SERMON, JANUARY 18, 2009

1 Samuel 3:1-10; Psalm 139; John 1:43-51

I wonder if you know any skeptics. My world seems to be full of them—especially I know a lot of people who are skeptical about Christianity and organized religion. They have their doubts about the claims that Christians make for Jesus; or maybe they aren’t sure there is a God at all. Actually when it comes to the institution of the church they don’t have doubts—they flat out reject it.

And God knows if you are a thinking person you have to have your own set of doubts—your own skepticism about the church as institution. It isn’t hard to come up with a litany of reasons to stay away from it. Just consider the history. Just consider our current state of disagreements and disaffections. We live in a time when the underside of institutions—churchly and otherwise—has been exposed—and the unquestioned loyalties of the 1950s are long gone. We live in an age of institutional skepticism.

Just this week I got a long email from a young man I haven’t seen in years. He is my godson, now in his in early forties. He has just returned to church after many years of absence. He told me that the hardest part of worship is saying the creed. He just doesn’t believe it all. He has his doubts about it. Maybe he even knows some of the not too pretty history of political machinations that lie behind its adoption. Maybe. In any case he can’t get his brain around it all—he doesn’t really give what I would call intellectual assent to all the affirmations of the creed.

He isn’t the only one. Our churches are filled with people who find the creed to be a strange, foreign document. They aren’t sure they believe every line of it—or think that whatever it meant originally is not how they personally would interpret the words. They have their doubts. Some are skeptical. I would say that this is the case in most congregations—at least it has been so in those I’ve served.

Frederick Buechner, a Presbyterian minister and wonderful writer once said this about doubt: “Whether your faith is that there is a God or that there is not a God, if you don’t have any doubts you are either kidding yourself or asleep. Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.” (1)

Samuel and Nathanael have their doubts in our stories this morning. Samuel, the boy given to the priest Eli by his mother, and dedicated to serve in the temple, hears the voice of God calling him by name. But even though he is where he is (the temple) and even though he’s been serving God day and night, he doesn’t recognize the voice he hears. He is caught off-guard by the voice of God in the place where we might expect that voice. The God he has been serving he just doesn’t know. His wonderings send him to Eli to see if he is the one calling. After all that makes the most sense, doesn’t it? Finally, Eli, blind as he is, realizes what is going on and tells Samuel to listen.

Nathanael’s doubts spring from his assumptions. “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” he asks. He’s made his judgments about that little nothing place and its people. He judges Jesus, without knowing him. He judges him on the basis of his judgments about where he comes from. This kind of thinking is rampant in our own day—we know about this, don’t we. Judging folks on the basis of where they come from—on their origins. The whole gospel of John really is an inquiry into this very question. People who reject Jesus are those who judge him on his appearances, on what they know of his origins. They reject him because he has no stature in the religious world—he’s a nobody from no where acting like he’s a somebody from somewhere. The truth is that the folks doing the judging don’t know half the story. Jesus’ origins are not what they think, and they’ve forgotten that God is one known for picking the surprising, no-account person for God’s work.

The thing about Nathanael’s skepticism is that it moves him to investigate—to inquire. The invitation from Philip is simple and direct: ”Come and see.” And rather than draw back, go the other way, Nathanael decides to go and see for himself. This is where Fred Buechner’s words about doubt hit home: the ants in the pants that keep you awake and moving. I know some skeptics who ignore that discomfort—who think by drawing back—by simple rejection they are honoring their skepticism. They get stuck. It’s easy to do.

I’ve done it myself. Made judgments about people based on their look, their origins, their language—whatever. Then I draw back and my skepticism, my judgments remain in place. Unexamined really. I’m stuck. It’s the daring to draw near that can open me to new life. It’s the acceptance of the invitation, ”Come and see,” that can lead to new insight. I think of many years ago when for the first time I entered a prison to visit a man there—a man I didn’t know. His mother had invited me to go and see him. My judgments and fears filled me almost to my eyeballs. But by the time I’d finished my visit, I knew that I shared a lot in common with the man I’d visited. Oh, we had our differences, but we had much in common. I’d found some much needed humility, as well as new life and relationship where I’d expected none. Can anything good come out of Nazareth? You’d be surprised.

Our passages this morning have much to tell us about God and God’s call: in both stories there are doubts, wonderings, skepticism; in both someone else helps the person understand who is calling—someone else invites the person to “come and see” to “come and listen.” You and I live in a time when just about everybody has a cell phone or a blue tooth in their ear. I get calls from robots who speak my name. We’re overwhelmed by calls—how to distinguish among the voices? How to keep from getting immune to all? It certainly helps to be in community—to ask our spiritual friends and elders for their input—to worship together, sing and pray together, attune our ears, open our hearts to God and God’s ways. All of these help.

But the most important part of the story of Nathanael is that Jesus calls him in his skepticism, in his judgment, and invites him into relationship. We tend to think that Nathanael became a follower of Jesus because of what he saw in Jesus. And this may be so. But we can also attend to what Jesus saw in Nathanael. How Jesus first saw Nathanael. First saw and first loved him—doubts and all.

Psalm 139 sings of how God has known us since before we were made, knit us together in our mother’s womb, it says. This isn’t about predestination. This is a song of love responding to the deepest truth of all that we are known and loved by God first. Our response of love is just that: a response. Nathanael saw Jesus as the Son of God because Jesus had seen Nathanael and loved him first. This is what we most deeply desire and long for—to be fully known and loved. It is also perhaps the scariest of our desires. We so often draw back in fear that being fully known we will NOT be loved. But that is NOT how divine love works.

The Creed, the hymns, the prayer, the words of our communion service are all kind of fumbling efforts on our part to express that incredible love that God has for us. None of those words do it justice. None of our words can capture this mystery. The Gospel of John is filled with these words about Jesus: son of God, Lamb of God, King of Israel—on and on they spill out. These may be words that make our brains spin, words we cannot give our intellectual assent to. Words we doubt, we wonder about.

But faith really is not just about intellectual assent—its about who we give our hearts to. With whom will we throw in our lot? With whom do we want to relate? Being in the company of? Travel with? Nathanael lets his doubt lead him to come and see. He thinks he’s seen the fullness of who Jesus is in Jesus’ knowing him from an impossible distance. Jesus tells him he ain’t seen nothin’ yet. This love will transfigure both of them. And us, as well. _______________ (1) Buechner, Frederick, Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC, Harper & Row, 1973.

SERMON, January 4, 2009 THE EPIPHANY

Today we are celebrating the Epiphany: The season of the revealing of Christ to the whole world. We’re a couple of days early, but the season begins with the arrival of the 3 Kings. Here in church these Kings have been journeying all these past weeks to make it to their destination. You can see them there now. And maybe that’s been the case in your homes as well—if you have a crèche. Often people set up their family crèches with all the figures right from the start. Some families though wait to bring out the Kings until now. In most families whatever the timing, we take out the figures—so well known—and arrange them, and use that time to re-tell the story. And if you have or had children in the family often they play with the figures, move them around and re-tell the story. Many years ago, in a home of someone very well known to me the crèche would be set-up and as the days went by strange and sometimes shocking additions were made. Oh, the holy family was still there, and the shepherds and the magi—but there might be Batman suddenly in the midst of it all—or Spidey—once even Darth Vader. I’ve heard that My Little Pony can appear alongside the sheep. In some homes maybe Barbie & Ken show up—or Kung Fu panda. You never know who might show up at the crèche. It's very disturbing really. Spoils the symmetry of the arrangement. Adds an unsettling quality to the story.

In truth the way Matthew tells the story the magi themselves were as unsettling as the arrival of Darth Vader or Barbie. We tend to forget that I think. The birth itself and the folks who visit have become so much a part of the pageantry of the season (the bathrobes, the Burger King crowns, the capes, the empty boxes elegantly wrapped) that we’re more likely to find them cute than to be shocked by them. We’ve domesticated the story.

The first words spoken by any human in Matthew’s gospel are these: “Where is the child who has been born king of the Jews?” They’re spoken by the most outside of outsiders—extreme Gentiles—you might say: magi. And the words are spoken in the center of power: Jerusalem. And you’d kind of expect these foreigners—non-believers—pagans to go where the power is—where else would you go to find a king but there? As our passage from Isaiah reminds us the riches and camels will come from afar to Jerusalem—a Jerusalem restored and prosperous.

And we know the rest of the story goes—really there is hardly any reason to read it on a Sunday morning—. Herod is afraid—he doesn’t react nicely to the news that there is another king in HIS kingdom. He calls in his advisors—and asks them to refresh his memory: Just where was the Messiah to be born? Perhaps with some fear and trepidation they glom on to a text from Micah (not the one from Isaiah we just heard). In the Micah passage they recall that the Messiah is to be born in Bethlehem—the least of the least—just nine miles from Jerusalem but it might as well have been a thousand miles away—to compare them Jerusalem and Bethlehem. Kind of like maybe Washington DC and Graton—something like that.

In any case Herod sends the magi on their way to Bethlehem and asks them to report back on their findings. And off they go these outrageously different foreigners—off they go to find the newborn king in Bethlehem. And there indeed he is. They leave their outrageously fine gifts, fall down on their knees in homage. They go home by another route—deciding that discretion would be the better part of valor when it came to reporting back to Herod. And that’s it. How sweet it is.

The month of January is named after Janus—the Roman god of the gates, who looked both backwards and forwards. It’s a month when we tend to do that too. We think back to the past year and forward in anticipation to the new year. In church communities of course we look back to the stories of Christmas and Epiphany—to the stories of Jesus’ birth and life and from those stories we imagine our future. But, in the throes of Christmas gatherings, gift giving, pageants, and carols I have a tendency to skip over parts of the story that are essential. I forget how bizarre it is that the first words spoken in the Matthew’s gospel are words of the magi: very weird foreigners. And, I forget how the magi have to leave Jerusalem and go to Graton to find the Christ child. I forget how Matthew’s story is all about how there is no room for this new king in “The Way Things Are.” The powers that be don’t like the idea of God-with-us in Bethlehem. I forget that the story is one of how God works in the midst of no room to create a space for the light. How God’s grace refuses to be shut out—no matter what.

So from the beginning of Matthew’s gospel we learn that this Jesus is part of something bigger. Something God is doing that begins with transgression of boundaries and continues always breaking down barriers and opening up to the stranger, the outsider, the least, the lost, and the unimaginable. Always this catches me off-guard—even though this behavior of God’s runs clear throughout Scripture—beginning to end. The magi—these unknown astrologers, experts in the occult, interpreters of dreams—from the East (good grief maybe even from Iran) ignorant of the Law, foreigners in the extreme—these magi manage to act on what knowledge or intuition they do have to seek and find and pay homage to Jesus. An infant. They are the first to acknowledge Jesus as king. How amazing is that?

Matthew writes with words used in his day and Jesus’ day to describe the respect paid to the Roman emperor. He uses them about this baby. The way he uses the words you can’t help but wonder at the contrast between the two rulers. The emperor and his kinglets, and Jesus and his followers. It starts you thinking already this early. It starts you thinking.

And the first question the magi ask is where? where? is the child born king of the Jews? The where is important. It makes a difference. Because the promise of the birth in Bethlehem is all connected to the promise of a king who will care about the people—the folk, the people of the land, the little people. It’s the little promise of a ruler who will turn rulership upside down. Come out of nowhere to care for the forgotten. That’s who’s born in Bethlehem. There’s no room for this kind of king in Rome or Jerusalem. No possible role for such a one who is just not compatible with the ways of the state, the ways of power, the ways of the economy. The fact that Jesus is born in Graton is of critical importance.

And finally the great good news of this story is all about how God acts to deliver even when the sign in the window says NO DELIVERIES ACCEPTED. God brings light into the darkness, into the shutness, the rejection. God slithers into Bethlehem when the powers that be are gathered in Jerusalem making their plans and strategizing—when they are gathering their armies, their wealth, and their power to ensure their own success. The powers that be no matter where they are—are all about control and doing it on their own.

Lest you think this kind of thing has nothing to do with us: I can only say that I am often with them in that. I too, seek control and spend lots of energy doing life on my own—as though it all depends on me. I often keep a tight lid on my own heart—I look at the world around me and let disillusionment close me up and shut me down. I am enmeshed in the systems of “The Way Things Are”: in myself, my family, my community, the world. I tend to look for God in all the wrong places. It’s hard to let go and open yourself; it’s hard to turn away from Jerusalem.

The folks who turn to Bethlehem turn to a different promise—a smaller one perhaps—one that runs under the radar. God with us. The magi remind us to expect to find Batman and Barbie in the crèche—to listen deeply to the truth they have to offer—to dare to journey to the edges to seek the One who comes. The powers that be will do their best to destroy the light—but to no avail. There is no containing the grace of God; it will cross every boundary you set, defeat every rejection. There is no stopping that grace. It will slither into Graton—no matter what. Go there, you will see for yourself.