2 Epiphany B
Transcribed from a sermon
by
Rev Valerie Ann Hart
January 14, 2012
St. Barnabas
Episcopal Church
Martin Luther King
Jr.
1 Samuel 3:1-10
John 1:43-51
We are in the season of Epiphany
that celebrates Jesus making himself known in the world. It began after
Christmas, on January 8, with the celebration of Epiphany and the coming of the
wise men. Last week we remembered Jesus’ baptism in the river Jordan. After he
was baptized he went out to find the people who would help him, his disciples,
so this week and next week we read about the call of some of the disciples. The
readings this week from the Old Testament and the Gospel are both about calls. We
read about three different people who were called by God.
In the Old Testament we hear about
Samuel. Now to give you a little context about Samuel, this is during the time
of the judges before they built the temple in Jerusalem. At different times God
was worshiped in different places. At this time God was being worshiped in
Shiloh and Eli was the priest of the Lord. The story of Samuel begins with
Samuel’s mother who is getting on years and hasn’t had any children. At that
time it was a terrible thing for a woman because the most important job of a
woman was having children. So she had come before God and prayed desperately at
Shiloh to give birth to a child, especially to have a son. When Samuel was born,
since she had promised that if she had a son she would dedicate him to serving
God, as soon as Samuel was weaned and able to be on his own she brought him to
Shiloh to have him serve under Eli the priest. In the story we read today it is
clear that he was a boy, but how old he was at this point is not clear. Perhaps
he was 11 maybe thirteen, we don’t know.
We do know he was helping at the
shrine and he had been dedicated to God. Evidently he is sleeping in the same
room as they kept the Ark of the Covenant. As he is sleeping he hears a voice
saying, “Samuel, Samuel.” He doesn’t know what that is so he gets up and he
goes to Eli and says, “Are you calling me?” Eli answers, “No, I wasn’t calling
you.” Samuel goes back to sleep. He hears the voice again calling him. Once
again he goes into Eli who once again responds, “No, no, I wasn’t calling you.”
Finally the third time Eli realizes that this voice that Samuel is hearing is
the voice of God, so Eli says, “Next time tell God you are listening and see
what God has to say.”
It was kind of a long reading with
all that God had to say. To sum it up, at that time the priesthood was passed
on from father to son, it was an inherited position. Earlier in the Book of
Samuel it tells about how Eli’s sons were not behaving very well. They were
kind of skimming some off the top of the contributions that were being made to
God. See it started a long time ago. It is nothing new.
So God was saying to Samuel that
Eli’s family is going to be destroyed. That is God’s way of saying the
priesthood is not going to be handed on to Eli’s sons, but it is going to be
Samuel who is going to carry on the spiritual tradition, which indeed he does.
This was a call to Samuel to be the great prophet and judge that we remember. It
is interesting to me how Samuel doesn’t recognize the call of God is at first.
He needs someone else to help him understand what is going on.
In the Gospel we have the call of
two different people, who have very different responses. The first is Phillip.
We don’t know whether Phillip knew Jesus before this, but when Jesus says to
Phillip, “Follow me” Philip just gets up and starts following. In fact he
doesn’t just start following, he starts telling other people about it. He is so
excited to follow Jesus that he goes to tell his friend Nathanael. When he says
Jesus is from the town of Nazareth we get this wonderful comment.
(I am so delighted that someone
laughed while I was reading that, because to me this is one of the most
humorous passages in scripture. We don’t realize how much humor there is in
scripture, because if you read Mark Twain the way we read the Bible it won’t be
funny, right? There is a lot of humor here and there is some sarcasm on Jesus’
part. He can be pretty cutting sometimes if you read it looking for the humor.
So I love this little interaction with Nathaniel.)
Phillip goes and tells Nathaniel
“We found him. The one we have been searching for, the one who is going to save
us, the Messiah, the one we have been promised.” He is all enthusiastic. When Nathanael
hears he is from Nazareth he says, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” It
would be like if you have just heard that there is this wonderful
teacher/preacher in Bakersfield. You go to hear him and return and say “Come,
come to Bakersfield with me to find God.” And your friend says, “Bakersfield?”
And if anybody here is from Bakersfield, I apologize. It could have been
Lompoc, it could have been anywhere. The thing is, it was more than just a
place because then the town that you came from was part of your identity. He
was insulting Jesus’ whole family. It was a terrible insult to Jesus to speak
that way about his home town.
Then you get this scene where
Nathaniel comes and Jesus just beams “Oh, Nathanael, well there is a real
honest Jew. No deceit. You are a wonderful person, what a fantastic person you
are.” Now Nathanael, unlike most of us who whether we felt good about it or not
would at least pretend to be humble and say, “Oh, not me.” But Nathanael goes,
“Well how do you know how great I am?” It is just hysterical to me that someone
would respond to Jesus that way. And then Jesus does the little hook and says,
“I saw you under the fig tree.” Well, if Jesus saw him under the fig tree, that
means Jesus also heard what he said under the fig tree. Which must have been
uncomfortable for Nathanael. So that is when Nathaniel over reacts and says,
“This must be the son of God.” The whole thing is so overblown it is a
wonderful little snippet.
Nathanael’s call is a different
kind of call. It is the type of call in which you have heard about it from
someone else and you are not too sure. You don’t know whether to believe it or
not. Nathanael doesn’t believe it until he has an experience of Christ. A lot
of us who are called are like that. We are not too sure until something
personal happens within us.
Now the man that we are
remembering this weekend, Martin Luther King Jr., also had a time of doubt. His
grandfather and his father were both preachers. When he was in High School,
even though he was extremely bright, he didn’t live up to his capacity, and he
wasn’t sure about God. He didn’t know what was true and what was real and he
didn’t want to be a preacher because he wasn’t sure about Christ. He went off
to college and he did okay but not really well at first, and then something
happened to him. The books I was reading don’t indicate what, but something
happened to him in the middle of college where he began to believe in Christ
personally and he started to study hard and get such good grades he got a
scholarship to go to Boston College and get a Ph.D. He also decided to become a
preacher. And he came to Alabama, to Montgomery Alabama as a new preacher, a
new person to lead this church. He hadn’t bee there very long when Rosa Parks
refused to get up when there were too many white people in the bus, and since
there were so many white people they wanted the colored people who were in the
front of the colored section to get up and stand so the white people could sit.
Rosa Parks refused. Some of us, we remember that time, for some of us it is
history. But we all know of Rosa Parks.
After that some of the black
leaders in Montgomery said, “We need to do something, “ and they gathered
together. Martin Luther King Jr. offered his church for them to gather and
decide what they were going to do. He wasn’t the leader at that point. He just
offered his church for a gathering place. As they gathered and they talked they
decided that it should be Martin Luther King Junior who would lead them. One of
the reasons was he was new in town and didn’t have very many enemies. He also
had a wonderful gift of speech, could communicate well, and a certain presence.
They decided and elected him to lead the Montgomery bus boycott. And then
everything else is history after that.
Martin Luther King’s call was not
God saying to him, “Go out there and set my people free and lead them.” It came
because there was a situation and he opened his church to it and then the
community lifted him up and said you are the one to lead us. He stepped into a
role he couldn’t possibly have imagined when he started his ministry. There are
lots of different ways of being called.
One of the interesting things
about people who are called, like Martin Luther King Jr., is that none of them
are perfect. Sometimes people say why are we celebrating him? He wasn’t
perfect. If you read the Old Testament you’ll discover that all the great
leaders of the Old Testament were highly imperfect. We have David who sends
Bathsheba’s husband off to be killed because he is attracted to Bathsheba. We
have Solomon doing things that are not appropriate. Even Moses and Abraham did
some questionable stuff. The Old Testament heroes were not perfect, but they were
faithful. In our church we have this book called Holy Women, Holy Men that
describes different people that we remember who were great in one way or
another in the church. Martin Luther King Jr. is one of them. In this it says that
we don’t remember these people because they were perfect, we remember them
because they were faithful. We remember them because they lived a life that was
an example of Christian life. To me that is a very comforting thought. It means
I don’t have to be perfect. It means that God can use me flaws and all. As long
as I listen and I am faithful to what I hear.
God calls us in many different
ways. Sometimes it is a still small voice in the back of our minds that we are
not quite sure what it is saying, and maybe we need someone to help us to
understand what that voice is. Recently I talked to a parishioner who said, “I
have had this thought in the back of my mind to start this thing going, but I
just kind of ignored it because I was too busy. It was kind of back there and
then one day at church in the middle of the service, out of nowhere, it was
like a load voice saying, ‘Do it!’” Sometimes if we don’t listen to the still
small voice we get a louder voice. Sometimes, like Samuel, we have somebody
else try to explain it to us. Sometimes we have someone who sees a gift in us
that we don’t see in ourselves and comes up to us and says, “You know, I think
you’d be really good at ….” We have someone here who is really good at doing
that with Sunday school. Sometimes
we get the call from God in church, sometimes we are watching TV and all of a
sudden it is real clear what we are supposed to do. But we all have things we
can do to serve.
We all have a purpose in life.
Once you are baptized, once you have said, “Yes Lord,” then it is time for God
to tell you how God can use you. And it varies. Sometimes it seems like it is
nothing significant. “Who cares that there is somebody who puts out coffee
every Sunday” but when visitors come it makes a huge difference that there is
coffee put out. It may seem small to you, but it can be major for someone else
who feels welcome.
Sometimes people are called to
great things, but someone like Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t know it was a call
to greatness when he was being called. He was just called to organize a
boycott. We never know, but we are to listen.
We are part of a community because
in a community we can help one another listen to what God is calling us to do
and be. God has a purpose for us. And once we find that purpose, when we say
yes, here I am, we find a satisfaction and a joy and a peace that we couldn’t
have imagined without it.
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