"Come and See": The Call to be in Relationship

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Second Sunday after the Epiphany, January 19, 2020 by the Very Reverend Tyler Doherty.

“What are you looking for?” is one of those big, cosmic questions that gets right to the heart of what it means to be a human being. John’s disciples see Jesus walking by and in his person they connect with their human longing for a well-lived life. A life, not of skating across the surface, but lived to the full. A life of depth, meaning, and purpose. A life that embodies the peace and joy they see radiating from this itinerant rabbi on the move who won’t even stop walking while he asks the question.

The two disciples can’t articulate what it is they’re looking for. All they know is that they yearn for more. They can’t put their finger on what that more might be, what it might look like, or how they might find it, but they’ve connected with that sense of holy longing, the dawning recognition that life might just about more than they’ve previously thought. They see in Jesus a truly human human being--a life transparent to the will of God.

It’s telling, of course, that Jesus doesn’t answer the disciples’ question about where he is staying by giving them his business card with his address on it. Surely, the disciples would have tucked the card into their pockets, filed it away for later, and found something more pressing to attend to. “That’s all the way on the other side of town,” we might hear them say, “I’ll drop by another time.”

Instead, Jesus invites the disciples to “Come and see.” The disciples have to leave the tutelage of John the Baptist in order to follow Jesus. They have to step into the unknown and take a risk. They have to be willing to have their picture of themselves, God, and their relationship with others challenged because Jesus invites them into relationship and relationship transforms. He invites them to come and dwell where he dwells, and significantly, they spend the day with Jesus being present the presence.

Information about Jesus isn’t what transforms our lives. Direct, personal encounter with God in the person of Jesus through the Holy Spirit is what changes us. Through dwelling on Jesus’ life particularly as revealed to us in the Gospels, through daily prayer, through weekly worship in community, through going out to serve the least of these as boundary crossing love we gradually learn to stand where Jesus stands, to breathe the air he breathes, to allow our fragile, foibled human frame to be indwelt by love. 

Faith is not, in this picture, a set of propositions assented to by our rational intellect, as if we could be transformed by accumulating information about Jesus or merely having the correct sets of beliefs about him. Rather, faith is a relationship, a transformative encounter with the Living God in the Risen Christ. “The only problem,” Luke Timothy Johnson told me once in conversation, “with the search for the Historical Jesus, is that it’s like doing an autopsy on a living person!” We wouldn’t content ourselves with a description of a sunset in place of the real thing, or eat the menu instead of the meal, and the spiritual life is no different. It’s relationship that transforms and transfigures. It’s in relationship and in community with other Christians that we learn to love like rocks with sharp edges gradually worn smooth after years of bumping up against one another. 

So much of our contemporary culture mitigates against this relational and communal nature of faith. Friendship, in the world of Facebook, doesn’t mean being with the other through thick and thin, bearing each other’s burdens, or having their uncomfortable reality impinge on us; it means clicking the “like” button at the bottom of a picture of what they’re eating for lunch. Our news is carefully curated to give us only the viewpoints we agree with from sources we like.We live in echo chambers where true encounter with the other, true encounter with the stranger who can’t just be assimilated to our point of view is increasingly difficult. The image that perhaps captures our times best? The solitary individual staring into their palm at their cellphone.

It’s no wonder then that we see an increasing tribalism in our national life. The call to be in relationship and community, even with those whom we disagree, is under threat. But this is where the Church, the community of Christians gathered around Jesus can make a real difference. The Church, as people who are committed to walking the Way of Love, to becoming a little bit more like the one we follow after and call “Lord,” is all about flesh-and-blood relationships. There is no such thing as an individual Christian. Whether it’s discussing and reflecting on a piece of short fiction, getting things set up for Sunday Eucharist, visiting homebound parishioners with a meal, opening our doors to homeless families for a week at a time, or just visiting with someone at coffee hour after mass, the Church provides us with innumerable opportunities to be in relationship with the other, to be there for and with the other not how we’d like them to be, but just as they are, and to learn to love them.

I remember going back to my sending parish in Philadelphia halfway through my time at seminary for visit. I was supposed to give an adult forum on the life of a seminarian. I gave my little talk and then opened it up for questions. And the thing everyone wanted to know was, “Where did my deepest learnings take place?” I think they were expecting an answer like, “In learning koine Greek, or studying Karl Rahner.” My answer surprised them. I told them my deepest learnings took place in chapel, in the hospital room, and at the lunch table. You see, in all three of those places I was in relationship. 

In Chapel I was in relationship with primarily with God--hearing the Word preached, receiving the gift of God’s very self in the body and blood of Christ, standing shoulder to shoulder with my brothers and sisters in prayer for a broken world and being sent out at the Deacon’s dismissal to be Christ’s hands and feet in the world each day.

In the hospital room, I’d swallow hard each morning and step through the doorway into a terminal cancer patient’s room not trying “bring Jesus into the situation,” but through listening to the person’s story trying to discern how God was already there. It was through the simple practise of just “being with” the other without agenda, without having all the answers, that God’s presence gradually unfolded itself amidst the IV poles, the beeping monitors, bad hospital food, and bloody bandages. 

And at the lunch table. What’s so transformative about eating lunch, you might ask? Well I ate lunch with the same people every day for three years. Progressives. Conservatives. Folks from the Deep South and the Northeast. From the Heartland and coasts. Folks who had gun safes in their dorm rooms. Folks who served rural parishes. Folks who were church planters and met in storefronts in the inner city. Honestly, it was exhausting. And sometimes I just wanted to go through the drive-thru at McDonald’s at eat my lunch in the car! But something amazing happened through the simple practice of trying to keep showing up as open and attentive as I could. I started to get a glimpse of what it might be like to be in relationship with someone with whom I totally, fundamentally disagreed. Sharing that table fellowship day after day started to school me in love.

It’s easy to dismiss someone in the abstract. It’s easy to write someone off when all we see is our ideas about them, or we’ve reduced them to cardboard caricatures. But when we are in relationship with a person, when they’ve ceased to be just a cipher for a political stance and have acquired the true depth and dignity that is the mystery of the human person created in the image and likeness of God, it’s a lot harder. The temptation is always to pick up our toys and go home, to surround ourselves only with like-minded people, but the Church actually models for us a different way to be for and with one another. We don’t all vote the same way. We don’t all hold the same theological views, but what unites us is that we are all facing the same way--turned to Jesus as the fountain of life and ground of all being. 

I experienced this most powerfully at a Church in Old Town Alexandria, VA. Just across the Potomac, it was a congregation where the head of the NRA and Democratic staffers all turned to hear the Gospel proclaimed in their midst and said with one voice, “Glory to you, Lord Christ.” It was a congregation where the liberal and the conservative knelt shoulder to shoulder at the altar rail to receive the most precious body and blood as brothers and sisters in Christ.They built houses for Habitat for Humanity, fed the homeless, and taught Sunday School together. They pledged themselves to each other in love, in the recognition that even if they disagreed with each other on just about everything, they couldn’t just silo themselves off in a tribal enclave and still call themselves Christians. They stayed at the table and in relationship. They ate lunch.

So the call in today’s Gospel is twofold. First, to “Come and See.” Whether we’re happy, sad, buoyed up, or broken-hearted, we make the journey, we spend time in relationship with Jesus, stay with Him in the simple, child-like faith that whoever we are and whatever we are experiencing time spent in his presence renews, refreshes, and emboldens. Second, we’re called into the same covenantal relationship with others that God has established with us in the person of his Son. Again and again God reaches out to us and we are called to the same steadfastness, patience, and forbearance. He stays with us no matter what and it’s our job to be that banquet table for others--no one left out, no one excluded, no one quietly dismissed. Pass the salt.