The second week after the Epiphany

“They said to him, ‘Rabbi, where are you staying?’ He said to them, ‘Come and see.’”

+ In the Name of God the Loving Creator, the Light of the World, and the Life-giving Spirit. Amen.

John the Baptist is a character who pops up every ear in Advent and appears again today. In the Gospel last week, Jesus sought out John at the River Jordan and asked to be baptized.  In John’s Gospel today, John makes an astonishing proclamation about Cousin Jesus: “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!”

Throughout scripture, lambs are symbols of gentleness. When John identifies Jesus as the “Lamb of God” he is giving us an epiphany of the surprisingly gentle way that God deals with our shortcomings, our failures, and our sins. We might expect that we deserve rebuke and judgment, but, in fact, we get an innocent lamb who will go to the slaughter for us—the cross—and take away the sin of the world. And it is this Lamb of God that takes away our great burden, our great guilt, our great shame by entering our world and becoming one of us.

If we fast forward again, we find John standing with two of his followers. He points Jesus out to them. Again, he says, “Look, here is the Lamb of God!” Now they are paying attention. He has piqued their curiosity and so they trail along after Jesus to see just what he is all about. “What are you looking for?” Jesus asks them.

That’s a fair question. It’s also a question he might ask of us. “What are we looking for?”

There may be those who, like Andrew and Peter, are here because someone has pointed them in the direction of Jesus. There may be those who are seeking a deeper understanding of just exactly what faith means and who God is. There may be those who are in church because something has led them through the doors and they feel the need to be here, even if they can not articulate exactly what that is. Some of us, like Andrew and his companion, came here from another faith tradition, denomination, or parish and, like them we came to see—and stayed.

Some time ago, I read about an Episcopal parish that includes in its diversity a group of people that has one very unusual thing in common—they do not believe in God. That may seem strange, but for me it is evidence that a congregation can truly be an inclusive church. What better place for atheists to be, both for themselves and for the rest of us, than in a church where they may challenge the accepted theology merely by their presence, and teach us that the God of our understanding—the Lamb of God—is much more astonishing than what we might expect.

“What are you looking for?” Jesus has this answer, “Come and see!”

Thinking again about Andrew and the others who trailed after Jesus that day, I imagine that they might have thought of following Jesus a little bit like we might think of going to the circus.  What excitement!  What fun!  What prospects!  The appeal of the Big Top.  “I’ll even go find my brother,” Andrew thought, “so that he might have the same opportunity to drop everything and join up. They certainly did not consider the risk involved—only the promise.  Little did they know how it would all end.

The late Mike Yaconelli, author of Messy Spirituality: God’s Annoying Love for Imperfect People, gave an interview before his death in which he said how tired he was of hearing religious speakers tell how perfect they were and who always seemed to have answers for other people’s lives. “You and I are incomplete,” he said, “I’m unfinished. I’m unfixed. And the reality is that that’s where God meets me—in the mess of my life, in the unfixedness, in the brokenness.

This week I read an account of a baptism in The Living Church that was witnessed by a small town Southern Baptist college student. The concept of priests, liturgical rites and sacramental wine were all unfamiliar to her.

“We began the ‘Presentation and Examination of the Candidates,’ she wrote, “and the final question in the list was addressed to the congregation: ‘Will you who witness these vows do all in your power to support Drew in his life in Christ?” We said we would.

You see, these Episcopalians knew something about Baptism that my Baptist church didn’t know. For these people, baptism was more than a symbol of one’s commitment to Christ. It was more than a technicality required to become a member of the church. It was a community promising to guide and support, and it was a community renewing its own commitment to Christ. It was a faithful family ignoring their own discomforts for the desire of one.

After the priest poured water on this young man’s head, he anointed him with blessed oil with the sign of the cross. ‘Drew, you are sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own forever.’

I watched,” the young author writes, “for the first time not an apathetic spectator at a baptism. I wasn’t an Episcopalian, but I don’t think the members of that church would have called themselves Episcopalians at that moment either. We were just a group of regular people, standing at the font, loving one another and loving our God.”

That strikes me as a wonderful assessment of who we are and why we are gathered today. Come, and see!