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Where He Finds Us
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis January 22, 2006, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill I Samuel 3:1-10 John 1:35-51
“It is possible to imagine,” writes novelist and essayist Marilyn Robinson, “that time was created in order that there might be narrative—event, sequence and causation, ignorance and error, retribution, atonement. A word, a phrase, a story falls on rich or stony ground and flourishes as it can, possibility in a sleeve of limitation. Certainly time is the occasion for our strangely mixed nature, in every moment differently compounded, so that often we surprise ourselves, and always scarcely know ourselves, and exist in relation to experience, if we attend to it and its plainness does not disguise it from us, as if we were visited by revelation.” It is possible and so I invite you to imagine, this morning, that time was created in order that there might be narrative, not first our narrative but the narrative of God’s life with us, replete with event, sequence and causation, ignorance and error, retribution, atonement. A word, a phrase, a story falling on rich or stony ground, flourishing as it can, possibility in a sleeve of limitation. And if scripture’s plainness does not fool you, then you do begin to inhabit these pages as though you have been visited by revelation, as though you were an ancient character moved to exclaim, again and again, “This is where He found me.” According to John, of course, you were found in the beginning, chosen by God in Christ before the foundation of the world. Perhaps only now you are waking to that fact…or not…or never between your birth and your death! Nevertheless, even though the story you may tell of your life has no tip of the hat to God’s hand upon it, says John, God in Christ elected not to be God without you, long before God’s word became an event in your life. Or put another way, he calls us long before we hear him; or said yet again, the light that shines in the darkness shines upon us even though, like Anne Lamott, we have “squinched” our eyes shut. Election is the theological name for this unobservable leap: we are elected by God in Christ from the beginning, the theologians say, differing only and wildly about exactly which ones of us and how many of us may be said to fall in the category of the elect. As most of you know, my money is on the heresy that says there is none “whose history is not decided in the history of Jesus Christ, in the sense,” says Karl Barth, “that whatever may or may not take place in [an individual’s history]…in Jesus Christ [that one], too, is justified, sanctified and called.” In sum, whether we know it or not, we have been found, not in the first place but before the first place--from the beginning--in God’s electing love. So with our eternal election as the necessary prologue to the story of God with us, we come in time, in the fullness of time, to Him who finds us unknowingly lost amid the narrative of event, sequence and causation, ignorance and error, retribution, atonement; finds us, that is, lost in the living of these days. He has been sent to seek us in the flesh and, according to John, he sets himself to the task without as much as a dip in the Jordon or a month-long retreat in the wilderness. John’s gospel deliberately cuts to the chase, Christ’s chase of us down the nights and down the days…down the arches of the years…down the labyrinthine ways of our mind and…up vistaed hopes…where he finds us. He finds us, literally in the first place according to John, where we are following someone or something else. Not by chance, John’s disciples had fallen in with a prophet who presented himself penultimately: “I am not the Christ,” he insisted, but rather kept pointing them toward the One who was to come. This, I daresay, is seldom the case with prophet or politician, ideologue or institution, philosophical camp or nation state; nor is it the case with the bliss we were encouraged to follow on the cusp of the last century or the bottom line we unsuccessfully have been pursuing since this century commenced. Allegiance has already been sworn by us to one or another of these by the time in the narrative that Jesus finds us. He finds us, therefore, threatened at first by his presence: holding on to the life we know and can control, willing maybe to incorporate him into our lives, but only as long as he does not disrupt our other commitments and loyalties. I think of Anne Lamott, again, who said of her first steps toward faith, “I wanted to fall to my knees, newly born, but I didn’t. I walked back home…and got out the Scotch…I was not willing to give up a life of shame and failure without a fight…. I had stopped meeting the love of my life at X-rated motels. I still met him at motels, but nicer ones. I felt I had standards again—granted, they were very low standards, but still…” Pretty rocky ground, to be sure, but still, I would say, amid the narrative—event, sequence and causation, ignorance and error, retribution, atonement—by grace, a life of faith may become a possibility in a sleeve of limitation at the command of him who finds us where we are following someone or something else. In contrast, John sent his own disciples packing. “Behold the Lamb of God!” he cried; and in response two of his disciples heard and, with no reported hesitation, began to follow Jesus. Jesus, you will notice, did not command them to follow. He asked nothing of them but inquired of them what they were seeking. Countering his question with one of their own, they ask “Where are you staying?” as if to say, “We are seeking to be with you.” At the start, that is what faith is: it is a relationship you may explore long before you must stumble—literally stumble—upon doctrines and creeds. All Jesus says in response is, “Come and see.” His church would do well, now and again, to say the same! Before going any further, John tells us next that Andrew, who was John’s disciple, first ran to get his brother Simon, underlining in the second place that he finds us through the voice of another who brings us to the place where he finds us. For Andrew it was the voice of his teacher; but on the heels of John’s witness it was Andrew’s voice calling out for his brother. “We have found the Messiah,” says Andrew to Simon, ushering Simon to the place where Jesus finds him. How many of us were brought by another’s voice to the place where he may find us: an odd relative or a complete stranger who put the question of meaning to our lives or, as he himself suggested, the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the sick, the prisoner in whose face we first encountered his love? Do not let the plainness of such encounters disguise the divine initiative thereby revealed! Even by way of his own voice, John surely means to send us, generations and generations hence, to the place where we may see, in a Word made flesh, God’s summons; where we are given light enough to set out down the road on which we are destined to travel. So with our strangely mixed nature, in every moment differently compounded so that often we surprise ourselves, and always scarcely know ourselves, we take a second step. Following another savior, hearing another’s voice, and then in the third place, he finds us where we doubt he would ever find us. The next day, or so a word, a phrase, a story goes, falling on the rich or the stony ground of our minds, Jesus sets out for Galilee and finds Philip. Here the initiative is all Jesus. “Follow me,” he says. Yet one gets the feeling Philip has been called not for his own sake, but for the sake of Nathanael. Ready with an argument for Jesus’ identity, Philip soberly reports to Nathanael that they have “found him of whom Moses in the law and also the prophet’s wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.” Nathanael would have none of it. Knowing the law and the prophets as he did, Nathanael found this Nazarene to be suspect. Knowing Nathanael as he did, Jesus found a disciple dwelling where there necessarily needed to be room enough to doubt. Or put another way, Jesus found himself in the company of one for whom his plainness, heretofore disguised, only obscured God’s visitation from Nathanael’s doubting and darkened eyes. I think of Ignazio Silone’s innkeeper insisting upon the plain identity of the fugitive disguised as a priest who has taken a room. “‘Perhaps he’s neither a priest nor a doctor, but a saint,’ said the girl whom the stranger had inadvertently healed. “‘I was on the point of death, he came, he touched my hand, and I was saved….Perhaps he’s actually more than a saint,’ the girl…said, ‘I have an idea he might be Jesus Himself.’ “This was too much for Matalena, who sat down on a stool and murmered, ‘Are you mad? What makes you think he might be Jesus Himself? Why should Jesus come to my inn? Isn’t He in heaven on his Father’s right hand?’ Matalena spoke softly, so that her first-floor lodger, if he were really [Jesus], should not overhear her doubting words. ‘It would not be the first time that Jesus has disguised Himself and come down to earth to see how the poor are living,’ the girl from Fossa replied. “Matalena was suddenly seized with unspeakable excitement. She was not prepared for such a happening…. ‘What makes you suppose that perhaps it is He? What gave you the idea? …said Matalena…. ‘I recognized him by his voice,’ the girl replied. ‘When he appeared he took my hand and before I had time to say anything he said, “Courage, I know everything.” I realized at once that it was no human voice.’” A word, a phrase, a story falls on rich or stony ground and flourishes as it can, possibility in a sleeve of limitation. “How do you know me?” Nathanael asks Jesus with what I imagine to be narrowing eyes that must squinch in the presence of Christ’s light. With a voice that has invaded time with the truth of John’s prologue, vocation now following on the heels of election, Jesus answers: “Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you.” That is to say, the light that shone upon Nathanael from the beginning is about to become an event in Nathanael’s history, shining as light such that Nathanael is made to see. “Rabbi,” exclaims Nathanael at long last, “you are the Son of God!” “Because I saw you under a fig tree?” Jesus asks incredulously. I hear his voice echo down the corridor of time in the voice of fugitives disguised as priests who inadvertently heal us and in the voice of the poor, the prisoner, the hungry, the homeless disguised as the good shepherd who would miraculously find us still if ever we would give up our scotch and our better hotels and our doubt, as well, to take the first step, on rocky ground, toward him. “I have spent my life watching,” Marilyn Robinson reports in the end, “not to see beyond the world, merely to see, great mystery, what is plainly before my eyes. I think the concept of transcendence is based on a misreading of creation. With all respect to heaven, the scene of miracle is here, among us.” How miraculous, then, that we who so often surprise ourselves and always scarcely know ourselves, may be found to exist in relation to Him who has found us and, as if we were visited by revelation, we may hear him calling us, may see him bidding, simply, plainly, even now to come and see! Thanks be to God. |