St Brendan's Anglican Church
 

Sunday Jan. 15, 2012,
Epiphany II
Fr. Gerry Swieringa

Nathaniel asked him, “Where did you get to know me?”

Who really knows you?

I haven’t told a dog story in my sermons lately so here’s one. Years ago I had a Brittany Spaniel, Mac was his name. We did everything together. And we especially liked fishing together. I would get out of the car and rig up my rod while Mac bounded off into whatever thicket or woods was nearby. I didn’t worry about him because I knew what he would do, and he knew what I would be doing. Sure enough, maybe a half hour later when I was wading in the deep water, here would come Mac out of the woods and swim up to my side. He would paddle there, a true doggy paddle on the downstream side of my hips, until I reached down and patted him on the head. Then he was free to go off again back on his hunts or prowls until maybe another half hour went by, and he would return for another visit. We both really knew each other in that world of fishing, rivers and woods. I didn’t worry about him and I’m sure he didn’t worry about me. We knew where to find each other, how to reestablish our relationship, and to trust each other in absence from each other. I can say that Mac really knew me, as far as a dog is able to know a person.
In today’s Old Testament lesson, Samuel knows exactly where his master Eli is, and Eli knows where Samuel is. They know the relationship between them. Samuel ministered to Eli, who was old, whose eyesight was failing, who needed someone to help him with his priestly chores. Samuel had been dedicated to this role by his mother, Hannah, who said of her son, “I prayed for this child, and the Lord has granted me what I asked of him. So now I give him to the Lord. For his whole life he will be given over to the Lord.” I Sam. 1:27,28. Samuel depends on Eli for his welfare. Eli depends on Samuel to help him accomplish his role as Priest. They know each other. And yet, as we read in today’s lesson, they really don’t know each other at all because their relationship is about to change dramatically. God, who knows them better than they know themselves, better than they know each other, is about to show them their true selves.

  How does this happen? How is it that one moment we can be sure of who we are and our place in the world, and the next we have a new and often troubling insight that God, who as our Psalm today notes, “knows us while we were yet in our mother’s womb,” has other plans for us. Welcome to the world of “the call.”

Picture our hero Nathaniel as a young man, a local fixture under the fig trees of Bethsaida, on the NE shore of the Sea of Galilee. You probably know the type. Studious, head often in the clouds. Those who watched him grow up probably had him figured for a blossoming rabbi. There was nothing he liked better than to bury his head in the Books of the Law, and dream, and think, and pray. Fig trees served as the local version of the air-conditioned library. There a person could open the scrolls under a light, cool breeze, and spend the day with his thoughts. If you needed to get the well dug or the stable cleaned, Nathaniel was not your man. But if you needed good companionship, and you valued honesty and forthrightness, then you looked for Nathaniel under the fig tree, alone with his thoughts and his God.

Nathaniel’s future, or so it seemed, was charted. He was a scholastic. He would be a teacher.

Then here comes his friend Philip. Something different about Philip today. There’s a lightness to his step. There’s a bit of gleam in his eye. Philip says, “We have found the one Moses wrote about in the Law, and prophesized by the prophets. And his name is Jesus. And he’s from Nazareth.”

Now claimants to the mantle of the messiah were common. Many took hold of a group of expectant people and led them under the guise of messiahship, until they were summarily exposed and their followers disbanded. Nathaniel knew Philip to be a levelheaded man like himself. He was not given over to hero worship. Nor was he especially looking for an immanent King of the Jews. Plus, Philip, like Nathaniel, knew that the Holy Scriptures prophesized that the messiah, when he did come, would come from Bethlehem.

So Nathaniel responded with the Biblical version of “You’ve got to be kidding.”

But Philip knows his friend, and he also knows who it is that he agreed to follow. “Come and see,” he says. And Nathaniel does.

We can see them walking up to where Jesus is talking to a small group. Jesus’ back is turned to them. Then Jesus turns while they are still some few steps away and says to Nathaniel, “Here is a true Israelite, nothing false.” It’s not much of a description, but it’s enough to knock Nathaniel flat. He knows that Jesus knows him.

“How? He asks. “Where did you get to know me?”

Nathaniel, Eli, Samuel, and Philip all are called out of their comfortable anonymity and into the spotlight. It’s a spotlight of deep inner knowledge. It’s a spotlight of unrealized and undreamt potential. It’s a spotlight from which there is no return. They have been called.

Eli was called to reckon with the great failure of his life, his inability to correct and discipline his sons when they defamed the temple of God.

Samuel was called to begin the prophetic phase of his life, a phase that would one day result in his calling of David to be Israel’s King. But it began forebodingly. He was called to give Eli the news of God’s displeasure and God’s judgment.

Philip was called to the role of witness and evangelist.

Nathaniel is called to be a preacher of the Word. Most scholars agree that he is the apostle Bartholomew and that his ministry eventually ranged into Persia, Egypt, Armenia and possibly India as well.

So being called had a powerful effect on each of them. Whatever they had planned for their lives was forever altered. They now had a new identity, a calling that would define them and give them purpose and meaning and to which they would be dedicated until their last days.

Callings continue to humble and mystify. But there is that tug. There is that stirring of an impulse to respond to God’s love. And it grows. As we begin to respond the stirring strengthens. This is what happened to Anne Lamott, Further Thoughts on Faith, . Pg. 59-61.

There’s always the thought that others are so much better equipped than we are. But that’s because we only see ourselves as who we are, but God who calls us sees us as who we will become. The first step in accepting the call of God is to agree with God that he knows us better than we know ourselves. He is not bound by our knowledge of what we have done. Neither is he calling us to make some quantum leap into the unknown. He is not calling us beyond our capabilities or our resources or our personalities. He is calling us within the gifts he has already given us. He is not calling us to be something other than who we are, but to be all that we are.

When Jesus called Philip, he called him to follow. That’s significant. He didn’t call Philip to write a new Gospel or develop a new theology or to lead a new emergent sect of Judaism that would be known as the Way before they became known as Christians. He called him to follow. The first truth about followers is that they aren’t leaders. They’re followers. In fact, leaders make the worst followers, and that may help explain much of the struggle Jesus had with the Jewish leaders of his day. They simply weren’t ready and equipped to follow. But Philip could do that, so he did. Likewise Nathaniel, and Simon and Andrew and John and all the disciples could follow, and so they did. Even when they eventually led, they still followed because Jesus sent them the Holy Spirit to continue leading them after he arose.

Jesus continues to call us to follow him today. Your calling, my calling, is as individual as our fingerprints, but it will always be to follow where Jesus, through the Holy Spirit, leads us. How do we know that it is Jesus calling us? Because he knows us better than we know ourselves. There is an authenticity to his call. In the lesson from the Old Testament, on the third calling of Samuel, we read, “The Lord came and stood there, calling as at the other times.” There is an insistence and a persistence to God’s call. He makes himself know to us in his calling of us. It’s not phoned in. It’s not emailed to us. Our call is given to us personally by the One who knows us better than we know ourselves. And he stands there, beside us waiting until he hears us say, with Samuel, “Speak Lord, for your servant is listeneing.”

In the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.