The Second Sunday After Epiphany
Almighty God, whose Son our Savior Jesus Christ
is the light of the world: Grant that your people, illumined by your
Word and Sacraments, may shine with the radiance of Christ's glory, that
he may be known, worshipped, and obeyed to the ends of the earth;
through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with you and the Holy Spirit lives
and reigns, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Isaiah 49:1-7
1 Cor 1:1-9
John 1: 29-42
I was pondering today’s lessons in
light of our Annual Meeting (and
procrastinating by perusing Facebook) when I came across the post of one of our
talented parishioners, Bob Valvano. Bob’s words jumped out at me in their truth
and wisdom. (Plus they provide what is ever-elusive for me as a preacher—a good
sports reference!)
Bob explains
that in playing sports, and in life in general, the challenge is not just to
know WHAT to do, or even to know HOW to do it, but it is to know WHY you are
doing what you do. And then the even deeper challenge is to know WHO you are
while you are doing these things. We all already know, or can find out easily,
what we need to do to win a game or to get better grades in school or to live a
Christian life, for that matter. But sometimes it is difficult to know HOW to
execute that winning play, or how to make myself study more, or how to organize
my finances so that I can tithe. Great coaches, Bob continues, don’t just tell
their players what to do, or even just how to do a play. Great coaches get
their players to want to do things by leading them to the WHY, to the reasons
for doing things a certain way.
Coach Jesus seems to be asking the
disciples that WHY question in today’s Gospel: “What are you looking for?” he
blurts out as they follow him around silently. He doesn’t want them to stop
following—indeed, he invites them to “come and see” firsthand what he is all
about—but he also wants them to ask themselves why they are following him. The
answer makes a difference in commitment and mission. Have you ever heard Jesus
asking you the same question? Perhaps other people have asked you that question
for him? WHY do you believe? WHY do you go to church? WHY did you give money to
that homeless man? WHO is Jesus calling you to be? These are all important
questions for each of us to ponder as we live our lives as Christians. The
Church could also perhaps do a better job in coaching us through them.
What struck me today, though, in
reading our lessons and in thinking about our own parish, is that the WHY and
WHO questions are just as vital to Christian communities as they are to
individuals. Religion is such individualized business in America these days. We
speak in terms of my call, my gifts, my walk with Jesus. I ask myself what I want in a parish, how it
best suits my family’s needs. We often forget to consider the community apart
from ourselves and our spiritual journeys. Even when we do think about the
church as a whole, our fear pushes us to obsess over the WHAT, or perhaps the
HOW of our community’s role in the world: What does the church need to do in
order to grow? What does the church need to do to get young families in the
pews? How do we get more money? How do we get our message into the community?
And so on and on and on… Book after book. Consultant after consultant. I’m not saying that these aren’t good
questions to try to answer, but as Bob points out in his reflection, they are
not the questions that truly bring new life.
When Coach Paul gives advice to the
church in Corinth, however, it is interesting to note that he doesn’t even try
to give any instruction to this cantankerous bunch of Christians without first
naming WHO they are. Right off the bat,
Coach Paul names this little group of squabbling believers as nothing less than
the church of God, the church that belongs
to God. Just as God grabs Saul the Pharisee and turns him into Paul the
Apostle, God brings together this particular bunch of individuals in Corinth
and makes them God’s assembly.[1]
It is this assembly that Paul will later describe as Christ’s Body. We
sometimes forget, don’t we, in asking ourselves WHO we are as a church here at
St. Thomas, that it is God who calls us together, out of the separateness of
each of our lives, that it is God who makes us “church,” that it is to God that
this assembly belongs? This assembly doesn’t belong to one age-group; we don’t
belong to one service; we don’t belong to the rector, or to the vestry; we
don’t belong to the group with the loudest voices or the most money. This assembly
belongs to God. And as such, shouldn’t we find reassurance that, given half a
chance, God wants to sustain us, here, together? If we in this place are God’s assembly, it will
certainly take more than the waning tide of mainline religion to wipe us off
the map. If we truly know and accept WHO and WHOSE we are, I wonder if we would
be free to act with greater courage and creativity?
Look at the community of Israel that
Coach Isaiah is working with in our first reading. He’s talking to a nation who
is about to return to its own land after generations in exile. The people think
that they know WHY they are heading home: to rebuild their city and to settle
back into the same kind of life that they had before the destruction of war.
But Isaiah is telling them that God’s answer to the WHY question is different
than they imagine it to be: As far as God is concerned, they are returning not
to get comfortable again, but in order to bring God’s salvation “to the ends of
the earth.” God is asking them to reach out beyond themselves, beyond putting things
back the way they were. Isaiah’s words remind us that, as one scholar writes,
“God’s [WHY] is always bigger than ours, holding our stories within God’s life
and weaving them into the wide-open future.”[2]
Coach Paul will eventually give the
Corinthian Christians some advice about HOW to be church, but he too first
insists upon the WHY of the assembly. For Paul, the church gathers because the
people have been “made holy in Jesus Christ.” They have been set apart in the
service of the living God, through baptism into Christ.[3]
I was interested to learn that “calling upon the name of Christ” does not mean
praying to Jesus for help in getting what we want. It means confessing Jesus as
Lord.[4]
It means that we live self-giving lives and die self-giving deaths with our Lord
Jesus, and that we rise again with him out of the waters of baptism.
When I was reading Bob’s article, I
realized that I probably never got into playing sports as a kid because no one
ever bothered to show me either the HOW or the WHY of physical activity. I was
born klutzy and slow. I wasn’t naturally good at catching or throwing balls or
doing anything, really, with my weak little body. So I couldn’t find joy in
sports by myself.
“Who wants to run around in the heat
after some dumb ball?” I scoffed, not knowing the skills involved. “Who wants
to watch a bunch of cheerleaders waving pompoms around when you can be reading
a good book?” I wondered.
“Just get out there and be normal!”
yelled my mother and lots of very scary PE teachers over the years.
But no one ever took me kindly and
firmly by the hand and said, “Here’s HOW you can kick that ball if you are
having trouble. Here’s HOW you can get stronger.” No one ever let me experience
the WHYS in the value and camaraderie of teamwork or in the joy of making
physical strides. I never developed an identity as a “player of sports” and my
life is less rich for it.
When outsiders look at us, the Church,
or even when we look at ourselves, running around and tripping over each other,
trying to be Christ’s Body like an amateur basketball team trips and scrambles in
the sun, it is easy for the observer to scoff, “Who would want to be doing that?
What’s the point?” And when those who are supposed to help us just holler, “Get
out there and act like Christians, for goodness’ sake!” that doesn’t help us at
all. Yet God has given us an identity and a mission. Christ has given us a Body.
We need to hear the words of Coach Isaiah, Coach Paul, and Coach Jesus, coaches
who take our struggling Body gently by the hand and remind us that our Body is
a beloved and blessed servant of God. We need to feel these coaches leaning
over to us as we try to follow and whispering, “WHY are you following me? Come
and I’ll show you.”
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