Curiosity and the Call of Christ

2 Epiphany A      January  19, 2014

Is.49:1-7          Ps. 40:1-10

1 Cor. 1:1-9      John 1:29-41

 Lectionary Link

  One of the themes of the season of the Epiphany, the season of the manifestation of Christ as the light of the world, is the theme of the encounter of Christ, or the call of Christ.  Christ called the disciples and they followed.  As stories it seems rather simple but now we have institutionalized the call of God in Christ to be something that happens to those who end up in the specialized roles of leadership in the church in the ordained ministry or religious life.

  A simple encounter with Jesus cannot get you into ordained ministry anymore, in fact, if one thinks that one has too many actual encounters with Jesus, it often means referral for psychological evaluation.

  The truth of the history of church would indicate to us that the success of the church has many explanations, different explanations because the teachings of Christ have been universal enough to be adopted to many different cultural settings.

  I have recently come to think that the success of the church had to do with the message of Jesus getting out of rural Galilee and into the cities as a social club format for providing the people going through urbanization, identity clubs and socialization advocacy networks within the city.

  If we look at Christianity today, where is it growing the most?  In the Southern Hemisphere.  Some people like to give simple explanations; it is because the people of the Northern Hemisphere have rejected Christ and it is because the peoples of Africa and South America are really the faithful ones to the real truths of primitive and pure Christianity.  At the same time, sociologists would say that the people of Africa are ripe for Christianity and Islam because of the rapid urbanization which is taking place.  People uprooted from tribe and village need identity clubs in the city to introduce them to modernization which has not fully spread its effects to the countryside.

  We should not be offended by the many scenarios for the call of Christ throughout the world or even within Morgan Hill. The call of Christ has been adaptable to many situations and it will continue to be adaptable.  Part of what we are trying to do here at St. John the Divine is to understand more clearly how the call of Christ can be adopted to our situation here.

  In the Gospels we find some insights about the call of Christ.  The call is social in nature, that is, people get referred to Jesus Christ by people they respect.  John the Baptist was respected enough to have his own community of followers.  But the historical record proves that John the Baptist and his community were too parochial, too locally based on the Jordan River.  John’s message could not become an effective message in the cities of the Roman Empire.  So the disciples of John made the transition to Jesus.  Jesus was baptized by John, perhaps his first curate or assistant but John did not let his ego get in the way when he observed the excellence of Jesus.  He referred and recommended his own disciples to Jesus.  They came, they saw and they told their brothers and friends who also came and saw Jesus for themselves.

  You see how origin stories about the call of Christ simplify the subject matter for the purpose of the teaching occasions in the places where the Gospel words were preached and written down.   The location of  John the Baptist and Jesus in the story would have been geographically distant from the people who heard these words in a city in the Roman Empire and the actual geography of the Gospel story would not have had much meaning for the people in cities throughout the Roman Empire..  They weren’t written to be geography, they were written to explain the dynamics of the call to Christ which was engaging people who were drawn to these new Christian clubs called churches.

  The call for you and me here today is still both an individual and social thing.  Many Christians in America and in Europe have experienced the material abundance of our cultures and so we do not have socialization crisis in our lives.  We can be more independent units and pick from an entire array of clubs and groups to find the kind of fellowship that we want to advocate our values in our society.  But in other places and in other times the church has been the dominant social force for people who are trying improve their life in a new place.

  In the Roman Catholic Church today, you have one sector of the church who find significant identity because of the Catholic educational institutions stretching from elementary through very fine universities.  They find identity in such “catholic” cultural expression of higher education and Notre Dame Football and Jesuit Universities' basketball.  The attendance of the Catholic church would be down in the United States except for immigrant peoples who arrive and struggle for a new start but who find attending Mass to be a significant factor in the process of setting down roots and getting established and finding friends and advocates in a new place.  The church is a place to meet "expats" who speak the native language and the church provides the meeting space to foster the identity of immigrants in the United States as their new location.  People who have been here from birth do not need the parish church to function in the same way for them.

  The call of Christ involves for you and me the significant self-love of curiosity.  Curiosity is being drawn to a vision of who I am and what I can do and become in the future.  People like Jesus had such mentoring charisma that people said, “I don’t know what I really want to be, but I do know that I want to be more like that man Jesus in the art of living.”  The call is the same today.  It is successful dealing with our curiosity about who we can become in the future as we are informed by examples of excellence.

  At St. John’s today you and I are in this process of being called but also being the voices of Christ as ones who are doing the calling.  We are possessed with curious self-love to want to surpass ourselves in a future state by seeking out mentoring examples, but at the same time we are to be the voice of Christ and the helping hands of Christ that are used to call others because ironically, we are to be examples to others and each other to improve our art of excellent living.

  Let us continue to be curious about the next phase of our call towards excellence.  But let us also make ourselves available to be watched by others so that something of Christ can reflect from us to others in their own unique phase of responding to Christ.

 Today, let us re-commit ourselves to making our parish a place where this dynamic of the call of Christ to us and through us happens in only the way it can happen through us.  May we all continue in the call of Christ today.  Amen.