John 1:29-42

The next day he 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).

[Upon entering for worship, worshippers were given a card on which to write some way they have been moved or inspired, thanks to their faith, in recent days. I begin by rattling of some of their responses, as well as my own.]

Dave Duff funeral… Steve Beebe’s “O Holy Night”... sharing money from the Pastors' Discretionary Fund to help pay someone's rent...etc.

Thanks for playing along. 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. And my hunch was correct because what most of you shared was just as telling as what wasn’t.

No one said anything/there wasn’t much 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 mentioned anything that had to be thought about or reasoned or rationalized in too many ways – I didn’t ask for an essay, after all. The most meaningful things to most of us are things we have experienced, witnessed, seen, heard, tasted, touched, felt in some real, human way.

And I think this is something like what the disciples of John the Baptist were hungry for – whether they would have explained it that way or not – when they first saw Jesus and started to follow him in this morning’s Gospel. John points them in the right direction, “Look, here is the Lamb of God!” And they follow, because “Lamb of God” for 1st Century Jews meant sacrifice, forgiveness, redemption – and who wouldn’t want to see and get their hands on why John would have ever thought to call Jesus any of those things?

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 something. But Jesus doesn’t do any of that. He just says, “come and see.” “Come and see.” And so they do.

And, ultimately they saw him heal and forgive and tell great stories. (Even his teachings were experiences, really – parables that painted wonderful pictures about the Kingdom of God, alive in their midst.) They watched him live and move and breathe with and among everyday people, just like they were. 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 – like a “lamb of God,” after all. 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 changed them, transformed them, and changed the world around them by the grace they learned to receive and to share because of all they experienced. And that’s still God’s hope for us as followers of Jesus: 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 in this place. 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’ve experienced.

One of my favorite one-liners from Shane Claiborne – a Christian, theologian, activist, worker for justice, author, and whatnot – is something you’ve probably heard me say it before – and I give Claiborne the credit, though I’ve seen it attributed to others, too. Anyway, Shane Claiborne said (at least once), that the Gospel spreads best, not by force, but by fascination. …Not by force but by fascination … when we demonstrate our salvation – not earn it, not explain it, not prove or try to make sense of it, but demonstrate that our salvation already is – with acts of love and grace and mercy; with acts of justice, peace, welcome and hospitality.

And this seems to be just how Jesus operates – and how he calls us to be just the same: to be a disciple, to follow the way, to share the Gospel not by force but by fascination. To put flesh and bones – to give life…our life…our flesh and bones – to the good news and grace we experience from one day to the next.

It’s one thing to stand here in our white robes or 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 and patient, to be sacrificing and sharing and generous beyond reason, 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 water of Holy Baptism or any of the things you scribbled down to share this morning, the stuff of life and faith that matters most, just has to be experienced and shared to matter. 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 become it and go and show it to such an extent that others are fascinated by the light our very lives share with – and for – the sake of God’s world.

Amen

Matthew 6:25-33

‘Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? Therefore do not worry, saying, “What will we eat?” or “What will we drink?” or “What will we wear?” For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But strive first for the kingdom of God* and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.

Believe it or not, I was a little scared of Dave Duff when he started coming around Cross of Grace five years, or so, ago. Maybe “intimidated” is a better word than “scared” – and it had much more to do with me than with him, really – but I was worried…, concerned…, curious…, at the very least, to see how this grandfather, from the Nazarene-flavored tradition of the Christian church was going to fit in and follow along and be filled by the way we Lutheran-flavored Christians do things.

And when he called to set up an appointment to “sit down and talk,” in my office, with Linda by his side – after you’d been with us for a while – I thought I was in for it. I thought I was going to hear about all the ways our liberal, progressive Lutheran theology was off-base and out of whack and not in-keeping with everything he’d come to believe, through his faithful, capable, prolific, wise study and understanding of Scripture. (Dave Duff knew his Bible, you know.) Mostly, I was worried he was going to tell me all of that as an explanation for why he wouldn’t be coming around any longer.

Well shame on me for my short-sightedness, for my assumptions, and for my limited understanding of just how wise and gracious he could be. It helped – and gave me great hope – to learn that, in addition to all of his church background and history, he was also a Buckeye, of course – and it’s no exaggeration to say that that conversation changed – and raised – my expectations of people.

See, among other things, Dave set up that meeting to tell me about how pleasantly surprised he was that we call each other Partners in Mission – and that we mean it; by how freely we welcome and encourage each other around here to get our hands dirty doing the work of the Church. And Dave went on to embrace and to demonstrate that in a million ways over the years by leading several sessions of the Dave Ramsey Financial Peace University class; by leading workshops for writers and writing devotionals, himself; and most meaningfully for him, lately, I think, by becoming one of our Eucharistic Ministers and sharing communion as often as he could with some of our folks who can’t always make it to worship.

In a nutshell, during that meeting in my office, I think he wanted to let me know that, while he wasn’t sure of, or sold on, this whole “Lutheran thing” altogether just yet, that he was still on a journey of faithfulness and discipleship; that he was still growing, at his age; that God wasn’t done with him, yet; and, I think, he wanted to understand and grow into what we Lutherans try so hard to show and to share when it comes to the grace we proclaim for all of God’s children, because some of that was new and different and challenging for him, in a good and holy kind of way.

He also let me know, in so many words, that if all of this was good enough for the Blachly family, it was good enough for him, because, he relished the gift of worshiping with his family as much as anything.

Well, when we talked the other day, Linda and Liz, we talked about how today was intended to be more about the worship of God and celebration of the Gospel of Jesus – and less about Dave. And that that’s what Dave would prefer. But that’s a hard thing to do where someone like Dave Duff is concerned, because the God we worship and the Gospel we celebrate were so central to who he was and to how he lived.

And what Dave Duff taught us, if we were paying attention, is that the promises of Scripture are true. That God’s kingdom is alive and well among us. That God’s heaven is not just something to wait for – up there and out there, on the other side of eternity – but that the Kingdom of God is worth striving for and that it is, indeed, right here in our midst and there are ways to achieve it and to experience it and to share it with the world.

And Dave did that in more ways than we can count. He did it in big ways by traveling the globe on mission trips to share the Gospel and through his passion for that Jesus film he shared with so many people around the world. He did it in small ways, too. I remember asking him to lead a prayer in our Bethel Bible Study class once and he prayed – by name – for the family members of people in this congregation I didn’t even know he knew. He studied his Bible – alone and in groups; he showed up for prayer vigils; he was in worship as often as he could be; he gave his money generously – tithing, from what I can guess, and with no strings attached. He lived as a disciple and it changed his life and impacted the world around him.

He told me about an epiphany he had at the communion table once – where he suddenly felt surrounded by a “cone of love” (those were his words) – and where he was reminded, by revelation of sorts, about the power of God’s body and blood and the healing redemption they bring; healing redemption which surpasses even the most advanced chemo-therapy. He talked about how, while he had been feeling compelled to find time and find a place to meet up with God for more prayer and devotion as he struggled with his illnesses, that Sunday morning came and that – right then and there – in the communion line, eating bread and drinking wine (or grape juice, as it were, thanks to that Nazarene background!), he realized that God had already found him.

It was Dave’s joy, don’t get me wrong to find and make time for God and he made as much of it as anyone could. But even when he didn’t – even when he couldn’t – he realized, God came to him; God found him; God filled him, in bread and wine, in body and blood; God surrounded him with love and forgiveness and mercy, through the fellowship of his friends and family. And in all of that Dave experienced – right here, in this life, in spite of his illness, and struggle, and sin, and even until his dying day – he experienced hope; he experienced eternity; he experienced the love of Christ; he experienced the Kingdom of God – grace…on earth as it is in heaven. Grace, right here on earth, just as it is in the heaven for which he waited.

And I believe that’s what he would have us remember and celebrate on his behalf today, and for as long as we remember and give thanks for his time among us.

At the end of that two-year Bethel Bible Study course we offer here, which Dave and Linda finished a couple years back, I make it a practice of sharing a verse with each student as a way of celebrating how I have seen God at work in and through their lives over the course of the study.

The verse I gave to Dave was from Ephesians 3:18-19. It says:

“I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”

See, from what I could tell, Dave spent a lot of time, like so many of us do, trying to make rational, logical, educated, academic-kind-of-sense of his faith and of God’s gospel. He was an engineer, after all. And all of that wisdom and intellect served him – and the rest of us – quite well.

But I think God did a work of transformation for and through Dave in recent years – and maybe in some ways, thanks to his illness – to such a degree that God’s grace revealed itself in new, different, surprising ways for him. He told me once that he was grateful for the “gift” of his prostate cancer because it was “better than dropping dead of a heart attack.” Again, those are his words.

And I think he was grateful, not just because the slow progress of his disease gave him time to plan and prepare and to say and to share all the things that need saying at times like these. But I think he was grateful because he was able to count his blessings differently, over the last couple of years – this illness wasn’t anything any amount of wisdom or intellect or study could make sense of or fix or cure, in the end.

But in spite of it and thanks to all the ways God found and cared and loved him through it, Dave was able to be grateful for God’s presence in his life – over the course of his life. And he was able to revel, in advance, in the grace that was his in this life – and to hope with all the faith he could find – for the grace that was to come, and that is surely his now, thanks be to God.

Amen

"Come and See, Go and Show" – John 1:29-42

Dave Duff - Matthew 6:25-33