Sermons

“Savory Characters Rarely Make History”

Isaiah 53:1-6; John 1:43-51 – Rev. Rebecca Littlejohn

Vista La Mesa Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), La Mesa, California – January 18, 2015

Holy God, bless the speaking and the hearing of these words that we might let go of anything that would keep us from following your Christ. We pray it in the name of Jesus, Amen.

This story we just read about Nathanael is one of my very favorite passages in the whole Bible. I mean, there are a lot of people whose initial encounters with Jesus don’t go that well. But this guy managed to insult Jesus before he even met him, and then a few short verses later, is declaring him the King of Israel! Talk about your dramatic reversals! It seems clear that something very powerful is going on there.

I am a big fan of this story, because I can relate to Nathanael in so many ways. But it’s not him I want to talk about today. Jesus, after all, is the one being insulted. And that, also, is probably a way in which we can relate to Nathanael. There is this whole other side to the Messiah thing that we don’t talk about all that much.

As Christians, most of the time we operate under the assumption that we all love Jesus. And usually, without thinking it through too much, we extend that assumption to include the projection that we would have loved Jesus, that is, that in the original context, we would have been on the right side of the story. Occasionally, during Holy Week, we confront the possibility that we might have been in the crowd shouting “Crucify him!” But with the other gospel stories, we like to picture ourselves within that inner circle of disciples, rather than on the outskirts in the form of a judgy by-stander or a disapproving religious official. The disciples were clueless enough, after all, to be further removed than that would be embarrassing. At least, that’s the way it seems in hindsight.

But as it turns out, we don’t live our lives in hindsight. And scripture reminds us that, in the moment, it’s likely we wouldn’t have been nearly as into Jesus as we’d like to imagine. Since the beginning of Christianity, there have been serious-hearted moments when it’s been acknowledged that the reality of Jesus is just as honestly reflected by the “suffering servant” passages from Isaiah like the one we heard this morning, as any glorifying scripture elsewhere. “He was despised and rejected.” There was “nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.” And if we read the gospels with clear eyes, rather than allowing retrospective sentiment to distort our analysis, we will see that it wasn’t decent people following Jesus around; it was the sketchy people, the kind of folks we mostly don’t want to be associated with, that hung around the guy. He was a radical, a troublemaker, a disruption. And there is nothing polite society abhors quite like a disruption.

It bears noting, on this holiday weekend, that similar distortions have overtaken our understanding of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. I mean, he has a national holiday now. But the difference between now and then is stark as, shall I say, black and white. Again, it is nice to imagine ourselves on the right side of history. But if we’re honest, we have to confess that much of the time, we’re pretty big fans of the status quo. We like calm. We like steady. We don’t like upheaval or chaos or disruption. And Martin Luther King was a disruption. He was the embodiment of disruption, on a national scale. There’s no way that wasn’t going to make a good portion of those of us in this room uncomfortable. We want to be good people, and we know the world isn’t the way God wants it to be, but we really don’t like change. Even if the change is improvement, we prefer that it happen gradually, almost imperceptibly, so that we don’t have to experience the uncertainty and insecurity that accompanies rapid change. But that’s not really the way history unfolds, is it?

These days Martin Luther King, Jr., has basically been canonized as a saint in the American pantheon. His birthday is holiday, with festive and earnest events and parades. There are countless highways and parks named for him, and books and artwork and musical numbers like the one the choir sang earlier inspired by his legacy. But lest we white-wash that legacy – or more the point, our own perspective on that legacy, it’s vital to remember that we’re talking about a man whom the director of the FBI called “the most notorious liar in the country.” This was a man thrown in jail, for breaking laws, who encouraged other people to break laws and get thrown in jail as well. There are many ways in which one might have argued that this was not an upstanding citizen. And I’m sure many did. And some of them might have been us. We might not have been shouting “Crucify him!” but we easily could have been muttering about people getting what they deserved after he was killed. We don’t like disruption.

The biblical witness warns us that those whom God sends to change our world will not be welcomed with open arms and festive celebrations. The systems of power and order within our societies do not allow for dissent that is anything other than superficial. When a movement emerges that seriously threatens those in authority, they will make clear very quickly to the rest of us that it is not in our best interest to support those rabble-rousers. And mostly, we believe them. Our faith itself can be a tool of this calming effect. We believe in love, after all. If someone wants change, they should approach others lovingly and explain that need. And so it is that we let ourselves get sucked into the systems of oppression that rule our society, content to let things be calm, rather than insisting on justice.

When justice tries to erupt in our society these days, we are just as likely to dismiss it out of hand as Nathanael was to accept a Messiah from Nazareth. Can anything good come out of protests? Can anything good come from shouting? Can anything good come from getting arrested? We must be careful, lest 50 years from now, we are tempted to mis-remember which side of history we were on. Perhaps we can pray that we, like Nathanael, will have our prejudices challenged by something so powerful, so personal, so extraordinary that we suddenly recognize the truth of things and declare our loyalties as dramatically as he did.

What happened to Nathanael that day? A guy who had always managed to put his foot in his mouth, who said what other people were too polite to say, who was generally regarded as a loudmouth know-it-all was transformed into “an Israelite in whom there is no deceit.” He was seen, with the most honest eyes and heart he’d ever met, and it changed him. This guy who knew him better than he knew himself may have been called a rabble-rouser and a troublemaker, but there was something about him – a truthfulness that couldn’t be ignored, a love more powerful than conventions of polite society – that Nathanael responded to with an attitude adjustment that would have made a merry-go-round operator dizzy.

And that’s thing about these folks that come from the margins. They have a perspective on the truth that is clearer than those of us safely living in the middle of decent society. They are willing to take risks we are not because they have a lot less to lose. They bear a message that is more honest than most of what we hear in a given day, and if the medium they use to share it isn’t quite to our liking, at least it commands our attention. If we can respond with passion as deep as Nathanael’s, we may find that this new way of being in the world will bring us more blessing and joy than we ever imagined possible. We may find not only truth, but our true selves.

It seems to me that, as people claiming to follow Jesus, the best way for us to honor Martin Luther King, Jr., is not to imagine what it would have been like to work with him – since we probably wouldn’t have been – but to look around at who is disrupting polite society today and try to conceive of how they might be more like Jesus than we thought. What is the truth they are sharing that could set us free, if we could be receive it? What is the burden they are bearing that is as much about our sins as anything else? When we are tempted to despise and reject, we must be very careful, if we claim to follow Jesus, to make sure that we’re not despising and rejecting the gospel in a new form.

What would it mean to part of the movements that change history, rather than merely people who celebrate those changes from the safe distance of 50 years? How will we be challenged to let go of conventional ideas of what’s appropriate, if we truly apply gospel logic to our modern world? What would it mean to lay down our lives for our friends, and who would Jesus define as our friends? How will it change us, and make us whole? As we remember Martin Luther King this weekend, let us do it with unflinching honesty, with full awareness of the disruption and discomfort he engendered in us and people very much like us. Let us commit ourselves to opening ourselves up to that discomfort, taking on the challenge of living within it, so that we might hear the truth that will transform us and set us free. Alleluia and Amen.