Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
Sunday January 15, 2022
Scripture Reading: John 1:29-42
“What are you looking for?”
I remember one time when I was living in Tanzania, I was trying to find a house in the village 5km from the hospital to do a home visit. I have very vague instructions – we live behind Daktari’s store – but in a place with no street names or house numbers, I wasn’t having any luck. So I went in to Daktari’s store to ask for help. “What are you looking for?” he asked. When I said whose house I was looking for, he sent his assistant with me to take me right to the house.
“What are you looking for?”
I suspect that I’m not the only fan of Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache books; and like many of her readers, I wish that the village of Three Pines was a real place. In the world of the books, this is a village that is not found on any map, and people usually stumble across it by accident. It is a village of good friends and good food. Here is one of her descriptions of the village from the book A World of Curiosities: “Three Pines was a safe place, they’d declared. Not safe from hurt or pain. Not safe from illness or death. What the village in the valley offered was a place to heal. It offered company and companionship, in life and at the end of life. It offered a surefire cure for loneliness.”
“What are you looking for?”
There have been times in my life when I haven’t been able to name or describe the thing that I was looking for. I think of the time in my late teens and early twenties when I was skirting on the edges of faith. I wasn’t comfortable with where my life was at in that moment. I was lonely. I was feeling overwhelmed. I didn’t really have a sense of purpose or direction in my life. If someone had come up to me and asked me, “What are you looking for?” I probably wouldn’t have been able to answer… and maybe would have burst in to tears with the force and the implications of that question.
And so I ask, “What are YOU looking for?”
These are the very first words of Jesus in the gospel of John; and one trick that all four of the gospel writers use is putting extra significance on the first public words of Jesus. These first public words of Jesus, even more than the opening words of the gospel itself, give us insight into what Jesus’s focus is going to be through the whole gospel story. (And if you want to dig into Jesus’s first words in the gospel of Matthew, come back next week!)
Here, in John’s gospel, Jesus’s first words are, “What are you looking for?” followed almost immediately by “Come and see!” Jesus, in John’s gospel, is most concerned with inviting people into relationship with him – inviting people to encounter God, and then transforming them into disciples, into people who follow the way of Jesus and live God’s love in the world.
Even when I wasn’t able to articulate what I was looking for, the invitation to come and see was still there for me. And when I came, and when I encountered the overwhelming love of God – that was when I was able to articulate what I was looking for, what I was longing for – I was longing to know that I was loved, not for anything I had done or for anything that I hadn’t done, but simply because I was me. And that is what I found when I answered the invitation to come and see.
And that invitation is for all of us. Even when you aren’t able to name your deepest longings, the invitation to come to Jesus and see is there for you. The invitation is there to seek the answers even when you don’t know what the question is. The invitation is there to rest in God’s love and to allow yourself to be transformed by this love.
Because God’s love is transforming – God’s love meets us where we are, but doesn’t leave us where we are. God’s love transforms us into the Body of Christ – we are literally made into new people by God’s love so that we can continue the work of Christ.
We start to see this at the end of the reading we heard today – Jesus invites Andrew to come and see, then Andrew became a follower, a disciple of Jesus. Then Jesus himself didn’t need to invite Simon Peter – the invitation came from Andrew, acting as Christ, to come and see who he had found.
If we were to read beyond the passage we heard today, we would see this same pattern again – Jesus calls Philip to follow, then Philp invites Nathanael to “Come and see.”
And so I ask you again, “What are you looking for?” What are the deepest longings of your heart? What is it that you are seeking – that thing that is so important, so special, so sacred that you are maybe afraid to put it in to words?
And even if you aren’t able to put words to your longing, I invite you to “come and see.” Come and see the face of Christ, as reflected by this community. Come and know that you are beloved – know that you are deeply, deeply loved by God and by this community. Come and rest in this love, for you are a beautiful, beloved Child of God. And come and be transformed by this love – transformed into the image of Christ – transformed, not into someone different, but to be even more yourself, to be who God created you to be.
And when you are there, resting in Love, letting God’s love wash over you and flow through you, then it is our turn to be the ones inviting – it is our turn to be like Andrew and like Philip, inviting the people around us, the people in our lives, to come and see.
One of my favourite songs by U2 is “Window in the Skies,” and the chorus goes, “Oh, can’t you see what love has done? What it’s doing to me?”
We are transformed by love, and this transformation can be visible to the world around us. “Oh, can’t you see what love has done and is doing to me? Come and see what this love can do for you!”
Tero Karppinen on flickr
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