One of the many connections I have with your former rector, Susan Klein, is that she followed me as vicar, then rector, of St. Aidan’s Church in Malibu. For many years Susan and I have been good friends, and we are both members of a clergy colleague group. Over the years we’ve had occasion to discuss our time in Malibu, especially the revolving door of “seekers” who come into the church, look around for a while, and then leave. After my stint in Malibu I served for many years at All Saints, Pasadena, and part of my job there was to oversee the Covenant Class, an eight-week course for newcomers that brought people into the life of the parish. What we learned there was that, after a few weeks, about half the people who had enthusiastically joined the church just drifted away to try out another faith community.
My experiences in Malibu and Pasadena led me, over time, to understand that many people are spiritually restless and are driven to explore a number of religious traditions, Christianity among them. As Susan once said, “The problem isn’t that people today don’t believe anything. The problem is they believe everything”, putting Christianity on an equal plane with belief in Astrology, Crystals, and Numerology. Many people come toward us, but only some of them will stick with us.
Today’s Gospel [John 1: 29-42] brings this issue into focus. Two disciples of John the Baptist are seeking the Messiah when they encounter Jesus:
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.”
These two disciples (Andrew and one unnamed) are, like modern seekers, restless. They make the move from John the Baptist to Jesus without missing a beat. They are ready to follow anyone who might offer a new hope of healing and peace.
What I find interesting in today’s gospel is the neat irony revealed in what happens next:
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).
Andrew and his colleague have been seeking the Messiah. It turns out that, all the while, the Messiah has been seeking them. They have expended a lot of frenetic energy looking for God. It turns out that God already had them in sight.
We talk a lot in our culture about “spiritual journeys” and “seeking”. Perhaps the wisdom of this story from early on in John’s Gospel has to do not with looking but with being found.
There has been a lot of talk this week about Prince Harry’s new autobiography, Spare. From what I gather, it’s an autobiography filled with many grievances. I was intrigued when Patti Davis, the daughter of Ronald Reagan, wrote an op-ed in The New York Times last Saturday called “Prince Harry and the Virtue of Silence” [“Prince Harry and the Value of Silence”, New York Times, January 7, 2023]. As the daughter of an American president if not a king, Patti Davis knows a lot about what it means to be aggrieved about one’s treatment in a powerful and famous family.
In her article, she says in part:
Years ago, someone asked me what I would say to my younger self if I could. Without hesitating I answered: “That’s easy. I’d have said, ‘Be quiet.’” Not forever. But until I could stand back and look at things through a wider lens. Until I understood that words have consequences, and they last a really long time.
Now I don’t want to equate this morning’s disciples with the children of a king and president. But there is something a bit frantic about all four of them. The two biblical characters seem agitated. The two modern ones feel aggrieved. They all act out of a lack of confidence in their status as loved children both of fragile human parents and of God. They are looking for something or someone outside of themselves to validate them.
Over the course of their lives I am sure that Andrew and the unnamed disciple learned to relax and let Jesus find them. And given the wisdom on display in her op-ed essay, I will bet that Patti Davis understands that our approach to wholeness is best grounded less in our own complaint than in an openness to what might be coming toward us. I sense that of the four, Harry is still in process and will, perhaps, get there one day.
The disciples were searching for the Messiah. The Messiah was searching for them. What would a person of long acquaintance with the faith say to a seeker? In Patti Davis’s words, here’s the first step: “Be quiet”.
Being quiet is an easier concept to envision than enact these days. So much of our common life is taken up with chatter. It’s not only the hundreds of advertising messages we receive each day. It’s also the amount of what we might generously term “discourse” in social media and other communications forms that assaults us. It seems like we don’t know what we think until we say it. But with everyone talking all the time, who is really taking any of this chatter in? Is anybody listening to any of this?
Early on in our passage, John the Baptist sees Jesus and calls him the “Lamb of God”. In its very earliest days, the Christian community chose the lamb as its symbol. It was only after Christianity became the religion of the Roman empire that the church discarded the lamb and embraced the cross as its brand. It’s easy to understand why. For hundreds of years we were a marginal movement. Suddenly we were the state’s official religion. Think about it: the lamb is a symbol of weakness. The cross is a symbol of power.
When we’re frantically looking around for God, we are often more drawn to power than vulnerability—to the cross rather than the lamb. Andrew and his friend are on the lookout for a Messiah, a king, a representative of power and authority. Instead of a potentate they find Jesus, a very unlikely Messiah. This lamb of God does not proclaim himself. He sees and knows these two by name. Jesus finds these restless seekers in spite of themselves.
A little autobiography here: tomorrow is Martin Luther King Day, and King had everything to do with my becoming a Christian. I was a freshman in college in the spring of 1968, and in high school and college I had read everything that King wrote. But I had never even entered a church building. King was assassinated on Maundy Thursday, and on Easter I went to a church for the first time in my life to try and make sense of his murder and what it all might mean. Martin Luther King’s witness had found me in high school, and in college his death brought me first into a church and gradually over time into the Christian community. Thinking back, I realize I didn’t really have much to do with it. God was looking for me, and found me through the life, death, and witness first of Martin Luther King and then through the life, death, and resurrection of the one he followed, Jesus of Nazareth, the lamb of God.
At the close of today’s Gospel reading, Jesus meets Andrew’s brother Simon, and tells him that from now on he will be called “Peter”. In almost every language save English, “peter” means “rock”. Even in this first meeting, Jesus sees something essential about Simon’s nature that he brings out by giving him this new name. This story is not only about God’s search for us. It is about the depth of God’s knowledge of who we are at our core.
If you find yourself on a frenetic search for God, for meaning and hope in your life, your work, your relationships, you couldn’t do better than follow Patti Davis’s advice to Prince Harry. “Be quiet.” God is on the lookout for you, and (one way or another) God is going to find you. God already loves you and knows what you need. All the spiritual flailing around we do will only get in the way of the inevitable deep and lasting connection we all seek.
God will not rest in the search for you. Your job, a hard one sometimes, is to stop, and listen, and be quiet so that you may be found. Amen.
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