Sunday, January 17, 2021

Known, Called, and Transformed: Sermon for the 2nd Sunday after Epiphany



Even when I was a kid, I read anything I could get my hands on. Given that my parents were older when they had me, and therefore my grandparents were older when I came along, and also that we didn’t have much money so most of our books were second-hand, that meant I did a lot of reading that usually was more common among older generations of kids. My step-grandmother handed me a battered Hardy Boys book she’d found at a garage sale, probably to get me to stop bugging her during one visit. And it was during reading that book that I learned that one could make one’s own radio from what was called a crystal radio set. This intrigued me. And so, since I was also a big fan of Radio Shack, because they gave you a free 9 volt battery each month, I discovered that they still sold those kits, even in the 1970s.

So I saved up my lawnmowing money and my babysitting money one summer, and for once, rather than buying books with my cash, I bought a crystal radio kit. This was a bare basics model, but when I was done, I had a functional AM radio with a solitary earpiece as well as a speaker, and I had learned a little about circuits and coils and all kinds of stuff. I could listen to the radio at night without my parents being any the wiser. I especially loved listening to Cardinals games, when the reach of KMOX made it all the way to Tulsa at night.

In making that radio, I learned a little bit about how radios worked at their most basic level. Making helped lead to understanding.

Perhaps that’s why our psalm today particularly resonates with me. Our psalm expands upon the idea we’ve heard throughout Epiphany of being known intimately by God who is our Mother, Father, and Creator. Psalm 139 reminds us that God’s knowledge of us is complete, even as we cannot possibly presume to know God in the same way.

Sadly, some of the most beautiful and humbling verses of this psalm are among those omitted today, and I think they make a vital point, so I want to include them here:

6 Where can I go then from your Spirit?
   Where can I flee from your presence?
7 If I climb up to heaven, you were there;
   If I make the grave my bed, you were there also.
8 If I take the wings of the morning
   And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,
9 Even there your hand will lead me
   And your right hand hold me fast.
10 If I say, “Surely the darkness will cover me,
   And the lights around the turn to night,”
11 Darkness is not dark to you;
   The night is as bright as the day;
   Darkness and light to you are both alike.

These omitted verses make a valuable point about human nature. It is true that we often FEAR being known that much. Someone who knows us that intimately would know our faults, our pettiness, our dishonesty, our cowardice as well as our moments of courage, compassion, and wisdom. We want to manage our own PR. We want to selectively put on display only our best versions of ourselves—and sometimes don’t want to admit our failings even inwardly. We want to believe that we can bury our flaws and our faults, our sins and trespasses, so deep they can never be found. When we find out how deeply we are known by the One who loves us, our response may be to flee. It’s often that way. We feel the blessing of God’s presence with us, and know that God is “our portion and our cup.” We radiate with that blessing. And yet, the minute we think we have God all figured out, that’s when we get off track. Deep down, we think God is like us. We humans tend to judge others harshly, and we project that attitude on God as well, despite all evidence to the contrary, despite the doctrine of grace that makes our approach to God possible at all. Deep down, we think that God can only love the best versions of ourselves, because that is too often how we work in relation to others and their flaws.

Yet the second we think we can hide from God, we are lying to ourselves. God is with us always—not just in good times, and certainly not just in bad times. And God is not only with us, but God KNOWS us. Three times it is stated that God knows us intimately—and the knowledge of that simply boggles the mind of the psalmist. In the last part of the psalm that we read today, we are reminded that God not only knows us, but has made us, each and every one, which implies an even more intimate level of knowing.

We live in a time of great turmoil. And I am grateful for these words of this psalm at this time. I see this psalm being sent to us at this time as a true sign of God’s grace. God KNOWS us—and yet loves and treasures us anyway. Even when part of what makes us who we are includes our anger, our spite, our recklessness, and the very real damage we inflict upon others. Even then, when the thought of that love is overwhelming, and we just “know” in our hearts that we don’t deserve such love, that love nonetheless remains. God is with us throughout our fallible, messy lives. God’s love penetrates whatever veils we try to draw around our present or around our past. We sometimes pray, “God have mercy upon me, a sinner.” Yet, the promise is there within those words: God DOES have mercy on us, sinners as we all are, because we are known and loved with a fierce, unending love that is beyond our imagination.

We are all naked before God, like Adam and Eve in the garden. Yet God is with us, loving us, knowing us in all our victories as well as in our darkest, meanest actions. God is with us, loving us, from our first breath to our last. God’s hand is upon us, pressing upon us and at the same time bearing us up with a love that cannot be denied, not even by sin or by death.

Deep in our hearts, unless one is without a conscience, and there ARE people like that, we know the shortcomings of our own lives, the places where our nerve has failed when we could have chosen to do right but instead went along with the crowd.

That’s why most of us resist the idea that God knows us that deeply and completely, and yet STILL calls us to share as disciples in ministry to the world. Yet each of us who call ourselves Christians also must accept that we have been called to transformation of our lives and to discipleship—to carrying God’s good news out into the world. A world that as we have been seeing for the last many months, is groaning our in pain and distress.

We see Samuel called by God in our first reading, and we see Philip and Nathanael called by God in our gospel. When Philip tells Nathanael that Jesus is the one predicted by Moses and the prophets, but then he includes a contradictory detail—Philip adds that Jesus comes from Nazareth. This information actually works against Jesus, for none of the messianic prophecies claimed that the Messiah would come from Nazareth. No, the Messiah was supposed to come from Bethlehem, as part of the House of David. But Nathanael is willing to go take a look.

Nathanael at first fails to understand who Jesus is, just as the boy Samuel misunderstood who was calling him and speaking to him. Yet Jesus tells Nathanael that he had “seen” Nathanael under a fig tree, and this causes Nathanael to believe that Jesus DOES have the special powers that the Messiah would have. Just as in our psalm, we have Jesus as the Son of God claiming to know a person intimately, even though he and Nathanael had never met.

Once again, we see God through Jesus reaching out to us and seeking us, knowing us even better than we know ourselves. God calls to us, but we can choose to respond or not. And Jesus could have said a lot of things about Nathanael—he could have shamed Nathanael for being a cynic, or for passively sitting under a fig tree. Instead, Jesus calls out the characteristic about Nathanael that Jesus most wants to bless, the quality of honesty and lack of deceit that we ALL need more of, especially after living through a century that has been marked by demagogues repeating dangerous, bloody lies until they become powerful weapons against reason, integrity and truth. Jesus calls Nathanael one who is without deceit, and Nathanael is transformed by this assessment to begin to live into it.

When God calls to us, we are changed. The call we hear is to a new identity with new possibilities, a new understanding of ourselves. That new understanding is predicated upon God’s knowledge of and love for us, asking us to open up our eyes to have an epiphany in our understanding of ourselves as well as of our understanding of God. When Jesus calls to us, we are really being called to see ourselves in a new light, in a new way.

We may feel unworthy of our calling to be disciples of Jesus—and we may use that excuse to confirm our natural inclination to keep our faith quiet rather than to share it. The problem is, that natural inclination then leads us to fail in our duty to be witnesses and workers rather than mere claimers of the privileged status of Christian, especially when that claim is used to claim superiority over others as we see too often today.

This reading always comes around the observance of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday on January 15. When we find our courage to urge others to “Come and see” failing, it is good that we are surrounded by, as the saying goes, “so great a cloud of witnesses” as the saints who have gone before us. Dr. King’s legacy was to not just invite but to challenge the white majority in this country to “come and see” a God who called all people of faith to demand justice and equality among all of God’s children by truly “seeing” that the historical system of laws and attitudes were meant to oppress, silence, and disenfranchise people of color. Dr. King invited all of us to come and see and follow a Jesus who made his home among the outcast, the oppressed, and the marginalized. Dr. King’s words from more than half a century ago confront the challenges we are facing in 2021 boldly and presciently:

“One of the great tragedies of life is that men seldom bridge the gulf between practice and profession, between doing and saying. A persistent schizophrenia leaves so many of us tragically divided against ourselves. On the one hand, we proudly profess certain sublime and noble principles, but on the other hand, we sadly practice the very antithesis of these principles. How often are our lives characterized by a high blood pressure of creeds and an anemia of deeds! We talk eloquently about our commitment to the principles of Christianity, and yet our lives are saturated with the practices of paganism. We proclaim our devotion to democracy, but we sadly practice the very opposite of the democratic creed. We talk passionately about peace, and at the same time we assiduously prepare for war. We make our fervent pleas for the high road of justice, and then we tread unflinchingly the low road of injustice. This strange dichotomy, this agonizing gulf between the ought and the is, represents the tragic theme of man’s earthly pilgrimage.”(1)


Coming and seeing is a start, but of itself is not enough. Proclaiming that you believe is not enough. Jesus calls his disciples not just to listen, but then to follow. To take a different path than they had planned. To upend their lives in the name of the outrageous truth about the power of love in a world in which oppression lies and tells us we are always alone and vulnerable.

God has searched us out and knows us—and loves us completely. Knowing us as we truly are, God calls us to a life of action and virtue as God’s children. I have seen you, God says. Now come, and see—and be transformed.

Come and be open to seeing—let us be brave enough to admit we need transformation in our personal and national lives. Come and see, and confess where we have closed our eyes to the damage of dishonesty about ourselves—and take hold of God’s call to see honestly our own faults and blindnesses about the struggles of others—and be transformed. Come and give thanks for God’s grace—for a God not of vengeance and violence, but a God that knows us and loves us as petty as we can be—and step out onto a new path in which we truly live by the creeds we claim, as kindred who live lives worthy of our calling as children of God in truth, in integrity, and in mutual love.

Amen.


Preached at the 10:30 online service at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO in time of COVID19.


Readings:


Sources:
1) The Rev Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., "Love in Action," delivered April 3, 1960, published in Strength to Love, p. 31.
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