"To Be a Witness" San Williams UPC
John 1:29-42
Our music this morning is somewhat more varied than usual. We’re grateful to David and Rachel Chao and Jeremy Bell for introducing some jazz rhythms into our worship. While I don’t understand much about jazz, I appreciate the way jazz musicians skillfully weave various musical interpretations around a central theme. Well, if someone tried to set the Gospel of John to music, jazz would be the genre of choice. Unlike the other Gospel writers—Matthew, Mark and Luke—who tend to write in a fairly straightforward manner, John’s writing style is more complex, syncopated and nonlinear. Like with a jazz combo, there’s always a lot happening in John’s Gospel. John is forever moving us in and out of scenes, conversations and images that suggest multiple meanings and layers of interpretation. Take today’s reading, for example, which was the story of Jesus’ baptism. We considered this story just last week in Mathew’s Gospel, but John sets the same story to new music. John first sounds a basic theme and then shows how that theme can play out in the lives of Jesus’ disciples.
The first note John sounds in today’s reading is the central theme of the fourth Gospel. Namely, Jesus Christ is the Lamb of God, God’s Son, who will bring life to us and to our world. Jesus is the One who has come into the world to restore our relationship with God. That’s the unifying theme of John’s Gospel. In John Gospel, John the Baptist is the instrument through which this theme is first heard. In today’s reading we heard the Baptizer’s witness about Jesus sounded with force and repetition, because John wants to make sure we understand that John the Baptist was not the Christ. He is only a witness to Christ. John the Baptist appears and disappears in John’s composition, but with only one reason to have a voice at all: he is a witness to Christ.
Karl Barth, arguably the most influential theologian of the last century, treasured this image of John the Baptist pointing to Christ, the Lamb of God. In fact, Barth hung a painting of Matthias Grunewald above his desk. Grunewald’s painting depicted John the Baptist with a long, boney finger pointing to Christ on the cross. Barth wrote his massive volumes of theology with Grunewald’s painting hanging over his desk. The painting was a daily reminder to the great theologian that his role, like that of John the Baptist, was simply to serve as a witness. In all of his extensive writings, Barth had a single purpose, and that purpose was to point his readers to Christ as the Son of God.
Barth also believed that, figuratively speaking, Grunewalds’s image of the witness pointing to Christ should hang in every sanctuary where Christians worship as well as in the heart of every Christian who seeks to follow Christ. After all, we are not witnessing to ourselves but to the one who has called us into new life. All we do—our worship, our fellowship, our service, our hospitality—is for the purpose of pointing us and others to Christ. John the Baptist sounded the theme that is picked up and played by the church: Jesus Christ is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, the Son of God who came so that we might have life abundant.
But after introducing this basic theme, John begins to improvise on this theme. He switches the focus to two of John’s disciples who decide to follow Jesus. When Jesus sees the two disciples following him, he turns and asks them: “What are you looking for?” That question is the very first utterance by Jesus in John’s Gospel. We might have expected Jesus to have opened on a different note—perhaps a proverb to demonstrate his wisdom, or a command to assert his authority, or maybe a prophetic oracle to establish his position, maybe even a sermon to lay out his mission. But the first sound Jesus makes is in the form of a question: What are you looking for?
Now turn that question on ourselves. After all, you came to worship this morning when you could still be home in your slippers, sipping your coffee, reading the paper, watching previews for today’s playoff games. Yet you came here to worship. Why? What are you looking for? Our UPC Session has been engaged in conversation about this very matter. In a report to the Session last Wednesday night, the Membership Ministry made the comment: “We at war, the economy is flimsy, parents work too much, kids are overscheduled. People are searching for meaning, grace and the opportunity to serve.” Articles on what draws people to church make similar points. They relate surveys in which people express their reason for seeking out a church with statements such as: I feel something is missing in my life…I long to experience the Holy…I want to sense a connection with the transcendent…I want to belong to a community that offers opportunities to serve others, and so on. Before Jesus calls his disciples, he first asks them to ponder a question: What are you looking for?
Well, the first disciples responded to that question with a question of their own: “Where are you staying?” Sounds like one of those flustered responses we sometimes give and then feel silly about. But if Jesus was disappointed in their response, he didn’t let it show. Instead he took their question about where he was staying seriously and said simply, “Come and see.” Now there’s a note that draws us in. Prior to following him, Jesus doesn’t ask for any commitment up front, no entrance exam, no down payment. Rather a winsome invitation: “Come and see.” Jesus’ comment reminds us that knowing Jesus entails relationship. We learn who Jesus is and what he means to us only by coming to him, staying by him, learning from him and serving with him.
And isn’t this same dynamic true for the church. Our witness to Christ, if it is to be credible, resides in what people see when they come among us. We can’t expect people to be impressed with what we say. Our theology, our creeds, our arguments for faith won’t be convincing to most people today. The only thing that really matters is what people see when they come and stay with us, even if it’s for an hour on Sunday morning.
In other words, what kind of witness do our lives actually make? To an outside observer, would we look like everyone else in the rat race, distracted and disaffected, prone to resentments, caught up the same prejudices, full of the same fears? Or to an observer would our worship be so sincere and engaging, our hospitality to genuine, our service so selfless and generous that they would cause someone to want to take a closer look--to want to come and see more?
Writer Kathleen Norris wrote in Christian Century magazine about attending an interfaith conference at St. John’s Abbey in Minnesota. One of the speakers was a French Benedictine who reported on the longstanding exchange program that French monastics have had with Japanese Zen Buddhists. He said that after a Buddhist visitor had been in the monastery for about a month, he had only one question. It seemed to him that the monks did not live very well. They worked hard, their food was neither good nor plentiful, and they did not get enough sleep. “Yet they are joyful,” he said, “and I want to know: from where does this joy come?”
Friends, that’s the kind of question we want people to ask of us. Imagine a congregation in which faith, hope and love are so alive that they cause people to want to take a closer look. Imagine our church’s witness as so clearly pointing beyond ourselves to the love of Christ, that it prompts people to ask--as the Buddhist monk did: Where does their joy come from? Where does this hospitality come from? The commitment to serve others--where does it come from? Of course, such questions as these can’t be answered with words alone. They are answered with an invitation: Come and see!