This year I was thinking that I might give an award to the house in our neighborhood that keeps their Christmas lights up the longest. I’m taking great pleasure as I drive home in the evenings now, in noting which ones are still glowing in the darkness. After all Epiphany, these Sundays that run through January and right up to Ash Wednesday, mark the season of light in the Christian calendar. It’s the season that starts with that big star in the sky over Bethlehem guiding the Wisemen to the Christ Child. It’s the season in which we rejoice in Christ, the light of the world.
So if you’re feeling bad that you haven’t had time to pack all those lights away yet this year, just tell your neighbors that your crazy pastor said it’s OK. It’s our way of celebrating the fact that in Christ Jesus, the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has never overcome it.
But if you think that’s a bit too eccentric for your taste, light a few candles and remember that God’s light shines, bringing light to our hearts and to our world.
The season goes by all too quickly, to my way of thinking. The lectionary readings themselves get us into this fast forward mode. Just two weeks ago, Jesus was a baby in the manger receiving those royal visitors. By last week he was already a grown man being baptized by John the Baptist. And today we find him on the go, conversing with the Baptist, and then with Andrew and Simon Peter.
This is John’s version of the story of the call of the disciples. Next week, we’ll hear the more familiar version Matthew wrote of the call of the fishermen, but John tells it another way to help us see another meaning in it all.
After John the Baptist had baptized Jesus, he was standing with a couple of his own disciples. They see Jesus pass by and John exclaims: “Here is the Lamb of God!” John’s disciples hear John say this and leave to follow Jesus. Jesus sees them and turns to ask: “What are you looking for?” And they respond with another question. “Rabbi, teacher”, they call him, “where are you staying?” And Jesus says to them: “Come and see.”
Even for the Gospel of John, this is an odd conversation. Two questions. No real answer. Just a longing and then an invitation. Two would-be disciples. Two seekers, just like some of you here this morning. Two students wanting to learn more, to know more, to go deeper. Jesus engages them, asking: “what are you looking for?”, “what are you after?” He seems to know intuitively that their hearts were hungry, that they were wanting something more for their lives and he pushes them to get clear. “What are you after? What is it you want?”
These guys had been disciples of John the Baptist. They’re about to change teams. They’re gonna go with Jesus. But first, they’re pushing to know who he really is. Before making up their minds, they’re bold enough to ask. Who are you? Are you of God? Are you the teacher we should trust? Where are you staying, meaning—where is your heart, what are you fundamentally about? Where are you staying? And just as some of you may be asking this morning, in your heart of hearts, they, too, wondered: what are we getting into if we decide that we’ll come stay with you?
Remember, this is all part of the theology of John’s Gospel, his understanding of who Jesus is. At the very beginning of his Gospel, he wrote that in Jesus, God comes to stay with us. The Word became flesh and lived among us. That’s what incarnation is. That’s what we believe about Jesus. The Word made flesh. God with us. God living with us. God present with us here in this life. God abiding with us. God staying with us.
And so, you see, when these two ask Jesus “where are you staying?” they are picking up this theme. They’re trying to understand it. They’re trying to fathom this mind-boggling notion that God the Almighty, the Ancient of Days, the Holy of Holies, is, in Christ, coming to stay with us. “Where are you staying?” they ask him. “Are you really staying with us? Are you the answer to our prayer? Are you the one who is come to usher in the reign of God?”
Staying with something or someone long enough to really go deep is not an easy thing to talk about in this fast-paced world of ours. Ours is a world fixated on change and the latest whatever. The news the last couple weeks has been full of the latest cars at the Automakers Show and all the cool new gadgets at the Consumer Electronics Show. At one point I found myself thinking nostalgically of my grandfather’s old Chevy pick-up he used to drive me around in most every Saturday of my childhood. Whenever he wore one out hauling horses or cattle, he’d buy another one just like it so it was always the same. Never a question that he’d buy anything else. As a kid, there was something powerfully reassuring in the staying-power of that Chevy pick-up.
I recently heard a wonderful story about staying and what it means to stay and dig deep. It’s the story of a tailor’s apprentice in Philadelphia. I didn’t know that there were still apprentices in this world, young people who apprentice themselves to a master craftsperson for however long it takes to learn their trade.
27 year-old Joe Genuardi studied industrial design in college. After graduation, when most of his friends went to work at large firms like Ralph Lauren and DKNY, Joe was thinking of going to Italy to learn tailoring until he heard about Joseph Centofanti, an 89 year-old tailor who has been working at his shop right there in Philadelphia for over 50 years.
The old tailor has taught his apprentice how to make custom suits by hand, drafting each suit on life-size pieces of cardstock. Young Joe has learned how to calculate proportions using an L-shaped metal tailor’s square and to draft, cut and sew by hand. He hopes to have his own tailor shop one day, but he said: “It takes a long time to learn. And the more I learn, the more I know it takes longer. And I’m OK with that, because I love what I’m doing.”
To use the language of John’s Gospel, we might say that Joe decided to “stay” where the old, experienced tailor is staying, and to stay long enough to truly learn the craft and art of tailoring.
The disciples knew enough to know that to understand who Jesus was and what he was about, they would have to stay where he was staying. They would have to dig deep into his true identity and learn his craft, if you will, learn all the ins and outs of his ministry and mission. Jesus draws them in. “Come and see” he says. And the Scripture tells us that indeed, they came and saw where he was staying, and they stayed with him that day. And they began to learn how much more there was to learn and how it would transform their lives.
It’s all about staying, you see: God staying with us in Christ, us staying with God through Christ, us staying with God’s people in the name of Christ. And the way we know that’s what‘s happening is by what we see going on in Christ Jesus, the light of the world.
Many of you are familiar with the acronym made popular in the 90’s: WWJD—What Would Jesus Do? What you may not know is that it comes from an old novel, written in the late 1890’s by the Rev. Charles M. Sheldon, a pastor in Topeka, Kansas. Entitled In His Steps, Sheldon’s novel launched what came to be called the “Social Gospel movement” in America. Rather than focusing on the kinds of personal moral quandaries the WWJD slogan refers to today, Sheldon’s concern was for the social and economic disparities of his day, and the hardship they incurred on so many.
In His Steps tells the story of a fictional American city transformed by a congregation whose pastor challenges the members to agree for a year to ask themselves in every situation: “what would Jesus do?” For us now, from our vantage point, it’s fascinating to see that then, at the end of the 19th century, as the novel tells it, under the influence of that question, the following kinds of things happen: employers provide education and better working conditions for their employees, earnest young Christians rescue women from lives of prostitution and homelessness, and the city’s political bosses begin to think about the community’s good rather than personal profit. People stop abusing African Americans. The whole city is transformed as all this good will is appreciated and returned in kind, and the poor, the homeless, the last and the least become productive and dignified members of the community.
The issues are not really so different today, only bigger and global. And still, as disciples, as we stay with Jesus, as we walk where he walks and hear what he hears and feel what he feels, as we see the world through the light of his light, we, too, begin to become a part of his ministry and mission, living out the kingdom of God. As we stay with him, as we apprentice ourselves to him, what he does shapes more and more what we do.
If you’ve begun now to ask yourself how your life and priorities could be more shaped by asking “what would Jesus do?”, you might also be asking yourself how to stay with Jesus a bit more than you do. How do I stay with Jesus, long enough, far enough, to let his life shape my life?
There are many ways to stay with Jesus. One is through prayer, including the kind of walking prayer that people experience while walking the labyrinth. Last Sunday when Mary Garbesi was introducing it to one of our Sunday School classes, a little boy walked it for the first time and later said: “I felt God at the center.” That little boy has discovered for his life a new way to “stay with Jesus.”
Another way to stay with Jesus is through involvement and service. Last Monday night, about 25 of us turned out at the meeting of the Culver City City Council to support Upward Bound House’s new emergency shelter facility in Culver City. You came and you spoke up for the people Jesus himself would have staying with, among them the 8000 homeless children who tonight, like every night, will be sleeping in conditions not fit for human habitation right here in Los Angeles County. Our witness and our service as Christian disciples is another way of “staying with Jesus.”
Every year about this time, I re-read Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” as pertinent and prophetic each year as it was when written almost 45 years ago. “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” And he pleaded with the church, his beloved church, not to be content with being a “tail-light behind other community agencies” but rather to be a “headlight” pointing the way to liberty and justice for all.
At the beginning of this New Year, I invite you to come and stay with Jesus this year--through prayer and service, through witness and study, through fellowship and giving. Come and see God in Christ, the Lamb of God, sharing the life and suffering of the world. Come and see the world in the light of Christ and his mission. Come and see God here, a people staying with Jesus, a people faithful and bold, committed to the glory and the righteousness of God’s kingdom on earth as in heaven.
Where is Jesus staying? Come and see.
Notes:
“Tailor’s Apprenctice Hones Craft in Pennsylvania Shop” on NPR All Things Considered, Jan. 17, 2008.
In His Steps described in Robin W. Lovin’s Reinhold Niebuhr, Abingdon, 2007.
©Patricia Farris, 2008. Permission is given for brief quotation with attribution.
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"Where Would Jesus Stay"