The worship video for this sermon is available here.
It has taken me a while to warm to up to the gospel according to John. And by a while I don’t mean a few days this week in preparation for worship today. I mean like years, decades. Maybe it’s taken that long for my brain that was trained in the sciences to finally open up to the poetry and symbolism and mysticism in the fourth gospel. But I’m coming around to. Where I used to get frustrated, thinking, “Just say what you mean.” Now I’m more intrigued by how many different things are meant by the one thing that is said.
You see, the author of John loves to use the same word to mean several different things. Sometimes it even seems as if the participants in a story are talking past each other because the same word is coming from their mouths, but they mean different things. We see this in the story of Nicodemus coming to Jesus in the middle of the night. Jesus talks about being born from above and Nicodemus is trying to figure out this man thinks it’s possible to enter a second time in to the mother’s womb mean? A little later Jesus meets a Samaritan woman at a well and they get tied into conversational knots over Jesus’ request for a drink, living water, and deep wells.
In the telling of Jesus calling his disciples in the gospel according to John the story revolves on the verb “to see.” Seems a simple enough word. Most of us have been taught about seeing as one five senses for most of our lives. Both in the story we read to day and the few verses immediately preceding it, which includes the calling of Andrew and Simon Peter, some one sees or is invited to see nine different times. “Come and see,” Jesus says to two of John’s disciples, one of whom is Andrew, who he saw with John. Those two then saw the place where Jesus was staying.
The next day, after Jesus found Philip and invited him to follow, Philip issues the same invitation Andrew heard, “Come and see,” this time to Nathanael, who is more than a little skeptical. But then Jesus saw him (that’s #5 for anyone trying to keep track) and spoke to him and told him how he had seen him under the fig tree. (I wish I had one of those little counters dinging every time I say the word.) Lastly we get number 7-9 when Jesus wraps up the encounter comparing the seeing they just experienced with the seeing Nathanael will do as a disciple. He will see greater things in the miracles and wonders Jesus performs, and he will see in some as of yet inexplicable way the interaction of God with humanity in the person of Jesus himself. Ding, ding, ding.
Nine different “sees,” and three different ways of seeing. Three ways that just might be giving us a basic outline for the spiritual journey, or the walk of discipleship to which Jesus is calling. Let’s think about it.
The first invitation is quite simple, “Come and see.” It’s an invitation to curiosity. There are very low stakes, right? Just come take a look. Philip has decided to follow Jesus, maybe on recommendation from Andrew and Peter, who we learn are from the same town, maybe because he’s just impulsive like that. Having made his decision he goes to find Nathanael and invites him to just come and see.
Many of our spiritual journeys started the same way. It could have been a parent or grandparent who brought us along to church giving us the chance to come and see (whether we asked for it or not). Maybe it was a friend whose way of living in the world inspired us. Maybe they asked us directly to come and see or maybe their inspiration was invitation enough. One way or another we started down this road with Jesus with curiosity, possibly even tinted with a little Nathanael-esque skepticism – I don’t know about this? Can anything good come out of the ancient world? Can anything good come out of that Christianity I’ve seen do so much harm in the world?
This kind of seeing is a sort of information gathering, testing the waters, asking lots of questions, and trying to figure out how the answers fit. It’s like what our senses do for our bodies; they receive stimuli, send it to the brain, and give it something to work with, to process, to build a base of knowledge about the world – or in our case about Jesus, his call to discipleship, his mission in the world.
The next kind of seeing is a little deeper. It’s not so much about the information our eyes or ears or skin or taste and smell can bring into us; it’s about how we understand that information. When Jesus said he “saw” Nathanael under the fig tree, Nathanael sort of says, “Oh you *saw* me, all right.” Actually, he changes the verb to express what he experienced when Jesus told him about his character, about his inner life. Nathanael asks Jesus, “Where did you get to know me?”
This part of the spiritual journey is when we start to make the connections, when we start to move the information we have been gathering from our heads to our hearts, one might say. In Nathanael’s case it comes first when he himself feels seen by Jesus, not at a literal level, but at a deeper level. It’s not unlike the knowing that the psalmist sang about. In fact being known is the way that Nathanael expresses it. He feels he is truly known, that Jesus sees and knows his character, his motives, his inner life.
In being seen he, too, can see who Jesus is. It goes both directions – from God to us and from us to God. No longer does Nathanael only see Jesus “the son of Joseph from Nazareth,” or even the one whom Moses and the prophets talked about, that Philip introduced him to. But now Nathanael searches for new words – Rabbi! Teacher. Son of God! The King of Israel! As he connects his resistant curiosity to his experience of Jesus, he can make new declarations of faith that reflect a fuller understanding of who Jesus is.
The source of this kind of connection can be hard to explain. For some it comes much more gradually than it does for Nathanael, and maybe can only be seen in retrospect. For some it comes in a time of crisis when the body of Christ, the church, friends or even strangers show up at just the right moment and see us, deeply see us and know what we need. For some it comes when all the pieces of a puzzle align and we know we are in the right place, that a divine hand has been at work. There is no one right way to come to see God at work in our lives, to know ourselves to be seen and loved and known.
What that sort of mutuality, that sort of relationship opens up, though, is the potential to see in even deeper ways – not just with the senses, or with the heart, but with our whole being, with our whole living. Jesus’ final invitation is to a kind of seeing that goes deeper than observation and information, deeper than knowing internally. It’s the kind of seeing that comes through participation. As much as Nathanael presumably saw in his time of walking with Jesus, we don’t have any evidence that he saw the skies part and messengers of God moving up and down like Jacob’s ladders.
No, this wasn’t a literal description of what Nathanael would see, but it was a description of what he would be part of as a disciple of Jesus – a world where heaven and earth come together, where Word is made flesh. As a disciple of Jesus he would be invited to see what the world can be like when God’s reign is made real, and he would see it by being a part of it. As a disciple he would see by joining the work of God healing a broken creation, God providing where there is scarcity, God forgiving where there are fractured relationships, God re-creating with new life, abundant life, life grounded in grace.
Come and see.
There’s a whole spiritual journey for us to discover in this simple invitation. And just as there is no one right way to come and see God, there is no one right way to walk on a spiritual journey of discipleship. It’s rarely as quick as Nathanael’s journey, so we can just let go of that expectation. It’s not always sequential. It’s practically guaranteed that even if we have seen, seen, and seen, we might find ourselves at some point with curiosity, questions, and resistance all over again. We might have to just come and see all over again. We might just have to rediscover who we are, who Jesus knows, and how we know him, so we can again see the transformation of the world alongside him.
I would be remiss if, on this particular weekend when we are challenged to not just remember the life and work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, but to enter into it, I didn’t take this same framework of seeing and apply it to the very spiritual work of overcoming racial injustice in ourselves, in our community, in the nation, and in the world. It seems particularly fitting since this text includes such a blatant demonstration of prejudice – prejudging – that is just one part of what we are talking about when we are talking about racism. “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”
In the same way that a spiritual journey or a walk as a disciple of Jesus moves from a literal seeing, to a knowing, to an understanding and participation, so also goes the journey toward being antiracist and racial reconciliation. It begins with a literal seeing. Now there was a time in our collective culture where it seemed to be in vogue to say things like “I don’t see color. I’m colorblind.” And for many folks, I really do believe that was born of good intentions. But since we know it wasn’t physically true – none of us can stop seeing color any more than any of us can change the tint of our skin – what it ended up saying was “I don’t see you. I’m ignoring a whole aspect of your being, your experience.”
So a literal seeing is important. An acknowledgement that different people have different experiences is crucial, because we can’t see at that next level – we can’t know another person, another community, unless we are able to admit that there isn’t just one universal experience. When we can do that, when we can see differences, and see our own tendencies to prejudge, then we can move toward knowing in a new way.
Then our eyes can be opened to the deeper ways of understanding each other. Then we can see the truth that all experiences are not the same – that racism, both historic and contemporary, impacts the quality of life many people experience. We can see that access to education and employment and housing is still not on a level playing field. Healthcare outcomes are not equal. We can see and know that racism is not just the laws about bathrooms and water fountains and bus seating in the past, but it is voting maps and lending practices and how we conduct scientific research today.
And then once we see that, once we truly know about ourselves and about others, the door is open for our participation in making a difference. We can see that we are called to be a part of the work of dismantling the structures that hold up racism. We can see there is likely work to do in our own hearts, people to listen to in our own neighborhoods, practices to change in our own church, questions to ask in our own community, laws to change in our own country. There is work we can do to see heaven opened, God’s will to reign throughout creation, and justice rolling down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. We can be a part of changing the world in which we live so that the love of God for all people, the movement toward justice for all people, the abundant life that is promised for all people can take root and flourish.
Come and see.
For Some Reason 