The Second Sunday after the Epiphany, Year B,January 14, 2018; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz
January 14, 2018

O God of our hope, may we have the wisdom, the strength, and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth – come when it may and cost what it will.

Sometimes our lectionary seems to lob softball pitches for helping us to make meaning of current events and equipping us to better navigate our future. In our first reading from the first Book of Samuel, we read that in the old days, the word of the Lord was rare, and the ability to see clearly was not widespread. Back in the year 1100 BCE, Israel was going through a time of immense societal change. Biblical scholar Bruce Birch calls it “a time of spiritual desolation, religious corruption, political danger, and social upheaval.” [1] Eli the priest and his sons were responsible for guarding the Ark of the Covenant and its holy oracle. Eli’s sons did not behave well at all and Eli wasn’t able to get them to change their violent ways. This is a story of the transfer of authority from Eli to Samuel that highlights Eli’s wisdom and integrity, and Samuel’s responsiveness and bravery. The word of God, here, is like a light that is both harsh and bright – exposing what is shameful and shining like a beacon to light the way. The call that Samuel hears is to prophetic work of declaring both judgment and hope, both repentance and return to the way of obedience to Love (which is another word for God). It’s a call for a better future.

From Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, we heard an exhortation to remember that we are to treat our bodies –collectively as if we are precious to God, because we are. We are to ensure that our bodies –collectively – are treated as if we are temples for the Holy Spirit within us – because the spirit of holiness is within us, whether we acknowledge her presence or not. We are to treat bodies –collectively — with the utmost dignity and respect. Everybody, according to Paul. Every body because in Christ, there is no discernable difference between people when it comes to being beloved by God. In God we belong to one another and we must treat one another well. It’s a call for a better future.

And from the Gospel of John, we hear this fascinating little story, interrupting our lectionary’s otherwise sequential reading from the Gospel of Mark. It’s a fast-paced and cryptic account of the two disciples called immediately after Andrew and Simon Peter, namely, Philip and Nathanael. This is a call story that is different from (and incompatible with) the story of the call of the disciples in the other Gospels. Nathanael is not named anywhere else in the whole New Testament. His name means gift of God, or given from God. Nathaniel asks the wonderful rhetorical question, “Can there be anything good out of Nazareth?” (that insignificant, obscure, tiny village of cave dwellings, home to bandits and other troublemakers, population less than 500?) Of course the whole Gospel screams YES! That is exactly where our messiah is from.

In the banter reported here, Jesus calls Nathanael an Israelite in whom there is no guile, in contrast to Jacob – also known as Israel – who tricked his brother and his father to get his birthright and blessing. I don’t know what Jesus means when he says that he saw Nathanael under the fig tree before Philip called him, but maybe this. In this passage from the Gospel of John, full of allusions to the First Testament, John’s audience would have known the biblical prophecies of Zechariah and Jeremiah of a future “time when a man will call his neighbor under a vine and fig tree…mark[ing] the advent of a messianic Branch who would reign as [a David-like] king.” [2] According to the footnote in the JANT, the tree of the knowledge in Genesis is traditionally considered to have been a fig tree and it’s associated with abundance [3] and well-being.

This passage is all about seeing. This is in the same Gospel where Jesus says in response to Thomas, blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe. Two things strike me about the Nathanael and Thomas stories are that Jesus discloses the most about himself to the ones who express skepticism and doubt in this Gospel. And, that no matter how we’re used to hearing about these lessons, I think they teach us that seeing is not about believing. Rather, seeing is about beloving.

You might remember an essay in the New York Times a few years ago by Mandy Len Catron about falling in love. [4] I think about it often – and I thought it this week because this story from John seems like the story of when Nathanael fell in love with the ministry and mission of Jesus. Catron, writing about two people falling in love with each other, cites “psychologist Arthur Aron [who] succeeded in making two strangers fall in love in his laboratory.” In Aron’s experiment, two strangers meet to answer a series of 36 increasingly personal questions over the course of a couple of hours, and then stare silently into each other’s eyes for four solid minutes. Catron wrote about trying this out with an acquaintance. She says:

“I’ve skied steep slopes and hung from a rock face by a short length of rope, but staring into someone’s eyes for four silent minutes was one of the more thrilling and terrifying experiences of my life. I spent the first couple of minutes just trying to breathe properly. There was a lot of nervous smiling until, eventually, we settled in. I know the eyes are the windows to the soul or whatever, but the real crux of the moment was not just that I was really seeing someone, but that I was seeing someone really seeing me. Once I embraced the terror of this realization and gave it time to subside, I arrived somewhere unexpected. I felt brave, and in a state of wonder. Part of that wonder was at my own vulnerability and part was the weird kind of wonder you get from saying a word over and over until it loses its meaning and becomes what it actually is: an assemblage of sounds… .”

Catron explains that we commonly believe that love is something that happens to us, but Aron’s study demonstrates that love is an action that has to do with seeing and being seen, about bothering to know someone and about being known. She concluded, “… you can’t choose who loves you… and you can’t create romantic feelings based on convenience alone. Science tells us biology matters; our pheromones and hormones do a lot of work behind the scenes. But despite all this, I’ve begun to think love is a more pliable thing than we make it out to be.” She concludes that it’s possible to generate trust and intimacy, the feelings love needs to thrive. It’s possible to choose to love. For Nathanael and the others, following Jesus was choosing to see Love and be seen by Love. They were responding to a call for a better future.

Although Nathanael names Jesus as the Son of God (which is what Caesar claimed for himself) and King of Israel (which is what Herod claimed for himself), Jesus responded by referring to himself as Son of Man – literally a mortal or a mensch, a title that by the first century, CE, had become a distinctive prophetic title. [5] Jesus’ promise or prediction about seeing heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man is another reference to Jacob (aka Israel’s) story. You might remember that was Jacob’s dream – of angels ascending and descending on a ladder in a place where he mistakenly thought God was absent. I hear Jesus saying that any mortal, any mensch can have that prophetic title and do that prophetic work. Anyone can serve as a ladder on which messengers and messages of love are carried.

This past week, like so many weeks of the past year in our national discourse, we’ve swung between soaring, inspiring calls for hope and justice and plummeting rhetoric of ignorance and hatred when it comes to talking about people who are marginalized and mistreated by white supremacy and by patriarchal power. We’ve heard and read words of courage and integrity – full of grace; and words of the shabby, deteriorating menace of racism (on which our country was built), utterly lacking in grace. It can feel like being on a sickening carnival ride. Speaking to this yesterday in Elle magazine, R. Eric Thomas implored readers to refrain from declaring things like “this is not my country” and instead, to declare, “I’m not taking this with me into the future.” The difference is that former is denial, while the latter is a vision of choosing what will shape us, and amending our lives accordingly. [6] It’s a call for a better future.

There was another story this past week that didn’t get so much attention outside of Boston, but it’s big news for us. Mayor Walsh wrote an op-ed piece about his announced intention to rebuild the harbor bridge to Long Island, and to invest in an even more comprehensive addiction recovery campus. It was just over three years ago when access to Long Island was abruptly closed and more than 700 of our most vulnerable neighbors were suddenly without treatment or shelter in what turned out to be the snowiest winter on record. In a miraculous collaborative effort, communities of faith and concern came together to voice outrage, raise awareness, pool resources and roll our sleeves up to get to work. We have not let up and we won’t until safe, adequate and dignified places to receive treatment and shelter have been restored. We are asking folks in and around Boston to join us in supporting the mayor’s vision of hope and healing services on Long Island. The Boston Globe’s photograph of Mayor Walsh included a superimposed picture of a bridge appearing to come out of his upper body, and I thought, I saw the heaven opened and angels of God ascending and descending upon this prophetic mensch!

I believe that this is how God works – through the voices of our teachers, in our waking and our sleeping, in our wildest dreams, in respecting the dignity of our collective bodies. This is how Love works – in how we choose to look and see, in how we allow ourselves to be deeply seen, in how we decide what to take with us into the future. This is how the heavens open up and angels of God ascend and descend upon us, the Body of Christ when we are willing to answer the call for a better future.

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