Sermons from the Pulpit

     So here is Nathanael, asking the fearful question so many before and after him have asked: Where did you get to know me? Have we met? Have you been watching me, studying me, stalking me? Now there's a truly paranoid response to Christ, wouldn't you say? Cloaked in invisibility, Christ or God observes me as if through a one-way mirror. I'm exposed, naked, with no secrets, no possibility of controlling how I am seen and no way of observing my observer.

     Yet this experience of being watched is very commonly described among those who claim to have any experience at all of God. For example, here is Job, that righteous man:

Let me alone, for my days are a breath.
What are human beings, that you make so much of them, that you set your mind on them,
visit them every morning, test them every moment?
Will you not look away from me for a while, let me alone until I swallow my spittle?
If I sin, what do I do to you, you watcher of humanity?
Why have you made me your target?

     And recall the Psalm which formed our Call to Worship just now, the 139th Psalm, one of my favorites:

You know when I sit down and when I rise up;
You discern my thoughts from far away.
You search out my paths and my lying down, you are acquainted with all my ways.
Even before a word is on my tongue, O Lord, you know it completely.
You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me.
Where can I go from your spirit, where can I flee from your presence?
If I say the darkness will cover me, even the darkness is not dark to you,
The night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you.

     This is the flip side of the comfortable saying that the Lord is my shepherd, and now that I think of it, it gives me a whole new perspective on what it means to know God. You heard in the first reading, as Jim read it, that when the Lord called out in the night to the boy Samuel, Samuel "did not yet know the Lord." But it's clear that the Lord knew Samuel, and it's also clear that in the process of getting to the know the Lord through this little midnight misunderstanding, Samuel also got to know some things about himself. The Lord held up a kind of mirror to him.

     Now when you see yourself in everything you look at, that's called narcissism and it's not considered healthy. But this mirror is different. It shows you how you look to God. Young Samuel and old Eli both discovered that in God's eyes Eli had failed entirely in his calling as a priest and minister. Young Samuel learned that he, who only thought of himself as Eli's little helper, was perceived by God as being fit for the weighty tasks of listening when God spoke and telling all Israel what God had to say. The narcissist's mirror does not offer nearly this much in the way of surprise and challenge.

     Myself, I do not necessarily want to know how I look to God and I'd rather not think about how much God knows about me. This is one of the hardest things, for me, about receiving the so-called gift of faith, which I may or may not have prayed for -- or if I did pray for it, I didn't know what I was talking about, as people usually don't when they pray.

     I call it a so-called gift because it is not nearly as comforting or comfortable as I thought it was supposed to be. Faith, such as it is in me, reveals me to myself as one who is utterly, totally, absolutely known. As Jesus said of Nathanael, "Here is an Israelite in whom there is no deceit" - at least, none that can fool the watchful eyes of God.

     Every calling has its besetting nightmares. I wish I had a nickel for every time I've heard a minister say, "I dreamed that it was Sunday morning and I stood up to preach and I suddenly saw that I was buck naked, and I woke up in a cold sweat! What do you think it means?" People who dream such dreams worry that it might mean they are disturbed or somehow unfit. I would tell them that on the contrary, it shows they have the good sense to be terrified under the gaze of God. There is no better starting place for the life of faith.

     Of the time of Eli and Samuel, the story says, The word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread - or in the lovelier language of the older version, There was no frequent vision. It'll be fighting words if I say the same is true of these days of ours, given the large number of people who claim to be speaking God's definitive and specific Word on a host of topics of current concern, from sex to death. But I'll say it anyway.

     I say there is no frequent vision that has anything to do with God, because of what we just observed: To see God or to know God is, by the grace of God, to see and know oneself with a holy clarity and depth that can only shake you to your bones if you are such a mortal sinner as you and I are. Too few of today's spokespersons for God show much evidence of being shook like that, and so I mistrust them. I want to see more of Nathanael in them.

     Nathanael, you recall, is the same guy who said, when he first heard about Jesus, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" So if Jesus saw him under the fig tree before Philip called him, then Jesus heard him say that. And so this is the very first thing he learns about this Jesus: This man knows that I insulted his home town. This man knows that I am a total jerk.

     Therefore, this man is the Messiah, the Son of God and the King of Israel? That may seem to be a bit of a leap, logically speaking, but it might not be. What would you say are the appropriate qualifications for the Redeemer of the world and the second person of the Trinity? Someone who knows us a whole lot better than we know ourselves and wants to be with us anyway - hey, that's not bad for starters.

     Whatever else the Word of God accomplishes, this one thing I have seen it accomplish in myself and in others, including many of you: I have seen the Word change the ways that people know themselves and each other and the world around them, and I have seen it change the ways they deal with themselves, each other and the world.

     Here on the eve of the only American holiday ever named for a Christian minister, one large example is obvious even if it is incomplete. But I don't want you to go out of this sanctuary believing that God's Word is only writ large, in names that go down in history, like Nathanael or Philip, Simon or Andrew or Martin. I want you to understand that this is God's design for you and for us, starting from the moment that each of us was first moved to come to this place, and I want you to sink your teeth into that and hang on to it like a terrier until that moment when you realize that you can let go because it has taken hold of you and will never let you go.

     And to encourage you, let me close by reading to you one person's testimony to what that's like. His name is Douglas Steere, and he writes as a Quaker, but this applies to all ways of meeting and worshipping God, even ours.

The meeting for worship has sent tears down my eyes and cheeks. It has given me specific things to be done and the strength to undertake them. It has, on a few occasions, laid on my heart rimless concerns whose precise structure and whose outcome I could not foresee, and kept them before me until they came to some degree of clarity. It has called me into the intercessory chain gang to pray for other people and for situations where the need was urgent. It has changed my mind when I did not mean to change it. It has firmed me up when I might have yielded. It has rested me. It has upset my sluggish rest. It has helped prepare me to live. It has fortified me in knowing that my ashes will eventually lie in the earth only a couple of hundred feet from where I am sitting at [this] meeting and has helped me to feel the Presence of the One who can bear me now and bear me then. It has scarified me and broken down the hull of my life and shown me how I might live. It has warned me that I am too cowardly to live that way, but reminded me for good measure that it is not what I give that makes me suffer, but what I hold back. It has comforted me and quieted me when I was torn and hurt, and it has dug up the garden of my soul when I thought that the present produce was all I could manage. In it I have physically slept and again I have been terribly awake. In it my mind has wandered like a hummingbird on holiday and yet in it I have felt moments of intensity and concentration and awareness that have shown me what life could be like.

     May that sort of vision be frequent and widespread among us.

     Amen.