Knowing and Being Known

St. Andrew's Episcopal, Mer Rouge, La.

Today’s lessons are about knowing, not knowing.., and being known. We’ll begin with Samuel, if for no other reason than because it is one of my favorite call stories in the Bible. Samuel reminds me so much of us much of the time!

Samuel is, of course, Eli’s helper in the Temple. He goes to bed one night and hears a voice calling his name. He thinks it’s Eli. Eli says, Nope, not me, go back to bed.

And this happens three times. But in the midst of this repetitive and seemingly redundant story of God calling Samuel, and Samuel thinking it’s Eli, we finally get a statement of the obvious: "Samuel did not yet know the Lord..." 

And it takes Eli, the High Priest, being awakened in the night three times to figure out what is going on! One would think the High Priest would be a little more in tune with God and God’s ways of calling people.

How like we humans this is! We do not know God well enough to hear God’s call. Or, we doubt our senses and our sanity, or we second guess ourselves or we are skeptical.., and rightly so.

I have certainly heard people claim that God had called them to do something that I don’t believe for a moment God would ever call anyone to do. I once was trying to counsel a woman who kept getting fired from jobs for passing out religious tracts while on the job, and she insisted that God was calling her to do it.

Human knowing is always imperfect. However wonderfully we are made, however great our capacity to use science or intuition or whatever to understand humankind and our world, there’s always more to know.., and that’s in part because the universe is dynamic. It constantly changes.

But at our smartest and wisest and best, we cannot and will never fully know God! Indeed, the erroneous belief of some people of all faiths—Jews, Muslims, Christians, both Catholic and Protestant, Buddhists & Hindus—that they have God all figured out… has caused some of the greatest violence and grief and misery humankind has ever known.

I believe it was Fr. Richard Rohr, Franciscan and Roman Catholic priest, who said, “The moment you become certain you know the mind of God is the moment you’re no longer dealing with God.”

On the other hand, God does know us. And we get a glimpse of that in today’s Gospel story. Phillip brings Nathaniel to Jesus, and Jesus welcomes him with a most unusual greeting. Aw, he says, an Israelite in whom there is no deceit!

Nathaniel asks, Where did you get to know me? And Jesus answers, I saw you under the fig tree before Phillip called you. 

Here is where our understanding of scripture is limited by lack of knowledge of other faiths. In Judaism, being “under the fig tree” means “studying Torah."

Now remember that when Phillip first goes to Nathaniel, he is skeptical. Can anything good come out of Nazareth, he asks. But he comes anyway, and he meets in person the one who already knows him, and whom he is prepared to meet because he has spent time studying Torah. Studying Scripture should open your mind, not close it.

In other words, Jesus basically says, ‘We’ve already met. We met in Torah. I’m the one you’ve been reading about in Holy Scripture.’ And Nathaniel recognizes him and declares his faith: You are the Son of God! 

God knows us, and knows us well enough to find us, to call us in a way that we can hear—if not the first time, then the second or third. It’s okay to question. It’s fine to be skeptical. But trust that God knows us and will use Holy Scripture, other people, whatever.. to find us and call us.

So… I wonder how it feels to you, to each of us this morning, to contemplate being known by God. Can we wrap our minds around that? Can our soul bear it? Is it the best news ever? Or does it strike fear in our hearts?

I’m guessing some of all that. And isn’t “all that” what we heard in today’s Psalm? 

Lord, you have searched me out and known me,
   you know my sitting down and my rising up;
   you discern my thoughts from afar. 

The Psalmist acknowledges that God knows us. But by verse four, the response to seems a little stressed out! 

You press upon me behind and before
and lay your hand upon me. 

Another translation uses the phrase “hemmed in,” not at all a comfortable feeling. And I am immediately reminded of fights in bars and movies that begin with, “Get your hands off me!”

In other words, knowing that God knows us, deeply and truly, each one as we are, is not entirely comfortable.

On the one hand, humans long to be known and understood, not only by God but by other humans. On the other hand, being known too well strikes a bit of fear into our hearts.

We are deeply flawed creatures. We would love to be known for that which we are proud of, for those aspects of ourselves we find acceptable, lovable, attractive. We do not want others to know our flaws and shortcomings. We would hide them from each other, and perhaps even more so from God!

Moreover, who among us has not been deeply wounded by another human who used his or her knowledge of us to hurt us? Who among us has not been wounded by revealing ourselves, making ourselves vulnerable to another human, only to be betrayed by that trust?

But the Psalmist takes us in another direction. God’s knowing is deeply and perfectly loving. God is with us in heaven and in the grave, in air and sea. God’s hand leads us and holds us fast. 

And then the most loving imagery of all: 

For you yourself created my inmost parts;
     you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
Your eyes beheld my limbs, yet unfinished in the womb;
     all of them were written in your book. 

God’s beloved. That is who we are. That’s what it means to be known by God. And what can we do in response? Just two things: Love god back, and our neighbors—all of them—as ourselves. Everything else follows.                     

AMEN

Incarnation

St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, Mer Rouge, Dec. 28, 2014 

So... there we were, just 3 days ago, kneeling beside a manger gazing in wonder at a newborn babe. He cries from time to time, as newborns do, to signal that he is hungry and needs a diaper change.

He looks so very human, lying there tiny and helpless, wrapped in bands of cloth. Our hearts melt. The least maternal among us cannot resist offering a finger for a tiny hand to grasp. It takes a cold, hard-hearted human to resist a newborn baby.

But, how do we wrap our minds around what the angels and the shepherds told us—that God has come to dwell among us?

 I think for most of us, most of the time, our belief about who Jesus is and Jesus’ relationship to God, comes “from below.” In other words, we come at it from the human angle. We begin with the babe in a manger, his earthly parents standing protectively near. We understand that.

We understand that the child grows to be a man and takes on responsibility. Jesus the man ministers to poor people and sick people; he associates with tax collectors and sinners. He is tempted; he walks the dusty roads of Galilee and grows weary of the crowds. He is human. He has a special relationship with God, to be sure, but he’s human nevertheless, like us in every respect.

Then along comes the Gospel according to St. John. Every 1^st Sunday after Christmas, we read this poetic and compelling, yet mysterious, prologue to John’s account of Jesus the Christ.

Where, we might be tempted to ask, is the babe? Where is Mary, the blessed mother, Joseph, the faithful father? The shepherds? Indeed, not one human populates this account.. save John the Baptizer!

Here’s a Gospel trivia question for you: Where and how does Jesus the human first appear in the Gospel according to John? In verse 29 of Chapter 1, as a 30-year-old man, when he comes to the river Jordan to be baptized!

The Christmas story is not part of John’s account. John’s Gospel offers us a view of Jesus “from above.” That is, John’s account begins with God, and with the unity of “the Word” with God.

It echoes the creation story, and tells us again that God exists outside of time, and that even light and life itself are from God. And in so doing, it provides us with a healthy reminder of God’s difference from humankind.

In John’s interpretation of Christmas, the babe in the manger is “the Word” that not only was with God, but was God, “the Word” spoken in an act of self-communication. It reminds us that we can know God only as God comes to us in self-revelation. Nothing we can do—not our most noble aspirations or our most dedicated acts of service—can earn or precipitate such an event.

From the prologue to John’s Gospel, we learn first and foremost that in Jesus Christ we meet nothing less than the revelation of God. Christmas is, first of all, the celebration of a gracious decision on God’s part to become human in the baby of Bethlehem.

I myself have often wondered why the author of John chose to tell this story in quite such abstract words and concepts. Why didn’t he just come right out and say, in plain Greek, “Oh, and by the way, Jesus was God!”

I suspect it had to do with the fact that “plain Greek” is no better than “plain English” for talking about such things. How could any human language be up to the challenge of declaring and explaining something so utterly unbelievable, so preposterous, as God becoming human?

Indeed, another lesson we learn from John’s prologue is that God’s revelation in Jesus Christ is just not obvious. The Word came to a world that should have known him. After all, he created it.

In particular, he came to a people who perceived themselves to be chosen from all the peoples of the earth to be God’s own. And they expected a Messiah!

Yet, he was rejected. As John states, He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.

Jesus was not universally recognized or acclaimed as the revelation of God. The remainder of John’s Gospel relates story after story of how prominent religious people not only did not recognize Jesus, but found him offensive, accused him of blasphemy, and charged him with being demon-possessed.

Jesus just wouldn’t obey the rules and hang out with the right kind of folks! Those who confidently thought they saw things rightly, in fact turned out to be blind.

But of course John the author addresses us as well, and he will not let us off the hook. He confronts us with a divine self-disclosure that does not document itself with foolproof evidence. We are not provided with irrefutable grounds for faith.

Instead, we are asked to believe that a baby in a feeding trough, born to a young woman who was not yet married, a Palestinian peasant who grew up to be an itinerate preacher living in a buffer zone in the Middle East, powerless before a Roman Governor, is the One in whom we meet the Creator of heaven and earth. The fact that the good church people of the day, who should have received him, in fact rejected him, leaves us all the more uneasy.

But rejection is not the whole story. Some did receive Jesus. They trusted and believed in him, and found themselves empowered to become children of God. They just aren’t the company we quite expect to find ourselves in: a couple of fishermen, a tax collector, a Samaritan woman with a checkered past, a beggar born blind, an unnamed Roman official, and ultimately, on Golgatha, a thief and a foot soldier.

What a motley crew! What an unlikely group to become the community called into being and nurtured by the revelation of God in Jesus. Certainly none of us needs to worry about whether we are pious enough or good enough or successful enough to be called into the community of the children of God.

But that in itself tells us much about the character of God and God’s intentions in Jesus. If we accept that God has seen fit to materialize in human flesh and form, then we live in a universe of possibility we can hardly imagine. If God can reconcile with humankind through a helpless babe born to an unwed mother in the lowliest of places, what might God be able to do through us?

Mary and Joseph “Yes” to God and the world was transformed. Each of us has a “Yes” we can say to God. It might seem small, insignificant. Not worth doing. But we’re all called. What is the Christ Child asking you to do to change the corner of the world you live in?  

Amen.