January 14, 2024, He Chose You, John 1:43-51 – Mtr. Kathryn Boswell

saintphilipsnorwood ♦ January 14, 2024 ♦ Leave a comment

To listen to this sermon, click the link above. The text of the sermon is below.

When Jesus was saying good-bye to his close friends, on the night before he was crucified, he told them this: “You didn’t choose me – I chose you.” All hell was about to break loose, literally, in their lives. The multitudes that had followed Jesus, astonished at his teaching, basking in the glory of his powerful works, were about to turn, in the blink of an eye, into an ugly, angry mob, demanding his death. Jesus himself was about to be taken away from them and brutally killed. And, with the exception of John, every single one of the apostles, even the indomitable Peter, was about to become their worst self: a coward, a traitor, running scared just when their Lord and Master needed them most. Not to mention that after those days of terror and grief and shame were behind them, they were about to be given the keys of the kingdom of Heaven – a weight of responsibility that was unthinkable for this little band of rough, uneducated men.

They needed the reassurance, when Jesus had gone from them, that this whole project wasn’t a figment of their imaginations or some delusion of glory, some brilliant concept that they suddenly realized they were altogether too stupid and too fallible and altogether too human to carry out. Jesus reminded them at that moment, because they needed to know, that ultimately everything depended, not on their choices, but on their being chosen.

It runs counter to a lot of the spiritual wisdom we’ve all been brought up on. Sin is making bad choices. Obeying God is making good choices. Our Confirmation is the day we choose to make our faith our own, and not just a reflection of our parents’ faith. We attend this particular church because we choose to attend it. We choose which ministries we want to be involved in, which spiritual disciplines will help us grow. And we forget, or maybe we never really knew, that ultimately our relationship with God doesn’t depend on our choices, it depends on our being chosen.

We read two stories today that are all about God’s initiative. They are very helpful in showing us how the call of God works, what it means to be people who are first and foremost chosen and called by God, as opposed to being people who, first and foremost, have chosen to believe in him. We read first about Samuel. Samuel became one of the greatest of the Old Testament prophets, but as we meet him in this story he’s just a child. He’s serving Eli in the Temple because he was born to his mother and father in their old age, when they had almost given up on having a child. Samuel was an answer to his mother’s desperate prayer, and out of her abundant gratitude, his mother promised that she would offer her son to serve in the Temple.

But Samuel didn’t really understand anything about God. He was there to serve Eli. And he was good at his job. Every time he heard the voice he hopped up and went scampering in to Eli. He was obedient. He was a good boy. He wasn’t religious. He wasn’t spiritual. He didn’t know God. And then God called him. I think one of the remarkable things about this story is that Samuel really had no idea that it was God who was calling him. The voice didn’t sound like thunder or trumpets; there wasn’t any lightning or mysterious shinings. I imagine a little boy would have been terrified by anything like that. Samuel just heard a voice; it sounded like his old master, Eli. And he needed Eli to help him recognize the voice as the voice of God.

We are very prone, I think, to seeing our faith not only as something we choose, but also as an individual choice. We pray as a congregation at church, of course, but I think most people tend to think of our real relationship with God as a personal encounter, a one-on-one exchange. But the truth is, we are all dependent on other people in our hearing the voice of God. We have all had people: parents or teachers, pastors or friends or writers or artists, who helped us to recognize the call of God when we weren’t able to hear him on our own, when we had no idea what we were hearing. God speaks to us as he created us: as a people, in community.

Samuel was in the Temple because of the faith and devotion of his mother. Samuel was quick to listen because of the kindly training of Eli. And it was Eli who understood that God was calling Samuel, and told him what he needed to do. It’s a very different picture than the kind of mountaintop encounter we often imagine, just me and God. It’s much more complicated. It’s a little messier, maybe, than we might have imagined, a little more ragged and non-linear. But in the end it was indeed God standing at the foot of the little boy’s bed, and in that moment Samuel heard God for the first time. “And as Samuel grew up,” we read, “the Lord was with him and let none of his words fall to the ground. And all Israel from Dan to Beer-sheba knew that Samuel was a trustworthy prophet of the Lord.”

The story of Nathanael was another story about God’s calling. And again, it wasn’t a lone mountaintop experience. It was his friend, Philip, who brought Nathanael to see Jesus – and even then, he really wasn’t expecting to be impressed. “Can anything good come from Nazareth?”

Except for knowing he was a friend of Philip, we really don’t know much of anything about Nathanael, except for this one all-important thing. We know that Nathanael was known by Jesus. Jesus knew what kind of a man Nathanael was. And Jesus knew something very particular about him – something that happened under a fig tree. John doesn’t give us any clue what it was – probably John didn’t know either. What mattered is that Jesus let Nathanael know that he was seen, that he was known, and that sudden realization that Jesus really knew him broke through all his skepticism and all his prejudice and all his self-assurance, until all Nathanael could do was worship. “Rabbi,” he said, “you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!”

The days ahead are going to be hard. I say that because the world is a hard place. I say that because most of us are growing older, and old age is not easy. I say that because our country and our world are being shaken by changes and uncertainties and divisions and violence and instabilities in ways that have not been seen before – not in our lifetimes, maybe never before. I believe the church is going to have to grow and change, to become something new, something more urgent, something more needed, than it has been. I don’t think faith is going to be something we can put on and off like a jacket or a piece of jewelry; in the days to come, I believe our faith is going to be the core of our existence, the pole-star of our lives.

Like the disciples on the night of their last supper with Jesus, we need to know now more than ever that we aren’t here, that we aren’t Christians or Episcopalians or members of St. Philip’s just because of our own choices. We are here because he chose us. We are here because we were called. Most of us didn’t have some kind of mountaintop experience. Most of us have heard the voice of God through other people, our mother or father, a teacher or a friend. For most of us, the way has been pretty ragged, maybe a little messy, definitely non-linear. But what we find now that we are here is that Jesus has been calling us all along. We find that he knows us, knows us completely, knows us better than we know ourselves. And that means that we belong, and that means that we are not alone, and that means that we don’t need to be afraid. Because the voice of the one who has called us is the voice of the one who tells us, “Be sure of this – I am with you always, even to the end of the world.”

In hard times – actually in all times – the choices we make are important. We know that. God didn’t create us to be robots; he formed us as creatures with hearts that feel our own feelings, and minds that think our own thoughts, and free wills that choose the right or the wrong. We will be held responsible for our thoughts and our actions. But the foundation of who we are, the solid, unshakable basis for all our hope and all our confidence is that we are his children, “born,” as John writes, “not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of the will of God.” We love, because he loved us first. We are light and salt in a dark and hopeless world because he called us first. We know who we are because we are fully known by God. And we will stand, even in the hardest and darkest of times, because we are “the called according to his purpose”, and he is able and willing to make us stand.