Knowing as We Are Known
A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the 2nd Sunday After Epiphany, January 17, 2021 by Holly Huff, Postulant for Holy Orders.
As a boy, Samuel grows up serving in the temple, involved day after day in a life of worship and praise. Our Old Testament reading finds him literally sleeping in the sanctuary. Despite this holy setting—or even perhaps because of it—when Samuel hears his name called in his sleep, he thinks it is Eli, the high priest, calling for him.
Samuel, Samuel, he hears. Samuel dutifully gets up and goes to Eli. Here I am, you called me? No, Eli says, I didn’t call you. Go back to bed. And Samuel goes and lays back down.
Soon enough, he hears the voice again: Samuel, Samuel. Eli, you called? No, go back to bed.
And a third time he hears it. Samuel, Samuel.
Samuel doesn’t yet know who is calling him, though to his credit his response even at being woken from sleep is receptive and open. “Here I am.” His words are echoed later in scripture by Mary, who gives her yes saying “Here am I, the handmaiden of the Lord.”
The text tells us that “Samuel did not yet know the Lord,” and so he doesn’t recognize this voice at the first or third call. We read that “The word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread.” Visions were rare—but not because God was not present. There is the mention that Eli’s eyesight had grown dim, impairing his vision, but the lamp of God had not yet gone out. The light of God’s abiding continual presence was still burning. And the question is whether it is seen, by Eli or Samuel and ultimately by each of us.
So the Lord calls to Samuel in the night. “Samuel did not yet know the Lord,” and it took a bit to catch his ear, but the Lord knew Samuel and continued to call. Consider the great image in Luke of God as the persistent widow, knocking at the door of an unjust judge. She just keeps coming back. She won’t give up on us. God calls again, and finally, with some guidance from Eli, Samuel hears. His eyes are adjusting in the semi-darkness, learning to discern the light that was always already there waiting for him to take in. The lamp of God is still burning. The next time he hears his name—Samuel, Samuel—he says, “Speak, Lord, your servant is listening.”
The Lord knew Samuel, even when Samuel did not know the Lord. The Lord knew Nathaniel, too. In today’s passage from John, Nathaniel meets Jesus for the first time and finds to his surprise that this apparent stranger knows him intimately.
This passage comes at the end of John’s telling of the calling of the disciples. Philip, having been found by Jesus, goes to find Nathaniel, and says, “We’ve found him, the Messiah, the one we’ve been waiting for, Jesus of Nazareth.” And Nathaniel responds first with simple prejudice wrapped in a distanced sort of irony: “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” As if.
But this snarky response is not the sum total of who Nathaniel is. Underneath the posturing, burdensome persona, Nathaniel is a true seeker. John sets him “under the fig tree,” a reference that associates him with students of the Torah. He is someone who is looking to know God.
When God turns up unexpected, he derisively offers a scoffing prejudgment. But Philip, his friend, is doubtless used to Nathaniel’s crusty exterior. He just smiles and lets it roll off his back. “Come and see,” Philip says. No more words, just come and see.
Nathaniel takes this invitation and Jesus recognizes him. Jesus recognizes who Nathaniel really is, not the sneering, ironic persona, but his true self, unencumbered by pretensions of ego—not the ironic, sort of nasty Nathaniel but underneath that an earnest searching. Jesus calls him “An Israelite in whom there is no deceit,” no guile. I think this is the precise moment of grace in this passage. Jesus recognizes Nathaniel as he really is, as he was made to be, and his gaze restores Nathaniel to his true self, which then lets him see Jesus more clearly, and this time in earnest. The light comes into focus: “You are the Son of God, the King of Israel!” Nathaniel proclaims. He comes to know Jesus in the act of finding himself already known by Jesus. There is a mutual recognition here.
Wonderingly, after this gracious moment of encounter, Nathaniel asks how it is done. “Where did you get to know me?” Jesus says, “I saw you under the fig tree before Philip called you.” Jesus knew Nathaniel long before Philip called him. Before Philip called him, way before, when his body was still being knit together in his mother’s womb, God knew and loved Nathaniel, loving him into existence, in fact, shepherding him through every moment of his life leading up to him standing under that fig tree. Jesus knows every piece of Nathaniel and loves him as the God-created unique image of the divine that he is.
Now, after this moment of grace-filled recognition, something shifts in Nathaniel’s perception. He sees with new eyes now, and Jesus tells him “You will see greater things than these—the heavens opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.” He is referring back to Jacob’s ladder in Genesis, when Jacob saw the gate of Heaven at Bethel. Jesus says now that those who follow him will see it wherever they go—the gate of heaven, the entrance to the sanctuary, is everywhere.
God knew Samuel even when Samuel had not yet heard the word of the Lord. God knew Nathaniel, knew his heart. And God knows you, too. God knows you by name, like Samuel and Mary and Nathaniel and Jacob. God loved you into existence, and cradles your life in the palm of the divine hand. The lamp of God, that nurturing warmth and constant presence, has not gone out and will not—the light shines in darkness and the darkness does not overcome it. The entrance to the sanctuary is everywhere. As Paul writes to the Corinthians, you yourself are a sanctuary, a temple of God’s Holy Spirit, made by love to glorify God in your body.
To glorify God in your body. What does this look like? As St. Irenaeus wrote, “The Glory of God is a human being fully alive.” To glorify God in your body is to be the unique person you are, letting the particular refraction of God’s light shine through you and out into the world. It looks like kindness, justice, peace, and the fruits of the spirit. Like Eli, like Philip, we become little lamps lighting the way for others, saying “Go and listen,” “Come and see.” To glorify God in your body is to embody love out into the world—loving as we have first been loved, now with clearer eyes, helping others to see they too are known, beloved and called by name.
This is the love for which we were made, by which we were made. And when we listen for and watch for this love that holds up all creation in every moment, we align ourselves with the grain of the universe, no longer straining against our own nature, our own being. The prejudice and preconceptions of the false self are in fact a lot of work. It takes effort to maintain the illusion of separation from God, and there is ease in giving up our attempts at self-sufficiency. Jesus said, “My yoke is easy and my burden is light.” We were created for communion with God, and your true self, underneath our posturing self-protections, attunes with flow and ease.
The stories of Samuel and Nathaniel are stories of discernment, of tuning into God’s presence and action in the world like an old radio dialing in past the static. These stories call to my mind another: Simeon and the nunc dimittis, which we’ll hear read in a couple of weeks when we celebrate the Presentation of Jesus in the temple. Simeon had lived a long life. Promised by the Lord he would not die before he met the Messiah, he spent many years in watchful waiting. On the day the infant Jesus is brought to be presented in the temple, Simeon is driven there by the Spirit. He meets the baby rejoicing, praising God, saying “Mine eyes have seen the light of your salvation—which you have prepared for all the world to see.”
Christ is the world’s true light, and each of us a temple where he dwells. To glorify God in body and spirit is to let Jesus live in you, offering your whole self as a sanctuary for the divine. Like Samuel, curled up in his bed in the temple, we can make our dwelling place in the continual radiance of God’s presence. We too can dwell in the house of the Lord forever, our lives each a temple as the Spirit does its sanctifying work on us, making us more and more transparent to and illumined by the light of Christ. Because God has already made God’s dwelling place in us—as St. Augustine prayed, “You are in me deeper than I am in me.” Our lives our not our own. Our part is to say, “Speak, Lord, your servant is listening.” To come and see, to open our eyes.
Of course we continually go through times when our sight dims and our attention frays. We slip back into the ironic distanced accretions of our habituated false selves. Can anything good come out of Nazareth? The invitation is the same as to Nathaniel: Come and see. Return to that posture of earnest, open receptivity, where we know and are known. And even when we lapse back into absence and dimsightedness, the Lord still calls us, searches us out. God knows our inmost parts, traces our journeys and our resting-places. God beholds us perfectly and completely, even as we are yet unfinished, still being formed and fashioned. Our sight is still in the process of purification from the preconceptions and prejudices we impose onto the present, removing the distorted lens that filters out the more glittering shades of reality and letting in the light of God’s salvation, making visible the face of Christ shining through the face of our neighbor and the face of the stranger. May God give us eyes to see. Amen.