John 1:29-42

The next day [John the Baptist] saw Jesus coming toward him and declared, “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world! This is he of whom I said, ‘After me comes a man who ranks ahead of me because he was before me.’ I myself did not know him; but I came baptizing with water for this reason, that he might be revealed to Israel.”

And John testified, “I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him. I myself did not know him, but the one who sent me to baptize with water said to me, ‘He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.’ And I myself have seen and have testified that this is the Son of God.”

The next day John again was standing with two of his disciples, and as he watched Jesus walk by, he exclaimed, “Look, here is the Lamb of God!” The two disciples heard him say this, and they followed Jesus. When Jesus turned and saw them following, he said to them, “What are you looking for?” They said to him, “Rabbi” (which translated means Teacher), “where are you staying?” He said to them,“Come and see.” They came and saw where he was staying, and they remained with him that day. It was about four o’clock in the afternoon.

One of the two who heard John speak and followed him was Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother. He first found his brother Simon and said to him, “We have found the Messiah” (which is translated Anointed). He brought Simon to Jesus, who looked at him and said, “You are Simon son of John. You are to be called Cephas” (which is translated Peter).

Thursday night was midterm exam night for our Bethel Bible Study class – you may have heard some weeping and gnashing of teeth from them in recent weeks because of it. I haven’t graded the exams yet, but they’re always more worried about it than they need to be. So, in an attempt to remind a very anxious class about what we’re really doing here – and about what really matters in all of this – I asked them a question for “Extra, Extra Credit” on their mid-term exam. And their answers ended up being excellent sermon fodder for this morning.

The question was simple: “Unrelated to the Bethel Bible Study, share something meaningful you have experienced or enjoyed or been inspired by as part of our life together at Cross of Grace.” As I’d hoped, the answers moved me and inspired me and turned out to be a great connection to this week’s gospel.

Someone said it feels like home here…where kids are loved, family is supported, God’s grace and mercy are witnessed and love is felt. And they said how moving and meaningful it has been for their kids to see their dad serving here.

Someone said that, because of what we do here, they have grown to be more open and accepting and comfortable having hard conversations with people and that they can show love and compassion to people who struggle in ways they haven’t always been able to do.

A couple people said something about the overall feeling of warmth and welcome at Cross of Grace that matters to them.

Another person explained how they hadn’t ever been particularly involved at Cross of Grace until one Sunday morning when someone asked them to fill in for someone who didn’t show up. All it took, they explained, was for someone to ask. And ever since, this person has been as involved as anyone in what we’re up to around here.

Someone else remembered how deliberately and kindly they were welcomed the very first time they showed up – and how they continually feel welcomed, acknowledged and seen here.

Lots of people like how involved and connected kids are allowed to be, some mentioned the bells, the band, the friendships; others mentioned our outward focus on mission and ministry; some talked about relevant teaching and preaching; one person mentioned a card they got in the mail and a very specific invitation to serve as a Stephen Minister; someone else said that we “choose life” around here in all the ways – spiritually, mentally, mindfully; worshiping, serving, giving, empowering.

That’s all great stuff… holy stuff… moving things that remind me of how and why it’s good to be the church around here. But for me, what was mentioned in those answers to my “extra, extra credit question” was just as telling as what wasn’t mentioned.

No one said anything about doctrine or dogma or denominations. No one said a word about the abstract rules and self-righteousness that so many Christians fight about out there in the world. No one said a thing that had to be thought about or reasoned or rationalized in too many ways. It was all stuff that had to be experienced, witnessed, seen, heard, felt in some way.

It’s why it all connected so mightily with what the disciples of John the Baptist were hungry for when they first saw Jesus and started to follow him, for a change, in this morning’s Gospel. John points them in the right direction, “Look, here is the Lamb of God!” And they just follow.

They meet up with Jesus, and they call him Rabbi, which means “teacher,” like maybe they were expecting a lecture or a reading or a sermon or a midterm exam, perhaps. But Jesus doesn’t do any of that. He says, “what are you looking for?” and then “come and see.”

“Come and see.” And that’s what they do.

And, who knows what happened that afternoon at 4 o’clock when they went to stay with Jesus. But ultimately, as they followed him around Galilee, they saw him heal and forgive and tell great stories. They watched him live and move and breathe among the people. They watched him touch lepers and be touched with the oil and tears and hair of a sinful woman. They saw him love others, purely and plainly. They watched him suffer and struggle and sacrifice and die – and they suffered the sting of that loss as a result. And they felt the joy of his redemption, on the other side the empty tomb, even more.

And all of this moved them, transformed them, and changed the world around them, too, by the grace they learned to receive and share because of all they experienced. And that’s still God’s hope for us as followers of Jesus on the other side of Christmas: that we would come and see – which so many of us have, based on the simple, holy, profound experiences we can share about our time here. And God’s hope is that, once we’ve come and seen, that we will go and show, too, so that others might be changed by the same grace we have known.

Rob Bell, has a great way of explaining this. He says, “Jesus shows us that ultimate truth and mystery are located in bodies and matter and lips and arms and music and grass and water and eyes and relationships.” In other words, God is in what can be tasted, touched, heard, seen, felt and shared. Not so much in what can be read about or described with all the right words. Or passed on by way of a midterm exam.

And one of my favorite things Rob Bell says is this: “It’s one thing to stand there in a lab coat with a clipboard, recording data about lips. It’s another thing to be kissed.”

“It’s one thing to stand there in a lab coat with a clipboard, recording data about lips. It’s another thing [altogether] to be kissed.”

It’s one thing to stand here in our white robes or our fancy clothes, with our hymnals and our bulletins in one hand and our best intentions in the other. It’s another thing altogether, to be loving and forgiving, to be sacrificing and sharing, to be tasting and offering up the fullness of God’s kind of grace and mercy with the world.

Whether it’s the bread and wine of communion; or the excitement of a kid, overjoyed to get “The Box” (you should have seen and heard Jackson Hall last weekend at second service); or whether it’s the water that runs down the cheeks of a baptized child; or the tears that fall from the eyes of a proud parent; or the sound of a song that hits, just so; or the fullness of grace that “just is” – or should be – in places like this … the stuff of life and faith that matters most, just has to be experienced and shared to make a difference. You just have to come and see it – as much as anything – in order to believe it, or buy it, or be changed by it in some way.

This life of faith is meant to be felt – which God proved by showing up in the skin and bones of Jesus. This life of faith is meant to be practiced – not just preached about. This life of faith is meant to be shared through worship, learning and service. This faith matters most – for us and for others – when we come and see it in flesh and blood, through sweat and tears, in laughter and love and when we go and show and become it, too, in all of those ways, for the sake of the world.

Amen

John 1:1-14

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light. The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. 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. But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God. And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.

As you know, a couple of weeks ago – for the first time since Oprah – I took a vacation during Advent. Christa and I went to Key West to celebrate a friend’s 50th birthday. It was lovely – and warm – and sunny – and all the rest.

And in addition to eating and drinking and biking and walking a lot, we took a boat ride and snorkeled some. And the highlight of that little excursion was that – in addition to a lobster, some sponges, a couple of very small fish, and some refuse from the recent hurricane – we saw and swam with a sea turtle, which is a relatively rare treat, according to our guide, who seemed as genuinely impressed by it as the rest of us were.

When we began our three-hour tour, our boat’s captain asked if any of us had ever snorkeled or scuba-dived in places like Bali or the Great Barrier Reef, only to warn us that no matter what we were about to see in the Florida Keys, it wouldn’t be anything nearly as cool or beautiful or colorful as any of that. And he was right. It was all pretty gray and dead-looking and lacking in life, even, to be honest.

But there was that sea turtle who – as noteworthy as he was – wasn’t much to look at. I tried to find a picture to show, but every picture I could find online – from the turtles to the water they were swimming in – was too colorful and too pretty and nothing like the one we saw. He was as gray and lumpy and as colorless as the rest of that underwater seascape. And, when he kicked up the sand around him or if you took your eyes off of him for to catch your breath, he could be hard to find again.

He was camouflaged pretty well by his gray, barnacle-covered shell and his slow motion paddling that kicked up the dust and muck beneath him to hide him from view every once in a while. He basically looked like a rock that could swim.

But he did have to come up for air which – according to Christa and our friends – is when you could see more of his true colors. (I missed that part, because I was back in the boat having a beer by then.)

But the whole time I wondered if that sea turtle knew or cared that we were watching him. He didn’t seem to. He just did his thing down at the bottom of the sea, moving rocks around with his nose – looking for a lobster dinner, according to our guide – without any indication that he knew there were nine human beings floating and swimming and pointing and splashing on the surface, less than 6-10 feet away from him the whole time.

So I wondered how risky it must have felt for him to come up for air – to rise to the surface with all those people surrounding him – and to trust that he’d be okay. To expose himself – and whatever colors he was hiding – to the people who were watching. And how could he be sure he’d survive to snoop for more lobsters in the end.

And it made me think of Jesus – and God’s choice to be born; to come to life in a new way; to come out of hiding, you might say; to rise to the surface, as it were; to be seen without the camouflage of so many generations and so much history; and to just live and move and breathe all of a sudden, in the person of Jesus.

Of course we know what a risk that was and how all of that turned out to be – it wasn’t safe… our sin did him in… which was only a surprise to the likes of you and me.

But on Christmas morning … at the beginning of this new day … as we start to retell the story and wonder again about what it means to look for God among us – now that we know how it all panned out – I think our call and joy and blessing is to look for and to see the colorful parts more readily and to notice the good news more often.

Our snorkeling guide gave us some clear instructions before we jumped into the ocean that day – long before we ever saw a thing. She said that if and when we spotted anything noteworthy – and especially if we came upon an octopus or a sea turtle – we were supposed to shout to tell the group what we were looking at, call them over to our location, and point to where the rest of us could see it too.

That seems like a simple, sacred charge for Christmas morning and the days to come … that we keep our eyes peeled for evidence of God’s unhidden grace, rising to the surface of this gray, murky, messy world where we live … that we shout, sing and share that good news with whoever will listen … and that we point others in the same direction so that they’ll be blessed and better for knowing what we know about God’s love, beauty and grace in our midst.

Amen. Merry Christmas.

"Come and See"

Sea Turtles and Christmas Day