Come and see: the real deal
Wonderings:
I wonder if you’ve ever been overwhelmed by a stressful situation.
I wonder who you think of as “the real deal.” Who do you think is worthy of imitation?
Reflection based on these wonderings + the readings assigned for the Second Sunday after the Epiphany.
Isaiah 49:1-7; Psalm 40:1-12; John 1:29-42
Let us speak, and listen: held in the presence of our loving, liberating, and life-giving God. Amen.
John the Baptist knows that he has encountered the real deal. In this first paragraph of our Gospel lesson today, John the Baptist makes a big speech about it. But what spoke to me most in this reading was that line in the second paragraph: “Come and see.”
John is standing with two of his disciples, and Jesus walks by. And those two of John’s disciples also begin to wonder if Jesus is the real deal. So they follow Jesus, to see where he’s going. Jesus, noticing this, asks them, “what are you looking for?” And they don’t really know. And I love that. Because it feels so resonant with so many moments in my own spiritual life, where I don’t know why I’m drawn towards something, and that intuition feels wise, worth following.
The way I imagine this scene, Jesus asks the disciples “what are you looking for?” and they just invent something on the spot: one says “uhh…we just, uhh…we really want to know, uh, where you’re staying?” And the other says, “Yeah…John said you are the Lamb of God, and uh, we really wanted to know where your AirBnB is.”
And Jesus—so cool—says, “come and see.” And they follow, and the Gospel according to John doesn’t tell us what they talk about with Jesus, but we do know that one of them, Andrew, comes away from that trusting that Jesus is the Messiah, the Anointed One. He is so moved by the experience that he goes to tell his brother, Simon—and Andrew and Simon become Jesus’ first disciples.
“Come and see.” Jesus meets these people, as Jesus meets us, in the question we are asking. Even if it is kind of a stupid question. And Jesus leads us, so gently, into mystery that we can never fully comprehend, but a mystery which is worth trusting: the long and winding road to justice and joy. The real deal.
I think what strikes me here is the gentleness, the open-handedness, of Jesus’ invitation to come and see. Jesus does not need anything from these two disciples of John. He doesn’t need their attention; he doesn’t need to prove anything to them; he isn’t putting on a show for them. He is completely grounded in who he is; he does not require anything of them.
And that feels like such a stark contrast to the politics of spectacle that surround us and threaten to overwhelm us. Such a stark contrast to the ways that our federal government in particular is exercising its spectacular power. I mean spectacular in the sense of “making a spectacle.” When the Defense Department started bombing boats in the Caribbean in blatant violation of international law, they edited the video so it would look good on social media platforms, and they posted it, and Pete Hegseth commented with a string of emojis. They want everyone to see; they need everyone to see how powerful they are, how brazen and careless they feel they can be.
One reason I think that ICE agents often travel in packs of 5 or 10 cars, involving dozens of agents in a single arrest, is to make a spectacle of overwhelming force. A force that no one should even try to resist. That’s one reason too that the Secretary of Homeland Security stands before the press in full makeup to describe Renee Good, a peaceful protestor ensnared by one such overwhelming ICE presence, as a domestic terrorist.
These spectacles are a proclamation of a particular story. They are cynical attempts to goad us, as a nation, into living in a story that goes something like this: the world is a dangerous, degraded place where only brute force will keep you safe. Everything is scarce; everything is a battle with the enemies that gather all around. And it is only through victory over these enemies that we can reclaim what has been stolen from us. Only infinite power will soothe our infinite resentment.
And as I said earlier this week on Instagram, that story is so lonely, and so full of fear: there is no space for solidarity, for grace, for giving and receiving. And theologically, it's absolute crap.
In this place, we proclaim a different story, and as Christians, we aim to live it out. And in this season of Epiphany, when we are looking at many facets of the Nicene Creed, coming at it from multiple angles, let me use the Creed as the framework for this story. If you look in your bulletin, you can see that the Nicene Creed has three sections. Here’s a very abbreviated version of that story, in three parts.
We believe—we trust—in God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth. We trust in a God who creates the world in an awe-inspiring, abundant diversity of life, and God intends for us to flourish in it: for own flourishing to be bound up with the flourishing of all other life. We receive this world as a gift.
And when we forget that, God shows up among those made poor, those oppressed by our pride and power games. That incarnate solidarity with the suffering is one way of understanding what that second section is about: “we believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ.” I often struggle with the word “Lord,” given that its usage is so shot through with power-over. A Lord requires a serf, a servant, a slave. But there also is a liberatory way of reading this, that works for me sometimes. The Greek word for Lord is kyrios. And in the time of Jesus, if you asked most anyone in the Greek-speaking Roman world who their kyrios was, their immediate answer would be Caesar Augustus, the architect of violent domination across the Mediterranean.
But as bearers of the Christian story, we reject any pretenders to the title Lord except the One who is born among the enslaved and exploited, who leads a movement of non-violent resistance to Empire, who is condemned and executed as a criminal. Or as it would be spun today, a “domestic terrorist.” We put our faith in no Lord, except the one who collapses the hierarchies of domination; we bow down before no one who demands that others suffer for his glory; because in Jesus we have seen and known a Lord who is willing to suffer for ours.
Last section: “we believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life.” We trust that God has not left us alone; that God inspires us and breathes life into our work for justice and healing. We trust that God desires life for us and for all beings: the life that is deeper and richer than death. And because we trust that death is not the end of life, we trust that we are surrounded, too, by a great cloud of witnesses: ancestors and exemplars who are cheering us on as we make our next faithful steps.
I want to end by acknowledging the ancestor, the exemplar who we honor this weekend, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Dr. King was the real deal. Not a superhuman being, but a fallible, mortal man. We know, thanks to FBI surveillance, about his extramarital affairs. But did you also know that Dr. King suffered from sometimes debilitating depression throughout his life? That he attempted suicide twice as a child? That he needed to take extended leaves of absence from ministry and organizing work during particularly severe depressive episodes?
We know from his own words what story Dr. King was living in: that the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice, that the God of the universe endows each human being with inalienable dignity and worth. And that story compelled Dr. King to keep on taking one faithful step after another towards the realization of that dignity. And he knew that the movement he led could never survive the violent assaults of white supremacy, could never survive the fire hoses and dogs and billy clubs swung by people wearing a badge if they did not focus on living in that story.
And so, as you’ll see there in your bulletin, next to the Creed, a commitment card that everyone in Birmingham needed to sign before they would be allowed to participate in nonviolent direct action with Dr. King. And the first commitment is to “meditate daily on the life and teachings of Jesus.” You’ve got to know what story you’re living in. Because, as one teacher puts it, “the story you’re living in tends to be the story you’re living out.”
These times call for us all to struggle in the ways we are called against injustice and harm, against sin, against evil. And because the struggle of good against evil runs through the center of every human heart, it’s not enough to know what we’re against; we’ve got to commit to what we’re working for. We’ve got to know what our story is. Because the story we’re living in, is the story we’re living out.
So as we stand together today and affirm our faith, in the words of the Nicene Creed, see how it feels to say it as an act of resistance. And as an act of commitment to the only Lord who is worthy of our devotion. See how it feels as a protest song, as a freedom song.
We’ll speak the words, but we’ll sing a refrain—Stevie Wonder, everybody.
