SEATTLE MENNONITE CHURCH
Second Sunday after Epiphany, January 19, 2003
Sermon: Weldon D. Nisly
TITLE: Attending to God’s voice
THEME: Epiphany Attention – Call & Response
TEXTS: 1 Samuel 3:1-20 God calls a servant (a voice calling in the night)
Psalm 139: 1-18 Hymnal # 823
John 1:43-51 Jesus calls a disciple
Hear the voice of the Gospel according to John (1:43-51)
After Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan River by John the Baptist, he began his ministry by calling disciples to “come and follow” wherever it leads and whatever the cost.
The next day Jesus decided to go to Galilee.
He found Philip and said to him, "Follow me."
Now Philip was from Bethsaida, the city of Andrew and Peter.
Philip found Nathanael and said to him,
"We have found the one about whom Moses in the law
and also the prophets wrote, Jesus son of Joseph from Nazareth."
Nathanael said to him, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?"
Philip said to him, "Come and see."
When Jesus saw Nathanael coming toward him, he said of Nathanael,
"Here is truly an Israelite in whom there is no deceit!"
Nathanael asked him, "Where did you get to know me?"
Jesus answered, "I saw you under the fig tree before Philip called you."
Nathanael replied, "Rabbi, you are the Holy One of God! You are the Ruler of Israel!"
Jesus answered,
"Do you believe because I told you that I saw you under the fig tree?
You will see greater things than these."
"Truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened
and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Human One."
This is the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
On March 31, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. preached a public sermon in the
National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. It was to be his last public proclamation.
Four days later on April 4, Dr. King was killed by an assassin’s bullet.
The Gospel makes it clear that hearing God’s voice and following Jesus will cost you
your life. “You must loose your life in order to have life.”
Martin Luther King listened the to voice of God and the call of Jesus with great courage and consistency. The Christian tendency with King as with Jesus is to honor the person while ignoring their life.
The poet Carl Wendell Himes, Jr., voiced our dilemma as only a poet can.
Now that he is safely dead / Let us praise him
Build monuments to his glory
Sing hosannas to his name.
Dead men make
Such convenient heroes: They cannot rise
To challenge the images
We would fashion from their lives.
And besides, / It is easier to build monuments
Than to make a
better world. (TOS,
12)
King began that last public sermon in the National Cathedral saying,
I would like to use as a subject from which to preach this morning:
“Remaining Awake Through A Great Revolution.” The text is found in
the book of Revelation…”Behold, I make all things new; former things
are passed away”
(Clayborne Carson
& Peter Holloran, ed., A Knock at Midnight:
Inspiration from the Great
Sermons of Rev Martin Luther King, Jr.,
205).
King goes on to use the illustration of Rip Van Winkle sleeping through the
American Revolution. He adds:
One of the great liabilities of life is that all too many people find themselves living amid a time of social change, and yet they fail to develop the new
attitudes, the new mental responses, that the situation demands. They end
up sleeping through a revolution.
A great revolution is taking place in the world today. In a sense it is a triple revolution: that is, a technological revolution, with the impact of automation
and cybernation; then there is a revolution in weaponry, with the emergence
of atomic and nuclear weapons of warfare; then there is a human rights revolution, with the freedom explosion that is taking place all over the world.
(Knock, 206-207).
Today Dr. King’s voice is as penetrating as when he spoke 35 years ago. Today we
need to hear God’s voice and Jesus call for life through King’s life.
Samuel and Nathanael faced God’s call and their response in the biblical word heard today. We hear again the voice of God to Samuel and the voice of Jesus to Nathanael.
Already in his youth Samuel faces one of life’s great challenges and opportunities. Samuel hears a voice calling his name. Will he respond to the voice of God? With
Eli’s encouragement, Samuel hears and responds.
Samuel learns to discern not domesticate God’s voice. Only then is he able to respond.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus calls ordinary people to “Come and follow.” Jesus calls Andrew, Peter, and Philip who come and follow.
Then Nathanael faces the call and his own response. His first response is a
cynical retort to his friend Philip, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”
Jesus sees into Nathanael’s heart and recognizes all the gift and possibility in him.
An amazed Nathanael hears Jesus’ voice and responds
Last Sunday Bob Ekblad said that the Greek word for voice is phone.
[long “e”
-- Phone is not the Greek word used in John but the notion is
there.]
Listening to God’s voice is a call for us to
“be on the phone” with God. Every
time you are on the phone ask yourself “What
is God saying to me today?”
Martin Luther King, Jr., listened to the voice of God like Samuel. Like
Nathanael he followed wherever Jesus led. And like Jesus, it cost him
his life. We are called to do no less.
On Monday, at the National Cathedral where King spoke 35 years ago, there
is a gathering organized by Sojourners, to honor King by fighting a war on
poverty not a war on Iraq.
Dr.
King’s prophetic words are as true today as they were in the 1960’s, when he
said:
In the days ahead we must not consider it unpatriotic to raise certain basic questions about our national character. We must begin to ask, 'Why are
there forty million poor people in a nation overflowing with such
unbelievable affluence? Why has our nation placed itself in the position
of being God's military agent on earth...? Why have we substituted the
arrogant undertaking of policing the whole world for the high task of
putting our own house in order?'
Hear now Martin Luther King, Jr.’s voice from the National Cathedral 35 years ago. This is about 12 minutes from the end of the sermon “Remaining Awake Through A Great Revolution.” He is speaking about bringing thousands of people to Washington, D.C., for a Poor People’s Campaign. As clearly as in any of his sermons, King connects poverty and racism and war and the violence of a nation. He calls a nation to be true to its constitution and the Church to be faithful to her calling.
[Begin with “And I submit that nothing will be done until people of good will put their bodies and their souls in motion…”
(from A Knock at Midnight, 218-224)].