“God Knows” - Sermon by Senior Minister Deborah K. Stevens Jan. 20, 2008, at North Broadway United Methodist Church, Columbus, Ohio

Scripture: Isaiah 49:1-7, John 1:29-42

How many of us, when faced with frustration at a circumstance we don’t understand, have rolled our eyes and shrugged our shoulders and said, “God only knows!”

We casually use the name of God in circumstances like that and in other ways. “God only knows” is a shorthand for the experience of observing or experiencing something that we just don’t get. But we usually don’t say that about things that are earth-shattering in their consequences; only about things that we decide we don’t need to know.

It is as though when ‘God only knows’ we need to pursue the question no further and we can just let it be. But not every time in our lives and not every circumstance in our lives is such that we can just let it go with a ‘God only knows.’ There are times when we desperately want and need to know why. When the events of life are painful or horrible and make no sense at all, it’s not just enough to dismiss them. In those circumstances, we need to know what God knows and what God knows of our pain, our suffering, or our loss. We need to know what God knows about a future that seems hopeless in light of current circumstances.

Such was the situation of the people of Israel in the time of second Isaiah. They were a displaced people, homeless in essence, torn from their homeland, refugees in a foreign land. And to the people of Israel, everything was tied to the land and to the covenant given to Abraham about land.

We all know that home is a physical place and a spiritual place. But for the people to whom Isaiah speaks, those are one and the same. And if these people who are displaced and lost and hopeless and forlorn in their exile are of a mind to throw up their hands and say, “God only knows,” God is of a different mind.

God is not a God who keeps knowledge to God’s own self. It is in the character of God to reveal divine knowledge. The biblical text is the story of God revealing God’s identity, God’s character and purposes to people across the events and circumstances of history. The prophetic vision and voice are central means of divine revelation in the biblical text, and indeed the prophetic voice and vision continue to be central to the experience of God’s people.

Thus it is that Isaiah can say to the people Israel that God has not forgotten them, that indeed God has always known them and God has a purpose for them. The purpose is more than they could have imagined. It’s not just that they themselves will be restored, but it is that God desires to give them a larger purpose, to make them a light to the nations.

Of course, the prophetic voice is not limited to specific historic contexts. There is an historic context to the utterance of the prophetic voice in the biblical text and we need to know that historical context in order to understand the meaning of the prophetic word. But because the prophetic voice reflects the will and the purposes of God, that voice transcends specific historical circumstances and speaks again and again and again across time. Such it was that Martin Luther King Jr. was able to use the words of the prophet, the prophetic voice lifted out of a different time and place from the biblical text to proclaim in his day, in his time, in our time, the call for justice and righteousness which is God’s purpose and will.

Christian theology of course maintains that the decisive revelation of God is not only in the prophetic voice and vision but is embodied in the person of Jesus Christ. But what do we know really about Jesus? We know that the gospels - Matthew, Mark, Luke and John - are not historically coherent. And we know that much of what Jesus said and did was not especially or uniquely different from what other healers, teachers and prophets were doing at the time. And when we don’t know everything about Jesus that we wish we did or find that we know less than we thought we did, it turns out that we’re in good company. Listen to the words of John the Baptist as this conversation is described in the gospel of John. John the Baptist says, “I myself did not know him, but I came baptizing with water for this reason: that he might be revealed to Israel.”

John understands in retrospect that the purpose of his own baptismal mission was to give opportunity for God’s revelation of the identity of Jesus and then to bear witness, to testify, that this is indeed knowledge from God in the person of Jesus. It is not just John’s opinion; it is John’s perception that this comes from God.

Certainly John the Baptist stands in the tradition of those with prophetic purpose and vision. And to him, this revelation of God seems self-evident. Having seen the Holy Spirit come and remain on Jesus, John is able to say, ‘This is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. This is the one who comes to baptize not with water but with the Holy Spirit.’

But how do we know? We who are not steeped in the culture and prophetic tradition of Israel, we who are not prophets but modern skeptics, how do we know as God knows?

I suggest that the narrative of the call of the first disciples as the gospel writer John constructs it can help us understand how these many millennia later people still come to know the power and presence and comfort of God. It begins when John names Jesus as Jesus has been revealed. ‘Look, here is the Lamb of God.’ And then two of John’s disciples hear and follow, and when those disciples seek more information from Jesus, he invites them to ‘Come and see.’ They came and saw where he was staying and remained with him that day. We are told that Andrew was one of the first who followed and he found his brother Simon and spoke what he knew to Simon and brought Simon to Jesus.

The verbs in this section of the narrative are very interesting and compelling. John uses the verbs in the passive voice of the narrator, but listen to them in the active voice as they are expressed in the New Revised Standard Version. Just a list of some of the verbs from this section: watch, exclaim, hear, follow, see, come, remain, hear, speak, follow, find, say, bring, look, say. Saying and hearing and following and looking and saying and hearing and following and bringing and looking and on and on occur in a rhythm over and over again as Jesus’ group of disciples grows, and if you read on in John’s narrative you see the other disciples: Phillip finds Nathaniel, and so on and so forth.

But back up for a moment to that conversation between Jesus and the first two followers. Jesus asks them, “What are you looking for?” The disciples reply, “Where are you staying?” Jesus: “Come and see.” Isn’t it interesting that this exchange goes like this? Wouldn’t it make more sense as a narrative if Jesus said, “Who are you looking for?” The disciples said, “We are looking for the Messiah.” And he said, “Come and see.” But Jesus doesn’t ask them ‘Who,’ he asks them ‘What’. Neither of them answer each other’s questions. They ask, ’Where are you staying?’ He doesn’t say, ‘Over there with so and so,’ he says, ‘Come and see.’

What we are looking for most of the time is an answer to the ‘why’ questions of life. Somehow this narrative suggests that Jesus is more an answer to ‘what’ than ‘who.’ We are looking for ‘Why did this happen? Is there a larger purpose? What is the purpose of my life, of our lives? Why is there so much suffering in the world? What is God’s purpose?’ The disciples appear to have had an inkling that what they were looking for might be embodied in Jesus and so they want to know ‘Where will you be? Where are you staying?’

The text tells us that they remained with him that day. It never tells us where they were staying, but we know they didn’t stay anywhere for very long. Though the four gospels may not agree on geography and time line, they all agree on this: To remain with Jesus is to be on the move in the world. Jesus relentlessly goes from place to place, from person to person, from situation to situation, and particularly in John’s gospel the movement is relentlessly toward his fate in Jerusalem.

The gospels do not give us out and out answers to our questions. In fact, as Jesus is asked questions over and over and over again, his replies remain more questions, parables, stories. It is his actions that speak of his identity. Come and see.

We live with questions. The poet Rilke has said that ‘We live the questions and then one long distant day we may live into the answers.’ And so in this, John’s story of the meaning of Jesus’ baptism, we are invited to come and see. We who are the baptized, the body of Christ, are invited to both come and see and to become the ones to whom others are looking for the answers to their questions.

What will others see when they look at us? Will they see a forgiven and forgiving community? Will they see us acting as Jesus acted? Will they see us as a gracious community? When people look at the church, will they see those who look at the suffering of the world cynically or with no hope or who ignore it? Or will they see people who are looking with eyes wide open at all the places in the world where there are homeless refugees, hungry children, orphaned babies, destroyed communities, those things that cause us to say, “God only knows”?

Most of all, will they see a community of the forgiven and the forgiving who are able to look at the world the way it is and say with conviction and hope, ‘We are following the one who takes away the sins of the world’? Don’t we need to know that there is one taking away the sins of the world and inviting us to be a part of that work?

Come and see. Come and see, we can say to our community. Come and see how we pray in this place, how we commit to mission and ministry, how we speak and hear and abide in community with one another. Come and see what we have learned. Come and see what we think we know.

Our God, the one we know through Jesus Christ is redeeming the world. Come and be with this God and know that you will be led to a new place. There are so many out there in the world who need to know that there is a living, forgiving, loving, compassionate God. How will we show and tell? How will we invite? How will we say, ‘Come and see’?

Those are questions with which to live, even as we know that God is taking away the sins of the world. Amen.