Nathanael, Jesus, pumpkins, and the Gospel According to Randy Bachman

2nd Sunday after Epiphany, Year B
Lectionary Readings: 1 Samuel 3:1-10(11-20)   Psalm 139:1-5, 12-17   1 Corinthians 6:12-20
John 1:43-51


This morning I'm going to talk about Nathanael and Jesus,

and about Moses and God, the blue people from Avatar, and Bachman-Turner Overdrive.

And pumpkins.

The pumpkins are very important.

Let's start with the Gospel. Jesus decides to go to Galilee and he finds Philip and calls him to follow. Then Philip runs off to get Nathanael, who is not as enthusiastic about it. But as he's walking up, Jesus says "Here is an Israelite in whom there is no deceit" And Nathanael says "How do you know me?" Jesus says he saw Nathanael under the fig tree before Philip called him.
We don't know what that's about, but Nathanael does, and the fact that Jesus also knows convinces him that Jesus is the real deal; he knows what no one else but God would know. For him, it wasn't so much that seeing was believing - it was more being seen.

My nephew Jackson is a year and a half, and before bedtime, he likes somebody to read to him. For a while, his favorite book was God Knows All About Me by Kate Toms,

which is basically Psalm 139 for toddlers.

"From my fingers to my toes,
from my knees to my nose,
God knows all about me!"

There have been profound ways I've learned that God knows all about me, but then there are also little things that seem so insignificant that I never imagined he would care - and he knows those things too. Here's where the pumpkins come in.

I moved here from Beaumont at the very end of August; in early October, I went back to perform a wedding for one of my classmates from Lamar University. After the wedding, as I was driving back up here that Sunday night, I pulled into a gas station and suddenly noticed that there were pumpkins everywhere. I blinked a few times and then started laughing out loud. Why was that so funny? Let me give you the back story:

A couple of weeks before, I had visited St. Alban's in Arlington, where I met their deacon and their rector, who invited me to a meeting about campus ministry at UTA, inexplicably. I wasn't involved at UTA - I wasn't involved with St. Alban's - I wasn't even officially in the diocese yet - but for some reason, I was at this meeting, and they were talking about an idea for a pumpkin carving event, and for some reason, I opened my mouth and offered to bring pumpkins. As soon as I said it, I thought, "Why did I do that? Where am I going to find a bunch of pumpkins?"

The rest of the week, I was getting ready for the wedding, talking with Fr. Vernon (since I had just visited St. Stephen's for the 2nd time), and making plans to meet up with friends in Beaumont. And I would occasionally think about the pumpkins. I figured I could go to the grocery store, but I have been gradually getting more interested in trying to buy food grown locally when I can. I thought maybe I could go online and try to find someplace that sold local produce, but looking for pumpkins seemed kind of trivial. I didn't want to get sidetracked. I would worry about it after the wedding.

The wedding Saturday was great - so much fun - and Sunday I got to see a lot of good friends, had lunch with one of my deacon buddies. Then I started back. The drive was fine, but after about the fourth hour, I figured I should stop soon for gas. It was already dark. I was kind of in the middle of nowhere, but after a few miles, I could see some lights ahead, so I took the exit - the first building I came to was lit up with zig-zaggy neon lights in different colors, and I thought "this is probably not a gas station..." I was about to drive on past and get back on the highway when I looked left and saw a gas station on the other side of the highway, so I took the bridge over to it.
I was pulling in the driveway when it occurred to me that there were pumpkins stacked EVERYWHERE.


I blinked a few times and looked closely at the pumps; they said "Cooper Farms" - maybe this wasn't a gas station, either. I pulled up to a pump. Sure enough, you could get gas there.
You could also get pumpkins - LOTS of pumpkins.
Turns out, this was a creative marketing idea the farm had come up with: a gas station/point-of-sale for the produce. And the farm was just a few miles away. I laughed - I hadn't even been thinking about the pumpkins. Here they were, problem solved. I went inside and paid for my gas, along with a bunch of pumpkins. One of the guys who works on the farm helped me cram them in my trunk and on the floor of the back seat. Then I got in the car, put on my seatbelt, and started laughing - I laughed for the next few miles, and off and on the rest of the way home.

God KNEW me: he knew I wanted to buy a bunch of pumpkins, he knew I needed gas, and he knew where I could find both of those things right then, in the middle of nowhere, on a Sunday night. I hadn't asked him to help me with any of that; it wouldn't have occurred to me that such a solution even existed. And he didn't tell me; he just took me there, pulled his hands away from my eyes and said "Surprise!" and sat there with a grin on his face. Such a random thing - why would God bother helping me find pumpkins? Why would he care about that? And he seemed to smile at me and say, "Why wouldn't I?"

To God, all hearts are open, all desires known, and from him no secrets are hid

Lord, you have searched me out and known me: you know my sitting down and my rising up; you discern my thoughts from afar... my body was not hidden from you, while I was being made in secret and woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes beheld my limbs, yet unfinished in the womb...

God knows all about me

If you have seen the movie Avatar,
What do the blue people say when they greet each other?

"I see you"
And what does it mean?
It means "I know you - I see who you are at the deepest level."

This greeting comes from isiZulu:

Sawubona - I see you
Yebo sawubona - yes, I see you, too

Another response in some places is: Ngikhona - I am here

It's similar to what people say in the Bible when God starts talking to them. They say "hineyni" and what it means is "Behold me" which is sort of like saying "look at me" or "see me" and it's usually translated into English as "Here I am."

It's how Moses responds to God speaking to him from the burning bush.
It's Isaiah's response to God's question "Whom shall we send, and who will go for us?" "Here I am, send me"
It's Mary responding to the annunciation, when the angel Gabriel told her the news about Jesus "Here am I, the servant of the Lord..."
And in our Old Testament reading for today - little Samuel hears someone calling his name, and his first response, even though he didn't know who he was responding to, was "Here I am, for you called me"

Which brings us back to Nathanael.
Jesus calls Philip, and Philip calls Nathanael to "come and see" what he's found.
as Nathanael's walking up, Jesus says "Here is truly an Israelite in whom there is no deceit" and Nathanael isn't sure what to make of that. "Where did you get to know me?"
Jesus tells him "I saw you under the fig tree before Philip called you."
Whatever it was Jesus was refering to about the fig tree, Nathanael knew, and that convinced him that Jesus knew him at the deepest level. Jesus said to Nathanael, "I see you," and Nathanael is suddenly able to respond to Jesus, "I see you, too."
In a 180-degree turn from his earlier attitude of "Can anything good come from Nazareth?" Nathanael says "Rabbi! You are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!"

The next time God says, "I see you..."  try to respond like Moses, Isaiah, Samuel, and Mary - and say "Here I am"
Or you can respond like Nathanael and say, "Yes, I see you, too"

Which brings me finally to the Gospel according to Randy Bachman and a great interpretation of what Jesus said to Nathanael afterwards. "Do you believe because I told you I saw you under the fig tree? You will see greater things than these...."

In other words

Bbbaby - You ain't seen nothin' yet!

Nicodemus - faith and reason

Year A, Lent 2
Readings: Genesis 12:1-4a Romans 4:1-5, 13-17 John 3:1-17 Psalm 121


The story of Nicodemus is fascinating to me. I think it describes what often happens when a logical, analytical mind encounters spiritual truth.
Nicodemus is trying to understand who Jesus is and where his power is coming from - because he figures it has to be from God, but how does that work, exactly?
He's sincere - he really wants to understand, "What is this relationship between body and soul? - between God and man?" but when Jesus answers him, Nicodemus finds the reply very confusing.
Jesus had said that, to see the kingdom of God, everyone needed to be 'born from above,' but that didn't make sense to Nicodemus. "How can anyone be born after having grown old?"
Jesus tells him. "What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit..."
That still didn't clarify it totally for Nicodemus, because his next comment is, "How can these things be?"
I find this conversation encouraging, because I think Nicodemus is an intelligent person, so if he's confused, I feel reassured that, when I'm confused about faith questions, it's not that I'm not smart enough, it's just that the answers really are hard to understand.
I also find it encouraging that, when Nicodemus says he's confused, Jesus works harder at explaining it. I'm grateful for people who have the courage and honesty to say when they don't understand something, even if it makes the teacher irritated, because usually then the teacher will say it again more clearly and maybe use some examples, and the result is that everybody understands better. Think how many people have come to understand God's purpose in sending Jesus to save humanity - which is what our faith hangs on - from the single verse of John 3:16 - part of Jesus' further clarification to Nicodemus. It's such a clear explanation. When I was little, we memorized it in Sunday school. You probably know it, too.
"For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life."
We can partly thank Nicodemus for that excellent summary because he asked the question.
Asking questions is, I think, an important foundation of scientific inquiry, and we've come up in a scientific, questioning age. Everything is being and has been questioned and examined, turned inside out, defined and re-defined - like we were trying to chart and re-map in specific details all the vagueness of the past, to take away the element of mystery that wrapped around everything in the medieval period. We don't want 'hocus pocus'; we want reality - something solid and definite to believe in.
Here's an interesting little piece of linguistic information about that word 'hocus pocus,' the way we talk about words or rituals that seem silly and pointless. "Hocus pocus...abbra cadabra, and Viola! Here's a bunny!"
But it's fake; it's a trick to make you think the magician has powers, but really he doesn't. He just knows how to make you look the other way at the right time.
During the Protestant Reformation, people were beginning to question what the rituals in church were all about, really. The service was all in Latin, and so people didn't know what was being said and mostly didn't understand what was being done, but at some point, the priest would say a particular thing, a bell would ring, and everyone was supposed to look, because the priest would hold up the bread, and that was how you received communion - that's how you received grace. The people who attended the service didn't actually take communion by eating the bread or drinking the wine; they received it by seeing it. So, if you weren't paying attention then, you could miss the main part of the service and seemingly it wouldn't do you any good. But some people started to wonder whether any of those things, which they didn't understand, were actually doing them any good anyway.
People had lost track of what all those things meant that the priest was doing and saying, and they started to question whether those things had any meaning at all. The words sounded like gibberish. When the priest held up the bread, he said (in Latin) "Hoc est corpus meum" - "This is my body." But most people didn't know Latin. So it's not suprising, really that when the priest said "Hoc est corpus meum" - and maybe the bells would drown out the 'meum' part, leaving just "Hoc est corpus..", it's understandible that what people heard was 'Hocus pocus,' - - and that came to have a meaning of its own related to how they felt about what they saw and heard in church. Maybe all these rituals and unintelligible words don't really have a meaning. It's just 'hocus pocus...'
People became dissatisfied with accepting things they didn't understand; they wanted reasons and answers.
Religion has reacted in different ways to this cultural shift of wanting to question everything - in many instances defensively, making it wrong to question issues of faith, which put a lot of people in the predicament of feeling they had to choose between thinking or believing. Some people were executed because of dilemmas like this. And some fought back, carrying out executions of their own and breaking all the things that smacked of mystery and 'hocus pocus' to get back to a 'true religion' based on reason and not meaningless movements and unintelligible words. But just because someone doesn't know the meaning or understand the words doesn't mean they don't have meaning - we have to be careful to balance our capacity for reason and desire for explanations with respect for what we don't understand.
As Fr. John and Fr. Jack discussed in the Lenten series class Wednesday night, "faith vs. reason" is a false dichotomy - that's just not how it is - God made us with the ability to reason. It's only right that we should use it - and the faithful use of gifts God gave us will not lead us away from God but toward God, even if the path seems to wind around.
And it has wound around quite a bit - even in the past 10-20 years, not to mention the past 100. Our culture has changed a lot in this questioning and exploration. One thing I think we're learning from this process is that we're not likely to ever understand it all. For every new thing we've learned this century, we've discovered whole areas of things we never dreamed about before - and each new thing is more beautiful, and complicated and amazing than we imagined. Remember what whole new worlds, literally, were opened up to our imaginations by the invention of the telescope and the microscope, for example, and more recently with quantum physics, genetics, and multi-dimensional math.
As we look for answers to our questions about life and the world, as we try to understand, God shows us new things, and each thing we understand is more amazing than we had imagined before... until I think eventually, more than answers to our questions about life and the world, we begin to want to know the God who made this world and gave us life.
In our class Wednesday night, talking about how the world began and why we're here, we had a big discussion about this relationship between faith and science. George Kondos made a comment about Einstein saying that science was trying to understand the mind of God. Einstein represents to many people the pinnacle of modern scientific thought - one of the most brilliant minds of all time - and his conclusion is that science is essentially a search to know God.
Isn't that really theology?
I love theology, and I think it's the highest of all fields to study, but I think even that is not where the journey of faith is leading. One of the most brilliant theologians of all time - St. Thomas Aquinas - after he had written tomes of material constituting a complex and beautiful systematic theology, one day completely stopped writing. Because, he said, something had happened while he was celebrating the Eucharist one day, and whatever that experience was, it made everything he ever wrote seem like 'so much straw.' Compared to what he'd been trying to describe in his theological writings, the reality was so much more amazing - so the thing to do then was worship, not write about it.
Our ability to reason and our desire to understand may be things God created in us, but they're tools, things to help us get to where we understand enough to worship, and at that point, the rest of it, as amazing and complicated and beautiful as it is, won't even be able to hold a candle to the one who made it. This may partly explain the stories why some people who meet Jesus just stop whatever they were doing to follow Him - even though not everybody does it immediately when they meet him, like some of the disciples did.
As I mentioned at the beginning, I love the story of Nicodemus, because it took him a while to work it out. Today's gospel reading is not the only place he shows up. Here, in this passage, we see the beginning of his journey - questioning, trying to understand who Jesus is and how he has access to God's power. Later, he comes up at Jesus' trial, trying to offer a voice of reason in Jesus' defense. Then, still later, he is one of those who come to take Jesus' body down from the cross, "bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes.." - kind of like those wise men from the East, whose scientific inquiries led them to follow a star.
Nicodemus, a Pharisee who was diligently trying to observe and follow the law, started from a different place. While the magi started from science, Nicodemus started from religion, but they all found themselves on a journey of faith that ultimately led them to worship the God who made it all, who created the star, and who gave the law, and who sent his Son to show us how much God wants us to know him and be with him, because he made us and loves us, brains, questions, and all.

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Given to St. John's, Silsbee
Feb. 17, 2008

Peter's obedience

Year C, Epiphany 5
Gospel: Luke 5:1-11


In this passage, obedience opens up the way for miracles.
This is a powerful story about Jesus calling people to join him in mission. In the last and most recognized part of this story, Jesus tells Simon that he will make him a fisher of men, and they leave everything to follow him.
But leading up to that moment, Simon and his crew make some crucial choices, based purely on obedience, before they realize who Jesus is. Those acts of obedience open up the way for Jesus to do something miraculous.

View from the Crew
There are several people in this story besides Jesus and Simon Peter.
Sometimes, a good way to understand what’s happening in a situation is to mentally put yourself in the place of somebody who was there – Did you ever see those videos in history class, with Walter Cronkite narrating: “It’s 1776 at the signing of the Declaration of Independence and You are there!”
Well, imagine you are a crewmember on Simon’s boat. “It’s 30 AD, on the shore of the Sea of Galilee as Jesus calls his first disciples – and You are there...”
It’s just turning to evening as you join Simon and the rest of the crew in the boat. Simon’s boat is about 20 feet long, wooden, and smells like fish – so does Simon, and so do you.
Simon’s partners, James and John and their crew, are fishing in their father’s boat. Both boats put into the water as the stars are coming out. Fishing is a quiet kind of work; there’s no need to talk, really, and you don’t want to scare the fish.
It’s a long night, throwing the net out, pulling it back in – and catching nothing. Over and over: throw it out, pull it back – nothing, throw it out, pull it back – nothing. Simon steers the boat from one favorite spot to another, and every one of them turns up dry tonight.
The sky begins to get grey, and still no catch. You can see the other boat a ways off, and they’re sitting high in the water, too. This whole night is going to be worthless if you don’t catch something soon. Throw the net out; pull it back – nothing.
Finally, with the sun up, Simon gives the signal, and you pull back in to shore. Total catch for the night – nothing. The fish must have found a good hiding place. Everybody starts washing out the nets.
Nearby, a lot of people are gathered around a man who’s talking. He starts walking over, with the people following him. Apparently, he knows Simon; he gets in the boat and asks him something. Simon looks over and motions the crew back in the boat. What’s this about?
Simon says to row out a little ways from the shore. The crowd on the shore moves closer to the water. Then Simon says to drop anchor. The man sits down in the stern, facing the shore and starts talking. Apparently, he’s a teacher or a preacher, and from the size of the crowd, he must be popular.
How does he know Simon? And how long is he going to talk? You’d like to get home. It’s been a long night.
Simon looks tired and slightly irritated. This is not a time to ask.
The man finishes his talk and then motions to Simon. You hear him ask Simon to put out further and drop the nets.
Simon’s patience is visibly waning. “Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing...”
“Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets.”
The man looks at Simon. Simon looks at you.
You’re thinking, ‘Who is this guy getting in your boat and telling you how to fish?’ He glares back and motions to throw out the net. Whatever. Now is clearly not the time to ask, but later, Simon’s going to have to explain this.
You throw out the net.
And the rest is history. The nets came up so full that they started to break. The crew had to signal the other boat, and they filled both boats so full they started to sink. Everyone was amazed, and Simon didn’t have to explain anything. It was obvious that this teacher had much more authority than they realized, and not just about fishing. When they got back to the shore, they left everything and followed him.

Simon’s obedience (twice)
In the most dramatic part of this story, Simon falls down in front of Jesus, recognizing him as Lord after seeing this miraculous catch of fish. Then, Jesus tells him not to be afraid, that he will become a fisher of men.
Though the catch is the dramatic part, I think what leads up to the catch is just as important, if not more so. What I’m talking about is Simon Peter’s obedience, and also his crew’s obedience.
When Jesus got in Peter’s boat and asked him to put out a little ways so he could teach the people, Peter and his crew did it. Perhaps he did it as a favor, recalling that Jesus had just healed his mother-in-law. Perhaps he did it partly out of respect because Jesus was a teacher.
When Jesus was finished teaching, he asked Peter to do something else – something that didn’t make sense and wasn’t really called for.
Jesus asks Peter to put out into deeper water and throw out the nets for a catch. Peter may have been willing to do Jesus the first favor out of a sense of respect or gratitude, but with this second request, he was stepping into Peter’s territory.
For Jesus to be authoritative in teaching about the Law was one thing, but for Jesus to tell Peter how to fish seemed to be overstepping his bounds.
You can probably think of someone you know who is an expert in everything. No matter what the topic is, they know all about it, even if they don’t. They’ll argue with someone who really is an expert. What do you do? To argue back will just make you crazy; but to let them go on is just as bad.
The issue is who really has authority on the subject. It would seem Peter, the fisherman, should be the authority on fishing, not Jesus, the teacher/carpenter. But Jesus was also God, and having been present at creation to make the sea, the fish and Peter himself, he was actually a much higher authority on the subject.
Peter, despite appearances, decides to give Jesus the benefit of the doubt. He explains that they’ve already tried what Jesus suggests and failed, “yet if you say so, I will let down the nets.”
This is obedience.

Obedience
Obedience is doing what you’re told, not because you want to or because it makes sense or you feel it’s likely to work, but because the person who tells you has authority, and you submit to it.
This concept undergirds all military endeavors; the military depends on clear authority structures and prompt, complete obedience. The idea of obedience is not a popular one in our culture of independence, though. Even the army now has changed its slogan - An Army of One – to reflect our culture’s obsession with individuality.
But we’re starting to see that an excess of individuality, when it becomes a primary good and doesn’t ever bow to the idea of a ‘greater good,’ causes society to deteriorate.
The Church is not an army of one. The Church is a Body with many parts, governed by Christ as its head. When the parts of the body do things on their own, without the head’s direction, it causes problems for the whole body.
I recently learned a bit about Huntington’s Disease, which is similar to Parkinson’s – in this condition, the nerves begin sending signals to the muscles at random times. The result is jerky movements that make it hard for the person to speak clearly, walk straight, eat, or move without bumping things. The person’s thinking is clear; it’s not a disorder of the brain. You could say it’s an obedience problem in the nerves. The nerves send out their own orders to the muscles, without the brain’s direction, and the result is chaotic movement and frustration for the person trying to live in his body while it’s doing its own thing instead of what he’s telling it to do.
When we as the Church focus on self-actualization rather than developing a good ear for hearing Christ’s direction and a quick response of obedience, the result is chaotic movement within the body and Christ getting frustrated that his Body parts are all trying to do their own thing rather than cooperating.
Obedience has nothing to do with how I feel, or what I think; it has everything to do with knowing who’s in authority over me and accepting that direction, regardless. I can express my concerns, my doubts, my outright objections, but if I do it anyway, that’s still obedience, and that’s what’s crucial to being someone God can work with.
God calls people individually, and he knows us each by name, but we can only collaborate with His larger purposes if we obey Him. What Peter and his crew and the partners in the other boat saw that day with the miraculous catch of fish was that Jesus had authority over their world. And it was their obedience, even when they didn’t yet know the extent of his authority, that put them in a position to see this.
There will most likely be times in your life when you’re told to do something that you don’t want to do or that doesn’t make sense or that you don’t think will work. In those situations, you need to discern, not the wisdom of the order, but who’s giving it. Remember the game ‘Simon says...’ If Simon says, you do it. If Simon doesn’t say, don’t do it or you lose that game. If the order is authoritative, then do it. It may open up the possibility of something miraculous.
Jesus told Simon, ‘Let down your nets for a catch.’ Simon objected, but he obeyed, and his crew obeyed him also. That’s why we’re here today. Because these fishermen obeyed Jesus’ directions for catching fish, he taught them to catch people, and they taught the people they caught, until now we’ve been caught and hauled into the boat to fish for others. That’s pretty miraculous.

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Given to Vidor Presbyterian
Feb. 4, 2007