“What
Are You Looking For?”
John
1:29-42
January
20, 2008, 2nd Sunday after Epiphany
Dr. Catherine Taylor
(aired
on Day1)
One Saturday while driving on a busy city highway,
my daughter and I saw an unusual bird.
It was some sort of falcon, with sharp, black eyes
and that unmistakable meat-eating beak.
Caught at a stop light, like good bird watchers we started calling out what we saw.
"Cheek spots! Speckled breast! Brown sides!"
Then the light changed.
It was at least an hour before we finished our errands
and got back home where we could look in the bird book.
By then, our memories of what we had seen
differed from each other just enough that we couldn't agree.
I thought I had seen the white-spotted breast
and rich brown sides of a kestrel, but a kestrel has a blue back,
and Rorie absolutely insisted there was no blue.
To her eye the back was all brown,
which would make the bird a merlin, another little falcon.
Unfortunately, female kestrels and merlins both have brown backs.
Both species can be found in the area in winter,
and both thrive in either the countryside or the city.
In other words, the possibilities were open.
Whatever it was, it was marvelous!
So alive, perched right next to the highway
on top of a street sign, diving onto a little grassy island,
scarfing up birds or mice.
As far as I was concerned, seeing that falcon was like looking up to see
a Bengal tiger sitting on the traffic island.
When we lived in the South,
my family liked to go on vacation to the Gulf in Alabama,
and on one of these vacations we saw a scissor-tailed flycatcher.
It's a rare visitor from South America
with pale yellow-green feathers and a very, very long, narrow V-shaped tail
like a pair of scissors lying open on a table.
It was resting in the long grass by a state park road
looking exotic and tired.
We knew it had flown across the Gulf,
and this was perhaps the only chance we'd ever have to see it.
We had been in the park exploring an old fort,
and during the morning all four of us took turns
taking each other by the hand and leading each other
back to the road again to look at the flycatcher.
Then there was the time I was on the way
to church early on a Friday and saw an owl.
I'm fairly sure it was an owl,
because its body was thick and heavy.
It flew in front of me, up high across the road,
the sun reflecting on its golden body in the early light.
As you have guessed by now if you are a bird watcher,
just seeing a bird isn't enough.
You have to tell somebody about it.
And that's especially true if all you get is a glimpse.
That's why seeing the rare flycatcher
when we were all together was so wonderful.
We talk about it every now and then.
If you aren't a bird watcher, there is bound to be
something else you just have to tell someone about.
How many times have you heard a group of people
who have all seen the same play in the same game
tell each other exactly what they saw?
They might do it immediately right in the stands
or during the commercial or the next day at work.
It's not just sharing information
or confirming that the other person saw what you saw.
That's not why people re-tell plays in a great game
or describe a wonderful sight.
Telling is experiencing.
Telling is having the experience again
and giving it to someone else.
Telling is shining a light that shows a particular way
and then walking along that way together.
That's why death is always a time for story telling,
for sitting down together as a family
and remembering the night
when Dad stopped the train in a New Jersey town
where the train hadn't stopped in 35 years.
He showed someone his Naval Academy ring and used his charm,
which had been his greatest asset all his life,
and the train stopped in that town that night
for the first time in memory
because Dad wanted to get off there.
When you tell a story like that one in your den or living room,
you can look at the faces of the children there,
hearing about a relative they've never met,
and you can tell what they are wondering.
They are wondering if they are going to turn out–
now that they know it's possible to turn out–
to be the kind of person who can stop a train with a smile.
All four readings today are about the calling to be tellers,
to go and tell others your story of who God is.
In the Isaiah text, the servant of God says
he or she was called from before birth
to be a servant in whom God would be glorified,
to be a light, not just to Israel alone,
but to the whole world.
"I will give you as a light to the nations,"
says God to the servant,
"that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth."
The salvation is not for the one who knows the story.
It's for those who are going to hear it wherever they may be.
The Psalm for today says,
"Tell the glad news of deliverance,
speak of God's steadfast love."
And Paul talks of his apostolic calling
and "the calling of the Corinthians
to give testimony to Christ, to tell of him."
The Gospel reading is a whole sequence
of people telling each other they have seen Jesus
and who they think Jesus is.
It begins with John telling about Jesus' baptism.
As the story opens, John is talking about himself.
The details are very precise.
Twice he says, "I did not know him."
As soon as he recognizes Jesus,
John goes from "I did not know him"
to making public announcements that
"Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world."
Here is the one I was sent to proclaim: "the Son of God."
Then almost the very same thing happens again.
The day after the baptism John tells two of his disciples
that Jesus is "the Lamb of God,"
and what do they do?
They run off after Jesus.
They want to see for themselves.
They catch up and have an odd conversation with Jesus,
and then Andrew runs off and finds his brother Peter
and brings him to meet Jesus too.
When Jesus meets Peter,
Jesus gives him a new name, "Rock."
Peter will do so much telling that he'll be a foundation
on which the church will be built.
To read this story is to get caught up
in the cycle of listening, telling, and re-telling
that is the story of discipleship.
The question is "Where is the falcon or the tiger?"
Where is the touchdown play?
Why are stories of meeting this man Jesus
told again and again?
There are at least two answers.
One is the answer in Isaiah.
God wants the story of salvation told
and calls people to tell it,
calls them before they are born.
That is the prophet Isaiah's own story and Jeremiah's too.
It is also the story of Martin Luther King Jr,
whose extraordinary life we celebrate this weekend.
For the other answer we have to go back
to the middle of what we heard today in John,
to the point where two men,
who have no names yet,
are running after a man on the street,
pointed out by someone else.
"What are you looking for?" Jesus asks the two disciples.
Now, "What are you looking for?"
is a fairly strange question when you think about it.
The logical question would be, "What do you want?"
Maybe this isn't a story about what people want.
If you look at the story again certain words are central.
The word for staying and for remaining in Greek
is the same word–meno–and it's used in this story
five times in very quick succession.
Twice John says the Spirit came to Jesus and remained.
The two disciples asked, "Where are you staying?"
They go and see "where he was staying
and they stayed with him that day."
Remain. Remain. Stay. Stay. Stay.
Could this story be telling us something
the disciples don't know yet themselves?
What people are looking for is not information,
not answers to questions such as "Who is Jesus?"
or "Is this the one?"
Or "Am I right about this church business?"
Not even the answer to the question
of why stories of meeting this man
have captured the human heart for generations.
What we are all looking for without even knowing
it is a place to stay, a place to remain always.
That place is Jesus,
a person who is himself a home,
a place to belong, a whole way of life.
Jesus knows that what the disciples really want
is a place to belong.
Whatever he sees on the faces of these two men
panting in front of him after running down the street,
whatever he sees, what he says to them
is just right, and wonderfully inviting: "Come and see."
They do go with him.
They end up staying,
and his story becomes their way of life.
The poet Kathleen Norris moved to the plains of South Dakota,
where her family had lived and had deep roots.
One day she had a conversation in a tavern
with an old cowboy, who sought her out
because she was from "one of the old families."
He wanted to tell her “about a side saddle he owned,
made by his great grandfather
as a wedding present some 150 years ago.”
She tells of how they mused awhile
on the subject of their ancestors,
when suddenly the old man said,
"Who are we and where do we come from?
That's the real question, isn't it?”
Before Norris could reply, he smiled and said,
"And here we are telling each other lies."
"Stories!" she said, laughing. "Call them stories!"
"Stories!" he nearly shouted back, pounding one hand on the bar.
"That's who we are!" _
I left something out of one of my stories.
When we were down at the beach that spring,
we didn't spot the flycatcher by ourselves.
Someone told us it was there.
If they hadn't, there's a chance we might not have seen it at all.
There were other people walking around with binoculars in the park that day.
They were the ones who told us about the flycatcher
and exactly where along the road it was resting.
And so we went and looked at it and marveled,
and now it is a family memory.
"What are you looking for?" says Jesus
to people who were told by someone else
where he could be found.
"Come and see," he said and says still to people
who wonder if they have a place in his story.
The thing that moves people from one question to the other,
from "What are you looking for?" to "Come and see"
is the story the church has been called to tell.
It is the only story the church has to tell,
the story of its home,
the place from which we draw hope and strength and power.
That place is a person,
and the best way to tell his story
–perhaps the only way–is with our lives. Amen.
(Radio only) Let us pray.
Loving and gracious God, our beginning and end, no matter where we are, help us remain yours. If we are far from our best selves just now, whatever the reason, hold us close so we can remember our home in you. Remind those who are far removed that nothing, not even death, can bring an end to your forgiveness and love. Comfort those who mourn, protect the weak in ways they can discern, even if others cannot. Surprise the smug and confuse those who are certain about you, just enough to open them to newness. We give you thanks for signs of home around us, anything that makes us feel a moment of belonging to another person or place. And hear our silent prayers for whatever lies closest on our hearts, for we ask in the name of the person place, the Son you gave to make us your own, Jesus Christ. Amen.
__________________
_Kathleen Norris, Dakota, a Spiritual Geography, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1993, pp 86-87.