesus’ early life was anything but safe and comfortable.  In one gospel he is born in a stable; in another he has a king sending soldiers to kill him!  Yet he emerges into adulthood “full of grace and truth” because he understands who his real Father is.  He knows his life to be grounded far deeper than these tumultuous circumstances of his birth and infancy.  He knows he comes from God; he knows God is his Father. 

            This means he can inhabit our sin/flesh, he can take on our ego-centricity, and not be perverted by it.  It does not disfigure him.  It does not make him turn to violence or selfishness.  Knowing that God is his Father, God is his beginning, means that he knows no fear of anything earthly.  And knowing no fear, he does not react to threats with destructive actions.

            A key verse here is where it says that “those who did welcome him, those who believed in his name, he authorized to become God's children, born not from blood, nor from human desire or passion, but born from God.”  Trusting in him, following him, believing in him, means realizing that God is also our Father.  It is something we pray every day.  And yet we are so slow to realize the significance of what we are saying.

            Because if we really understand and know that the Creator God is our Father, our origin, our beginning, our Source… then we have no fear either.  Fear is driven out of us by the perfect love of God.  We become, not rejects from paradise who have to fight for every scrap of goodness, but new, unique expressions in the good creation of God’s goodness and love.

            As God sent him, so he sends us.  As he loved us so we are to love one another.  Now we bear the Word of creativity into a sterile world.  Now we shine the light of knowledge into a world of ignorance.  Now, into a world that careening into death, life blooms and grows in us and through us. 

V.

            And he gives us a calling, which we will hear in the rest of the gospel, which is to be the Word, light, and life in our world, in his name.  Why follow Jesus?  Because to follow anything or anyone else is the path of death and darkness.  Because following him is the path of true joy, in which our fear is banished and our suffering overcome.  Because to follow him is to become who we truly are as God created us.  Because to follow him is to live in a world that is literally made of God’s light and love.

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Not About Architecture.

2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16.Luke 1:26-38.Advent 4.

I.

One day King David has a great idea.  He decides he should build a temple for the Lord.  At the time David has this idea, he himself is living in a fine, new palace in Jerusalem.  God, however, still dwelt in the same old tent that they had used during the people’s wanderings, and then during the conquest of Canaan. 

God had always been worshiped, according to God’s command, in a portable tabernacle made of tents, awnings, and curtains, all draped on a wooden framework.  When David moved into Jerusalem and the people settled down to a more urban and less nomadic existence, it apparently did not occur to anyone that God should live in a house of stone and wood as well.

David’s idea might have been a little dangerous.  I have this perverse fascination with the obscure story of Uzzah.  When the Ark of the Covenant was being moved into Jerusalem, Uzzah was assigned to walk in the parade alongside the cart carrying the Ark.  When he sees that the cart was being seriously jostled by the bumpy ride on the cobblestones, he thinks the Ark is in danger of falling off.  So he lifts his hand to steady it... and God strikes him dead on the spot. 

The meaning I get from that story is that God doesn’t need us, or anyone, to help, assist, provide for, protect, defend, or otherwise “handle” God.  God is God and God will do what God wants without our aid, thank you very much.  And if any of you out there think to take it upon yourself to be God’s protector, defender, or helper, as if God needed us and could not help God’s own self, you have the example of Uzzah as a warning.  God does not need any favors or help from us.

So, David, who witnessed the Uzzah thing, might have had some serious trepidation when he came up with this idea that God should have a real house and that he, David, should take upon himself the task of building it.  This idea does not come from the Lord.  David thinks it up himself.  I wonder if David doesn’t worry that he might get the Uzzah treatment for imagining it is his job to provide a new home for God.

Maybe he feels guilty about living in a palace while God lives in a tent.  But a tent is what God commanded them to make and a tent is where God still lives, apparently without complaint.  No new commands have come down requiring that God have a building to live in.

David sees that times have changed.  A nomadic people had become an urban people.  Shepherds had become farmers.  The people who had lived in tents for generations, moving about the wilderness with their flockes, now live in stone houses. 

Shouldn’t we expect God to change as well?  Shouldn’t God’s dwelling reflect the lifestyle of the people?  Does God have to keep living in this old-fashioned, obsolete tent?  Does he have to keep reminding them of their old, former life?  Is it not even a veiled (so to speak) criticism of their sophisticated, new, settled life?

II.

We live in a time of change as well.  We may not be transitioning from one completely different economic paradigm to another, like the Israelites were going from being nomadic shepherds to urban farmers.  But we are moving from an industrial to an information economy, they say.  We are moving from the Modern way of looking at things to what is called the “Post-modern,” because that future is so undecided that we can’t even tell what to call it yet. 

The church is in transition as well, as we move from being in an overtly “Christian” culture to one in which there are many different stories, religions, and ethnicities none of them privileged like the Anglo-Saxon Christian one used to be.  We do not have the influence or the clout or the impact we used to have. 

And nowhere is this more acute than for “mainline” Protestants.  All of our denominations — Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Reformed, Baptists — have lost huge numbers of adherents in the past 50 years. 

And then there are the social changes: changes in the family, relationships, parenthood, sexuality, divorce, mobility; and economic changes: remember when if you worked for a big corporation you were set for life?

What do we want from God at times like these?  Do we want God to stay the same as ever, our steady, immoveable bedrock, the unchanging One upon whom we can depend no matter what?  Or do we want God to somehow change with us, becoming relevant to our pressing needs, fears, desires, and aspirations?  Or do we somehow want both?

For David it was all about architecture.  Should God live in a tent, or a building?  What kind of God do we want?  One that lives in a beautiful, functional structure like this one?  Or one that lives in a church that looks like a medieval fortress, emphasizing how God is our rock and defender?  Or a God that lives in a building barely distinguishable from a Wal-Mart,?  Or does God live in an inconspicuous modernistic building that looks more like a doctors’ office complex, like the church I used to serve (and where my wife now serves) in Martinsville?

There are other examples as well.  But my question is, in a time of great change, where and how should God be present to us?  In the past or in the present?  Like us or different from us?  The houses we build for God reflect what we want and need from God.  They rarely express what God wants.  They proclaim what we think God should be about among us.  God is about memory or relevance, protection or engagement, power or simplicity, majesty or intimacy.

And we need to be very careful we do not fall into Uzzah’s trap.  As if God needs us and our architecture to help God do God’s job.

III.

After David has his idea, and tells the prophet Nathan about it, Nathan is at first quite affirming.  “God is with you, if you feel led to build a temple for God, knock yourself out, Dave.”

But then God comes to Nathan in a dream and says, basically, “Did I ask for a temple?  Have I ever asked for a temple?  Have I ever expressed displeasure with my living arrangements?  NO!  When I want a physical house of stone and cedar I will let you know.  Until then I am content to live in my tent.”

Buildings, says God, are not all that important.  What is important is that, as God says: “I will appoint a place for my people Israel and will plant them, so that they may live in their own place, and be disturbed no more; and evildoers shall afflict them no more....  Your house and your kingdom shall be made sure for ever before me; your throne shall be established for ever.”

Not the physical house, but the spiritual “house” is important.  Not the bricks and mortar but the relationships, loyalties, mission, connections, and the love, binding people together are important.  These are the main things.  Christians understand the “place” and the “house” and the “kingdom” and the “throne” to be moral and spiritual things.  Physical things can be destroyed.  They are subject to weather and insects and birds and animals, and wear and tear.  Fire, flood, earthquake, theft, even an economic downturn... all of these are liabilities for physical buildings.

In my other job I have to read a lot of session minutes.  Sometimes, after reading some of these, I get the depressing feeling that we are not gatherings of Christian believers so much as managers and maintainers of buildings.  Some sessions tend to spend more time on the physical plant than on anything else, believe me.

And yet Christianity was, at the beginning, considered a somewhat anti-Temple movement.  The main charges against Jesus and Stephen had to do with their statements against the Temple.  And Christians did not even really have buildings specifically for worship until the 3^rd or 4^th century.  We worshiped for hundreds of years without buildings at all!

The apostle Paul understands “temple” to refer to Jesus Christ and his people and even their bodies.  The community is the temple.  That is where the Spirit of God dwells.  God is present in the gathering of the believers, no matter where that happens.  God is present in the whole creation as well, which Scripture clearly teaches. 

This is the place that God appoints for the people, where they may live without disturbance.  God’s house and kingdom is established in all the Earth, under David’s descendant, Jesus.  In his incarnation he makes the whole place holy.  He makes the whole place a sacrament.  He is present everywhere.

IV.

If anything, God is critical of all our attempts to box in, define, shape, protect, limit, determine, or control God.  This goes for our buildings as well as for our theologies, our liturgies, our moralities, our histories and memories, our hopes and desires.  God works against and continually bursts out of our architecture.  Our buildings and theologies tell us more about what God isn’t, than what God is. 

The angel Gabriel says that the child Mary is to bear “will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David.  He will reign over the house of Jacob for ever, and of his kingdom there will be no end.”  His kingdom has no end, no limits, no walls, no boundaries.  His kingdom — his commonwealth — is everywhere.

Jesus says that the hour is coming when we will not worship God only in this place or that place.  The hour is coming and is now here in him when we will worship the Father in spirit and truth. “God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”

God is not confined or defined by our constructions.  It is not our job to manufacture boxes for God to live in.  It is our job to be defined and confined by God’s Word and will.  It is our job to live God’s love, peace, and justice everywhere, with everyone.

Look for those places.  Especially in this season when we think we know these stories, and we have all the carols memorized, and we cling with particular ferocity to our traditions. 

God does not dwell in our containers.  God lives in our hearts when our hearts expand to embrace the whole creation.  This is why God becomes human in Jesus Christ.  In him God inhabits the creation, God becomes matter, flesh and blood, cells and molecules.  Not to be contained by them, but to fill them with the infinite.

It is so with us, we who claim to be his disciples, his people, his extended body on the Earth.  We have this gift not to wrap in a box however beautiful, but to let shine like glory everywhere. 

May we be that shining.  May we be the love of God we know in Jesus, and his peace, and his joy, and his justice, loose and shining and working in the world.  May this reality shine in us and through us in everything we do and say, everything we imagine and think.  So that these stories are not left as nostalgic boxes in which we think we have God contained, but as powerful bursts of transforming energy, bringing life and light to the world.

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