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The God Who Finds Us Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis January 18, 2009, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Isaiah 55:6-11 John 1:35-51
In the beginning, writes John in his prologue, the Word that was and was with God and was God decided to come to us. From the foundation of the world, God chose not to be God without us. Therefore in the fullness of time God sent his only begotten Son to pitch a tent in the wilderness with us who were without God in the world until he came. In the fullness of time, God set out to find us in order to be God with us. The God we will come to know over this year as John tells us the stories of Jesus is a God who takes the initiative, who acts decisively, who goes out to meet his betrayer and who chooses without hesitation to die for us. That is why, in this first story, we cannot skip over the verb that is variously translated as "desired," "decided," "determined," and "willed." Not by chance, writes John, but because God chooses not be God without us, Jesus decided to go to Galilee.to take the initiative.to make the first move. Not by chance, I might add, you are here this morning because once upon a time the God who desired and decided and determined and willed to be with you set out toward you in Jesus Christ. John records what happens next simply and directly, "He found Philip." Philip, as far as we know, did not realize he was lost; he had no clue that he was in need of being found. By and large, the same could be said of you and me. We go about our lives as though our lives were in our own hands. Whatever task it is that employs our working hours.whatever worry it might be that keeps us awake at night.we, for the most part, determine simply to bear these things alone; keep them properly to ourselves; soldier on as best we can. Some even rest assured by night and by day that the best they can do is pretty darn good. They are the righteousness and, apparently, they are the hardest for Jesus to find. Paragons of virtue, they pass judgment on those who have lost their way [the way being defined as the way of the righteous] while quietly congratulating themselves for being so profoundly on God's side. As Karl Barth put it, "The righteous are those who in their own judgment and that of other righteous people, who are never lacking in the world even without the intervention of Jesus, are standing in the right place as distinct from others, namely, at the right side of God." We shall meet them soon enough in John's gospel. Where, then, does Jesus find us.find the unrighteous.find you and me? He finds us in the wrong place. He finds us in seat 13A or 23F or 17B tucking our heads between our knees and praying over and over again as if for the first time while the plane goes down, "Lord, forgive me for my sins." Some, said the New York Times, were in the middle of the Lord's Prayer when the jet began to swim. He finds us on a gurney in the hallway of a hospital, waiting to be wheeled into surgery alone and mindful of the good gift of life we have wasted, speechless before the fact of our finitude. He finds us in the last car of the train headed home, rehearsing the news that the company has downsized and our household is on the dole. He finds us weary in well-doing and at the end of the road with little to show for the toil of our hands save the stuff we have accumulated. He finds us in marriages that have found us straying, in jobs that have kept us from our destiny, in families divided, friendships compromised, bodies decaying, hearts abandoned and breaking. He finds us most often when the circumstances of our lives have led us to conclude that we cannot bear all things, believe all things, hope all things, endure all things without him. "God comes to people," writes Dietrich Bonhoeffer in words that may begin to help us imagine where he might have gone with his thoughts about a religionless Christianity, "who have nothing but room for God-and this hollow space, this emptiness in people is called in Christian speech, faith." God goes after the sinner, which is to say the one without God in the world, the one who has nothing to offer according to the world, the one found by God in the places where angels fear to tread. In Christ, says John's gospel over and over again, the light of the world shines in the darkness of the "neglected, insignificant, weak, ignoble, unknown, inferior, opposed, despised.radiates over the houses of prostitutes and tax collectors.[is] cast on the toiling, struggling and sinning masses. The word of grace," says Bonhoeffer with prophetic fury, "spreads across the stale sultriness of the big cities, but it halts before the houses of the satisfied, the knowledgeable, and the 'haves' of this world in a spiritual sense..Christianity preaches the unending worth of the apparently worthless and the unending worthlessness of what is apparently so valuable." He finds us where we live without him. And here is the curious thing about what happens when he finds us. You would think, if you have listened to enough sermons or suffered through enough righteous lectures from those clearly on God's side with no need of him, you would think he would begin by cleaning up our act, counting our trespasses against us, exposing our faults and demanding our obedience. God knows that those already on God's side expect this of him and of his church, expect that he would call us out of the great company of the unworthy, the ungodly, the unclean and, once we are morally and spiritually rehabbed, welcome us over to the camp of the ethically superior. "Yet this is not what happens," says Barth. What happens is that he follows us into the places and the relationships, the situations and the sadness, the sickness and the sin we have endured without him. He enters our houses, dines at our table, comes to our bedside, takes the seat next to us on the plane going down in the winter sky. "He, Jesus, is not against [us] at the side of God," says Barth. "He is for [us].for the ungodly." Were we to say, then, what it is that transforms our ungodly lives moment by moment, we would have to confess it is not anything we will do or say or believe; no sin of which we have already repented, no wrongdoing confessed or behavior changed: it is only that he has found us. We are no longer ungodly because he is with us. Finding Philip, Jesus says simply, "Follow me." What could this command mean to Philip who had just been found by Jesus? What should he do in response? What would be involved if he were to follow him? All Philip knew of Jesus was that Jesus had found him. Reading on, we can only conclude that Philip followed Jesus first by finding another. Philip found Nathaniel, John records, and without another word implies that following Jesus begins with finding another because God in Christ has found you. That said, please note that Philip did not set out to find Nathaniel so that Jesus could save him from eternal damnation; nor, at that time, was Philip intent on adding him to the rolls of a religious institution. He simply wanted him to meet Jesus. Following Jesus begins with ".seeking [others] out.reaching them.encircling them.gathering and fetching.them," says Barth, so that they also might know themselves accompanied all their days, even and especially through the valley of the shadow of death, by Him who has loved them from the beginning. Nathaniel is skeptical: "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" he asks. Can anything relevant or useful or fine happen on a Sunday morning in the community called out by God's Word? Philip can guarantee nothing. Christ's church can guarantee you nothing in the world save for the chance to spend a few hours in a crowd that knows what it is to be as lost as you are; but also with a people where there is a high likelihood that one who found Philip might find you too. Philip only invites Nathaniel to "Come and see." Jesus, of course, is the one who sees Nathaniel first and greets him before Nathaniel can say a word. What is evident in the words Jesus first speaks to Nathaniel is that he has known Nathaniel long before Nathaniel ever knew him or even came close enough to see him. I think of the words of the old hymn that I want Mark to set to a tune that befits its substance:I sought the Lord and afterward I knew
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