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Known on Sight:Called to Be
My father is great with names. He was a guidance counselor at middle and high schools for 30 years and then worked as an assistant principal for two years in his retirement. In our small town, about the size of Avon Grove, he knows almost everyone. He can remember faces and name of students he had 30 years ago. He can remember their families, where they went to college or if they went into the service. It’s an amazing gift he has. I can see when he talks with someone he hasn’t seen in a long time how touched they are when he remembers a minute detail of their life and can ask a meaningful question about it.
Having someone know and call your name is one of the most intimate acts of humanity. To know someone’s name is to know about them – it can tell a piece of their heritage or what era they were born, their parents’ favorite politicians or movie stars. If we know someone’s name, we usually know a little part of their story as well. We know a piece of their identity when we know their name.
May I See Some ID, Please? is the sermon series we’re exploring for the next several weeks. We’ve been looking at identity: the identity of Christ and our identity as we know him and are known through him, as his followers. The first week, we explored Known By the Light: Called to Joy, through the lens of the Epiphany, when the magi followed the light of the star to the baby Jesus and there found great joy as they presented him with priceless treasures. Last week, we walked with Jesus down to the Jordan River and heard God give Jesus a new purpose in life through a love song, calling him God’s beloved child as we studied Known by the Watermark: Called to Life.
Today, we’re looking at Known on Sight: Called to Be. The two scripture passages we just heard are all about being known. But they go beyond superficial knowing, like knowing a name or knowing some interesting fact about a person. It’s about knowing at an intimate level, at the most basic level of our humanness. It’s about our calling to be people of dignity, wholeness and integrity, and recognizing and treasuring and protecting the dignity of others, for we are all made, called and known by God.
There are different levels of knowing. We may know a lot of facts about someone but not really know them. I can tell you a lot about Britney Spears: she’s a singer, she has released five albums, she likes to relax by reading, she has two children, she has struggled with addiction and mental health issues. But of course, I don’t really know her at all. I would know her on sight if she and I were both in the line at the grocery store, but I wouldn’t know her on a deep and personal level.
My knowledge of Britney Spears contrasts sharply with my knowledge of my children. I also can tell you lots of facts about them: Jackson is 6 and knows more about Star Wars than I know about church history; Wesley is 3 and is the singer in our family, especially if it’s Old McDonald or Frosty the Snowman; and Anya is one and loves to eat cupcakes and peas, but not at the same time. And unlike Brittney Spears, I do know them deeply and personally, from their birthmarks to their favorite type of cookies to what they dream about at night. I know them on sight and I want them to become everything they were created to be: loving, kind, generous, filled with integrity, treated with dignity, loving and beloved by God and by others.
In the Gospel lesson today, Philip knew Jesus on sight and Nathaniel was known by Jesus on sight. And through that knowing, they were called to be: to be disciples, to be leaders of a new movement, to be followers of the Son of Man, to sacrifice all that they had known and to gain everything they could never have imagined before.
I love this exchange between Philip, Nathaniel and Jesus, partly because it’s so much like conversations that we each have in our own lives. Philip has made a monumental discovery in Jesus – it is life-changing, earth-shattering, and unbelievable. This is no ordinary Joe Schmo – this man Jesus is the one who Philip’s people have been waiting for thousands of years for. And here he’s shown up in dusty Galilee, not exactly the center of the world. And so Philip goes off to find his friends and tell them about this amazing discovery.
We all have our own experiences like this, don’t we? I have a friend who is always trying a new diet or a new eating plan. And most every time, she will tell us about it and rave about it and go on and on about how wonderful it is, how it made her and her husband stop snoring, it cured her insomnia, she feels better – you know how it is. After a while, I start to take her enthusiasm with a grain of salt, because yeah, yeah, I’ve heard it all before.
Maybe this is how Philip was – always going on and on about some great new person who was going to change the world. Nathaniel is very skeptical of Philip’s news, especially when he hears that this Jesus is from Nazareth. “Nazareth, that old place? Nothing good can come out of there,” Nathaniel says. But even in his doubts and skepticism, he takes up Philip’s offer to see for himself. When Jesus tells Nathaniel that he knows his deepest heart, that he is a man of faith who has lived a holy and just life, Nathaniel realizes that Jesus knows him. Jesus saw Nathaniel sitting under a fig tree, which is the place that tradition says is the best for studying the Torah, the sacred Jewish text. From that fact, Jesus could have assumed a lot about Nathaniel. But Nathaniel realized in that moment, that Jesus didn’t assume, but that he knew Nathaniel, not knowing in a superficial, I know some facts about you kind of way, but knew him in a deep, intimate, personal way. Nathaniel was known on sight and called to be a person of worth and dignity.
The scriptures tell us that God knows who we are on sight– every part of us, all of our thoughts, all of our wishes, all of our desires, all of our dreams. Theologian Allen McSween says about God’s words in the Psalm that we read earlier, “(they) invite us to receive an identity rooted not in the things we say about ourselves or the labels others assign us but in the One who knows us more deeply and more lovingly than we could ever know ourselves. ... The value of our lives does not come from what we achieve or possess or what others may think of us. It comes from the God who knows and names us, from whose steadfast love nothing in all creation can ever separate us.”
Like this Psalm says, we are “fearfully and wonderfully made” – each and every one of us gathered here, all of our neighbors and friends, each person ever born in every place on this earth. On the eve of a historic week, when we remember the 80th birthday of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and we inaugurate the first African-American president, these scripture lessons cause us to pause and ask ourselves, do we acknowledge others as awesomely created by God? Do we encourage others, especially those different from us, to live out all they are created and called to be by God?
For so many years, racism and oppression in the U.S. – our sin on a national and a personal basis – did not allow people of color to live up to their creative potential as people wonderfully and awesomely made. We have made great strides in the past 40 years toward realizing Dr. King’s Beloved Community, where all people, no matter their skin color, can live in love and peace and harmony. But even in the face of a once-in-a-lifetime election, racism still grips us. Our institutional racism on a national and government level and the terrible acts of discrimination on personal levels treat our African-American, Latino, Native American and Asian brothers and sisters as “less than” rather than the more than creatures of a holy and living and creative God.
When we do not acknowledge our fellow humans as people created and known by God, or when we stand by idly and allow injustice and apathy to continue unchecked and unchallenged, we ourselves lose our identity, we fail to know and be known through Christ. Our challenge as people of racial, economic and social privilege then, is to ask ourselves, “Who am I called to be in God’s sight? Who is my neighbor called to be? How can we walk together, side by side, as creatures awesomely knit together by God in our mothers’ wombs, and be seen and known together by God?”
The Sermon Sunday School class last week studied these scripture lessons. Shirley Daddario, the class’s teacher, asked this question, “How do we allow for the unfolding of what God knit together within us and others, even those we will never meet?” Here are some of their answers:
· We Accept,
· we treasure God’s commandments,
· we are attentive to wisdom,
· we have a heart of understanding,
· we CRY out for insight,
· we seek God,
· we pray for all generations of our family
· we love.
As we go forth into this historic, monumental week, may we ask ourselves that same question. As people who are known by God on sight, as people who are called to be fearfully and wonderfully made, how will we allow God to unfold what God has knit together within us and others? And how will our responses in word, deed and action, allow others to know Christ through us? Amen.