Sunday, January 14, 2018

Come and See

John 1:43-51; Psalm 139
January 14, 2018
I want to begin with something that was published 49 years ago this month, from an essay written by Martin Luther King and published nine months after his death.
A voice out of Bethlehem two thousand years ago said that all [people] are equal. It said right would triumph. Jesus of Nazareth wrote no books; he owned no property to endow him with influence. He had no friends in the courts of the powerful. But he changed the course of [human history] with only the poor and the despised. Naïve and unsophisticated though we may be, the poor and despised of the twentieth century will revolutionize this era. In our “arrogance, lawlessness and ingratitude,” we will fight for human justice, brotherhood, secure peace and abundance for all. When we have won these – in a spirit of unshakable nonviolence – then, in luminous splendor, the Christian era will truly begin.[1]
Who would have expected that a nobody from a nowhere town would emerge to lead a movement that changed the world? Has anything good ever come out of that sewer of Nazareth that only sends us its worst people, skeptics naturally asked.
“Come and see,” said the nobody.
Who would have expected that a nobody, a black Baptist preacher serving a middle-sized congregation that gathered in a small, aging dump of a building in the parochial little capital city of a backward southern state would emerge to lead a movement that changed the world? Has anything good ever come out of Montgomery, Alabama, skeptics naturally asked.
But, said that nobody to the first meeting of the Montgomery Improvement Association in December, 1955, “there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression.”[2] Come and see what it looks like when those people rise up.
I draw this comparison because I have too often heard Jesus’ words of call, his invitation to disciples in John’s gospel, used as an invitation to join the church. In other words, such an interpretation suggests, when Jesus said “come and see” he was articulating a fundamentally religious invitation, an invitation to join a religion, as it were.
That utterly misses the point, and, in so doing, it lets us off way too easily. At least, that is, until we are willing to entertain a radically different understanding of “church.” For, if we hear in this passage an invitation that amounts to “join the church,” then, in most places in America today, that seems to mean “come and join a voluntary association of like-minded individuals dedicated to blessing the status quo,” or, even worse, “come and join another group of middle-class Americans who look like you do.”
I am mindful here of the distinction that Dietrich Bonhoeffer drew when he wrote about “religionless Christianity.” As Lori Brandt Hale and Reggie Williams put it in the February issue of Sojourners, throughout his life Bonhoeffer developed the “distinction between religion [on the one hand] and Christ-centeredness [on the other]; religion is our effort to reach God, while Christ-centeredness embraces God’s self-revelation to the world in the incarnation” and in the community of disciples.[3]
When Jesus said, “come and see,” he was not saying, “go talk with the pastor about becoming a member of the congregation.” No. He was saying, “follow me,” and he said it understanding full well what that meant.
If, in December, 1955, Martin Luther King had invited the people of Montgomery to join his church they would have laughed him out of the room and history would have passed him by. Instead, he invited them to join a movement within history. He, too, soon came to understand full well what it meant to follow the way of Jesus within history.
Bonhoeffer also understood. Indeed, he most fully developed his ideas about religionless Christianity in a series of letters written from a Nazi prison cell in the final two years of his life before the Nazis executed him. He knew the cost of discipleship.
Lots of folks in the progressive part of American Christianity have been asking for a while now if we are living in a “Bonhoeffer moment.” I believe that we are, but I further believe that we have been for a long time. To our deep shame, we’ve ignored that reality in favor of lots of tinkering around the edges. We’ve reached for God through praise bands and emergent church and worship wars and culture wars, and mostly turned a blind eye to God’s self-revelation to the world.
We turn away because God, in sovereign love, chooses to reveal God’s self most clearly in and through the struggles of “the poor and the despised,” the people who come from places that the rich and powerful of our country – including our president – refer to as pigsties or, obviously, worse. Yeah, that’s where God is revealing God’s self to the world, and that’s where Jesus was headed when he said, “come and see.”
We really need merely to read some of Dr. King’s words – all of which are more than a half-century old now – to understand that we’ve been living in a status confessionis moment most of our lives but we’ve mostly refused to confess it.
Heck, in the mid-1960s King wrote that “white backlash [has] become an emotional electoral issue.” Does that sound contemporary enough for us? He went on, saying, “Men long regarded as political clowns had [been elected …] their magic achieved with a witches’ brew of bigotry, prejudice, half-truths, and whole lies.”[4]
Does that sound at all familiar? We should be confessing that we have not grown beyond that depressing reality, and we should repent of the white supremacy that still stunts our growth. The sad familiarity of those words tells us that we remain in a status confessionis but still we do not confess.
A status confessionis moment is a time when the confession of the church rests on choosing, as it were, which side you are on. A status confessionis moment is a time when you clearly hear Jesus saying, “come and see,” and you must decide if you are up to the challenge implied in the invitation, if you have the faith and the courage to follow where he is leading.
What does it mean to say that we are living in a Bonhoeffer moment? What does it mean for the church to live in a status confessionis moment? What are we confessing, and what are we specifically opposing, when we say, “you can follow this political figure or you can follow Jesus but you cannot do both”? What does it involve to say, “you can follow this particular political agenda or you can follow Jesus but you cannot do both”? Bonhoeffer and his friends said, in effect, “you can make the Nazi salute or you can make the sign of the cross but you cannot make both.” Dr. King and his friends said, in effect, “you can burn the cross or you can follow the way of the cross but you cannot do both.”
In his time, Jesus said, in effect, “you can say Caesar kurios – Caesar is lord – or you can say Christos kurios – Christ is Lord – but you cannot say both.” You can follow the empire or you can pray “thy kingdom come,” but you cannot do both.
What are we saying today?
A few years ago Mary Oliver published a poem called “Of The Empire.” It goes like this:
We will be known as a culture that feared death
and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity
for the few and cared little for the penury of the
many. We will be known as a culture that taught
and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke
little if at all about the quality of life for
people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All
the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a
commodity. And they will say that this structure
was held together politically, which it was, and
they will say also that our politics was no more
than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of
the heart, and that the heart, in those days,
was small, and hard, and full of meanness.
We can make our peace with this small, mean empire or we can follow the Prince of Peace, but we can not do both. What is our confession today? What song of our faith will we sing? What dreams will we give voice to, and, having given them voice, what dreams will we pursue with all of our hearts and minds and souls?
So, with the psalmist I sing, O Lord, you have searched me and known me. And, with the prophets, I see your Spirit poured out such that our young folks will prophesy, our elderly will have visions, and even the poor and despised will dream dreams. And so I see a day when we will be known for the fullness of our hearts rather than the narrow bigotry of our politics.
O Lord, you know me when I sit down and when I rise up. So I see a day when all of us will tire of sitting by as the president dishonors his office through dog-whistle racism and overt bigotry, and that we will rise up to insist that our country live out its founding promise that all of us – all of us, rich and poor, women, men, non-binary folks, friends of every race and creed, immigrant and native born, gay folks and straight ones – all of us – are created equal and endowed by God with certain inalienable rights as we strive together toward a more perfect union.
O Lord, you search out my path … and are acquainted with all my ways. So I see a day when we will choose leaders who look to build bridges instead of walls, who chart a path toward justice by reaching up with lofty language to inspire instead of trolling deep in the filth of the sewer for words that divide. And I see a day when we will pursue policies that lift up the downtrodden without waiting for help to trickle down from the untaxed riches of Wall Street.
O Lord, even the darkness is not dark to you, and so I see a day when we will resist the darkness, when we will walk together through this deep midnight of our nation’s discontent to a dawning day when all God’s children can sit together at one table of plenty, break bread together, drink deeply when the wine is poured, and lift their voices in a thunderous chorus of praise and thanksgiving, of justice and of peace. I see a day.
Come and see. Come and see. Amen.




[1] Martin Luther King, Jr., A Testament of Hope (San Francisco: Harper, 1986) 328.
[3] Hale and Williams, “Is This a Bonhoeffer Moment?” Sojourners, Feb. 2018.
[4] Martin Luther King, Jr., “Where Do We Go From Here?” in A Testament of Hope, p***

posted by David Ensign at 6:09 PM