See for yourself... and for the world too

John 1:29-42

I guess I've always thought of the disciples as always knowing Jesus somehow. Or someone knowing him, anyway.  That he’d just always had followers, believers, as though the Church always just was.  Like your parents or grandparents, the stories you usually hear are from them already being together, stories of after the relationship began.

But the really intriguing stories are the ones about when they met.  Before they knew each other. When she saw him across the dance floor for the first time, when his friend introduced her at a church picnic, when her blind date entered the restaurant or he laid eyes on his sister’s college roommate.  How did their story start?  When did they recognize that this was the One?

Matthew, Mark, and Luke tell the story of Jesus in a certain way, they tell about his birth, and then his baptism and then the calling of the disciples, very orderly and matter of fact.  And the prophets foretold his coming, or his genealogy is there and somehow, in their versions of the story, it’s easier to assume everyone always just knew each other, the world and Jesus, that is.

 

But John does his own thing.  In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God… and the light shines in the darkness… and he came to what was his own but they did not know him… the whole cosmos which he had a hand in creating didn’t recognize that this was the One.

And the baptism story in John is not actually the baptism, it’s John the Baptist telling about the baptism.  Because that is what John does in the gospel of John (different John), he doesn’t actually baptize, that is, he is not “John the Baptist”, he tells about it, he testifies, he’s “John the Witness,” the seer, the teller, the one who makes known, and who points always, in all things, to Jesus.  

So John tells about how he didn’t know Jesus, and once he was baptized the Spirit came upon him and John suddenly recognized him, and now he can testify that this is indeed the Son of God! 

But being his cousin and all, John surely knew who Jesus was; they’d grown up together, right? Or at least seen one another from time to time!  "But I myself did not know him!," he says. Twice.  I didn’t see!  he cries. I talked about him and anticipated him and prepared the way for him but it wasn’t until God pointed him out to me that I SAW, this is the ONE, the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

He was among his own, and yet his own did not recognize him.

"I once was blind, and didn’t recognize the light of the world, John reports, but now I see!"  And we plunge deeper into Epiphany, or rather, epiphany plunges deeper into us.  And the world and her people get acquainted with their creator.

So a couple of people are chatting with John, and they overhear John him say about Jesus as he is walking by, “That’s the one I’ve been telling you about!”  So they shadow Jesus.  This scene cracks me up.  Because following someone without being invited is always, without exception, awkward.  Like the time a friend and I were getting in our car in a mall parking lot in L.A. and she swore she saw George Clooney just pulling out, so we tailed him obnoxiously until he lost us at a stoplight.  Or when I stood next to Jack Black in the subway in New York, and my sister in law and I giggled and pointed under our breath, and pretended we weren’t staring at him so much that he got off at the next stop. 

They just followed him.  Intrigued enough to tail him, not quite sure what they’d say if he ever saw them, no plan after that, just following. Turning corners when he did, slowing down to keep the pace.  Finally, I can see Jesus sigh, and stop and turn around.  And they’re caught.  He sees them.  They see him. They see him seeing them.  “What are you looking for?” he asks, What do you want to see?

That’s a question, right there.  What are you looking for? Really?  In all the world, what do you most wish to find?  When you are looking, which isn’t all the time, for most of us, it’s not even much of the time, but when it does happen that you are really looking, what is it you are hoping, truly longing, to see?

Well his question caught them short.  Perhaps they weren’t really sure what they were looking for. They weren’t even sure what they were looking at.  They were just curious, interested, and that was about all.  So, perhaps to avoid seeming rude or maybe because they don’t know what else to say but they want the conversation to continue somehow, they ask him, “Teacher, where are you staying?”

And he answers, “Come and see.”

But he says See.  Not “look”, like a surface kind of noticing, like, I’ll show you the address and you’ll see it and be on your way.  But SEE, in the deeper knowing, recognizing, experiencing sense of the word.  In the sense of what happened to John when he baptized his cousin, and what is about to happen in the coming chapters to Philip, and Nathaniel, and the Samaritan woman at the well, and a whole bunch of other unsuspecting people who haven’t yet been looking but end up seeing as this story unfolds.  “Jesus is calling these disciples to the kind of seeing that opens a door, a seeing that draws us into a journey that will change us in ways we cannot know or imagine at the outset.” one writer[1] describes.

Come and see. Experience.

So they do.  They spend the day with him; they hang out, they abide, they loiter with no agenda in particular, with no goal, or obligation, or project.  Just being with one another. Listening, talking, sharing food, hearing and seeing.  It becomes an encounter of mutual finding – they find him and when they do, he finds them.  And they go from not knowing, not recognizing that this is the One, to seeing, witnessing, and the next day they tell a couple others, we have seen, you should come and see too!

The light is in the world and the world does not know him, yet. He comes to his own and they don’t recognize him, yet.  Until they hang out with him a little bit, and then they see.  And the whole world changes view. The light that is in it illuminates it all.   Because if you see that God is in the world, how can the world ever look the same?

Come and see! Come and see what God is up to! Come and see what God has done! Come and see where Jesus is staying next! Come and hang out with the one who walks among us hidden.

I’ve been pondering the paintings hanging in our Artspace, or rather, the painter, Annie Young, who lost her sight as an adult and began painting these vibrant and amazing things as her eyesight faded and her vision disappeared altogether.  She titled this exhibit, “Blessed Beyond Belief, an exploration” and writes, of her work, “I seek to nudge your heart, your mind...my work may bring to you a smile, peace or a yearning to take action. I create the images that hold my mind's eye hostage, make my fingers itch...it is my never-ending hope that you see what I feel.”

And it occurs to me that while she cannot see what she has painted, her painting is witnessing to what she Sees, she is testifying to what she recognizes, inviting us to come and see what she can feel, the presence of God, the experience, to see with our eyes, what she sees with her soul. Her paint is her witness; her art is her testimony.

The Church is the witness, we’re like John, the seer and teller. We are the community who sees.  And not all of us see all the time; in fact, most of us don’t see much of the time. But we keep inviting each other, Come and See! God is at work! Jesus is here!  

Sometimes we need others to see for us, and sometimes we can see where others can’t.  And we tell our stories of how we ourselves missed Jesus in front of our eyes, how we didn’t recognize that God was there until suddenly we did.  And our story helps another come and see for themselves.  And before long, we are a whole people with the eyes to see that redemption is happening all around us, all throughout the world while we’re not looking, and so we start looking.

Today we join our own journeys together with some more witnesses, more seers, more people whose eyes and souls scan the landscape, the nooks and crannies, for the light of the world.  More people who recognize Jesus in places we might miss, who have their own abiding experience quite different from each of ours, who have their own personal encounters with the Messiah who moves among us. 

And they bring their own vision, their own unique ways of noticing and witnessing to who God is and what God is doing. Their lives reflect the presence of God in ways yours might not and mine never could. And by coming together, we get new lives and stories to see into, and we get a new set of eyes on our own lives, as together we seek to recognize where Jesus is and what God is up to in all of this.  And side by side, this community witnesses – looks into the world and sees Jesus, points to where he is, follows him there, and tells others what we ourselves see.

What a crazy week it has been in the world.  Politically, meteorologically, historically… Epic floods and mudslides, enormous blizzards and ice storms, countries defining themselves in historic elections and bloody coups, and in our nation finger-pointing and grieving and reeling from terrible violence and divisive rhetoric and the world continues on. 

A couple of nights ago, at the dinner table, Owen, thinking, of something he had learned in school that day, asked me if I had ever heard this song, and then raised his sweet high voice and began to sing out, “We shall overcome, we shall overcome… Oh deep in my heart, I do believe, We shall overcome someday.” And I heard the words, in all these contexts simultaneously.  Martin Luther King Day tomorrow, remembering and commemorating that incredible struggle for freedom, but I also heard it against the backdrop of the people in Haiti still pulling bodies from rubble a year later while their friends and loved ones die of cholera. 

And when he sang, “We’ll walk hand in hand…” I heard the words with the news on the TV in the background going over again the aftermath of the shooting in Tucson and the partisan arguments and blaming even while a nine year old was being buried.

And as they talked about the right to carry hidden guns and being more suspicious of troubled people Owen sang, “We are not afraid…” 

And by the time he sang, “We are not alone…” I was weeping. 

Oh deep in my heart, I do believe. 

I see it. I recognize.  The light has come into the darkness and as dark as the darkness gets it cannot overcome the light; the creator has joined creation and our story is now one story.  And even when we forget to look or it's hard to notice, the Word is here in the flesh and I touched him! John says, I dipped him under the water and I saw the Spirit come on him and I KNEW, and before I didn’t know but now I know, and I can testify to it, it happened to me, I was there.

Come and see.  Come see.  Hang out a while.  He’s up to something.  I’ll help you look.  You help me recognize.  We’ll walk hand in hand.  And then we’ll tell each other about it.  We’ll tell the world what we see.

---

[1] Jan Richardson, at The Painted Prayerbook

On Words mattering

My friend, Chris Duckworth, a minister in Arlington, VA and blogger at The Lutheran Zephyr, shared this in his sermon this morning, and I would like to share it here.

A few months ago,
    when comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert held a rally on the Mall,
    a lot of people dismissed their efforts as little more than a publicity stunt
    and thinly-veiled politicking just two weeks prior to the election.
Part satire, part political demonstration,
    these comedians lampooned our nation’s broken politics,
    and assailed its hateful, vitriolic political rhetoric.
Comedians did this, because few others had the guts to do so.

And perhaps as many as two hundred thousand people attended,
    to take a stand – and have a laugh doing so –
    calling for our nation to turn down the rhetoric of vitriol and animosity,
    to stop labeling political opponents as enemies and
    to stop characterizing politics as warfare,
    as if our elections were a matter of life or death,
        as if one party were the path to socialism and the other to fascism,
        both roads to ruin and death.
Give me a break.
We’re all Americans, these comedians said,
    and they bid everyone – particularly the news media – to just calm the freak down.
Though it is not clear what motivated Jared Lee Loughner
    to target Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords yesterday at a Tuscon, AZ, event,
    early indications are that politics were at least a contributing factor.
Our political discourse is sick, it is terribly sick,
    and the environment in which Jared Loughner acted is terribly polluted with
    violent imagery, false us/them dichotomies,
        and extreme language that only hurts our country
        tears its people apart.
The way we talk about those with whom we disagree has consequences.
They things that TV and radio star commentators say,
    on the left and on the right, have consequences.
The bumper stickers we place on our cars
    and the links we post on Facebook have consequences.
The fear that the media feeds on for ratings has consequences.
The polarization of our nation into red and blue
    rips at the fabric of our flag and denies our unity as We the People,
    seeking a more perfect union.


Words are powerful things.
We Christians should know this more than most,
    for we follow a Word made flesh who speaks words of hope and of life,
Jesus, the living Word of God, died so that death would have no more power over us;
    He is the Word of Life that silences words of death and hatred and violence.
God has spoken his Word into our world and into our lives …
    but it has not yet been fulfilled, completely.
Just a look around will make that truth abundantly clear.
God’s living Word promises to come to us again and to make things new,
    in the blessed future when Christ comes again to usher in his Kingdom.
For that we wait in hope and we live in hope,
    speaking words of life and of hope now,
    witnessing now to the gifts of life and love that Christ gives to us,
    knowing that our Lord is present in the suffering of this world,
        and that suffering is not the end of the story for him or for us.
We are confident in what Christ has done and what Christ promises yet to do.
And so may we speak words of life and of hope into the world this day,
    echoing the Living Word who took on flesh and dwelled among us,
    who did not let death defeat him, but who rose again,
        the first fruit of the new creation promised to us all.

My Eyes Have Seen

"Christmas is in the can" shared by Tonya Hansen Toutge

Luke 2:22-40

(Isaiah 9:2-7)

My neighbor is one of the most efficient and orderly people on the planet.  You could set your clock by her.  On Dec. 27 I waved hello to her out the front door while she carried organizing bins from her car to her house, and I had to chuckle to myself when I pulled out of the driveway at 7 am December 28 and saw her tree all bagged up and waiting on the curb. 

I imagined the inside of her house, all quiet and pristine, vacuumed and scrubbed, ornaments and decoration tucked away on a basement shelf for next year and felt just a tad bit jealous.

So, in case you hadn't realized, you can look at my neighbor's curb.  Christmas is OVER, people.  And with New Year’s Eve now past, we are ready to put it all behind us.  I’ve had about 5 containers of assorted Christmas cookies stacked in a corner in my kitchen, cookies that we look forward to all year, and which we ate heartily and enjoyed immensely, but I am absolutely delighted to be dumping the stale leftovers in the trash this afternoon so we can get back to eating healthy again.  It’s time to move on.

In our culture, Christmas is a brief, cheerful episodic event, not meant to overrun its margins.  You get ready for it, you celebrate it, and you pack it away.  End of story.  But our Christmas story, and our Christmas season, continues. 

The really dramatic, miraculous moment has passed, certainly. The angels have retreated to heaven; the shepherds have returned to their sheep.  The virgin’s son has been born and she’s a regular, ordinary mom now.  It would be easy to put away the story with the ornaments and stockings, but the story continues.

A couple brings their firstborn baby boy to the temple, like any good Jewish couple, like every good Jewish couple.  In the hustle and bustle of the temple, the baby is brought for the ritual in the everyday event that has happened every time a firstborn male is born for centuries.

And here is the ritual: The firstborn son belongs to God, he is considered holy.  It is a symbol of the deliverance of firstborn sons from the Angel of Death in Egypt when the Jews were delivered from slavery; it is a symbol that everything that comes after this one is a gift from God. And so the first fruits of labor, the first money made, the first grains and livestock are given to God, to whom they rightly belong, because God gives us all. 

But the baby is brought to the temple for the custom of “redemption of the firstborn son” which was, in effect, to buy the child back from God – letting him belong to ordinary life.   Rather than giving the child to be raised in the temple, or setting him aside to be a priest when he became a man, the parents would offer a sacrifice to God – would pay God – for  the right to raise the child themselves, and therefore allow the child to grow up participating in ordinary activities, in secular life, rather than only holy things.  

So as everyday and regular as this ritual was, take note observers, this is also the moment when the Holy One, God-incarnate, is being claimed by human beings and marked for an ordinary and common human life.

Now, there is this man in Jerusalem, Simeon, a prophet, who spends his days searching the streets, wandering and watching the ordinary world, waiting to see a sign of the salvation of Israel.  He’s an unusual and holy man, respected but dismissed— after all, he’d been doing this his whole life, the same thing.

He plays his role on behalf of the people, one they are grateful for, certainly, but not something they give a second thought to.  He is just Simeon, coming in and out of the temple, praying, waiting, hoping, keeping vigil.

The Advent Man. 

But on this day, in the middle of the ordinary holy activity of the temple, Simeon, lingering in the temple, suddenly sees this poor, plain family approach the priest, just getting ready to carry out the ritual.  He rushes past the rest of the world in its routine, and makes a beeline for the family.  He reaches out to gently lift the baby from his startled mother’s arms.  Holding up this unremarkable couple’s small, red-faced infant in the air, Simeon face breaks out in joy.  He raises his voice above the din of the temple, and astonishing Mom & Dad and everyone else, he shouts out, “Sovereign God!  As you have promised, you now dismiss your servant in peace! 
For my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the sight of all people, a light for revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people Israel!"

Then he lowers the child softly into his mother’s arms. And with tears running down his wrinkled face and into his beard, he embraces and blesses the little family.  And when he has finished his blessing, he leans close to the mother; his hands grip her shoulders and he looks directly into her eyes.  His voice dropping and striking a chillingly serious note that causes her to shudder, he speaks, “This child is destined to cause the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be spoken against, so that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed. And a sword will pierce your own soul too."

Then comes Anna, another temple regular.  Once a young, sad and beautiful widow, she came to the temple sixty years earlier and stayed, devoting her whole life to fasting, praying, and serving in the temple. 

The Worshiping Woman.

 

When the commotion begins, Anna feels a surge of awareness, a powerful déjà vu.  As though in a dream, she rises from her prayers and slowly walks over, staring at the baby, now awake and starting to fuss. When she reaches the small group, she looks up and locks eyes with Simeon.  In deep recognition without words, her soul fills with joy that spills from her eyes.  She raises her head and begins to laugh and cry and shout thank you! to God, right then and there. 

Then after placing one small leathery hand tenderly on the baby’s downy head, she whirls around and began telling people, this one walking past, that one kneeling there, her voice filled with wonder and delight, “See this child! The redemption of Israel has come!”

When Anna and Simeon’s divine interruptions calm down, and the temple resumes its rhythm, these two witnesses stand by watching as the child is redeemed, and the priest completes the ritual releasing him to an ordinary life.  They watch, comprehending what nobody else sees: that in this moment God incarnate is called out of the holy to live life as a typical human child. 

And then the story becomes so ordinary, so commonplace, so representative,

that the next dozen or so years of diapers and potty training, 

and walking and talking

and cuts and bruises and stomach flu and temper tantrums

and birthday parties and baby sisters and new brothers

and rites of passage and making friends and being teased

and sharing toys and losing grandparents and doing chores

and learning skills and gaining independence

and laughter, anger, fear, gladness and tears – are all summarized in one verse: “...and the child grew and became strong; he was filled with wisdom, and the grace of God was upon him.”

Christmas is over, yes. 

But the light has come into the world. 

INTO the world – the very fabric of it. Inseparable from it. Tangled and tied and mixed up and stirred in, so that it cannot be extracted, can never be overcome.  The ordinary is infused with the holy, the holy has been claimed by the ordinary; God is irreversibly here. 

When the moment had passed and the people went on with their regular routines and their ordinary lives, they may never have given a second thought to the strange and beautiful scene in the temple that day.  But Simeon had seen, and Anna beheld. They had glimpsed the future. The Worshiping Woman and Advent Man saw, and recognized, and knew that the world would never be the same.  And so do we. 

We are the Christmas Keepers.

Christmas is not an episode, a happy but empty event; it is a reorientation to the future. Christmas is the beginning of God’s joining us in this life.  In every ordinary and unholy part of it.

And most often the times when our eyes see God’s salvation are not the overcoming, power and prestige moments, or the super holy and set apart moments, because that is not how God came.  God came in poverty and weakness, in ordinary struggle and everyday life. 

We see God’s salvation in the places of redemption amidst the pain, the moments of peace within the war, the hope that creeps in and compels us, sustains us, points us forward, the small gifts and surprise graces that permeate this ordinary, holy life. 

How do we keep Christmas? Not by singing the carols and then stopping, celebrating the day and then packing it away again until next year.  Because Christmas is a reorientation, not an episode.  Like Anna and Simeon, we keep Christmas by cultivating awareness, by recognizing glimpses of the holy in the ordinary, and by telling the story when we see it.

It has broken in, it is at work, subtly and deeply, easy to dismiss or ignore, but impossible to quench.  Unto us and for all the world, a child is born, and our eyes have seen the salvation of God. 

How have your eyes seen?  

And what will they see next?

Tis the Season…

I always find this time of year fascinating, after we’ve gorged ourselves on Christmas cookies and overspent on gifts and we’re feeling a little bit gluttonous and a smidgen bad about the time with family – which we so look forward to and then it rarely meets expectations.  The time after, when maybe we’re slightly regretful for who we didn’t get to see and what we never should have spent what we wish we didn’t say.  The gray, damp January and February slush fills our margins in and we’re sweeping dead pine needles from under the couch and thinking we’d really like a fresh start.

Perfect time for the American holiday season of Resolution. 

Beginning January 1, (or a little before for those who like to plan ahead), our Season of Solutions kicks in full force.  Every diet pill, nicotine patch, organizing gizmo, life coach, heath club, lean meal, self-help book and storage container is on sale.  Right.  Now.  And for the next few weeks, you’re allowed to tell people how fat you’ve gotten, how depressed you feel, how disorganized you are and what a terrible communication patterns you’ve fallen into with your partner, because this is the season to fix it!

Baby Jesus came to earth and now we get one more go at changing all the rotten things about us. One more opportunity to fix all the ugly and dark parts of ourselves while we have the motivation.  Quick, before we pitter out a few weeks from now and give up, and slide back into comfortable disregard until next year’s Resolution Season.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

The truth is, underneath the gaudy and obnoxious discarded garland and adopted resolve, there is something quite shocking and lovely about what happens after Christmas.  If we’ve let ourselves linger in Advent’s darkness as we await the light of the world, then we might notice that Christmas says something has changed forever, and can never go back.  God has come. To share life with us.  All of it.  Forever.  And just in case the baby in the manger and the shepherds and the secret arrival doesn’t sink in, we’ve got Epiphany.

 Epiphany celebrates the Magi, the foreigners from the East traveling for months on end, on a distant promise and a light in the sky, to find the Creator of the world on the lap of a peasant woman.  And the light of the world is no longer for those who waited, for those who knew it was coming, or those who were there when it came; it’s for everyone, all of us.  The light shines in the darkness. It spreads out and wraps its arms around those of every tribe and nation, every belief and persuasion, every political party, religion, gender, language, socio-economic status, educational level, ethnicity, sexual orientation, ability, criminal record, age, temperament, credit score …you get the picture.  The world has changed. God has come. There is no going back.

Our tired and plastic smile season of Resolution says, Its up to you to fix what’s broken about yourself.  Take control!  Make it better!  Resolutions are all about us and our actions, what we are going to do or stop doing. Our efforts and choices determine their success or failure.

But Epiphany happens to us.  It inspires us.  And it calls forth change.  It opens to us a world of possibility.  Profound meaning and surprising actions come out of epiphany because we are awakened.  We are summoned deep within ourselves by something greater than ourselves. 

Resolution begins with our fears and our failures.  It works to try to prevent pain and repair deficits. 

But Epiphany comes out of nowhere.  It brings possibilities and surprises.  It calls out of us potential we may not have known we had and involves us in great things. It lights a flame inside us and spreads to those around us.  When we open ourselves up to epiphany we open ourselves to be transformed.

Epiphany invites us into the unsettled, the mystery.  It says, Lift your eyes from yourselves, your brokenness and faults and look to God.  God is up to something.  It’s irreversible. It’s in the world. The darkness cannot overcome it.  It’s calling you. You are part of this Story.

Have you made resolutions?  Nothing wrong with that.  They’re often helpful.  I make them myself.  But this year I want to invite you beyond Resolution.  I want to invite you into Epiphany.

Instead of merely finding what’s wrong with you and resolving to fix it, I want to invite you to notice what God might be up to in your life.  Who are you?  What defines you?  How do you bring value to the world? Because you do.  Uniquely.  You participate.  What do you do that makes you feel alive and filled with joy?  What might God be summoning within you?

What if in 2011 we committed to live in the mystery a little more? What if we relaxed our grip and lifted our gaze, and allowed ourselves to be a bit more open to God’s activity in our lives?  What if we sought to discover more ways we are connected to God, to others, to the Story beyond ourselves?  What if we even dared to expect Epiphany? 

In a tired world of recycled Resolution, we need Epiphany. 

May Epiphany seize us. 

May we dwell in the mystery that gives us boldness and confidence to live into who God created and called us to be.  May God’s light fill our vision.

Like the Magi of long ago, and every friend and stranger who has walked the earth since, whether they knew it or not,

You are now a sharer in the irreversible promise of Christ. 

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.