|
“Come and see…Follow me…” Five simple words communicating a lifetime of lively spiritual journeys! In these five words, this man of few words holds out to some of his first disciples and to us a way of living that promises to fill life with meaning and purpose, as well as with challenge and direction. Come and see…follow me. When those first disciples heard and followed those five words, life for them changed forever.
In his Lectionary Commentary, author Charles L. Campbell writes, that today’s reading from the Gospel of John is very different from last week’s text from Matthew about the Baptism of Jesus. Last week, the sky opened, the Spirit descended, and the voice of God testified about Jesus as “beloved,” “God’s son,” “the one with whom God is pleased.” This week, we move from divine words to human testimony, as we see Jesus through the testimony of John, as “one whom you do not yet know,” “ the Lamb of God who takes away sin,” “the one on whom the Spirit descended,” “who baptizes all who follow him with the Holy Spirit.” Today we hear Jesus, not through the Spirit descending from a bank of clouds, but through his own words, spoken simply and directly, “Come and see…follow me…”
These little snippets can appear out of context unless you read John’s gospel straight through, from beginning to end. Doing so, you get a much better sense of the cluelessness of the disciples, which can be amusing at times. Today’s conversation with Jesus is an example: when Jesus asks the two seekers what they’re looking for, they respond by asking him where he lives. “Asked a momentous, life-challenging question by the one proclaimed as the Son of God, the followers reply by asking for Jesus’ address,” Charles Campbell writes. He continues with a beautiful reflection on what it means to seek and follow Jesus, and how the disciples may not have missed the mark after all, whether they realized it or not. Rather than losing themselves in endless disputes of fine theological points or complex and abstract questions, they are simply seeking a person, Jesus himself…so that they might be with him, and know him, and follow him. “Their simple question, ‘…where are you staying?’”
Campbell
writes, “challenges the church today to examine what we are seeking – Jesus or something else.” And rather than chastise the soon-to-be disciples for their apparent cluelessness, Jesus kindly, simply, lovingly invites them to “come and see…”
Two weeks ago, on Epiphany Sunday, we received our annual Epiphany words from the Spirit. OK, I admit, that I actually purchased them and made them available to you…but I do believe that the process by which we each selected our words, or rather the process by which our word selected us, is a process that is Spirit-led. (For those of you who didn’t yet receive a word, the basket is waiting for you in the Gathering Area, and I urge you to select one before you leave today.) The buzz after church that Sunday was palpable and anticipatory! Several of you seemingly couldn’t wait to share with someone else the word you held in your hand. Others were quietly reflecting on the potential meaning of their word for their spiritual journey in this new year. Still others, sure that God had mistakenly given them the wrong word, lingered around the basket, possibly hoping to surreptitiously exchange their word for another more desirable direction for their spiritual journey this year!
My Epiphany word for 2008 was “faith” and the little angel picture shows two angels—one in a draped pink robe and the other in blue; both are swinging like professional acrobats on two flying trapezes. Over the word “faith” is draped the angel in blue, her feet no longer touching the trapeze bar, her arms outstretched but not yet grasping the hands of the angel in pink. She is “faith” embodied—between one place of safety and not yet landed in another place of security. Like Jesus in today’s gospel story, and throughout this year, she will engagingly invite me out of the familiar to “Come and see…follow me…”
Over these past couple of weeks, and as I meditated upon today’s gospel story, I pondered what might happen if you and I were to commit to the spiritual pathway of “Come and see…follow me…” held out by Jesus today. How might our personal and professional lives be transformed? If we were to heed Jesus’ invitation spoken in these five words, really heed it in this new year, what might our life as a congregation look like?
The prophet Isaiah, writing several hundred years before the author of John’s gospel, offers a glimpse of what that life might look like. He or she uses these words and phrases to describe such a life: servant, our cause is God’s cause, God is our strength, we shall be a light to the nations, for God has chosen us and called us each by name. In other words, as process theologian Bruce Epperly has suggested in his commentary on this passage from Isaiah, God is present within our DNA, God is present in our fetal growth, and God is present in our evolving sense of self and our unfolding understanding of vocation, of calling…God’s vision for our lives inspires the unfolding of this present moment as well as the unfolding of our gifts and our personality over a lifetime.
For Isaiah, this unfolding surprisingly would include an ever-widening circle of influence and service. Up to this point in their history, Isaiah and the chosen ones had focused only on their own ethnic community as the realm of God’s sphere and activity; they are now called to a vocation of greater stature and impact. They must now think globally as well as locally, for they are being called to reveal God’s light to all the nations of the world. What a glimpse of how our lives might be transformed by following the invitation to “Come and see…follow me”! What a vision of how our vocation as a community of faith might be changed by following Jesus’ restatement of Isaiah’s invitation to be light to the nations, to be servant, to be strengthened by God who, like Jesus to those first disciples, calls us each by name.
Come and see…follow me… What might life look like if we heeded that invitation? The year was 1993. Keith Torney and the 700 members of the UCC congregation he was serving in Billings, Montana decided to do just that…to courageously heed Jesus’ invitation to come and see…follow me. White supremacists were targeting
Billings
. They had leafleted cars with Ku Klux Klan fliers on the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. and before Rosh Hashana they had pushed over headstones in a local Jewish cemetery. These hate-mongers had painted swastikas on the home of a Native American woman and finally, they had thrown a rock through the window of a home displaying a menorah. In response, the FBI suggested that Jews, who made up less than 1% of the town’s population, stop displaying the traditional symbol of Hanukkah.
But Keith Torney had a better idea. It had to do with following the Christ who said, “Come and see…follow me…” Rev. Torney urged all members of the large United Church of Christ congregation to proudly hang paper menorahs in their windows. When interviewed about this bold action, Keith said, “Our religion says that bigotry is wrong, and by doing something about it, it became unfashionable to be bigoted.” The eloquent symbols of tolerance soon spread throughout the city. This remarkable response of the people of
Billings
led to a humanitarian award for the congregation, it inspired a children’s book entitled, The Christmas Menorahs: How a Town Fought Hate, and it was the focus of the PBS TV special entitled, “Not in Our Town”. The KKK was forced to abandon their hateful efforts at bigotry in the face of this strong statement of faith. Come and see…follow me…the people of the United Church of Christ in
Billings
,
Montana
decided to heed that invitation and the results were life-changing.
Come and see…follow me… The year was 1967. One year to the day before The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would be assassinated on the balcony of a
Memphis
motel, he had been invited to speak to an overflow crowd at The Riverside Church in
New York City
. Several of Dr. King’s later biographers traced the seeds of his assassination to that very speech. It was the first time he had spoken out with such clarity and thoroughness against the war in
Vietnam
. His words, made available to us through the efforts of the Black Radical Congress International News Service, are eerily relevant some forty years later. Here is a small portion of what Dr. King had to say:
“Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of
America
today can ignore the present war… [Mine] is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances…and I yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the good news was meant for all [people] – for Communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the one who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them? What then can I say to the ‘Vietcong’ or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this one? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life?... I must be true to my conviction that I share with all [people] the calling to be a [child] of the living God. Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood, and because I believe that [God] is deeply concerned especially for [all] suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come tonight to speak for them. This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation’s self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers [and sisters]… I am as deeply concerned about our troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a [civil war] struggle, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy and the secure while we create hell for the poor… Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor…I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of
America
who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in [the war zone]. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours… Meanwhile we in the churches and synagogues have a continuing task while we urge our government to disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment. We must continue to raise our voices if our nation persists in its perverse ways… We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out every creative means of protest possible…the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, ‘Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.’ Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken – the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment. I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a ‘thing-oriented’ society to a ‘person-oriented’ society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies… A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: ‘This is not just.’ It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of
Latin America
and say: ‘This is not just.’ The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: ‘This way of settling differences is not just.’ This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
America
, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense… We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity and injustice which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism [or in our day, terrorism] grows and develops. A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to [all humanity] as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies. This call for a world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all [people]. This oft misunderstood and misinterpreted concept – so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force – has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of [humanity]. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of
Saint John
: ‘Let us love one another; for love is God and everyone that loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever loves not knows not God; for God is love. If we love one another God dwells in us, and God’s love is perfected in us.’ Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day. We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation…We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now…We still have a choice today; nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace and justice throughout the developing world – a world that borders on our doors… Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter – but beautiful – struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons [and daughters] of God, and our brothers [and sisters] wait eagerly for our response…”
One year to the day later, The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed by an assassin’s bullet, yet his words sound a clarion as clearly today as when they were first preached in
New York City
.
Come and see…follow me… Jesus asks neither those early disciples nor us to follow him blindly or naively, by putting him on some far-off, unreachable pedestal from which he is to be worshiped. Rather, Jesus lovingly turns around to face us as we inquire of him, “where are you staying?” And with a wink and a smile, Jesus laughingly, enticingly, engagingly, says to each one of us, “Come and see…follow me…follow me into places of hateful bigotry with your creative messages of love…follow me into war zones with messages of peace…follow me into the hospitals with healing and into the schools with supplies and into your workplace with joy…follow me by getting your hands dirty and your hearts broken…” In the words widely attributed to St. Francis of
Assisi
, follow Christ into places of hatred with love, follow Christ into relationships of injury with pardon, follow Christ into realms of doubt with faith, follow Christ into souls of despair with hope, follow Christ into darkness with light and into sadness with joy. For it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
Come and see…follow me… With these five words, Jesus of Nazareth quietly and lovingly invites each one of us to do more than simply ponder our spiritual journeys. These words invite us to boldly and prayerfully live our lives like the One who is beloved, Son of God, well-pleasing to God. Come and see…follow me… Friends, the world is waiting for you and for me to do just that!
|
