"Come and See"
John 1:29-43
In the gospel story we just heard,
it’s the day after John has baptized Jesus.
He sees Jesus coming toward him, and he declares, “Here is the Lamb of
God who takes away the sin of the world!”
Twice in this passage John the Baptist says, “I myself did not know
him.”
Does this make you wonder? What does this mean?
As Jill Duffield asks in
The Presbyterian Outlook, “Weren’t
they cousins? John knew Jesus,
right? Is this a case of not noticing
that which is closest to us?”[1]
Jill goes on to tell a story about
a woman who volunteered at an art museum as a docent. There was a statue in the collection that
this docent had walked by and even told others about countless times.
On one particular tour, the docent
was leading a group of blind guests. A
young girl was among those invited to touch the statue that she couldn’t
see. The docent remembers, “She ran her
hands down the body of this female figure, and her first remark was: ‘Oh, she’s pregnant.’”
The docent recalls, “And I had
never thought about that. But in fact,
the figure does look like a pregnant woman.
Here was a kid really showing me something that I had been looking at
for thirty-five years and had never noticed.’”[2]
The way Luke tells it in his
gospel, John recognized something about Jesus while he was still in his mother
Elizabeth’s womb. After the angel
Gabriel came to Mary to tell her she would give birth to the Son of the Most
High, she went to visit her elderly
cousin Elizabeth, who was pregnant with John. When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, “the
child leaped in her womb.”[3]
So… had John the Baptist looked at
Jesus for 30 years and never noticed who he really was?
Does that make you wonder what else we
might miss?
I don’t think we should be too hard
on John the Baptist for not knowing Jesus. The people of Jesus’ home town, his home
congregation, didn’t get it either. They
went pretty quickly from “Isn’t this the son of Joseph the carpenter?”-- to
wanting to throw him off the cliff when he told them something
they didn’t want to hear.[4] As Jesus said then, prophets aren’t accepted
in their home towns.
Over the centuries, others have
been given new ways of seeing. Martin
Luther King, Jr. was one of them.
In the mid-1950’s, he wrapped up
his course work for his Ph.D. and took his first call to a church. He had recently declined a nomination to serve
as the president of the Montgomery, Alabama chapter of the NAACP, because he
felt he needed to spend more time at his church work.
Not long after he got to Montgomery, there was a meeting held in the African-American
community to decide who was going to lead the bus boycott after Rosa Parks
refused to go to the back of the bus. All the other pastors and
influential leaders in the community were smart enough to know that this looked
like a risky business. So they decided to ask the new pastor in town to lead the boycott. They came to
Rev. King and told him that they needed him to serve as president of the
Montgomery Improvement Association, the group that would lead the bus boycott.
Rev. Martin Luther King had every
reason in the world to say, "This is not the right time for me. I have a
young family. I have a dissertation to finish writing. I have a
congregation that doesn’t know me or trust me yet. If I start out
at the head of this enterprise, what will that do to my relationship to my
congregation? It just isn’t a good time. This isn’t the time for me
to do something like this.” But,
as we know, this very human being was moved from “not my time”--to yes.
More than 60 years have passed since the Montgomery bus boycott.
More than 50 years have passed since the March on Washington when Dr. King gave
his “I have a dream” speech, and since he wrote his last book before he was
assassinated: Where Do We Go From
Here: Chaos or Community?[5]
Have we made progress since that time? Undoubtedly. But we need to
be honest
with ourselves about where we the people of the United States are
and about our history.
Later in the Gospel of John, we hear Jesus saying, “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”[6]
I believe the gospel has the power to set us free-- as individuals, as a
community, as a society-- if we have ears to hear the good news… if we have
faith to trust in God’s power to transform us and bind us together in Beloved
Community… if we trust in the gospel’s truth to make us free.
I appreciate the way Jim Wallis talks about the power of the truth in his
latest book:[7]
“You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free. I truly
believe that would be the best thing for all of us.
“To become more free because of the truth. To become more honest because of the truth. To
become more responsible because of
the truth. To become better neighbors because of the truth.
To become more productive and contributing citizens
because of the truth. To become better Christians, Jews, Muslims,
Buddhists, people of other faiths, or people of conscience with no religion—all
better because of the truth. To become a better and freer country for all of us because of the truth.
To become better and freer human beings because of the truth.[8]
I agree with Jim Wallis when he says, “We can no longer be afraid of the truth
about race in this country—past,
present, and future—because our fears will keep us captive to all kinds of
untruths.
Wallis says when he crossed the famous Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama,
on the fiftieth anniversary of the historic march that helped bring voting
rights to all our fellow citizens, he realized that we can find answers in
crossing another bridge—“the bridge to a new America that will soon be a
majority of minorities.”[5]
He’s talking about a new America that is coming into being due to demographic
changes. By the year 2040 or 2045, the majority of U.S. citizens will be
descended from African, Asian, and Latin American ancestors, according to the
US Census Bureau projections. “We will have become a majority of
minorities—with no one race being in the majority. The United States will
be no longer a predominantly white nation-- but a multiracial nation,
which will make the assumptions of white privilege increasingly less
assumed. That multiracial reality is already the case in many major
cities around the country….” and for several whole states.[9]
Truth be told, many white Americans—especially older white Americans—find that
kind of demographic shift troubling. Some commentators
have been pointing to this uneasiness about shifting demographics as something
that’s fueling the fears and suspicion of immigrants and people who are
different that we hear voiced by some people.
Change is coming. So it seems to me that
we can choose how we will face the changes. We
could approach them fearfully…grudgingly… and imagine all the worst possible
scenarios about how terrible things will be. Or we could trust in God to
be with us as we cross over a bridge to becoming a more diverse and inclusive
nation. We could pray for God to use us as people of faith, to model what
it means to live as Beloved Community and to be part of a transformation of our
country that is more and more fully a nation of abundance, where there is truly
liberty and justice for all.
Some of the stories we hear during Advent season each year remind us that
sometimes people have a failure of imagination, like Zechariah,
when the angel Gabriel told him Elizabeth was going to have a baby:
“How can this be?”[10]
In our time and place, God calls us
to be the people who come are so transformed in the grace and abundance and
freedom of Jesus Christ that we embody it as we live together in Beloved
Community with all of God’s children.
Come
and see. Follow me, Jesus calls to us.
In his last speech, Dr. King said,
“I’ve been to the mountaintop…. I’ve looked over and I’ve seen the promised land… Mine
eyes have seen the promised land….Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming
of the Lord.”
Martin Luther King’s prophetic
witness helped some of us--black and white Americans-- to have visions and
dream dreams. What he saw helped some
people to see themselves and other people differently-- as beloved children of God, created
in the very image of God, who need to be set free from hatred and fear
and oppression.
We’re not in the promised land
yet. But God’s love can give us new vision.
Can we see it? Is anything impossible for God?
In the words of our Presbyterian Brief
Statement of Faith: “In a broken and
fearful world, the Spirit gives us courage to pray without ceasing…to witness
among all peoples to Christ as Lord and Savior…to unmask idolatries in church
and culture…to hear the voices of people long silenced…and to work with others
for justice, freedom and peace.”
God’s love gives us new life and
new vision. So come and see. See the face of Christ in your neighbor. Get a glimpse of who God has made us to
be. Come and see.
Amen!
Rev. Fran Hayes, Pastor
Littlefield Presbyterian Church
Dearborn, Michigan
January 15, 2016
[3] Luke
1:41
[4] Luke 4
[5] Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go
from Here: Chaos or Community? First
published in 1967.
[6] John
8:32
[7] Jim
Wallis, America’s Original Sin:
Racism, White Privilege, and the Bridge to a New America. (Brazos
Press, 2016), Kindle Edition, Location 388.
[9] Jim
Wallis, America’s Original Sin, p.
189.
[10] Luke
1:18
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