Neill Morgan
Sermon Delivered January 20, 2008
29The next day he saw Jesus coming toward him and declared, “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world! 30This is he of whom I said, ‘After me comes a man who ranks ahead of me because he was before me.’ 31I myself did not know him; but I came baptizing with water for this reason, that he might be revealed to Israel.” 32And John testified, “I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him. 33I myself did not know him, but the one who sent me to baptize with water said to me, ‘He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.’ 34And I myself have seen and have testified that this is the Son of God.” 35The next day John again was standing with two of his disciples, 36and as he watched Jesus walk by, he exclaimed, “Look, here is the Lamb of God!”
37The two disciples heard him say this, and they followed Jesus. 38When Jesus turned and saw them following, he said to them, “What are you looking for?” They said to him, “Rabbi” (which translated means Teacher), “where are you staying?” 39He said to them, “Come and see.” They came and saw where he was staying, and they remained with him that day. It was about four o’clock in the afternoon. 40One of the two who heard John speak and followed him was Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother. 41He first found his brother Simon and said to him, “We have found the Messiah” (which is translated Anointed). 42He brought Simon to Jesus, who looked at him and said, “You are Simon son of John. You are to be called Cephas” (which is translated Peter).
What Are You Looking For?
“What are you looking for?” I asked my fishing buddy. It was the first time I had fished the Blue River in southern Oklahoma, but my friend Steve had been there once before and he was looking for a spot he remembered. We had walked nearly two miles from the parking area in to the riverbank, and now we walked North, sometimes along the bank, sometimes right across a shallow spot in the river through the cold water. (That’s why we wore waders.) We had passed lots of places that looked pretty fishy to me (I mean that in the positive and literal sense) deep holes just above or below little water falls, but Steve said, “No, this isn’t the place.” We walked on.
“What are you looking for? What does it look like?” I asked. I was getting a little impatient because it was afternoon and our morning had not been that good, just one little trout and hardly any strikes. That fly fishing truism kept going through my mind – “you can’t catch fish if you don’t have the fly in the water.” But Steve scanned the river and shrugged. “I’ll know it when I see it.” We walked on.
That’s how it is, though. “I’ll know it when I see it.” We cannot always describe exactly what we’re looking for, whether it is a fishing hole, something we’re shopping for, or the meaning of life.
It drives a retail sales clerk to sigh, close her eyes and drop her head into her hands when I say it, but it’s often my only answer to the question, “What are you looking for?”
“Don’t know exactly. I’ll know it when I see it.”
John the Baptizer had been telling his disciples that he came to be a witness to the Messiah, a witness to the one anointed by God, the one who would be the presence of God in human flesh. We can imagine John’s disciples’ frustration as they asked John, “How will we know? What does he look like? What does he sound like? What will he say? What is his name?”
John shrugged. “I’ll know him when I see him.”
And, sure enough, in today’s reading, John sees Jesus and he knows, there he is. “Look! Here is the Lamb of God.”
All this time, they had been waiting. From the beginning, John had told them, “I’m not the one. I’m not Elijah, I’m not the Messiah, I’m not really anybody except a witness to the One who is coming.”
And so, they waited with him. They waited for the One who would fulfill all their desires – their desire for a life of meaning; their desire to rescue their people from the oppressive heel of the Roman government; in short, their desire to live free.
A complex web of desires drives us human beings. The desires to be richer, thinner, popular, fulfilled, powerful, or happy have beneath them a core, a root from which all other desires grow.
It is the desire to live a life that matters.
I suppose there may be some people who would say, “No, I don’t believe anything matters in the grand scheme of things. I only desire to be happy and comfortable, free of stress and strain.”
But, I dare say, that is not you. If it were, you would not be here seeking to follow Jesus Christ. Sure, there are those out there who try to sell Jesus as a kind of anesthetic, a footman who is there to fulfill all our needs and help us feel happy, offer some comfort when we remember how brief is our span of years.
And, unfortunately, there is plenty of religion all around us, some that calls itself “Christian,” that is hard to distinguish from entertainment, or from nationalism, from the activities that would distract us from thinking about the things that Jesus told us matter: Loving our neighbor, praying for enemies, showing grace to those who show us hostility.
But, for Andrew and Peter and the disciples of John, distraction is not what they were looking for. And, it is not what we are looking for.
We are looking for more than a religious inspirational version of the high-tech theatrical pyrotechnics of the special effects that typify this generation.
We are looking for life, life abundant, not a distraction from it. I heard a Lutheran pastor say, “People are hungry for God, but they settle for spiritual junk food.”
I think he’s right. But why? Why would people settle for spiritual junk food instead of the authentic presence of God in their lives? The answer is that we settle because it’s the best we can do. We know there’s something better out there, but we just haven’t found it yet, and until we do, this will have to do. We walk up to the river and start casting into it. Just get that fly in the water because you can’t catch fish without getting the fly in the water.
But, even the most dedicated fisherman will get bored with casting into an empty fishing hole. We need to find the place that is full of life.
“How do we know it when we see it?” How do we know when we are living that abundant life?
As much as it may frustrate retail sales folks, I think it’s a perfectly legitimate answer: “I’ll know it when I see it.”
It is a perfectly legitimate answer when people are looking for a Christian community. John never tells his disciples how he knows, when Jesus walks by, that he is the Lamb of God, the Messiah, the chosen One of God. He sees, and he knows.
The good news about this for a congregation such as ours that wants to welcome our neighbors is this – we don’t have to spend time and money surveying the members of our community about what they are looking for in a church.
That’s the good news. The challenge that comes with the good news is this: Instead of polling our neighbors, we have to become more Christ-like. The more Christ-like we become, the more people will know it when they see it.
The more Christ-like we become, the more authentically we will love and care for one another; the more deeply we will yearn to serve our community together; the more hunger we will develop for knowledge of Scripture.
The more Christ-like we become, the more natural it becomes to tell friends and neighbors as Jesus did, “Come and see.” The flaw in most evangelism or church growth programs that come across my desk is that they are based on training the members of a congregation to invite people to church.
You have probably been on the receiving end of an invitation that has been trained into somebody. You know what that feels like, to get a well-practiced invitation. It feels well-intentioned, but not quite authentic. Kind of like when we were grade school kids and I got a valentine in my valentine box from somebody who only sent it to me because her mother told her she couldn’t leave out anybody in her class no matter how she felt about them. I can’t tell you exactly how I knew which valentine was an authentic expression of affection, and which ones were obligatory valentines, but I knew it when I saw it, and I’ll bet you did, too.
Inviting friends to church is all well and good, but unless we are inviting our friends into a community that we and they can experience as Christ-like, it is like taking someone fishing to a river where there is water but no fish.
On the other hand, the more Christ-like a community becomes, the more natural it becomes to tell our friends, “Come and see.”
“Come and see, come and eat with us, come and meet some people I think you’ll love – I know they’ll love you.”
It happens from the inside out. That’s my theme song of the year. When we build our faithfulness from the inside out, we begin with our spirituality, our prayer life, our giving, our immersion in Scripture, and it builds outward, layer by layer. Love for one another, love for our neighbor, concern for justice in our community and the world, and hospitality – all of that grows from the inside out. Like a piece of quality carved furniture, there is no veneer, it is beautiful and solid all the way through.
Fishing with my friend Steve on the Blue River, he finally stopped and said, “This is it.” He set his own fly rod on the bank, put one of his flies on my fishing rod and told me, “See that dark place between those rocks? Throw this fly right there and let it fall to the bottom.”
Well, you know what happened. I wouldn’t be telling the story if we got skunked. We pulled a dozen fish out of that hole, some of them more than 19 inches long. [Disclaimer: For an accurate measurement, take 15% off of whatever a fisherman tells you.]
The wonderful thing about fishing with Steve is that he took as much joy out of watching me catch fish as he took in catching fish himself. I have fished with a guy who has taken me to his favorite fishing hole and watched me catch fish and gotten more and more disgusted as the day went on.
“It’s not fair,” he says, when we’ve caught our limit. “I paid a lot of dues before I found this fishing hole, a lot of days getting nothing before I had a day of fishing like this, and you just waltz in here and catch your limit. It’s just not right.”
Grace is maddening.
Steve, however, is not like that. With Steve, you feel like there’s no end to the fish. It’s a stewardship of abundance instead of a stewardship of scarcity. There are plenty of fish for everybody and it’s a joy to see your friends catching fish, even if they catch more than you do.
That’s the Christ-like church. Our own experience of abundant life becomes so overwhelming that we cannot help ourselves, we can’t keep it to ourselves. “Come fishing with me, you won’t believe the place I’ve found. Come and see.”
Amen.