The Families of the Earth Can Be Blessed Through You

Brad Sullivan

2 Epiphany, Year B

January 14, 2018

Emmanuel, Houston

John 1:43-51

The Families of the Earth Can Be Blessed Through You

“Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”  I love this question of Nathanael’s partly because it appeals to my snarky side, and also because the obvious answer is supposed to be “no.”  Nazareth was a Podunk little sparrow fart town.  The messiah was not supposed to come from there, and further, at least in Nathanael’s mind nothing good could come from such a crummy place.  Nathanael would have rather written off Jesus and anyone from Nazareth.  Let’s leave those people there, and go on and hope for the messiah to come from somewhere important.  God just wasn’t playing Nathanael’s little game of making sure things looked good enough on the outside to stroke his ego.  “Sorry Nate,” God said.  “I know you want to be associated with a Messiah from somewhere awesome, but I’m not here to inflate your sense of self importance.  I’m here to bring about my kingdom of love, grace, and truth, and that includes places like Nazareth, and other little sparrow fart town and countries.”

When we get tied up in the place, the location where greatness is supposed to be, where we think God is supposed to be, God just says, “Oh you silly humans; I’m not in any one place.  I’m in all places, and like the Psalm says, even and especially with those people and places whom you often deem too lowly to matter.”  So while the obvious answer is “no, nothing good can come from the proverbial Nazareth,” God’s response is “come and see.”

Nathanael reluctantly does, “Fine, we’ll go see your crummy Messiah,” and Jesus tells him something pretty huge.  First he convinces him that he is someone worth hanging around and listening to, and then he tells Nathanael, “You will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.”

This is of course alluding to Jacob’s ladder, the story in Genesis where Jacob (who would later be renamed Israel) was sleeping outside and he had a dream of the heaven’s opened up and the angels of God ascending and descending upon a ladder to heaven.  In the dream, God spoke to Jacob and told him,

all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you and in your offspring.  Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.’  Then Jacob woke from his sleep and said, ‘Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it!’  And he was afraid, and said, ‘How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.’

This promise of God indeed came to pass.  Jacob was renamed Israel, and from him and his children came the people of Israel, the laws and ways of God, the prophets, and Jesus himself.  So, when Jesus told Nathanael “You will see heaven opened and the angles of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man,” he was telling Nathanael that families of the earth shall be blessed in you and your offspring (children, disciples, people whom you will teach about me and my ways).  “You, Nathanael, can be like a new Jacob.  God’s mission of healing humanity, of reconciliation to each other and to God can be lived out through you, Nathanael, and not only that, families of the earth will be blessed through you and through those who come after you.  Through you, Nathanael,” Jesus was saying, “the salvation that I offer, the life of God’s love, grace, and truth, can be known and lived and passed on to others, and families of the earth will be blessed through you and through those who come after you.”

You may notice, however, that there aren’t too many St. Nate churches.  “Through you, Nathanael, families of the earth will be blessed,” and yet we hear very little about Nathanael after this.  Most of what he did was not recorded in the pages of history, and yet through this seemingly unimportant man, families of the earth were blessed.  Like Nathanael, most of our names will not be written in the stars or even in the pages of history, and yet, the families of the earth can be blessed through each of us.  We can all be like a new Jacob, people of the earth blessed through us and those who come after us, as we live out Jesus’ ways and share with them his kingdom of love, grace, and truth.

Further, the kingdom of God can indeed come from Nazareth, or any other sparrow fart nothing of a place because God does not dwell only in one place, like the place where Jacob was.  Indeed, the dwelling place of God was in Jesus himself, with the angels ascending and descending on him.  The dwelling place of God is within all of creation and within humanity itself:  you, me, the important people from great places, and the lowly schlebs from sparrow far places like Nazareth and flooded out shells of buildings. 

We are Emmanuel, and God is with us.  God dwells with us and within us.  We can live out God’s kingdom of love, grace, and truth anywhere, and through us God can bless the people of West Houston and beyond to truly the ends of the earth.  As far as we can go and as many come to know and follow Jesus through us, God can bless the people of the earth. 

Can anything good come out of Nazareth?  Can anything good come out of this little flooded out gathering of Jesus’ friends?  Come and see.

The questioners, the loners, the kids with behavior problems...

Brad Sullivan

2 Christmas, Year B

December 31, 2017

Emmanuel, Houston

John 1:1-18

The questioners, the loners, the kids with behavior problems...

Over the weekend, a priest friend of mine and I talking and joking together about challenges of church life, and she said, “Yeah, church would be great if it wasn’t for all the people.”  It’s a common joke about the imperfections of the Church which is the ecclesia (or gathering) of Jesus’ friends.  Jesus’ ecclesia of friends began as a rather rag tag group of also-rans, the island of misfit toys type folks who needed and wanted the love and belonging which Jesus was offering.  Being a rag tag group of folks, the church was always an imperfect bunch, and that proud tradition has continued on to this day.

As the church, the ecclesia, the gathering of Jesus’ friends we’re a group of people who follow in Jesus’ ways, except when we don’t.  We love well, giving compassion to those who really need it, to those whose lives have been shattered and need someone to sit with them among the broken pieces of their life and slowly begin sweeping them up and putting the pieces back together.  That is, except for when we don’t love well for a variety of reasons, when our own lives just aren’t up to it, or when our own brokenness prevents us from seeing the broken person in front of us as a person, and we instead just see a broken thing.

As Jesus’ ecclesia, his gathering of friends, we love God and love people above all else.  That’s our way of being.  Some friends of mine recently told me that in their efforts to love God and people above all else, they’ve been going through their house get rid of anything that they would be really upset about if it was broken by a child…or an adult.  They want their home to be a place of love, where adults and children know they are loved, and that they are loved more than the stuff in their house.  That’s a great model for the church, where we love God and love people above all else, except of course when, in our efforts to love God, we end up loving things, and we place that love of things in front of loving people.  It happens.  The church is imperfect because it is irrevocably peopled with people.

In John’s Gospel this morning, we heard that the Word of God, which is God, is also the life and light of all, and that the Word of God became human, as Jesus, and lived among us as one of us.  That was really his first mistake, wasn’t it?  The Word of God already had a perfect ecclesia going, a perfect gathering of beloved friends with the Father and the Holy Spirit.  This perfect ecclesia remained perfect until the Word became flesh and lived among us.  Then, Jesus joined us to the ecclesia of God, along with all of our imperfections.  That’s kind of the beauty of it.  If God had wanted a perfect ecclesia, then I suppose he wouldn’t have become human at all.  We wouldn’t celebrate Christmas, and there would be no baby Jesus, or adult Jesus, or even teenage angsty Jesus.  There would just be the perfect ecclesia of God, without humanity, but God didn’t want that perfect ecclesia, a perfect church.  God wanted the ecclesia of Jesus’ friends, the church, the gathering with humanity, along with all of our imperfections, even if that meant that we mucked things up a bit.  So, “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.”

In becoming human and living among us, God showed us his love for us, not his desire for us to be perfect.  I mean, I suppose it’d be nice, but God showed that he loves us, warts and all.  He then formed the church, the ecclesia or gathering of Jesus’ friends, so that we could further share his love for people, warts and all.  Jesus wanted not a perfect ecclesia, but an ecclesia that shared his heart for people and his willingness to sacrifice personal comfort and convenience (and quite a bit more than that) for the sake of people…especially the ones no one else seemed to care that much about. 

The questioners, the loners, the kids with behavior problems.  Seek them out, invite them in, and love them more than your stuff, Jesus has taught his church, and be willing to sacrifice your personal comfort and convenience for their sake. 

The people who don’t have life figured out and have spent their life mucking it up for themselves.  The people who have life figured out and learned from a young age that life is harsh and cruel.  The people who have been rejected by their peers, rejected by society, rejected by their church or family.  Seek them out, invite them in, and love them more than your stuff, Jesus has taught his church, and be willing to sacrifice your personal comfort and convenience for their sake.

The people who aren’t like us, who make us uncomfortable, whose very existence disrupts our world, shattering the illusions we created to make our world seem safe.  The people whose need is greater than we can provide, whose loneliness and despair are deeper than we can see, and whose desire for connection and companionship is greater and more beautiful than even they are aware.  Seek them out, invite them in, and love them more than your stuff, Jesus has taught his church, and be willing to sacrifice your personal comfort and convenience for their sake.

We’re not going to fix every problem or make any lives perfect.  The lives of all people still have that one flaw in them, that all lives involve people and are therefore irrevocably messed up, messed up just like the church, the ecclesia, gathering of Jesus’ friends, and Jesus didn’t form his ecclesia of friends in order to make a perfect institution.  Jesus formed his church, his gathering of friends, in order to share with us his light, because he simply wanted us to be a part of the life of communion shared between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and so with all our imperfections, we reach out with that same light to others, and we sit with them in their imperfections, not to make them perfect, not necessarily to fix them, but simply to dwell with them, to shine some light into the darkness of their lives, and to join in communion with them, becoming friends, and joining together in the Church, ecclesia, the gathering, of Jesus’ friends.