Come and See
Second Sunday after the Epiphany, Year B
St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church
Charles Everson
January 18, 2015
Listen to the sermon here.
Evangelism.
This is a word that makes many of us Episcopalians
uncomfortable. It invokes images of
knocking on doors, and passing out tracts, and just rubs us the wrong way. It reminds many of us of a previously life in
a fundamentalist church and smacks of arrogance: who are we to try to convince
others that we are right about our beliefs and that they are ultimately wrong?
When I graduated college, I moved to Paris, France for two as
a Southern Baptist missionary. I know,
I know, when you hear the word missionary, you think of sleeping in huts in
Africa eating insects and showering once a week as opposed to taking French
classes in an 800 year old university and meeting with college students in
cafés. Putting aside the oddness of the
missionary context, I was 22 years old and on fire for God and wanted to tell
anyone who would listen about how Jesus had changed my life. One Saturday afternoon, about a year after my
arrival in Paris, there was a knock on my apartment door. The two young men at the door were wearing a
tie, and said in English, “Hello, how are you today?” Immediately, I knew they were Mormon missionaries
from the United States and invited them inside. “What do you do for a living?”
one of them asked. These poor guys had
no idea what they were getting themselves into.
“I’m a missionary,” I told them.
They began squirming and when I asked if I could get them some coffee, one
of them immediately said, “Oh no, we won’t be staying long.”
In today’s gospel lesson, we hear of one of the first acts of
evangelism. On his way to Galilee, Jesus
found Phillip and said to him, “Follow me.” Phillip’s did, and his immediate response after
choosing to follow Jesus was to invite someone else to do the same.
The Christian faith is passed from person to person. That’s how it started, and that’s how it’s
been for about 2,000 years.
Now, Nathaniel didn’t follow blindly. He asks, “Can anything good come out of
Nazareth?” In his gospel, St. John
presents to us many stories of folks making the same mistake as Nathaniel. They assumed that Jesus’ origins could
explain who he was. Nazareth was never associated with Messianic prophecy in
the Hebrew Bible, so when Nathaniel heard that Jesus was from there, he
naturally thought that Phillip was mistaken.
His skepticism allowed Jesus to suggest to Nathaniel that his first
impression was seriously flawed. We see
the same thing in our Old Testament lesson when Samuel first mistook the voice
of the Lord for that of Eli. Even when we
are face to face with the Divine, it is possible to be completely oblivious to
God’s presence in our life.[1]
Once we move past our preconceived notions of who God is, we are
able to move to that moment of authentic encounter with God. Just as Nathanial had cultural baggage that
at first blinded him to the presence of God, so we have cultural and
psychological impositions upon us that make us believe God is a certain
way. For example, we are told in the
great film Monty Python and the Holy Grail that God is a giant cardboard cutout
figure in the sky that yells at humanity to quit groveling. Many Christians believe that the Bible teaches
that God loves us except when we sin.
And many subconsciously project our view of our own father onto God
including all of his human imperfections and failures. When we begin to understand these preconceived
notions and move past them, we can see God for who he truly is and
authentically encounter him.
What does it mean to authentically encounter God? St. Paul writes this in his letter to the Ephesians
(and please forgive me for the long quote, but it well worth it):
You were dead through the trespasses
and sins in which you once lived, following the course of this world, following
the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work among those
who are disobedient. All of us once lived among them in the passions of our
flesh, following the desires of flesh and senses, and we were by nature
children of wrath, like everyone else. But God, who is rich in mercy, out of
the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our
trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved—
and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in
Christ Jesus, so that in the ages to come he might show the immeasurable riches
of his grace in kindness towards us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been
saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God— not
the result of works, so that no one may boast.[2]
An authentic encounter with God is when we realize that God’s
mercy and love are given to us freely and without condition. This is what Paul means when he says that we
have been saved by grace. It doesn’t
matter what we’ve done or what we haven’t done. An authentic encounter with God
in the person of Jesus rarely happens in some sort of emotionally charged way,
but occurs like it did with Philip and Nathaniel: all of a sudden in our
ordinary lives.
When Nathaniel challenges Philip about Jesus’s place of
origin, Philip doesn’t respond with a well-thought-out argument detailing why
Nathaniel misunderstands the prophecies.
He says, “Come and see.” “Come and see.”
Our task as Christians isn’t to prove the truth of the Christian faith,
our task is to say, “Come and see.” As a
seminarian who hopes to be a priest one day, I would insist to you that
evangelism is not a task reserved for the clergy. The task is not to debunk an athiest’s
philosophical worldview with fancy rhetoric and knowledge that requires
seminary degree, the task is to invite others to encounter the living God. That is evangelism.
As we encounter Jesus in our ordinary lives throughout this
coming week, let us ask ourselves this question: who is God leading us to
invite to “come and see?” Asking someone
else to “come and see” might mean inviting a friend who has been away from
church for a long time to this very place.
It might mean inviting a friend to the upcoming men’s retreat to
experience God in community, fellowship and prayer. It might mean inviting a friend to serve the
poor with you at Breakfast at St. Paul’s next Saturday to encounter Jesus in
the face of those you feed.
Evangelism. Not the
most comfortable word for us Episcopalians. The first thing that happened after
Philip had an authentic encounter with Jesus was to invite someone else to do
the same. As we come to this altar and
experience the unconditional grace of God, who will we then ask to “Come and
see?” Amen.
