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SERMONS

The Second Sunday after Epiphany
January 15, 2006

Epiphany 2B - John 1:43-51

One of the great and telling moments of International Diplomacy occurred one day when the Prime Minister of England happened to be taking a bath at the White House.

Upon stepping from his bath "au Natural," absent the regalia of England, or any regalia for that matter, Winston Churchill said to the visibly startled President, Franklin Roosevelt, "The Prime Minister of England has nothing to hide from the President of the United States."

It happened in a "flash," no pun intended, and so therefore had that rare immediacy of startled honesty. No time for double speak, no time for subtlety, no time for a rebuttal - only the facts as they stand in the moment.

In this morning's Gospel we find two individuals who respond differently to the sudden presence of Jesus in their midst.

Philip is one of those rare individuals who are awake, living in the present moment, following Christ purely upon invitation at least that is what John, the writer, would have us believe. "Follow Me," Jesus says, and Phillip simply follows. Like other disciples, Philip does not seem to suffer the slings and arrows of conscience. For whatever reason, Philip has lived a life such that he is prepared to hear what Jesus is saying, and prepared to act upon it.

"She is clear as a mountain lake," we often say of some people.

Philip is the human soul who is not bogged down with the question "to be or not to be?" The Master is calling, so there is nothing left to do but to follow.
Though we may not be Philips ourselves, we have all met them in our travels. It is Philip's voice that we find in the words of T.S. Eliot.

If you came this way, Taking any route, starting from anywhere, At any time or at any season, It would always be the same: you would have to put off Sense and notion. You are not here to verify, Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity Or carry report . . . You are here to kneel Where prayer has been valid.

What Eliot is telling us, and what Philip is showing us, is that some times on our journey of faith, we are invited to respond to God with a transparency and immediacy that has nothing to do with correct propositions, nothing to do with arranging the facts of a case, nothing to do with having adequate evidence that God indeed exists. The puzzle is complete because Jesus has come, and our calling is to follow him.

For every Philip, there must be hundreds of Nathanaels.

How pleasant it is under the fig trees. Sitting in the shade on a hot, hot day. Maybe we have a holy book sitting open on our laps. Maybe we are having some interesting, cultivated, and piercing conversation about the "meaning" of life. We are delivering ourselves of many any various discourses about the probability and nature of God's existence.

Nathanael sitting under the fig trees. The writer of John's Gospel is giving us a kind of stage cue, giving us a clue, about Nathanael. In the ancient world some rabbis, and students of religion, are depicted sitting beneath fig trees with the Torah opened upon their lap. Study, conversation, contemplation, the active pursuit of wisdom, these are the activities of those sitting beneath the fig trees.

Like Phillip, Nathanael gives a glimpse of his interior disposition when the presence of Christ suddenly touches his life; when he is surprised by God. Perhaps if Nathanael had been tapped by Jesus himself he would not hesitate because of his criteria, his expectations.

None the less, his friend runs up to him - "we have found the one we have been looking for - and he is from Nazareth."

Nathanael also tells us something about himself in his gently cynical response, one of the few recorded in scripture, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?"
Nathanael is looking for the Messiah that he has found in his reflections sitting under the fig tree. The Messiah of an informed curiosity, a Messiah verified by his own personal expectations - all of which must have little to do with his feelings about anyone coming from a place called Nazareth.

In this flash of an encounter, in this first brush with the coming of Christ, this first brush with his own discipleship, Nathanael shows us that his inner eye is looking for God to move in a particular way, according to particular expectations.

Perhaps because he is curious, or perhaps because he trusts the transparency of his friend Phillip, Nathanael decides to go and see for himself.

"Here is truly an Israelite in whom there is no deceit!"
Notice that Jesus is prepared to meet Nathanael precisely where Nathanael is living. Where Nathanael hesitates for a moment behind this tid-bit of sarcasm and regional disdain, that nothing good comes out of Jesus' hometown, Jesus is going to yank that chain a bit, going to give it back to him. "I'll play with you a bit," Jesus is saying.

"How do you already know me, where did you get to know me?"

And Jesus says something very profound to anyone who would hesitate behind a tid-bit of personal prejudice about how God moves in the world . .
. "I saw you under the fig tree before Philip called you."
We are known by God before we are prepared to know him.

He knows us before we are prepared to know Him.
How the fig trees sprout and grown in our lives. Often we think of the religious life as some process whereby we go out and find God. But the plain truth of the story of the Bible is that God is always seeking to bring that truth to us; he is the one out seeking us.
We like to think of ourselves as the seekers, because then we are the ones who imagine that we are holding the reigns, we are the captains of this wagon train.
Like Nathanael, we might nestle beneath the fig trees of curiosity and conversation in order to construct a portrait of God that will somehow fit our expectations. God is certainly like this, or God would certainly endorse that, or God would certainly never have a hand in such and such.

And so God would certainly never move in upon us from the out of the way places like the slums, the trailer parks, or the streets of Selma and Montgomery; maybe moving in right in upon us in the streets of suburbia.

The word epiphany literally means manifestation, and what the Nathanaels within each of us is being shown is that God will be manifest in ways contrary to what we think we already know, or what we know from hearsay. God's revelation is ongoing.

And the Good News is that Jesus means to meet us in the very place where our cynicism, pseudo-sophistication, and wariness might be our first response.

Nathanael the well-informed, the cultivated, is approaching Jesus; and Jesus is saying to him that the children of God have nothing to hide from the Son of God. Not only is there nothing to hide, and no where to hide, the entire heavens will be opened and all of God's glory will be revealed.

Where we might be dog-paddling in curiosity and conversation beneath the fig tree, there will be a flash, our deliberation will be placed on hold, and the invitation arrives: Come and See.