This is the sermon delivered remotely by Rev. Don Van Antwerpen to the congregation of Monocacy Valley Church on Sunday, January 14, 2024, drawing from 1 Samuel 3:1-10 and John 1:43-51.
Let’s start by addressing the elephant in the room; this is really weird, isn’t it? It’s ok! I’ve done this a number of times now and, if I’m being honest, it’s always at least a little bit weird, as much for me as it is for you all. Remote preaching is a very new thing, and it’s just not the same - for any of us - as having a pastor right there in person, and it’s ok for us to admit that.
When you’re there in person with each other, you can feel the energy of the preacher so much easier. And the reverse is true as well; as a pastor, being there in person makes it so much easier to tell just who is, and who isn’t, listening to the sermon!
Oh, a lot of pastors out there will deny it of course, but we’re human; we spend a lot of time on these sermons, and we like to know if you’re actually listening to us or not! Listening is important to us pastors, and not just because our egos get bruised when you fall asleep mid-sermon. It’s important to us because what we’re trying to do, in our own limited way, is to share with you some small fragment of what we hear when we try to listen to God.
We tend to think listening is something easy though, don’t we? Even when it comes to God, we imagine that listening is something simple, something passive; something that doesn’t actually ask all that much of us. There’s a reason why our go-to verse when talking about listening to God is 1 Samuel 3:1-10, where God calls Samuel while he’s still a young boy living in the temple.
Listen to this. 1 Samuel 3:1-10 says,
Now the boy Samuel was ministering to the LORD under Eli. The word of the LORD was rare in those days; visions were not widespread. At that time Eli, whose eyesight had begun to grow dim so that he could not see, was lying down in his room; the lamp of God had not yet gone out, and Samuel was lying down in the temple of the LORD, where the ark of God was. Then the LORD called, "Samuel! Samuel!" and he said, "Here I am!" and ran to Eli, and said, "Here I am, for you called me." But he said, "I did not call; lie down again." So he went and lay down. The LORD called again, "Samuel!" Samuel got up and went to Eli, and said, "Here I am, for you called me." But he said, "I did not call, my son; lie down again." Now Samuel did not yet know the LORD, and the word of the LORD had not yet been revealed to him. The LORD called Samuel again, a third time. And he got up and went to Eli, and said, "Here I am, for you called me." Then Eli perceived that the LORD was calling the boy. Therefore Eli said to Samuel, "Go, lie down; and if he calls you, you shall say, 'Speak, LORD, for your servant is listening.'" So Samuel went and lay down in his place. Now the LORD came and stood there, calling as before, "Samuel! Samuel!" And Samuel said, "Speak, for your servant is listening."
So I’m pretty sure we all know this one, right? Most of us were given this verse, at one point in our lives or another, as our model for understanding just how God speaks to us. We hear this story and we come away with an image of God’s voice as a quiet whisper coming in the dark of the night, when no one but us can hear.
Of course we tend to stop the story right there, choosing to end things with the wide-eyed wonder of Samuel, eagerly waiting for that voice to call out in the darkness one more time. And when it does, he answers back to the Lord, full of optimism, saying "Speak, for your servant is listening.”
Seems like a good stopping point, doesn’t it? Nice, hopeful and inspiring; and it works, provided we don’t wander down the page just a bit and see what’s lying in wait, ready to break that optimism like a toddler with a kit-kat bar.
Because what happens next is that God starts speaking, and after three straight verses of God delivering a very blunt warning of impending doom we arrive at verse 15, and see just how Samuel was affected by his decision to listen:
"Samuel lay there until morning; then he opened the doors of the house of the Lord. Samuel was afraid to tell the vision to Eli."
Samuel was afraid.
Sure, Samuel started from “Speak, for your servant is listening,” but that was the easy part. Saying you’re going to listen is one thing, but once he actually started doing it he heard things. God told Samuel exactly what was coming for the house of Eli - the temple household in which Samuel had been raised since he was little more than an infant, his whole life and the closest thing he had to a family - and it wasn’t good news, because everything he knew and loved was standing in opposition to what God wanted.
We imagine that Samuel’s act of faith was choosing to listen to that still, small voice in the night, but the real act of faith came in the long dark hours of the night, after that voice had finished talking, when Samuel had to wrestle with the threat that God’s word posed to his safe and comfortable life.
Listening to God isn’t simple or passive. Listening to God is a hostile act; it changes us, threatens us, offends us. The word of God comes to us with painful truths, truths that put an incredibly uncomfortable spotlight on our failings and imperfections. It tells us things that we do not want to hear. Listening to God means that we have to face that, to be prepared to hear the terrifying and necessary truth that change is coming, and that we cannot stay comfortable where we are.
Of course, if you're anything like me, you might be a little bit completely terrified at this prospect. Change is terrifying after all, so when the prophetic voice of God in the Old Testament gets a bit too intense for us, we tend to skip ahead a bit, hoping that we might find something a bit easier to deal with with the “love your neighbor” guy instead.
Today, that frantic page-flipping brings us to the gospel of John, and the calling of Nathaniel in chapter 1, verses 43-51.
Here’s what happened:
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 him 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 him, "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 Son of God! You are the King 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." And he said to him, "Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man."
Once again, we immediately have that instinct to focus on the easy part of the story, don’t we? We love to latch onto this moment where Nathanael glowingly knowledges Jesus as King, but skip over all the uncomfortable work that had to happen in order to get there.
The story doesn’t start with glory, after all. It starts with Nathanael sitting under a fig tree, waiting for his buddy Philip to come by for a bit of light conversation and some casual bigotry.
Wow…yeah, ok. That’s a really uncomfortable place to start, but it’s here, so let’s not sugarcoat it. Nathanael is something of a bigot. He really doesn’t like Nazarenes, at all, and he’s not afraid to say it. And he wasn’t alone either! In those days, Galilee was basically the middle of nowhere, and while there were one or two more metropolitan areas in Galilee - like the capitol at Sepphoris or the port city of Bethsaida (where this story takes place) - the rest of the region was basically a backwater, podunk, nothing of a place full of livestock and hicks.
And in a world where the glamor and status of the Greeks and the Romans dominated the social world, you did not want to come across as a hick!
So while all the world looked down on Galilee as being that place way out in the sticks from which nothing good ever comes, Galileans like Nathanael needed some way to avoid finding themselves at the bottom of the social pecking order. So he did what a lot of people do in situations like that; he picked the smallest, most isolated Galilean town he could think of - a tiny village of a hundred or so people, mostly farmers and craftsmen, home to immigrant families, widows, and all manner of underprivileged - and made fun of them instead.
"Can anything good come out of Nazareth?"
The thing about bigotry is that it doesn't just spring up out of nowhere. Bigotry is reactive, coming out from our fears, our insecurities, or even from our embarrassments, or the threat of potential failure. In Nathanael's case, his immediate, prejudicial reaction to Jesus being a Nazarene came from fear. He was afraid of being looked down on, afraid of being excluded, so he did what a lot of us do and found some other group he could point to so all that social pressure wouldn’t land on him.
You see, social status is something we are all very afraid of losing. Sure, maybe we don't let our fears rise to the level of outright racism or bigotries, but how often have we stepped back from connecting with someone because of how society saw them? How many times have made decisions about what friends to bring home to our family, what music we listen to around certain people, what clothes to wear in public, or even what churches to attend all because we didn't want people to think we were "one of those people"?
How many times in our lives have we been just as afraid of losing our safe and secure place in society as Samuel must have been afraid of losing his home within the house of Eli Priest.
But when Christ comes on the scene, when God speaks to us, it cuts right to the heart of our fears, making it impossible for us to hide our sin and brokenness.
"When Jesus saw Nathanael coming toward him, he said of him, "Here is truly an Israelite in whom there is no deceit!"
Jesus knew full well exactly what Nathanael had just said, so he’s not paying him a compliment; he’s calling Nathanael out on his bigotry, starting their interaction by cutting right to the heart of all his fears, worries, and insecurities and giving him the same revelation that God gave Samuel all those years ago; listening to God changes you.
Listening to God is hard work; it forces us to tear down all the constructs and justifications we have built around us to convince ourselves that our fears are rational. It forces us to abandon those places in our lives where we have taken shelter from the fearful risks of a good and righteous life.
When we truly listen to God, we see the fullness of ourselves, warts and all, and that long, steep path we all must walk from the broken and imperfect places where we are, to that just and righteous mountaintop from which shines the loving glory of our Creator.
It’s hard though, to make that choice; to choose to listen. To walk where Jesus walks, to follow in Christ’s footsteps; this is a difficult way to walk, and when hear that voice calling us to walk the walk the last thing any of us want to do is stand up proudly, and boldly trade our places of comfort and security for the dusty desert road from Galilee to the cross.
Every one of us, from prophets to presidents to paupers, want nothing more than just to sit under our own vine and fig tree, where no one can make us afraid (Micah 4:4/Washington). It's no coincidence that this is exactly where Nathanael was when Philip rocked up with a calling from the Lord, after all. It's so easy to just…stay put, to stay comfortably sat under our fig trees, to stay warm and comfortable in our beds and never go looking for that voice, never answer the call.
Listening brings change, and change hurts. So if we just…don’t listen…maybe things don’t have to change, right?
I wish that was an option, I really do. But the truth is that God isn’t calling to offer us the choice between embracing change for God or staying comfortable being who and where we are.
God is warning us that change is already at hand.
If we look back to Samuel, we don’t see God asking Samuel to stand and enact judgement upon the house of Eli; God tells Samuel that the judgement has already been made.
Change is coming, and the Lord is calling us to move with God.
Philip wasn't sent to tell Nathanael to prepare Galilee to receive Christ Jesus, and he wasn't called to journey out in search of Christ. He was told to make ready, because Christ had already come to town, and was close enough to hear him making wisecracks under his fig tree..
Change has already come. It is here, now, in this place. Today.
I know that change can seem scary, even threatening. It requires to confront ourselves, to surrender our comfortable positions and our easy prejudices; it requires us to follow people we might have scorned in judgement from our places of privilege and comfort, to listen to voices we never would have considered. It requires us to see all those who we never allowed ourselves to see, but who Christ Jesus has never lost sight of.
But it’s here; right now, right here in this very room today. We wouldn't be sharing the Word with each other from around the world if the usual ways of doing things worked perfectly after all!
Change is here.
This is why its important for us to listen; not because we need to be inspired, not because we need to be comforted in the spaces we are, not because everything’s fine and God just wants to congratulate us on our firm and unyielding practice of faith, or because listening will somehow be vaguely spiritually fulfilling.
It’s important for us to listen because God is trying to tell us something.
God is trying to tell us that where we are, like the house of Eli, isn’t good. It may be comfortable, but it isn’t nearly as safe as we think it is. Change is here because what’s actually coming over the horizon is judgement, and if we spend our time being afraid of change we’ll miss that warning to move out of the way.
If we stay stuck where we are, hanging out under our fig tree with a terminal case of listener's block, unable to hear the voice of love calling out to us, asking us to stand up, to get out of bed and listen!
So come and see, because Christ Jesus isn't here to sit under our fig trees with us in comfort. But if we follow Jesus, we will see far greater things than these, far greater things than the church we knew, far greater things than the church has ever been before. We'll see just what good can come out of Nazareth, because it's the same thing that will come out of us if we allow it; a great outpouring of love into our community, justice that flows down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. It's the hungry being fed, the poor being lifted up, the voiceless being heard, the oppressed being made whole again, the prisoner being set free, and the year of the Lord's favor being declared in our church, in our community, and in our world.
I don't know about you, but that sounds like something worth listening to!
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