Come and See

Scripture:        Isaiah 49:1-7, Psalm 40:1-11

I Corinthians 1:1-9, John 1:29-51

Thirty or so years ago, Heather Locklear was in a commercial for Faberge Organic Shampoo With Wheat Germ, Oil, and Honey.  Heather said, “I tried Faberge Organic Shampoo, and it was so good I told two friends, and they told two friends, and so on, and so on, and so on.”  And of course, as the word spreads, one image of Heather Locklear becomes two, becomes four, becomes sixteen.  A testimony to the power of word-of-mouth advertising, decades before the internet and social media such as Facebook.

Today and next week we hear the stories of Jesus calling his first disciples, this week from John’s gospel, and next week from Matthew’s gospel.  While some – not all, but some – of the names are the same, the stories have a very different feel.   In next week’s reading from Matthew’s gospel, Jesus personally invites Peter and Andrew, and then James and John, to follow him.  But in today’s reading, the invitations are more indirect, with John the Baptist telling Andrew and another disciple, in effect, “This is the guy I’ve been telling everyone about.  Check him out.”   Andrew tells his brother Simon.  Jesus issues a direct invitation to Philip to follow him, and Philip tells his friend Nathanael.  Whereas in Matthew’s gospel the invitations come directly from Jesus, in John’s gospel, the message travels indirectly by word of mouth.  In fact, it sounds like Heather Locklear’s shampoo commercial…two disciples told two disciples, and so on and so on…..   All kidding aside, I think maybe we can relate to John’s gospel a bit more here – Jesus isn’t present in the flesh with us to issue direct invitations, so the gospel inevitably travels indirectly and by word of mouth – including the mouths of those who invited us to come and see, and some of our mouths as we invite others to come and see.

In John’s gospel, seemingly simple words and actions often have double meanings or multiple layers of meaning.  And so the meeting of Andrew and another of John the Baptist’s disciples with Jesus is….awkward.  Really awkward.  We have John pointing Jesus out and encouraging them to check him out.  They follow Jesus…..literally, following Jesus’ path, but some number of paces behind Jesus.  It sounds almost a little stalkerish to me.   Or I get a mental cartoon image of these two disciples following Jesus in Inspecter Clouseau fashion, wigs and fake mustaches and all, becoming more obvious with every effort to be inconspicuous.  In any case, Jesus hears the patter of little feet behind him, turns around, and asks, depending on the translation, “What are you seeking?”, or “what are you looking for?” or, in many versions, simply, “what do you want?”.   Among these various translations, I try to imagine Jesus’ tone of voice – ‘What are you looking for?” or “Whatchoo lookin’ at?”  or “Whaddaya want?”   Again, there are multiple layers of meaning, from the immediacy of Jesus asking “what do you want from me?” or even “Why are you bothering me?” to a broader, more ultimate sense of “What’s missing in your life, and what do you want to fill that missing space?”  And the disciples ask Jesus, “Where are you staying?” The Greek word, menos, means “to remain” or “to abide” or “to dwell”.   Again, multiple layers of meaning.  On one level, they seem to be asking for his address….do they really care what bed and breakfast Jesus is staying at, or are they going to comment on Jesus’  interior decorating skills?....”you know, Jesus, the carpet here doesn’t match the drapes, and what’s with that coffee table….”   But at a deeper level, perhaps there’s something like “Where can we find you?” or even “what keeps you going?”  Jesus responds, simply, “Come and see.”   Andrew must have liked what he saw, because he then invited his brother Simon to meet Jesus.  And Jesus gave him a nickname, Peter, meaning Rock. 

We’re told that the next day Jesus wanted to go to Galilee, where he met Philip, and invited him, “Follow me.”   Philip invited his friend Nathanael, who gave Jesus a big buildup….until he came to the part where Jesus was from Nazareth.  Nathanael said, “Can anything good come from Nazareth?”  Apparently Nathanael had some prejudice, just as we might think of some areas of the city as “unsafe” or “bad neighborhoods”.   Philip got past Nathanael’s prejudice with the simple words, “Come and see.”  And just as Jesus sized up Simon with the nickname “Rock”, Jesus sized up Nathanael: “Here is a true son of Israel in whom there is no deceit.”  We may remember a presidential candidate of several years ago campaigning on the slogan of “Straight Talk Express”….and that’s Jesus’ take on Nathanael.  Straight talk.  No BS.  Nathanael senses that Jesus sized him up correctly, and asked, “How do you know me?”  And Jesus said, “I saw you yesterday, under the fig tree, before Philip talked to you.”  And Nathanael goes from 0 to 100 mph, from suspicion to adoration, no middle ground, saying to Jesus, “You are the Son of God, the King of Israel.”  And Jesus responded, “You were impressed with that little bit….you ain’t seen nothing yet.”  And then Jesus tells Nathanael that he’ll see the heavens opened and angels ascending and descending on the Son of Man.   It’s an obscure, weird image for us, but it would have reminded John’s readers of the Old Testament story in Genesis of Jacob’s vision of a ladder with angels ascending and descending from heaven to earth….only in this case, it is now Jesus, instead of a ladder, bridging that distance.  And, on an ironic level, it may foreshadow Jesus on the cross, with the soldiers carrying out a sick parody of that image as they nail him to the cross and put an inscription over his head, and offer sour wine as he hung in the sun, dying. 

Throughout today’s Gospel reading, there’s a pattern:  an invitation to “come and see” that leads the invitee to “go and tell”; they invite others to “come and see”, and then those others “go and tell”.  It’s like the Heather Locklear Faberge Organic Shampoo commercial; a small number of people each spread the message to a small number of people, so that the message spreads exponentially – two people to four to sixteen to 256 people.  Today we would say the message “went viral”, and with today’s social media, we know how quickly a photo – real or doctored – can be spread via Facebook and Instagram and such.   The message spread not only over geography but through time, until the invitation of Andrew to Peter and of Philip to Nathanael, spreading exponentially over time, brought us to church today. 

Our situation is both similar to and different from that of the first disciples.  The pattern of “come and see” leading to “go and tell” stills works.  But we can’t invite people to meet the earthly Jesus in the flesh as they could – which makes the situation both more difficult and easier.  On one hand, we don’t have a human being to introduce them to, only a spirit and a way of life.  On the other hand, the earthly Jesus could only be in one place, while the Risen Christ is present wherever two or three are gathered in his name. 

It’s striking how easily something as trivial as Faberge Organic Shampoo with Wheat Germ, Oil, and Honey can go viral – looking back today, that long mouthful of a name sounds comical – and the same with any random Facebook meme - but how difficult we make sharing the gospel.  Throughout history, the simple message of “come and see” turned into conversions forced at the point of a sword or the barrel of a gun, “conversions” – very much in scare quotes – when a Christian king came to power and the whole country was considered Christian territory.  And in the mainline churches during the 1950’s and ’60’s, the “mission field” pretty much shrunk to one’s own family – us four, no more - while the more fundamentalist churches engaged in all sorts of antics to get converts.  When I was in college, 150 years ago or so, folks from Campus Crusade for Christ used to chase the unwary and the unwilling around campus with their “Four Spiritual Laws” tracts….the cartoon image is of being stalked across campus by someone waving a tract and shouting “I want to save you” and the stalkee running away at top speed screaming, “Go away, I don’t want to be saved”.  At my former congregation, Old First, back in the ‘90’s, I remember a training session in preparation for a Bring A Friend Sunday in which Pastor Geneva had us practicing inviting each other to church, which mostly generated a lot of embarrassed giggling.  If you want to watch something both comical – it’s funny as all get out - and revealing, you can look up a video on YouTube under the title “What if Starbucks Marketed Coffee Like A Church.”  A young couple drives up to this enormous building with a vast parking lot….but all the spaces near the building are reserved for the baristas and such, so the couple has to walk.  The cars have weird bumper stickers:  “Real Men Love Coffee”.  On arriving at the building, they try several closed, locked doors before they find the one closed door that is unlocked, and when they get inside, all the regulars stand around talking to each other and ignore them.  (Parenthetically, the opposite response – everybody circling the new person like sharks circling blood in the water – can be just as offputting -there’s a happy medium somewhere. But back to the coffeeshop…..) There are ominous posters on the wall:  “Coffee must be hot or cold or I will spew it out of my mouth” – that’s a parody of a verse from Revelation warning the lukewarm church of Laodicia to shape up.  And periodically the baristas lead chants:  “Coffee is good, all the time/ All the time, coffee is good.”  It’s a ginormous but not very busy coffee shop with a weird cult vibe….makes you want to think twice before trying their KoolAid.  And of course it invites us to turn around the question, what if church evangelism looked more like Starbucks – attractive product, easily accessible location, open lots of hours, where you can come as you are and hang out with friends, no pressure.

Maybe the “product” is the problem.  “Come and see” sounds great, but if people come here to Emanuel, what will they see?  Especially if we’ve been in a place for a really long time – grown up here, grown old here - it can be hard to see the things that newcomers would notice, the wear on the building, the barriers of church language and lingo that are invisible to longtimers but very present to newcomers – and our newer members and visitors can help out here.   And beyond our challenges of both a building and a pastor that have seen better days and are a bit worn down, the real question is, “Can people come and see the love of God in this place?  Can people find a caring community where the Risen Christ is present?”  And I think the answer is “yes”.  But that “yes” is a well-kept secret.  More than once, people have told me, even though we’re only a block off Thompson Street, “I never even knew this little church was here” or “I thought the place had closed.”

Come and see, go and tell.   We can only go and tell about what we’ve come and seen.  May we be a place where hurting people can come and see the love of Christ in action, and may love spread as they – and we – tell what Christ has done for us.  Amen.     

Quote by Madeleine L’Engle