“Speak, Lord, for your servant is
listening.” (1 Samuel 3:9)
Have you ever asked yourself why you keep
going to church? That’s assuming, of course, that you do keep going to church. What draws you? What are you looking for,
and what is the result you hope to find? How does your faith change you, and
why is it important that you’re a Christian? Just what is it that you do with
this faith you have?
What is your sense of call? That’s the question which comes to my mind when I look at the
scripture readings assigned for Epiphany 2, Year B in the Revised Common
Lectionary. Both the story of Samuel (1 Samuel 3:1-20) and the story in John’s
gospel (John 1:43-51) deal with a call to discipleship and mission.
In the Hebrew scripture lesson we have the
story of the young Samuel who has, basically, been offered up to God as a
sacrifice by his mom, Hannah, because she was just so stinkin’ glad to have
been able to get pregnant with him. If you know the story you’ll remember that
Hannah was having a little trouble with conception—a medical situation which
the gals in her neighborhood considered to be a curse from God. The local
thinking was that any woman who couldn’t bear a son was somehow on God’s
naughty list. Hannah prayed her butt off to be able to conceive, and promised
that she would dedicate her son to God’s service if God took away the disgrace
of her infertility. She got pregnant, had Samuel, and gave him up to be raised
by the Eli, the priest and prophet.
Eli had two grown boys of his own, Hophni
and Phinehas, who were going into the family business of being priests,
prophets, and judges over Israel. Unfortunately, like a lot of P.K.’s
(Preacher’s Kids), these boys were pretty unruly. There was no Me, Too or Time’s Up movement back in the day, so Hophni and Phinehas figured
they could hit on the church usherettes all they wanted to. They also had their
fingers in the offering plate. This really pissed God off.
One night, God spoke to the boy Samuel
while he was sleeping. Sam thought it was Eli calling him but, after some
misunderstanding, Eli figured out that God was speaking to the young fellow, so
he advised Samuel to listen and be obedient. Unfortunately, God’s message to
young Samuel was a word of condemnation of Eli’s sloppy parenting. God was
going to smite Hophni, Phinehas, and their
“I-spared-the-rod-and-raised-two-rotten-brats” father, Eli. To his credit, Eli
took the Louis C.K. attitude, admitted he was wrong, and submitted humbly to
the punishment God was willing to dish out (This happened to be killing the two
miscreant sons and letting Eli die from the grief by falling off his bench and
cracking his head open. God’s kind of a badass in the Old Testament if you
haven’t noticed.). Samuel, young as he was, was then called by God to take over
as Prophet and Judge of Israel and clean up the mess left by the previous
administration.
In John’s gospel, we hear the voice of God
coming through an enthusiastic disciple of Jesus, Philip. Philip is kind of an
interesting character in the fourth gospel. He’s not the impulsive,
in-your-face guy Peter is. He’s excited, but cautiously so, and he seems to
have a healthy dose of skepticism in him at times. All the same, he really
believes that Jesus is the guy Moses was talking about in Deuteronomy 18:15. He
feels a sense of call to share this with his buddy Nathaniel. Nathaniel’s
reaction is to make a smartass comment about the hick town of Nazareth, but he’s
willing to come and check out this Jesus all the same.
When Jesus meets Nathaniel, he makes a
little joke about an Israelite in whom there is no deceit (v. 47). Israel, of
course, is the name God gave to the deceitful Jacob back in Genesis 32.
Nathaniel, smartass that he is, rebuffs the joke by asking Jesus—whom he doesn’t
know from Joe Blow—how he can make any judgments about his character. Jesus tells
him that he saw him earlier under a fig tree.
Now, dear reader, you may well wonder what
that reference means. Me too. I haven’t got a clue. I even checked a bunch of
resources, but nobody seems to know why Nathaniel was so astounded by being
observed under a fig tree. The point, however, is that the guy seemed to be
really impressed and moved by Jesus’ words—moved enough to accept the call to
discipleship. I guess he had to feel that Jesus really knew him or understood
him. They shared something personal.
This encounter with Jesus would lead Nathaniel
(whom Bible scholars always say is the same guy as Bartholomew mentioned in the
other three gospels) to preach the gospel in India and Armenia and later be
martyred in any number of very unpleasant ways depending on which legend you
choose to believe. One legend (recorded in Fox's Book of Martyrs) says his personal calling was to translate Matthew's gospel into the language of India.
So when did Jesus become personal to you?
Who called you out of yourself to seek a deeper relationship with Jesus? What
do you want from that relationship, and what are you expecting the church of
Jesus Christ to be? What are you willing to do to make that vision a reality?
I started thinking I had a sense of call
when I was middle school special ed teacher in Los Angeles. For the first time
I met kids who were victims of institutional poverty and a really inadequate
school system. I started to think that this could be made better if people took
their commitment to Christ seriously. I might not have been a Samuel who was
called to go and fix the system, but I could try to be a Nathaniel Bartholomew
who could carry the message that Jesus wants more from us and can give us the
power to be more because he’s already seen us under the fig tree and he knows
our potential.
What’s your call? What message are you to
carry, and how are you to carry it?
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