Straight Arrow
Isaiah 49:1-7; John 1:29-42
January 16, 2011
The Gospel sounds today at first like déjà vu all over again from last week as the baptism of Jesus is reported from a different angle. Instead, it’s about the second item always on the Gospels’ agenda for Jesus – first, get baptized; second, get disciples.
I bet if you were asked about it, you would assume that Jesus started teaching and then some of those who heard him were intrigued by what they heard and joined up with him. Yet not really, for Jesus barely says a word before he is scouring the neighbourhood for the kind of people we have come to call the disciples. In other words, a disciple does not need to know much to get started, just that he wants to get started with someone like Jesus.
The word translated typically as disciple means one who is learning. To use modern terminology, he or she is an apprentice – which should have been the title for this sermon. When she begins, she knows very little and has to learn on the job, a steep learning curve these famous disciples quickly found themselves caught up in. They didn’t know it all, and if wisdom has at all attached itself to you or me, the more we learn, the more we know we don’t know.
John’s rendition of the baptism of Jesus at the River Jordan is full of unknowing, if that isn’t an oxymoron. John the Baptist sees Jesus coming towards him twice and declares at first to no one in particular and later to two of his disciples – Andrew being the only one named - “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world,” which our choir sings every communion service.
The Baptist keeps talking here, he is the only one talking for Jesus never gets a word in edge-wise. John is on such a roll with his words that he does not mention at all baptizing Jesus. We know what is happening in the background, having heard the story from Matthew, Mark and Luke, but all John will mention is not the actual baptism of Jesus, not the back and forth doubts about whether John should be doing this, but John himself seeing the Spirit descending and remaining like a dove upon Jesus, a person John declares he did not know! Then John reports that God spoke to him, not Jesus, that this is the One who baptizes with the Holy Spirit. John testifies that Jesus is the Son of God. Different story, same details.
The next day John is standing around with two of his disciples, just watching. You see, the Baptist was the one with an established following. He was the teacher with disciples, yet he was not interested in professorial prestige. John was called to deliver a message and point to the person who was the message. Knowledge is power and not many leaders are willing to relinquish their power. John knew it wasn’t his knowledge or his power, so he pointed away from himself. “Look, here is the Lamb of God!”
The two unnamed disciples hear what he is saying and they look, and without a question they followed Jesus. How good a teacher was John that his students would listen to him to give him up and follow another? The students knew it was God’s presence that mattered. The teacher mattered, yes, just not in the usual way.
Jesus is not part of the conversation, but he senses the shadows of these two guys, so turning around, he asks, “What are you looking for? What do you want?” The two guys didn’t know what they wanted, so they ad-libbed, “Where are you staying?” Jesus sensed their need and played along, “Come and see.”
They came and saw the billets where he was staying and they stayed to talk to him the rest of the day, being only four o’clock in the afternoon. A lot of talking. One of the two fellows was Andrew, important since he was Simon Peter’s brother. At some point he must have excused himself and found his brother. “We have found the Messiah,” and Andrew brought him to meet Jesus. Now Jesus was doing the looking.
“You are Simon son of John. You are to be called Cephas,” the Aramaic word for Rock. We know him as Peter, which already is Greek for Rock, but there was something emphatic and insightful about Jesus’ assertion. Did a teacher ever give you a good name?
You and I are disciples, we are still learning, still apprentices. By what name do you think Jesus would have called you?
Isaiah had some ideas long before Jesus spoke to Cephas. The second song of the Suffering Servant (Isaiah 49), who is Israel, but whom Christians identified with Christ, says that God called him before he was born. “He made me a polished arrow and hid me in his quiver,” or “a straight arrow,” a way of saying the Servant will be an upright efficient messenger for God. Oddly, the Lord hides this straight arrow in his quiver, a marvelous image insisting that the Servant is there to be used as an instrument of God when God decides the time is right. This song may be understood as the preview of Christ, not a swaggering militaristic power player, but a suffering servant. Often the term ‘servant,’ a ‘deacon,’ is used of what we are supposed to be in this church and outside this sanctuary. We are straight arrows, however you want to spin that phrase, polished and ready to be used by God when God decides it is time. In the meantime, we are disciples, deacons, apprentices, performing the right stuff of love, mercy, self-giving to those hurting, knowing humbly that we have more to learn than we can ever teach.
What does it take to be a good disciple? What is it that we should be learning and learning, yet never quite learning it all? A wise professor, and there are lots of wise professors, talked about what it takes to be a good theologian. Theology, by the way, is not just for ministers, for all of us have to think about and in terms of God if anything is going to make sense in this church. Of course, a good theologian should be a scholar of the Bible, an apprentice in God’s word. Add to that a good acquaintance with Christian systematic theology, both historical and current, and be familiar with our Christian successes and failures throughout our history.
That list doesn’t make the professor wise; those are simply the basic tools. He added: what one really needs is “a willingness to be surprised.”
Most of the time, we don’t want surprises. We prefer to settle for the ordinary and routine and unsurprising and want to insist that is the only way God works. To be willing to be surprised is to have your imagination explode inside you and see something you’ve been looking at for a long time and finally see it for what it is, what it can be. To see someone doing something in an unconventional way and realize they’ve got something real, that’s the beauty of being surprised - to be challenged by God’s new thing that makes you have to redirect how you go about living.
What do you think those two disciples of John the Baptist were thinking? They were surprised by joy at the presence of someone whose possibilities threw them off guard. Throw me off guard again! Really surprise me! What we are learning and learning again as disciples of Christ is how to be surprised and never get over being surprised.
Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan