Come and See

Scripture:  1 Samuel 3:1-20 Psalm 136:1-6, 13-18

        I Corinthians 6:12-20  John 1:43-51

In the 1949 movie Beyond the Forest, Bette Davis plays Rosa Malone, the bored wife of a kindly small-town doctor in a mill town in Wisconsin.  Rosa is bored out of her mind with her husband and her small town – she compared small town life to lying in a coffin and waiting to be carried out - and wants to experience the fast life of Chicago.  In one famous scene, having just gotten home the night before from a hunting lodge at which she met a potential suitor, Rosa walks down the stairs from her bedroom into the living room of her home, filing her nails as she walks.  As her doting husband, who the night before had saved the life of a mother in complicated labor and was just getting home, asks Rosa whether her trip home had gone smoothly and whether her foot is feeling ok, she looks around, takes in the surroundings of the living room with those famous Bette Davis eyes, heaves a sigh, and says, “What a dump!” – thus launching a sort of cottage industry of Bette Davis impersonators for decades to come.   While her character’s husband liked their small town and valued the quality of relationships that could flourish there, all Bette Davis’ character saw was…..a dump.  What a dump!

In our Gospel reading today, Nathanael, who would become a disciple of Jesus, sounds a bit like this Bette Davis character.  His friend Philip runs up to Nathanael and tells him, we’ve found Messiah whom Moses and the prophets wrote about, Jesus son of Joseph from Nazareth.  And Nathanael says, “Nazareth?  What a dump! Can anything worthwhile come out of Nazareth?”  We don’t know exactly why Nathanael reacted as he did – likely he just thought Nazareth, at the time a tiny village, was just too small and insignificant for anything worthwhile to happen there.  Or maybe Nazareth had a bad reputation for other reasons – we’re not told.  All we’re given are Nathanael’s words – “can anything good come out of Nazareth?”.

Nathanael didn’t know it at the time, but this would be a pivotal moment in his life.  Philip could have just laughed and said, “yeah, you’re right, Nazareth is kind of Podunk” and they’d both have gone on about their day together….and perhaps they’d both have gone on with their day, and their lives, without giving Jesus another thought.  Or Philip could have told Nathanael, “Well, ok, suit yourself” and gone to be with Jesus – but then Nathanael would have been left behind.  But Philip did neither of those things.  Apparently he cared about Nathanael and thought Nathanael might really like Jesus, if he could just get Nathanael to meet Jesus.  So he said, “Come and see.”  And Nathanael likely muttered under his breath, “Oh, all right….”  But he went.  That’s the important thing.  When Jesus saw Philip coming with Nathanael, Jesus said, “Here is truly an Israelite in whom there is no deceit.”   Jesus pegged Nathanael as a guy who called things as he saw them, no BS.  Nathanael said, “Where did you get to know me?” – after all, he’d never seen this Jesus guy before.  And Nathanael’s attitude toward Jesus turned around pretty quickly….he ends up calling Jesus the King of Israel and the Son of God.

“Come and see!”  It was easy for Nathanael to write off Jesus based on where Jesus was from.  “He’s from Nazareth….you know how those people are…..why waste time talking to him.”  Had Nathanael persisted in his ignorance, he’d have just gone on with the life he had been living, and missed out on the life God had in store for him.  It took persistence on Philip’s part to get Nathanael at least to meet Jesus, to “come and see”.  Just as it would have been easy in our Old Testament reading for the old priest Eli to write off young Samuel, who would grow up to be a mighty prophet.  And to tell the truth, Eli sort of did ignore Samuel at first, until it dawn on him that God was speaking to Samuel.

It’s easy to write off people, communities, countries, whole continents, if we know little or nothing about them.  And it’s insulting to be written off by people who know nothing about us.  I rarely go back to my hometown…..maybe once a year to visit my dad’s grave and to take a hike through the woods that he loved…..but every once in a while on those trips, I’ll meet someone I knew when I was growing up.  Or I’ll go to a high school reunion….. my 40^th reunion is coming up in a couple years….and someone will ask what I’m doing these days.  When I tell them I’m pastor of a church in Philly, sometimes they give me this concerned look and say, “Isn’t it dangerous there…..don’t you get scared?”  That far out in the country, all they know about Philly is what they see on the news…..shootings and fires and such; as the saying goes, “If it bleeds, it leads”.  So apparently they think I drive up to church in a tank, with George Thorogood’s song “Bad to the Bone” blaring through loudspeakers, and carry a flame thrower and grenades to take out all the thugs and gang members that lie in wait with their switchblades and AK 47’s to mug me on my way to the pulpit, which along with the rest of the altar area they apparently think is behind a sheet of bulletproof glass…..they think I hand out communion through a little slot, like the guy in the booth at gas stations in some parts of the city.  But you know and I know that Philly is nothing like the pictures that these folks have in their heads.  You know and I know that here in Philly, just as anywhere else, people just want to love their spouses and raise their children and work their jobs and live their lives.   You know and I know that God is present here in Philly as much as in my hometown or anywhere else.  And actually when I came here, I was surprised to learn of a couple of good things that came specifically from Bridesburg.  One was the “Trick or Treat for UNICEF” campaign that I participated in when I was a kid growing up in Hamburg, and that started at Bridesburg Presbyterian church.  And, of course, the second was Bethany Children’s Home, which my home church in Hamburg supported financially, and which got its start right here at Emanuel Church.

It’s easy to write people and places off if we know nothing about them.  It’s harder if we’ve actually been there, or failing that, if we know somebody from there.  It’s easy to write off, for example, the entire continent of Africa as, to use Bette Davis’ term, “a dump”…..but we know Isaac, who came from Liberia and is working on a doctorate degree now.  Plenty of folks have told me that the world would be better if the entire middle east were bombed until it was a sheet of glass….but that wouldn’t be so good for Rama, the little Palestinian girl I sponsor. 

Sometimes we even write ourselves off.  Remember those words of Psalm 139:  we are “fearfully and wonderfully made”.  We don’t always think of ourselves in those terms…..in fact, we can get pretty down on ourselves.  But that’s how God sees us….and how God sees our neighbors, even those neighbors from places we think of as dumps. 

What would it be like to see ourselves, and see our neighbors, as God see us….to see the potential that’s hidden from our eyes.  We get down on ourselves because we’re not like…..some other person we admire.  But God’s  not asking us to be that person……but instead to be the best version of us that we can.  There’s a story about a young rabbi named Zuza, who constantly beat himself up because he wasn’t like Moses.  An older rabbi told him that, when he got to heaven, God wasn’t going to ask him why he wasn’t like Moses…..instead he was going to ask why he wasn’t like Zuza.  God didn’t want Rabbi Zuza to be Moses…..God just wanted Zuza to be Zuza.  For God, that was enough.

Come and see.  Come and see God’s love for us.  Come and see God’s love for others.  Come and see.  Let us open our eyes.

The German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, imprisoned by the Nazis for his resistance to Hitler, at time struggled with the disconnect between how others saw him and the brokenness  he felt within himself.  I’ll close with his poem “Who Am I”
Who am I? They often tell me
I stepped from my cell’s confinement
calmly, cheerfully, firmly,
like a Squire from his country-house.
Who am I? They often tell me
I used to speak to my warders
freely and friendly and clearly,
as though it were mine to command.
Who am I? They also tell me
I bore the days of misfortune
equally, smilingly, proudly,
like one accustomed to win.
Am I then really all that which other men tell of?
Or am I only what I myself know of myself?
Restless and longing and sick, like a bird in a cage,
struggling for breath, as though hands were
compressing my throat,
yearning for colors, for flowers, for the voices of birds,
thirsting for words of kindness, for neighborliness,
tossing in expectation of great events,
powerlessly trembling for friends at an infinite distance,
weary and empty at praying, at thinking, at making,
faint, and ready to say farewell to it all?
Who am I? This or the other?
Am I one person to-day and to-morrow another?
Am I both at once? A hypocrite before others,
and before myself a contemptibly woebegone weakling?
Or is something within me still like a beaten army,
fleeing in disorder from victory already achieved?
Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine.
Whoever I am, Thou knowest, 0 God, I am Thine!
Amen.