January 18, 2009
(Second Sunday after the Epiphany)

The Power of the Gospel

Joe Behen photo by The Rev. Joe Behen, Clergy Assistant

1 Samuel 3:1-10(11-20)  •  Psalm 139:1-5, 12-17  •  1 Corinthians 6:12-20  •  John 1:43-51
(From The Lectionary Page)

I’m always amazed by the stories of Jesus calling his disciples.  They begin to follow him based on so little, sometimes based on what seems like nothing at all.  I think that it suggests a power that is in many ways beyond understanding.  Today, we speak of what we call “the living power of the gospel.”  That power comes in many forms, but it is primarily about how it affects us, affects change in us.  The gospel is incarnated in the lives of very faithful people, including those we would call saints.  But I think that sometimes, God’s hand is on those who have no idea.  They are driven by something they don’t quite understand, but they know that driving them is important, that it’s real.  Sometimes they become part of the incarnation of God’s love, even if only in some small way, and their lives begin to look something like the gospel.

Several years ago, I spoke with a man in a hospital who was dying.  He told me how he had begun to see this time before his death as a kind of gift.  “I’ve always tried to be a good person,” he said.  “But I find myself now, kind of ‘sorting out’ what’s important and what isn’t.  I used to worry a lot with all the things that everyone worries with – paying the bills and all that.  And I still have to do those things even now.  But I don’t spend any other time on what’s not important.   In the past few weeks, I’ve seen my family and most of my friends.  I’ve been thanking them for the time they’ve been with me, for all the memories they’ve given me.  (Pause)  I guess that’s it.” he finally said.  “I’m living these last days in thankfulness.  I don’t think I really lived thankfully before.  It changes everything.”  We both got tears in our eyes, we prayed, and then I left.  He was soon moved to a hospice care facility, and I never saw him again, but I prayed for him and thought about him often after that.

In today’s gospel from John, Nathaniel is confronted with what will become the most important part of his life, Jesus.  Just as the man I met that day in the hospital had described himself, so does Nathaniel get this on some level.  But Jesus suggests to him that he doesn’t yet fully understand.  After proclaiming that Jesus is indeed the Son of God, perhaps Nathaniel thinks that he now has a grasp on what others simply don’t understand yet like he does.  But Jesus qualifies his profession of faith.  “Do you believe because I told you that I saw you under the fig tree?  You will see greater things than these.”  In fact, the next time Nathaniel appears in John’s gospel is in witness to the Resurrection.  It will be some time before Nathaniel learns to live what he has just professed.

But he does learn.  Like the other disciples, his life is changed altogether.  What becomes important to him is not what it was before.  And this, I think, is the power of the gospel.  It is what allows us to defy other powers, powers that diminish human lives, power that understands a human life as a resource for its own purpose, rather than as a gift from God.  It allows us to see beyond the difficulties and suffering that are part of our lives, to what transcends this world altogether.  The Gospel points us towards what is most important in this life.  It points us toward God.  The natural response that we have is simply thanksgiving.  And that thankful living incarnates in us lives that begin over time to look, in various ways, like the gospel.

“…you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.”  The stair that Jacob had seen in the wilderness showed him a connection between heaven and earth in a particular place.  Now, Jesus is shown in John to be the particular connection between God and humanity.  This is what life on earth looks like to God.  Speaking truth, even at one’s own expense, showing love for those who need love, and living thankfully to God, for showing us that these parts of our life transcend death.  This is why Jesus calls the disciples to him:

Their thankful living becomes a kind of connection between heaven and earth for others.  And that is our call as well.

The power of the gospel, then, is that it “casts new light” on the world in which we live.  That light reflects God’s call to us.

Thanks be to God.

 

Change Your Mind

by The Rev. Canon Susan Sommer

I was browsing through the online Christian Science Monitor earlier this week, when the headline of an opinion piece caught my eye. It was titled, ironically enough, “Do Opinion Pieces Ever Change Your Opinion?” (You can read it here.)  The gist of the editorial was, in essence, “generally not.” The author, Jonathan Zimmerman, cited The Political Brain, written by Emory University professor Drew Western following some interesting research he did involving brain scans. Turns out, according to Westen’s study, when the average person is confronted with evidence that contradicts his/her point of view, the parts of the brain that regulate emotion, not reason, light up. Instead of changing your former opinions, you actually experience a happy sensation by rejection the information that doesn’t fit them.

This article dovetailed with my own personal experience. I’m post-modern enough to be fully aware of the filters I have in place that help (or hinder) me in organizing my perception of reality. On occasion, I discipline myself to read opinion pieces by writers whose viewpoints are diametrically different from my own; when I do, I usually question their facts and refute their conclusions in my head, bringing about the happy sensation that Western talked about in his book.

Which makes our readings for this evening intriguing. Both our reading from 1 Samuel and the gospel from John are call narratives. God calls Samuel to be a prophet; Jesus calls Nathaniel to be a disciple. Both Samuel and Nathaniel are initially obtuse. Samuel mistakes the voice of the Lord for the voice of his master Eli. Nathaniel can’t quite work out how someone from Nazareth could possibly be the one spoken of by Moses and the prophets. Like us, both of them saw the world through their own particular interpretive lenses. In the case of Samuel, the Word of the Lord was rare in those days. Put yourself in Sam’s shoes. You hear a voice calling you in the middle of the night. Is it more reasonable to assume that it’s your human supervisor, or the voice of God? Or take Nathaniel, a native of the prosperous city of Bethsaida, schooled as all devout Jewish men would have been in the Law and the Prophets – which make no mention of the Messiah coming from Nazareth for crineoutloud. Is it more reasonable to assume that your buddy Philip is off his rocker, or to consider the possibility that God is doing completely something new?

By all conventional wisdom, to say nothing of studies on brain activity, neither call should have been answered. We are, as a people, disinclined to change our opinions, once they are formed.

There are ample disincentives, both social and biochemical. And yet it happens. Samuel embraced the impossible vocation of prophecy, and ultimately anointed David, son of Jesse, as King of Israel. Nathaniel accompanied Philip, perceived that Jesus was the Messiah, and followed him on the way. There are others. Fredrick Douglass called out this nation on the hypocrisy of extending citizenship only to white men. Elizabeth Cady Stanton left a life of upper middle class comfort to galvanize a nation toward Women’s suffrage. And because of their prophetic voices, the 13th Amendment and the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution were adopted. Martin Luther King, whose life our nation will celebrate tomorrow, brought voice and vision to the Civil Rights Movement and because of his efforts, and the efforts of others inspired by his witness, racial segregation was abolished. People changed their minds about the morality of slavery, about the capacity of women to make informed decisions at the polls, about the ethics of racial segregation in education, the work place, and public transit.

In time, I have no doubt that scientists will discover the biochemical reaction that makes possible our capacity to change our minds, and explain its rarity. But for the moment, we’ll rely on the explanation that the faithful have used for millennia – the work of the Holy Spirit, turning our hearts, and making possible our capacity to see things in a different light, to order our thinking accordingly, and to prompt within us a response to that change of heart.

It’s part of Baptism. Having received the Holy Spirit in baptism, we’re expected to do something with it. It means striving to be open to the newness and the possibilities that God reveals to us daily. It means developing the capacity to discern prayerfully that which may be of God as over against that which may be rather the sum total of our neurotic projections. It means engaging both intellect and humility in equal portion. No small thing. Thanks be to God for the witness of Samuel and Nathaniel, of Peter and Paul, Mary and Martha of Bethany, and of all the saints through the ages who changed their minds and because they did, changed the world.