1. “What are you looking for?” These are the first words Jesus speaks in the Gospel of John. It is a good question for us too. What is making you dissatisfied or causing suffering? What will bring you relief? What do you want?

It could be healing, security, respect or just to hear from your children or feel connected to your friends. Maybe you want your life to make a difference. Or maybe through this time of turmoil you don’t even know what you are looking for. You just want to feel okay again. What we seek tells us something about how we understand God. If nothing else, over the years people who pray begin to finally realize what it is that they really want.

Emblepo is a wonderful Greek word. It describes the experience of looking into someone’s face and really seeing that person. The ancient writer Philo uses it to mean clarity of vision, true insight, a “grasping of transcendent matters.”[1] This word describes how John the Baptist sees deeply into who Jesus is. Then he says, “Behold, the lamb of God” (Jn. 1). Hearing this two of his disciples go to approach Jesus. Jesus asks what they are seeking. Perhaps they are flustered but all they can manage to say in reply is, “where are you (and the Greek word means) staying or abiding or remaining.” Jesus knows what they really hunger for and he says to them, “Come and see.”

On a spring Sunday in 1934 an evangelist came to visit the packed sanctuary of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. In those days the five year old Martin Luther King, Jr. was known as M.L. His maternal grandfather had founded that church and his father was the Senior Pastor. For the rest of his life he remembered that day – the choir, the clapping, the energy of the moment. When that guest preacher invited people to come up to join the church, his sister Christine was the first one to stand.

M.L. immediately ran ahead of her, not as he was later to say out of some “dynamic conviction,” but because of a, “childhood desire to keep up with my sister.” Even at his baptism King was “unaware of what was taking place.” Hearing God’s call did not happen for him in an single powerful moment but was a matter of gradually taking in what he learned from his family and church.[2]

2. Today scripture confronts us with so many different ways of encountering God, of hearing God’s invitation to come and see, to walk through the doorway into a holy life. Samuel is a kind of apprentice to the priest and sleeps in the Temple next to the most sacred object of his people’s faith, the “ark of God” (1 Sam. 3). Three times Samuel is awakened by what he thinks is the priest calling him. Each time he goes to Eli who finally tells him that the next time the voice calling he should reply by saying, “Speak Lord for your servant is listening.” Samuel does this and God then says to him, “See, I am about to do something in Israel that will make both ears of anyone who hears of it tingle.”

Have you ever wondered how you can know that it is really God speaking to you, and not just your ego or insecurity? The seventeenth century Puritan Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) wrote a lengthy theological treatise about this subject that I find still helpful today.[3]

This story about Samuel seems to suggest that among other things a calling from God is a prompting or encouragement, an intuition that persists and repeats. We really begin to hear when we make time and space in our life for stillness and reflection. Often another person (like Eli) helps to confirm our interpretation. Finally, at some level of our being we have to want to understand if God’s invitation is going to reach us.

Today’s gospel helps us to appreciate what a different experience each of Jesus’ disciples had.[4] One of the disciples of John the Baptist who went on to follow Jesus is unnamed but the other is Andrew. Jesus invites him to “come and see.” He recognizes who Jesus is by spending time with him (“remaining” with him that day).

Andrew enthusiastically tells his brother. Our state motto is “Eureka” it means “I found it.” This is the word Andrew uses saying, “we have found the Messiah… Christ). Andrew brings Simon to Jesus. Jesus looks into him (in the way I described earlier emblepo), says his name and renames him Cephas or Peter which means rock.

Philip comes from the same town as Andrew and Peter and we don’t know how he first encountered Jesus as the one about whom Moses and the prophets wrote. He brings his friend Nathanael to meet him. Nathanael is cynical and doubting maybe even derisive. “Can anything good come from Nazareth?” But even as he approaches Jesus calls out, “Behold here is truly an Israelite in whom there is no deceit?”

Incredulously Nathan asks, “where did you get to know me.” And Jesus tells him, “I saw you under the fig tree before Philip called you.” The electricity of this connection still shocks us twenty centuries later. Philip replies, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel.” This foreshadows  the sign that the Roman Governor Pontius Pilate hangs at Jesus’ crucifixion.

Cynical, open, doubting, needing to see for one’s self, depending on the testimony of a respected family member or friend. Each of us comes to Jesus in a way adapted to our personality and circumstances. You may be the way by which someone learns about Christ. In these difficult times through your faith you may help to save someone who might otherwise be lost.

3. The great preacher and writer Fredrich Buechner famously defines what a vocation is. He writes, “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” This sentence has been profoundly true for me. The idea behind it inspires me just about every day. I feel blessed to love what I do. I enjoy preaching, pastoral care and being part of a community that seeks to feed a world that seems so hungry for spiritual nourishment.

But my friend Matt Boulton reminds us that when God calls Moses from the burning bush his first response is to say, “Lord please send someone else” (Ex. 4:13). So Matt gives us what he calls another, and complimentary, truth. He says, “the place where God calls you to is the place where your deep discomfort and the world’s deep blessings meet.”[5]

I believe both joy and discomfort are ways that God moves us and draws us to discover a truer version of ourselves. When I really listen to God these days what I hear is that this is our time to repair the damages to the fabric of humanity through racism and poverty. It is our time to heal the earth. The extraordinary inequality we see in this country, the mass incarceration of African American people, an inadequate response to the AIDS crisis, along with the crack cocaine and opioid epidemics, the rising tide of homelessness, climate change,  these all happened on our watch. Why do we tolerate so much human suffering? Is it because we think that some people and the planet must suffer in order to give everyone else the incentive to work? Is it because we really believe there are not enough good things to go around?

Martin Luther King Jr. taught that time is not biased in favor of human progress. Things will not just get better on their own. We are responsible to make things better, to support the dignity of the people around us. This change means that we have to give up the idea that we will always feel comfortable about what is happening.[6]

Some of us will say yes to ministries that bring us right to the edge of what we think we can handle. And yet, just as we receive our calling to act from Jesus, our help comes from him too.

There was a time when Martin Luther King, Jr. learned from reliable sources that there was a plan to have him assassinated. In a speech he talked about his death and asked his supporters to never retaliate with violence. King knew that in an instant his wife and daughter could be taken away from him and the fear kept growing in him. One night he came home late from a meeting. In the late hours of the night he was trying to sleep when the phone rang. An ugly voice threatened to shoot him and blow up the house if he didn’t leave town in three days.[7]

King got up, went down to the kitchen and started pacing as he brewed a pot of coffee. He thought about what he had learned about evil as a theologian. He wondered if there was any honorable way for him to step away from his commitments. Finally, he sat down put his head on the table and prayed. “O Lord I’m down here just trying to do what is right… but I’m weak… I’m afraid… I have nothing left.” Tears came to his eyes.

And then he felt a kind of presence and then an inner voice which said with assurance, “Stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth. And lo I will be with you until the end of the age.” He later said that that was the voice of Jesus who promised that he would never be left alone. God was no longer an idea, an abstraction, or a “metaphysical category.” The living God was close to him and would never abandon him.

Jesus asks us, “What are you looking for?” He knows that the short answer to this is that we deeply desire the one who “has searched us out and known us” (Ps. 139), the one who loved us before anyone else, the one who abides with us forever. Jesus invites us to come and see, to listen for his voice in moments of stillness and to follow where he leads. This will involve the joy of really seeing into who other people are. And it will mean speaking honestly about injustice even when it makes others and ourselves uncomfortable. What are you looking for? Come and see.

Years later on the eve of his death Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke to a crowd about his own death. He said that like Moses he had been to the mountaintop and had a glimpse of a promised land in which every person was treated with dignity. That night he said, “With this faith, I will carve a tunnel of hope from a mountain of despair… With this faith, we will be able to achieve this new day, when all of God’s children – black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics – will be able to join hands and sing… in the spiritual of old, ‘Free at last,’ ‘Free at last,’ Thank God almighty we are free at last.’”[8]

[1] “Grasping transcendent matters” comes from one of the Bauer Greek lexicon editions. See Herman Waetjen, The Gospel of the Beloved Disciple: A Work in Two Editions (NY: T&T Clark, 2005) 102.

[2] Stephen B. Oates, Let the Trumpet Sound: The Life of Martin Luther King, Jr. (NY: Harper and Row, 1982) 1-2.

[3] Jonathan Edwards, A Treatise Concerning the Religious Affections, 1746.

[4] I asked that Jn. 1:35-42 be added to today’s reading. I hope it’s not too much.

[5] Matthew Boulton, “Come and See: SALT’s Lectionary Commentary for Epiphany Week Two,” SALT, 11 January 2021. https://www.saltproject.org/progressive-christian-blog/2018/1/9/lectionary-commentary-for-epiphany-week-2

[6] Mitchell Weiss, “We the Possibility: It’s Helping Time,” Harvard Business School, 7 January 2021. https://www.hbs.edu/news/articles/Pages/we-the-possibility-its-helping-time.aspx

[7] Stephen B. Oates, Let the Trumpet Sound: The Life of Martin Luther King, Jr. (NY: Harper and Row, 1982) 84-5.

[8] Ibid., 467-8.

“You are my son, the Beloved, with you I am well pleased” (Mk. 1).

“Our mysterious awe in the face of existence itself is always overridden by the more primitive fear of violence and destruction.” Do you believe this is true?  I asked you this question in a sermon only days after Donald Trump was elected president in 2016. And now it is time to ask this again. This sentence comes from the Russian writer Nadezhda Mandelstam (1899-1980) as she tried to preserve the poetic legacy of her husband Osip after he was killed by the Communists.[1]

These days we are realizing that technologies that were supposed to bring us together, have more deeply divided us. What has been disrupted is not just the media as we used to know it – the newsrooms, professional journalists, small town papers and local television stations – but the traditions that helped us understand what is true. It is natural to feel afraid as human society becomes unmoored from truth.

How do we respond to “primitive fear” and the powerful lies that subjugate and divide us? How should we face the forces that distort and manipulate us? This week the president threatened the Georgia Secretary of State to overturn the fall election saying, “I just want to find 11,780 votes.”[2] Then on Wednesday he incited a white mob both in person and through social media. They overran the US Capitol building. Five people were killed including a Brian Sicknick, a Capitol police officer.[3]

We all know that far more blood would have been shed if Black people had acted in a similar way. My 70 year old aunt was arrested at the Capitol a few years ago protesting a massive pipeline project. She could not believe what she saw this week.

And so here we are with those persistent images in our consciousness. A confederate flag being waved in the rotunda. A grinning white man with his feet up on Nancy Pelosi’s desk. The doors to the Senate chambers being barricaded by a heavy table as an agent points his gun through a broken window. Shameless politicians telling us that really the mob was a group of liberals impersonating right-wing protesters. Broken glass. Smashed doors. Other nations looking on in horror. The Dean of Canterbury Cathedral sending a video message to America saying that it is darkest before the dawn.

This is the natural culmination of years of hearing people like Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh telling us that our own government is the enemy. Beyond the totally unnecessary loss of life, and the ugly desecration of a place that is sacred to democracy, there is such a tragic element to all of this. That crowd really believes a conspiracy theory that is clearly not true. They accept the president’s lie that the election was fraudulent or stolen.

And yet after all that shouting on the Capitol steps that this was their house, once they made it in they hardly knew what to do. All they could think of was to break things, steal some stationary, to take pictures of themselves on the senate floor and post them on social media. Is that it? Is that all that matters these days? Does it really just come down to how many likes we get on Facebook? Isn’t there more to life than this?

After the events of the last few days it is a relief to get back to the truly big picture that encompasses all time and space. The good book says, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1). And today we celebrate the ancient Feast of the Epiphany. It’s name comes from the Greek word epi which means upon and phaino which means to shine as when John writes, “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it” (Jn. 1:5).

So we are entering a season of epiphanies, of new insight into our connection with God and the world. Another way to put this is that we will be looking more deeply to see the unveiling of the truth, the longstanding reality, that we only barely apprehended before. My old teacher Peter Gomes used to describe Epiphany as the season when the “identity of Jesus” becomes “clearer to all those who will look and see.”[4] He says that the story begins with the angel’s appearance to Mary and like a stone in a pond ripples out through all the water of time and space even as far as you and me.

Traditionally at Epiphany three stories in particular reveal who Jesus is. The first is the story of the Magi, that group of wise ones from the East who, over great distances follow a star. They suffer in order to experience Jesus and to present their gifts to him. The second is the story from the Gospel of John in which Jesus turns water into wine at a wedding in Cana of Galilee. Jesus takes our watery life and makes it infinitely more delightful. The final story is what we have before us today.

Mark calls this, “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God” (Mk. 1). He doesn’t tell the story of Jesus’ birth and in a way this is his Christmas story. John appears in the wilderness. People who seem vastly different from one another are deeply attracted to him. They come from urban and rural places, from Bakersfield and Santa Monica, from Salinas and Carmel, from Hayward and Belvedere.

They share an understanding that something is wrong in their lives. They suffer in the way that we do when things go badly and there is no one else to blame and we wonder what we could have done differently. John really sees them. Like the best of preachers he helps them to discover a new relationship with God. He baptizes them with water.

Then Jesus comes with all of the power of the Holy Spirit. Mark writes, “And just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased” (Mk. 1). Immediately after this the Spirit casts Jesus into the wilderness to be tempted for forty days by the Devil.

The writers of the most ancient Jewish scriptures saw the ocean and the wilderness as tumultuous places of terrible chaotic forces that threaten human life. I can’t help but think that the wilderness is where we are these days as COVID continues to overwhelm us spiritually, emotionally and physically, as we wonder what the future will bring for our nation and the world.

But again let’s take a wider view  beyond our current situation and look very briefly at ideas from three of the most ancient Christians. The first is from the second century figure Justin Martyr (100-165 CE). Justin points out that Jesus had no need of a “baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” (Mk. 1). But out of humility and deep desire for solidarity with all people Jesus chose to be baptized. He wants to be with us. Justin says that the spirit descending shows the world that he was “far more than a mere worker of wood.”[5]

Also from the second century Irenaeus (130-202 CE) writes that God anoints Jesus of Nazareth with the “Holy Spirit and power.” Our baptism in his name gives us a share of this same power. This is what renews us even in the face of fear and uncertainty.[6]

Finally I want to quote from a fourth century hymn by St. Ephrem the Syrian (306-373 CE). “See, Fire and Spirit in the womb that bore you! See, Fire and Spirit in the river you were baptized! Fire and Spirit in our Baptism; in the Bread and the Cup, Fire and Spirit!” Being baptized we become the children of Mary fully participating in the divinity of her Son.

As I said earlier I’ve been wondering if, “Our mysterious awe in the face of existence itself is always overridden by the more primitive fear of violence and destruction.” At my lowest point, after the longest day of worrying about the people of this nation, I decided to go for a run. I was too late and the sunset just looked like a smudge in the western sky. But as I ran alone on the walkway 265 feet above the dangerous currents of the Bay over the Golden Gate Bridge, I received my answer.

Looking East the light blue color of the Bay perfectly matched the blue of the sky. Instantly I knew that although everything appears to be distinct and individual, we are all one in God. We are all God’s children, the beloved ones. Over the last ten months, as we have wandered this desert together we have had Epiphanies: about the importance of being together in person, the value of our human connections, the simple joy we take in singing. What is also being revealed to us is the terrible situation of healthcare and employment insecurity, racism, inequality, the vulnerability of the natural world.

After the last ten months, after the last four years, we see more clearly what we are called to do. These are not tasks that we grudgingly take up. This is the work that we were made for, that gives us meaning as children of God.

Our identity shapes our habits and our habits in turn determine our identity. The crucial question for each of us today is what kind of people will we be going forward? Are we going to be people who live in fear and are therefore habitually outraged, angry and hopeless?

Or will we be children of God rejoicing in our share of Jesus’ spirit and power. How will we humbly and quietly help the people around us who are struggling right now? During this season of epiphanies the truly big picture is that despite all our failings we are beloved to God.[7]

Let us pray: Holy God protect the world from COVID. Bless this nation and its ideal that each person matters and has a unique and irreplicable dignity. We pray for all the political leaders who may not understand any better than we do, the forces we are unleashing, or the demons we are serving in our fear and lack of trust in you. Give us the peace that passes all understanding and through the grace of your son Jesus, let us see the fire and spirit in the river in which we are baptized. Amen.

[1] 26 Pent (11-13-16) 28C. “There is a story about the composer Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975). As an internationally recognized twenty-nine year old he seemed to have everything. Then on January 2, 1936 the Communist Party officially instructed him to attend his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtensk District. The country’s dictator Joseph Stalin himself was in attendance but invisible behind a curtain. Stalin left before the end and although the audience seemed beside themselves with enthusiasm, Shostakovich felt “sick at heart.”

Two days later the official Communist Party newspaper Pravda wrote an editorial about Lady Macbeth entitled “Muddle Instead of Music.” It condemned his work as “artistically obscure and morally obscene.” It went on to say that Shostakovich was playing a game that “may end very badly.” In hindsight we know what ending badly meant in Soviet Russia. One could be declared an enemy of the people, publicly humiliated, privately tortured and then executed. Others were sent to prison camps and many more simply disappeared.

Alex Ross writes that, “Shostakovich never shook off the pall of fear that those six hundred words in Pravda cast on him.”  Sadly, while he agonized over whether his compositions would cause offense, this had nothing to do with the music. The same editor of Pravda later said privately about this incident. “We had to begin with somebody… Shostakovich was the most famous, and a blow against him would create immediate repercussions…””

Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (NY: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2007) 220, 216, 228.

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-raffensperger-call-georgia-vote/2021/01/03/d45acb92-4dc4-11eb-bda4-615aaefd0555_story.html

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/us/politics/police-officer-killed-capitol.html

[4] 1 Epiphany (01-07-18) B. Peter Gomes, Sermons: Biblical Wisdom for Daily Living (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2002) 30-6.

[5] I’m grateful to my friend Donald Schell who answered my late night call for help on this sermon with such wisdom. This next section comes from the email he sent me. Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho.

[6] Irenaeus, Against Heresies.

[7] Here are some words from Brian McLaren that give us a sense for how our ministry supports what God is doing in creation, “The universe is God’s creative project, filled with beauty, opportunity, challenge, and meaning. It runs on the meaning we see embodied in the life of Jesus. Newness multiplies. Freedom grows. Meaning expands. Wisdom flows. Healing happens. Goodness runs wild.” Brian D. McLaren, We Make the Road by Walking: A Year-Long Quest for Spiritual Formation, Reorientation, and Activation (Jericho: 2015), 11, 12, 14.