Come, Follow Me; A Sermon for the Second Sunday after the Epiphany

John 1:43-51

43 The next day Jesus decided to go to Galilee. He found Philip and said to him, ‘Follow me.’ ⁴⁴Now Philip was from Bethsaida, the city of Andrew and Peter. ⁴⁵Philip 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.’ ⁴⁶Nathanael said to him, ‘Can anything good come out of Nazareth?’ Philip said to him, ‘Come and see.’ ⁴⁷When Jesus saw Nathanael coming towards him, he said of him, ‘Here is truly an Israelite in whom there is no deceit!’ ⁴⁸Nathanael asked him, ‘Where did you come to know me?’ Jesus answered, ‘I saw you under the fig tree before Philip called you.’ ⁴⁹Nathanael replied, ‘Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!’ ⁵⁰Jesus answered, ‘Do you believe because I told you that I saw you under the fig tree? You will see greater things than these.’ ⁵¹And 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.’

Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart
   be acceptable to you,
   O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.

It was late in high school, on a Fall retreat with my youth group, that I first had the sense that God was calling me. I didn’t know what that meant at the time, and the only thing I was really interested in was music, so when I didn’t get a lot of support or encouragement regarding that call, I just pursued the one thing I knew.

I assumed that being called meant that God was asking me to stand where I stand now, barking at you or boring you to sleep from behind the pulpit.

But I think that from our readings from 1 Samuel and the Gospel of John today, we might gain a slightly broader sense of the nature of God’s calling to us.

Samuel is a young boy serving under a very old Eli. What kind of training in the Temple he has had, I don’t know. But the hour is getting late, and he is lying down in the Temple, near but probably not in the Holy of Holies, when he hears a voice:

Samuel! Samuel!

He jumps up and runs to Eli. “Here I am!” He thinks he’s caught snoozing, or he knows that he’d better come immediately when Eli calls. “Here I am! You called me.”

Yes, here you are. And no, I didn’t. Go lie down again.

Oh. Um.

That’s weird. He heard somebody. He knows it. Somebody called his name. So Samuel lies down again, his attention piqued just a bit. He’s probably wondering if he imagined that voice, but it sounded so real, just like,

Samuel!

Oh.

So he gets up again. And our history doesn’t mention him running this time. He is becoming more cautious, more suspicious that something extraordinary is happening. He comes to Eli again, and says in his most collected young tone:

Here I am, because you called me.

No, I did not, my son. Go lie down again.

And the voice calls Samuel a third time. And Samuel is becoming aware that something odd is happening, but he doesn’t know what. But Eli, who has a few decades on the boy, and has spent his life in close proximity to the Holy One, discerns exactly what’s happening.

And I think that helps us understand a certain misconception of calling. The popular way that calling is discussed is very personal, very intimate. In fact, I even began today by using that language. “God called me.”

What we tend to ignore or forget is that not everyone is open enough to discern God calling them. Sometimes the community of those closest to us, or even our expanded community, is much better able to see the ways that God is gifting us for ministry.

I was spending my Summers working at Buffalo Mountain Camp while I was working on my undergraduate degree in music, and a few years into my time there, one of our Ministers in Residence approached me and observed that God was gifting me for pulpit ministry.

Now, by that time, I had put away any thought of doing any such thing. I knew I didn’t have the patience to deal with school administrations’ degrading of music programs, so I couldn’t teach. I thought I’d pursue performance because I really enjoyed it, but I knew that the field was extremely tight and cutthroat, so I was giving serious thought to working in church music as my fallback.

What I wasn’t doing was pursuing pulpit ministry. And to hear someone else point me in that direction rather threw me off balance.

And that wasn’t the last time it happened.

Glen Phillips puts it this way: Sometimes, when you get so close to something that big, you can’t see anything at all.

Samuel went back, a young boy who did not yet know God, and answered the voice when it called again. And God gave him a word that only someone who has not yet learned to fear would be willing to repeat.

So God gifted Samuel with courage.

That is why many of our more biting prophets are young, I think: they haven’t developed the fear of recompense that we learn as we age. Learning to hold your tongue in the face of injustice and hatred isn’t wisdom; it’s just fear.

We celebrate tomorrow a man who wasn’t afraid, a man who was called of God as many other people were, but unlike the many, chose to hear and respond boldly. Martin Luther King, Jr., heard the voice that Samuel heard and shared that voice with all the world.

He heard the voice that Philip heard in Galilee, and like Philip, he knew exactly who was calling, and he gathered those around him, and his enthusiasm and his spirit were infectious. Philip found Nathanael, who was hesitant and doubtful, but who came anyway and was convinced.

King shared his enthusiasm and still calls people today to justice, to mercy, to understanding, to courage, to love.

God called Martin Luther King, Jr., to the pulpit and beyond. King reminds us that we are all, like Philip and Nathanael, called to follow.

What we know, as Christians, is that each of us is called. That is the sign of our baptism: we are called to follow, to use the gifts God has given us. Not just to live good lives, but to live lives that reach out to each other, with courage, with boldness; knowing, confident in the fact that God will pour out the Holy Spirit through us.

We are a priesthood of all believers. Each one of us is called in every single moment of our lives, and in every single moment we choose to listen or not to, to say, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening,” or to ignore that voice that will never stop speaking to us.

The calling is incessant. The choice to listen and respond is yours. What will you do?

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.