Second Sunday after Epiphany
Service Date:
18 January, 2009
N: Erm, Philip?
P: Yes, Nathanael?
N: Is he always like that, your friend Jesus?
P: Well, I've not known him long myself. But what do you mean, like that?
N: Does he always make your head ache, thinking about what he said and what it means?
P: I do see what you mean. And it's catching, too. You know John, that wild man who's been baptising people in the Jordan? I know two of the people who follow him around, the Zebedee brothers. Apparently, they were walking together one day...
N: What's that got to do with Jesus?
P: I'm trying to tell you! They were walking together one day and Jesus went by. And what do you think John called him?
N: Cousin? Someone told me their mothers are cousins.
P: He called him God's lamb! And John, the younger Zebedee, his head's been aching ever since, wondering what the Baptist could mean by it. After all, the only religious thing you do with lambs is sacrifice them to God at Passover. And his friend Andrew's almost as bad. He reckons this Jesus is the new Messiah, God's leader.
N: Oh no - not another Messiah. All we need is the Romans coming down on us like a ton of bricks because someone else has the nationalist bug and thinks he can free us like Moses did. But you told me this Jesus was the one Moses and the prophets wrote about. You surely don't think he's the Messiah, do you? Honestly?
P: Honestly? I don't know. Jesus has this way of looking right into your soul, just as if it was God standing there. Didn't you feel that too? And what was he talking to you about when you first came over?
N: Oh yes, that was what I was wanting to ask you about. It was the strangest thing. You'd told me about him, so I was coming over to say hello - I've never come across anyone from Nazareth worth knowing, so I was curious to see who'd made such an impression on you. But he got in first.
P: That's right. We've got a real Israelite here, he said - there's nothing tricky about him. And he's right, you know. With you, what you see is what you get. You always come straight out with what you think.
N: But how did he know me? That's what's bothering me.
P: I remember you asked him there and then: Do you know me? you said. I don't think I know you. You sounded quite rude!
N: He didn't mind. But he came out with something odd about seeing me sitting under the fig tree. Well, I do like fig trees. They're cool in the midday sun when I want to think. But what's that got to do with anything?
P: Come on, Nat! Think of the prophets. What does it mean when it says, ‘Everyone will sit under their own vine and fig tree'?
N: Oh, God's kingdom, you mean? When everyone's going to have enough to eat and enough time to sit down and enjoy their own garden? Well, no use denying I wish things were fairer round here.
P: I wonder how he knew.
N: It knocked me right off balance, what he said. I found myself stammering something about Messiahs and kings of Israel, and you know I can't be doing with that sort of talk normally. But it's the next thing he said. It's going round and round in my mind and I can't get to sleep at night.
P: Something about a ladder, wasn't it? More gardening talk?
N: Be serious for a moment, Philip! He said we'd see more impressive things than a man who knows me though he's never met me. He said we'd see heaven opening, and God's messengers going to and fro between heaven and earth, all because of the son of man. And I think he meant himself.
P: Like when Jacob had his dream of God's ladder between heaven and the stone he was sleeping on? That doesn't make sense. How could a man join heaven and earth like that? Jesus may be wise, but he's only human, isn't he?
N: Good thing I've got my fig tree. I need to do some serious thinking.
P: Yes, Nathanael?
N: Is he always like that, your friend Jesus?
P: Well, I've not known him long myself. But what do you mean, like that?
N: Does he always make your head ache, thinking about what he said and what it means?
P: I do see what you mean. And it's catching, too. You know John, that wild man who's been baptising people in the Jordan? I know two of the people who follow him around, the Zebedee brothers. Apparently, they were walking together one day...
N: What's that got to do with Jesus?
P: I'm trying to tell you! They were walking together one day and Jesus went by. And what do you think John called him?
N: Cousin? Someone told me their mothers are cousins.
P: He called him God's lamb! And John, the younger Zebedee, his head's been aching ever since, wondering what the Baptist could mean by it. After all, the only religious thing you do with lambs is sacrifice them to God at Passover. And his friend Andrew's almost as bad. He reckons this Jesus is the new Messiah, God's leader.
N: Oh no - not another Messiah. All we need is the Romans coming down on us like a ton of bricks because someone else has the nationalist bug and thinks he can free us like Moses did. But you told me this Jesus was the one Moses and the prophets wrote about. You surely don't think he's the Messiah, do you? Honestly?
P: Honestly? I don't know. Jesus has this way of looking right into your soul, just as if it was God standing there. Didn't you feel that too? And what was he talking to you about when you first came over?
N: Oh yes, that was what I was wanting to ask you about. It was the strangest thing. You'd told me about him, so I was coming over to say hello - I've never come across anyone from Nazareth worth knowing, so I was curious to see who'd made such an impression on you. But he got in first.
P: That's right. We've got a real Israelite here, he said - there's nothing tricky about him. And he's right, you know. With you, what you see is what you get. You always come straight out with what you think.
N: But how did he know me? That's what's bothering me.
P: I remember you asked him there and then: Do you know me? you said. I don't think I know you. You sounded quite rude!
N: He didn't mind. But he came out with something odd about seeing me sitting under the fig tree. Well, I do like fig trees. They're cool in the midday sun when I want to think. But what's that got to do with anything?
P: Come on, Nat! Think of the prophets. What does it mean when it says, ‘Everyone will sit under their own vine and fig tree'?
N: Oh, God's kingdom, you mean? When everyone's going to have enough to eat and enough time to sit down and enjoy their own garden? Well, no use denying I wish things were fairer round here.
P: I wonder how he knew.
N: It knocked me right off balance, what he said. I found myself stammering something about Messiahs and kings of Israel, and you know I can't be doing with that sort of talk normally. But it's the next thing he said. It's going round and round in my mind and I can't get to sleep at night.
P: Something about a ladder, wasn't it? More gardening talk?
N: Be serious for a moment, Philip! He said we'd see more impressive things than a man who knows me though he's never met me. He said we'd see heaven opening, and God's messengers going to and fro between heaven and earth, all because of the son of man. And I think he meant himself.
P: Like when Jacob had his dream of God's ladder between heaven and the stone he was sleeping on? That doesn't make sense. How could a man join heaven and earth like that? Jesus may be wise, but he's only human, isn't he?
N: Good thing I've got my fig tree. I need to do some serious thinking.
Hymns:
R&S 115 is another hymn by Isaac Watts, a paraphrase of Psalm 145 written for his Psalms of David published in 1719. The tune Church Triumphant was written by J.W. Elliott and published in the imaginatively titled Church Hymns with Tunes of 1874, edited by Arthur Sullivan, W.S. Gilbert's partner in light opera.
R&S 314 by Mary Artemisia Lathbury was written in 1878 for the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle in New York State. As the Companion to Rejoice and Sing comments, ‘It stands as a very adequate and simple preparation for any serious search for truth'. The tune Haymarket was written for this hymn by Paul Bateman, then music director at Her Majesty's Theatre, Haymarket.
R&S 70, another paraphrase, this time of Psalm 139, was written in 1951 by Peter Jarvis while he was training for ministry in the Methodist Church. The tune Rockingham was also originally published as the melody for five different psalms in Edward Millar's The Psalms of David for the use of Parish Churches of 1790.
R&S 318 comes from the pen of George Caird, then Principal of Mansfield College, Oxford, and incorporates 17 biblical quotations. The tune Cornwall by SS Wesley was first published in The European Psalmist of 1872.
R&S 613 was written a year or so before a conversion experience undergone by its author Frances Havergal, demonstrating that the desire for guidance in itself shows development in the spiritual life. The tune Fulda first appeared in William Gardiner's Sacred Melodies of 1815.
Sermon:
1 Samuel 3:1-10; Psalm 139; John 1:43-51; 1 Corinthians 6:12-20I'm in Yorkshire, I'm surrounded by Scots, so I feel safe praising Nathanael's virtue of plain speaking. But of course plain speaking only makes sense when we know what it is we're speaking about - and that means listening carefully before we get around to opening our mouths. And that's even more necessary when our subject is God; I'm sure you've heard a lot of nonsense spoken in and out of pulpits on that topic.
In our Hebrew Bible reading this morning young Samuel has his first lesson in listening to God. It's a story often told while the children are in worship with us, and often painted too: a gentle tale of a young boy, wide-eyed, listening in the darkness to the unknown voice calling his name, and of the old prophet, who has brought him up ever since his mother Hannah gifted him to God, telling him what to do if he should hear his name called again.
But in fact the story is darker than the way we sometimes tell it. For what does Samuel hear, when he finally realises that it's not short-sighted Eli having a senior moment and forgetting he'd called; not Eli, but the God in whose house they both live, who wants his attention? God warns him that the message he's about to hear and pass on will feel like someone boxing his ears, and that's no exaggeration. For the message Samuel hears is not good news so far as Eli is concerned.
In the morning, Samuel is reluctant to pass on what he has heard, but Eli drags it out of him. May God punish you, he threatens, if you hide from me what God has said. So Samuel tells it straight: God is about to strike down Eli's two good-for-nothing sons, who have let down the father who judged Israel for forty years. They have turned the meat intended for sacrifice into an extortion racket; they have corrupted the women who served in God's house. And soon they will die. This is not news at all to Eli - he has already remonstrated with his sons, but to no avail, even after a prophet warned him of their approaching end. But to hear this judgment from the mouth of a child must have been yet more terrible. In the end Eli merely comments: It is the Lord: let him do what seems good to him.
Eli's comment may seem like weak resignation, but I read it as the reaction of someone who, on hearing the truth, will not deny it, however terrible it may be. Sometimes, indeed, there is almost a relief at hearing the very worst, something that we had suspected for a while, but wished not to think, confirmed at last. And it's also remarkable that Eli, instead of assuming Samuel got it wrong, can hear and recognise God's truth spoken by his own apprentice.
Paul is someone else you can rely on to speak the truth as he sees it, however painful it may be for his readers - and this part of his first letter to Corinth will certainly have put the cat among the pigeons when it was read out in church. It may even have made a few eyebrows rise when you heard it in St Andrew's this morning. Do you really think, he demands of his readers, that you can patronise prostitutes Monday to Saturday and then turn up at church on Sunday as if nothing had happened? Think again!
Paul's treading a fine line here. He doesn't want the Christians in Corinth to get bogged down in rules and regulations - he stands up for non-Jewish Christians who don't want to follow all the food laws of the Hebrew Bible. But ‘anything goes' isn't the Christian motto either - though it might have been for Corinth, noted for its temple of Aphrodite. Just as what you eat affects your body, sexual intercourse affects those engaged in it, body and spirit. Reducing sex to a business transaction denies its power. And for the Christian, every power must be subordinate to God, since - as Paul tells them and us - we, and not our buildings, are God's temples - a staggering truth about the depth of our relationship with God, which Paul's hearers might never have gained, had he not been reflecting on a messy area of their lives.
Sex is something I rarely talk about in sermons. Maybe that's partly because it's so personal, so intimate that it feels awkward to speak of in public. Yet according to our psalm this morning there is nothing more personal, more intimate, than God's knowledge of us. God knows our movements, our thoughts, our words, before they occur. Yet while God knows us and has known us since before we were conceived, we cannot fathom the truth of who God is.
From heaven to the world of the dead, from the ends of the earth to the deepest darkness, God is there. From the quarks within the atom to the stars within the galaxy, God is there. And within the complex and sometimes torturous workings of our minds, hearts and spirits, God is there too, loving us as we are, calling us into who we may become.
It's not surprising that we cannot grasp the magnitude of God's being. Yet sadly, many who have glimpsed some aspect of God's truth have come into conflict with one another because they cannot reconcile their own partial understanding with the different views of others. Liberal, evangelical or Catholic Christians, even people of different faiths, we can miss the insights God would love us to receive from one another by being over-defensive about what we already know. That's one reason we will be sharing the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity with our local Churches Together group this evening.
Yet such misunderstanding is almost inevitable when we consider all the ways to understand Jesus we find in that one passage from John's Gospel we read this morning: Lamb of God; the one on whom God's Spirit rests; God's chosen Messiah; the son of man; the son of God; the king of Israel; Jacob's ladder linking earth and heaven. Here is God's truth all right: a complex truth that cannot be captured in any one word or image. Here is God's truth for which we must listen intently, even when what we hear may surprise us, may challenge our expectations, may even give us pain to hear and admit it. Here is God's truth that may come through someone with less experience than us, or from a part of the world we're tempted to look down on, or via the messier parts of our daily struggle to make sense of life. Here is God's truth on which we can reflect for a lifetime, with or without fig tree, and still not reach the end.
Yet let's not use that as an excuse to avoid plain speaking about what we do know. For as each of us can hear God's word spoken by others, each of us can hear and pass on a word from God ourselves. And God's word is very close at hand: not only in the Bible, but also in the mystery of everyday life, even the messy bits. For Jesus has become our ladder between heaven and earth.
