The Journey Begins
The Journey Begins
Jan. 19, 2014
Jay Bartow, Pastor Emeritus
First Presbyterian Church of Monterey
Texts: Isaiah 49:1-6; John 1:29-42
Remember the television series Mission Impossible? It began with a brief recording along these lines, “Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to . . . .” And then it went on to explain the daunting if not impossible mission to be accomplished. I can’t ever remember the recipient of the message saying, “I think I will pass on that one. Get back to me later with another proposal and perhaps I will consider it.” Without exception they took on the challenge and somehow managed to do it against all odds.
The movie series doesn’t begin in that way but grabs our attention anyway with some amazing stunts and scenarios that put us on the edge of our seats.
Isaiah speaks for God in Chapter 49 and addresses peoples from far away and describes the work of the Servant of the Lord. He says that God’s Servant will bring not only the people of Israel back to right relationship with God, a people who had disobeyed and been conquered and sent into exile for that. God says, “It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the survivors of Israel; I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”
Now that is a big mission, an inclusive mission, a noble mission, a mission that will take more energy, intelligence, imagination, and sacrificial love than we possess. But what if God means to channel those very resources in and through us to the world so that God’s light and salvation may touch everyone, everywhere? We need God’s help to do God’s work, and God is counting on us to show up. God proposes to save the world through those who have been touched and inspired by God’s light.
This passage from Isaiah has been called the Great Commission of the Hebrew Scriptures. Jesus restates this mission in Matthew 28:18-20 when he commands his disciples: “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
That you and I believe in one God and seek to follow God’s Son, Jesus of Nazareth, is testimony to the fact that Jews and Christians took this mission to heart and shared with the world at large what they had come to know and experience of God. The events and ideas we read of in the Bible were penned long ago and far away in languages and cultures different from those of our European or Asian or African ancestors, as the case may be. But I am profoundly grateful that they told and lived the story far and wide. The world took note of the light and love that shone through them and dared to believe that they belonged in the story also. “God so loved the world that he sent his only Son that all who believe in him might not perish but have eternal life ,” is how John puts it in chapter 3.
And earlier in his Gospel John records these words of John the Baptist who shortly after baptizing his cousin, Jesus, said to all within his hearing, “Here is the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!”
The air must have crackled with electricity when John said that. The sin of the world? One day’s reading or watching of the news is enough to bury me in despair: Iraq is unraveling after ten years of blood, sweat, toil from our troops and civilians there, not to mention those of other nations and of Iraq itself. The Arab spring has come to feel like a winter of discontent in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Syria and spilling over into Lebanon. Add to that the conflict in the world’s newest nation, South Sudan, the ongoing troubles in the Central African Republic, the Congo, Somalia. Time dictates that I end with that. But you get my point. The sin of the world is enormous, persistent, and like a deadly virus seeks to multiply into any host nation or people or individual.
Yet John the Baptist affirms that Jesus, whom he has baptized and on whom God’s spirit descended like a dove, has come to take away the sin of the world. He uses the phrase “lamb of God”, which may refer to the practice of his fellow Jews of slaying a lamb at Passover when the Jews marked the lintel of their doorposts with lamb’s blood so that the angel of death would pass over their homes. Passover commemorated the redemption of the Hebrews from slavery to the Egyptians. Perhaps he is saying that Jesus has come to save us from a worse bondage, to sin. Paul refers to Jesus as our Paschal lamb, sacrificed for us. (1 Cor. 5:7)
John the Baptist’s father, Zechariah was a priest who served at the Temple, and everyday two lambs were offered, one in the morning and one in the evening, for the sins of the people. William Barclay notes that the title, Lamb of God, is used twenty-nine times in the book of Revelation. It sums up the love, the sacrifice, the suffering of Christ.
In Isaiah 53, another of the descriptions of God’s Servant , and which the early church came to treasure as a description of how God would redeem his people by being wounded for their transgressions and bruised for their iniquities. You read that like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.
John’s words stun his followers, and the next day when he sees Jesus and again says, “Look here is the Lamb of God!” two of John’s disciples follow Jesus. John doesn’t call them back. In fact, John later says of Jesus: “He must increase and I must decrease.” John’s mission is to point beyond himself to Jesus, to prepare the way of the Lord. And we should follow his example.
Jesus notes that two of John’s disciples are following him he asks them, “What are you looking for?” Imagine yourself in their sandals. What would you say to Jesus in response to that question? . . . . . . . . .
They respond, “Rabbi, where are you staying?”
“Come and see,” he replies ,and they do. This may seem a bit strange to us, but it was not unusual for men to apprentice themselves to a Rabbi whom they felt to be wise and godly. They would live and study and eat and pray with him, and thus become his disciples. The Greek word disciple, means learner, mathetes, from which we get mathematics. Here the journey of faith begins, with a decision to follow Jesus, to listen to and observe him. Jews remark that a faithful disciple has a lot of the dust of his rabbi on him. I like that image, don’t you? If you follow closely and faithfully behind a rabbi in a dry and dusty land, you will have a lot of the rabbi’s dust on you.
When Peter and John were arrested by the Temple authorities for healing and teaching about Jesus in the Temple precincts, they asked of them an explanation for their actions. Peter responded with courage and eloquence. Luke tells us that when those authorities saw the boldness of Peter and John and realized that they were uneducated and ordinary men, they were amazed and recognized them as companions of Jesus. (Acts 4:13) There was a lot of his dust on them.
I would like that to be said of me. Wouldn’t you? I thank God for all the persons in this congregation and others whom I have met in different countries and contexts who had a lot of the dust of Jesus on them. Their compassion, their humility, their faithfulness, their concern for the those on the margins and those at risk, for the lonely, for the guilt-ridden, for those struggling with addiction, for those trying to find a way to believe, inspires me. I see them making a difference where they work and volunteer. I see them doing the heavy lifting as volunteers in churches and organizations that serve others. I observe them mediating conflict and working for reconciliation in a world fraught with conflict. Read the journal of Dag Hammarksgold, former secretary of the United Nations and you see a person of faith trying to bring the spirit of Jesus to a divided world.
Read the speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. whose birthday we celebrate, and you see a man who sought to relate to friend and foe alike in the spirit of Jesus. Reflect on the life of Mother Theresa and note how she began each day anticipating seeing the face of Christ in the poor whom she served. “Let us do something beautiful for God” is what she said to her sisters each morning as the left their house for the streets of Calcutta. Peggy Noonan, principal speech writer of President Reagan tells of an encounter she had with Mother Theresa as they approached one another in a hallway in Washington. Mother Theresa looked up at her and said in a firm voice, “Love God!” Mother Theresa not only worked for God, she spoke for God as well. It was she who spoke to Malcolm Muggeridge, a seasoned journalist who went to film a documentary of her work with the dying in Calcutta. He was a hardnosed skeptic with a well- earned reputation for wine, women and song. But she sensed that he was looking for God, and she knew God was looking for him, so she urged him to do what those two disciples of John the Baptist did, to come and see where and how Jesus lived.
Muggeridge came to faith in his seventies and wrote a testament of his faith, titled, Jesus Rediscovered. He finally joined the Catholic Church in his eighties in the little village of Robertsbridge, in southern England, where my family and I spent a fun holiday twenty-five years ago.
How do we come and see where Jesus lives in his absence? Begin with the source documents that tell us what he said and did. I had never read the Gospels until college, and I am sad to say that is the case for most Californians. I had heard snippets and hearsay, much of it inaccurate as I came to later discover. But we have source documents and why not read them for ourselves and invite a friend or two to share our journey and to see what we make of them? As I read I found myself asking with those who interacted with him, “Who is this man? He teaches with authority, heals with compassion, reaches out to the unclean and rejected, feeds the hungry, stills the storm, takes on the task of a slave and washes his disciples’ feet, forgives his executioners, and bears the sin of the world in his body on the cross? His followers are defeated at his death, stunned and empowered at his resurrection, and commissioned to carry on his work.
Paul calls the church, the community of believers, the Body of Christ. I have gained so much through worship, work, fellowship and service with fellow believers that I cannot imagine my life apart from them. Wherever I have traveled in the world I have found friends in the faith, a welcome and warmth that reflects the very embrace of Christ himself. Spend time with God’s people, and pray for a mentor or two with whom you can ask questions and seek guidance, share struggles and joys. Consider being a mentor yourself to others who may seek your companionship and encouragement. Your mentors will have books for you to consider, places to visit, persons to meet, who can nurture you in your journey of faith. Avail yourself of them. When the apostle Paul wrote to his friends in faith in Thessalonica he said, “So deeply do we care for you that we are determined to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you have become very dear to us.” God calls us to fellowship with himself and with one another. Read all of the New Testament letters and you see that they are addressed to communities of faith on the journey together. There are no Lone Ranger Christians in the Bible. If we think we can make the journey on or own we are deceived.
I close with a quote from the end of Albert Schweitzer’s provocative book, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, published in 1906. Schweitzer had doctorates in Theology, Philosophy and Medicine, and was a world-class organist and interpreter of the works of J.S Bach. He could have taught theology at a top university in Europe, been an organist in demand and earned a handsome living. Instead, he chose to go to French Equatorial Africa and to build a rustic hospital at a place called Lambarene and to practice medicine in a setting with little in the way of special equipment or technical resources, but with deep compassion and respect for those he served. He lived into his nineties. Here are his words, speaking of Jesus: “He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lake-side, He came to those men who knew him not. He speaks to us the same word: ‘Follow thou me!’ and sets us to the tasks He has to fulfill for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience, who he is.”
Jan. 19, 2014
Jay Bartow, Pastor Emeritus
First Presbyterian Church of Monterey
Texts: Isaiah 49:1-6; John 1:29-42
Remember the television series Mission Impossible? It began with a brief recording along these lines, “Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to . . . .” And then it went on to explain the daunting if not impossible mission to be accomplished. I can’t ever remember the recipient of the message saying, “I think I will pass on that one. Get back to me later with another proposal and perhaps I will consider it.” Without exception they took on the challenge and somehow managed to do it against all odds.
The movie series doesn’t begin in that way but grabs our attention anyway with some amazing stunts and scenarios that put us on the edge of our seats.
Isaiah speaks for God in Chapter 49 and addresses peoples from far away and describes the work of the Servant of the Lord. He says that God’s Servant will bring not only the people of Israel back to right relationship with God, a people who had disobeyed and been conquered and sent into exile for that. God says, “It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the survivors of Israel; I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”
Now that is a big mission, an inclusive mission, a noble mission, a mission that will take more energy, intelligence, imagination, and sacrificial love than we possess. But what if God means to channel those very resources in and through us to the world so that God’s light and salvation may touch everyone, everywhere? We need God’s help to do God’s work, and God is counting on us to show up. God proposes to save the world through those who have been touched and inspired by God’s light.
This passage from Isaiah has been called the Great Commission of the Hebrew Scriptures. Jesus restates this mission in Matthew 28:18-20 when he commands his disciples: “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
That you and I believe in one God and seek to follow God’s Son, Jesus of Nazareth, is testimony to the fact that Jews and Christians took this mission to heart and shared with the world at large what they had come to know and experience of God. The events and ideas we read of in the Bible were penned long ago and far away in languages and cultures different from those of our European or Asian or African ancestors, as the case may be. But I am profoundly grateful that they told and lived the story far and wide. The world took note of the light and love that shone through them and dared to believe that they belonged in the story also. “God so loved the world that he sent his only Son that all who believe in him might not perish but have eternal life ,” is how John puts it in chapter 3.
And earlier in his Gospel John records these words of John the Baptist who shortly after baptizing his cousin, Jesus, said to all within his hearing, “Here is the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!”
The air must have crackled with electricity when John said that. The sin of the world? One day’s reading or watching of the news is enough to bury me in despair: Iraq is unraveling after ten years of blood, sweat, toil from our troops and civilians there, not to mention those of other nations and of Iraq itself. The Arab spring has come to feel like a winter of discontent in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Syria and spilling over into Lebanon. Add to that the conflict in the world’s newest nation, South Sudan, the ongoing troubles in the Central African Republic, the Congo, Somalia. Time dictates that I end with that. But you get my point. The sin of the world is enormous, persistent, and like a deadly virus seeks to multiply into any host nation or people or individual.
Yet John the Baptist affirms that Jesus, whom he has baptized and on whom God’s spirit descended like a dove, has come to take away the sin of the world. He uses the phrase “lamb of God”, which may refer to the practice of his fellow Jews of slaying a lamb at Passover when the Jews marked the lintel of their doorposts with lamb’s blood so that the angel of death would pass over their homes. Passover commemorated the redemption of the Hebrews from slavery to the Egyptians. Perhaps he is saying that Jesus has come to save us from a worse bondage, to sin. Paul refers to Jesus as our Paschal lamb, sacrificed for us. (1 Cor. 5:7)
John the Baptist’s father, Zechariah was a priest who served at the Temple, and everyday two lambs were offered, one in the morning and one in the evening, for the sins of the people. William Barclay notes that the title, Lamb of God, is used twenty-nine times in the book of Revelation. It sums up the love, the sacrifice, the suffering of Christ.
In Isaiah 53, another of the descriptions of God’s Servant , and which the early church came to treasure as a description of how God would redeem his people by being wounded for their transgressions and bruised for their iniquities. You read that like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth.
John’s words stun his followers, and the next day when he sees Jesus and again says, “Look here is the Lamb of God!” two of John’s disciples follow Jesus. John doesn’t call them back. In fact, John later says of Jesus: “He must increase and I must decrease.” John’s mission is to point beyond himself to Jesus, to prepare the way of the Lord. And we should follow his example.
Jesus notes that two of John’s disciples are following him he asks them, “What are you looking for?” Imagine yourself in their sandals. What would you say to Jesus in response to that question? . . . . . . . . .
They respond, “Rabbi, where are you staying?”
“Come and see,” he replies ,and they do. This may seem a bit strange to us, but it was not unusual for men to apprentice themselves to a Rabbi whom they felt to be wise and godly. They would live and study and eat and pray with him, and thus become his disciples. The Greek word disciple, means learner, mathetes, from which we get mathematics. Here the journey of faith begins, with a decision to follow Jesus, to listen to and observe him. Jews remark that a faithful disciple has a lot of the dust of his rabbi on him. I like that image, don’t you? If you follow closely and faithfully behind a rabbi in a dry and dusty land, you will have a lot of the rabbi’s dust on you.
When Peter and John were arrested by the Temple authorities for healing and teaching about Jesus in the Temple precincts, they asked of them an explanation for their actions. Peter responded with courage and eloquence. Luke tells us that when those authorities saw the boldness of Peter and John and realized that they were uneducated and ordinary men, they were amazed and recognized them as companions of Jesus. (Acts 4:13) There was a lot of his dust on them.
I would like that to be said of me. Wouldn’t you? I thank God for all the persons in this congregation and others whom I have met in different countries and contexts who had a lot of the dust of Jesus on them. Their compassion, their humility, their faithfulness, their concern for the those on the margins and those at risk, for the lonely, for the guilt-ridden, for those struggling with addiction, for those trying to find a way to believe, inspires me. I see them making a difference where they work and volunteer. I see them doing the heavy lifting as volunteers in churches and organizations that serve others. I observe them mediating conflict and working for reconciliation in a world fraught with conflict. Read the journal of Dag Hammarksgold, former secretary of the United Nations and you see a person of faith trying to bring the spirit of Jesus to a divided world.
Read the speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. whose birthday we celebrate, and you see a man who sought to relate to friend and foe alike in the spirit of Jesus. Reflect on the life of Mother Theresa and note how she began each day anticipating seeing the face of Christ in the poor whom she served. “Let us do something beautiful for God” is what she said to her sisters each morning as the left their house for the streets of Calcutta. Peggy Noonan, principal speech writer of President Reagan tells of an encounter she had with Mother Theresa as they approached one another in a hallway in Washington. Mother Theresa looked up at her and said in a firm voice, “Love God!” Mother Theresa not only worked for God, she spoke for God as well. It was she who spoke to Malcolm Muggeridge, a seasoned journalist who went to film a documentary of her work with the dying in Calcutta. He was a hardnosed skeptic with a well- earned reputation for wine, women and song. But she sensed that he was looking for God, and she knew God was looking for him, so she urged him to do what those two disciples of John the Baptist did, to come and see where and how Jesus lived.
Muggeridge came to faith in his seventies and wrote a testament of his faith, titled, Jesus Rediscovered. He finally joined the Catholic Church in his eighties in the little village of Robertsbridge, in southern England, where my family and I spent a fun holiday twenty-five years ago.
How do we come and see where Jesus lives in his absence? Begin with the source documents that tell us what he said and did. I had never read the Gospels until college, and I am sad to say that is the case for most Californians. I had heard snippets and hearsay, much of it inaccurate as I came to later discover. But we have source documents and why not read them for ourselves and invite a friend or two to share our journey and to see what we make of them? As I read I found myself asking with those who interacted with him, “Who is this man? He teaches with authority, heals with compassion, reaches out to the unclean and rejected, feeds the hungry, stills the storm, takes on the task of a slave and washes his disciples’ feet, forgives his executioners, and bears the sin of the world in his body on the cross? His followers are defeated at his death, stunned and empowered at his resurrection, and commissioned to carry on his work.
Paul calls the church, the community of believers, the Body of Christ. I have gained so much through worship, work, fellowship and service with fellow believers that I cannot imagine my life apart from them. Wherever I have traveled in the world I have found friends in the faith, a welcome and warmth that reflects the very embrace of Christ himself. Spend time with God’s people, and pray for a mentor or two with whom you can ask questions and seek guidance, share struggles and joys. Consider being a mentor yourself to others who may seek your companionship and encouragement. Your mentors will have books for you to consider, places to visit, persons to meet, who can nurture you in your journey of faith. Avail yourself of them. When the apostle Paul wrote to his friends in faith in Thessalonica he said, “So deeply do we care for you that we are determined to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you have become very dear to us.” God calls us to fellowship with himself and with one another. Read all of the New Testament letters and you see that they are addressed to communities of faith on the journey together. There are no Lone Ranger Christians in the Bible. If we think we can make the journey on or own we are deceived.
I close with a quote from the end of Albert Schweitzer’s provocative book, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, published in 1906. Schweitzer had doctorates in Theology, Philosophy and Medicine, and was a world-class organist and interpreter of the works of J.S Bach. He could have taught theology at a top university in Europe, been an organist in demand and earned a handsome living. Instead, he chose to go to French Equatorial Africa and to build a rustic hospital at a place called Lambarene and to practice medicine in a setting with little in the way of special equipment or technical resources, but with deep compassion and respect for those he served. He lived into his nineties. Here are his words, speaking of Jesus: “He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lake-side, He came to those men who knew him not. He speaks to us the same word: ‘Follow thou me!’ and sets us to the tasks He has to fulfill for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience, who he is.”
