Connections

John 1:43-51

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 towards him, he said of him, ‘Here is truly an Israelite in whom there is no deceit!’ Nathanael asked him, ‘Where did you come 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.’

There is a lot going on in these eight verses. In this short paragraph alone, Jesus is given five different titles, six if you count “him about whom Moses…and also the prophets wrote.” He’s called son of Joseph of Nazareth, Rabbi, Son of God, King of Israel, and Son of Man. Now, as is the case with any well-written book, every word matters, every name matters—there’s a specific reason for every word in a good book. This is certainly the case in the gospel of John. There’s also good reason that he included this… pretty insulting question from Nathaneal—“Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Yikes. Now, think for a minute about where you grew up—there was probably a nearby town or city that people would cringe or make fun of, a place that had a bad reputation. I know growing up in Salem, on the North Shore of Boston, that place was Lynn— it had a mean little rhyme to go along with it and everything: “Lynn, Lynn, the city of sin, you never come out the way you came in.” Now if someone came up to a snootier North Shore resident and told them that they found the Messiah in Lynn, they’d be laughed outta town.

So that’s what’s happening here—Nathaneal’s comment isn’t meant to be especially funny or mean (though it’s more fun to read it that way); he’s really just emphasizing the fact that Nazareth is a tiny, insignificant town. It doesn’t have its own economy, it’s just a rural, working-class village. No one would ever believe anything akin to royalty could come out of such a Podunk little place like Nazareth. John is really playing with this juxtaposition here, of power and divinity vs. humbleness and humanness, and all those titles and names are emphasizing this juxtaposition as well—notice that the first name he’s given is the most humble one—Jesus, son of Joseph of Nazareth. The son of a common, working, mortal man. There’s a reason this is the first name Jesus is called— we’re to recognize that Jesus came to us in vulnerable, human form, something unheard of, something no one would have ever expected.

We’re currently in the church-season of Epiphany, and since Epiphany gets sandwiched between Advent and Lent, it kind of gets the short end of the stick, liturgically speaking—but it is a big deal. It’s the season that commemorates both the magi making their way to the baby Jesus and spreading the word about his arrival; and it’s also about the beginnings of Jesus’ ministry, with a focus on his baptism and the wedding at Cana when he turned water to wine. And in the Eastern Christian traditions, Epiphany is also known as the season of Theophany, which is an encounter with a deity. And when we think of encounters with God, we think of booming clouds and earthquakes and burning bushes— but here is the Messiah, a working-class young man from a nothing town.

So Epiphany is all about manifestation and the appearance of the divine—but the way these things manifest and appear are subtle. We have to learn to look for them, and we have to learn from them. And we have to learn that the divine can and will come from unexpected places.

At Bible study this past week, we were talking about this concept of finding the good in unexpected places, and we came to the topic of covid and these past four years— we were talking about the fact that people are still struggling since the pandemic first hit, whether it’s with something physical like long Covid, whether it’s the emotional toll of isolation that people are still coming back from, or whether people are struggling financially after the loss or change of a job due to the pandemic. And at Bible study, Maggie said, “we must have learned something from everything that happened.” And you know… we started to—we saw what can happen when money is put into public health and into vaccines, and when this vaccines are made free for all—people get their shots for the betterment of the masses. We saw what happens when you give struggling families a step up with monetary support during hard times—childhood poverty plummets. We saw what happens when young people get a break from their exorbitant student loans—they can actually think about saving for a house or a family. We learned that we do, indeed have the resources and the tools to help people, how incredible! But then… they took it away.

Matthew Desmond, author of the award-winning books Evicted and Poverty, recently wrote an article in the New York Review of Books called Tools to End the Poverty Pandemic. He writes, “…most Americans became more economically secure as the pandemic ran its course. Missed credit card, mortgage, and rent payments fell. Savings accounts grew. People started new business. Suicides declined, as did homelessness, as evictions plummeted to the lowest levels on record.” He continues to quote economist Scott Fulford saying “How could so much good come out of a pandemic that killed more than a million of us?” Desmond finishes that thought by asking “And how…having done so much good, having designed and deployed social policies that made a profound difference in the lives of millions of Americans, could we have let it all slip away?” Later in the article, Desmond writes, “Many of us breathed a sigh of relief as the pandemic subsided and the country reverted back to normal, but in America normal means widespread child poverty and housing insecurity.”[i]

And so at Bible study, as we were pondering how to look for the divine in strange places, we thought about what we learned during the pandemic, what good came out of it, and we wondered why people still feel so lost, and we came to some semblance of a conclusion—that we did learn some incredible lessons from this tragedy… but then we didn’t do anything with that knowledge. We didn’t do anything to continue to help people even though we saw that the good it could do. And I think that might be why sometimes things seem even worse than they seemed at times, during the pandemic—because it all feels extra hopeless. We know what we need to do to lift people out of poverty, and we know this because we saw the good that came out of something so dire and horrible as the pandemic—but those in power don’t care, so here we are, back to business as usual. No wonder people are still feeling depressed and lost! We know we have the tools to make this country a better place, but we’re not using them!

But what would make things even worse is if we all fall into complete despair and just assume nothing’s going to change. As usual, we have to start small. We have to figure out ways to find the divine in our personal lives, in the mundane, in the unfortunate.

I was checking in with Jeannie Frazer to see how their holidays went in light of Jessie’s lymphoma diagnosis and treatments, and Jeannie told me that their New Year’s celebration was surprisingly lovely—the family stayed outside in order to avoid getting sick, especially making sure Jessie doesn’t get sick in light of her immunocompromising cancer treatments; they say physically distanced from one another, around a bonfire to keep warm. They ate, told stories, laughed, and just had a wonderful time. And at the end of the celebration, everyone had had such a wonderful time around the fire, it was decided that this would be a new tradition.

So the Frazers gathered outside due to just awful circumstances—even with a good prognosis like Jessie’s, a cancer diagnosis is always awful—but a new tradition was born—a humble and simple and beautiful new tradition that takes pressure off hosting any fancy parties—just a simple and poignant way to ring in the New Year and celebrate better times ahead. No one would have expected that under such stressful circumstances, especially during the holidays when illness and grief can weigh even more heavily than usual, that something new and beautiful would be born.

I think Jeannie’s story really stayed with me because it was such a perfect example of really embracing the hand you’re dealt and making something positive out of it. And I want to stress here, I don’t mean this in any kind of toxic positivity way—that was something we talked about a couple sermons ago, toxic positivity is more along the lines of denying the bad that’s actually happening, and it’s this intense pressure to just be happy and positive no matter what—but that’s not what this is. It’s really about adapting and finding new ways to be joyful, and to be and work together, new ways to be, because of the bad, rather than just denying its presence.

And I think that’s what this country got wrong after covid—we didn’t adapt. We didn’t change our expectations or our ways of thinking. Instead of realizing we must in fact change in order to help one another, we just shrugged and things went back to the way they were.

In our Bible passage today, Nathaneal’s mind is changed, his way of thinking is changed. Despite the fact that he’s initially sure nothing good can come out of Nazareth, he changes his expectations. Firstly, he trusts his friend Philip that whoever this Jesus person is, is worth meeting; and then Jesus convinces him pretty quickly that he is the person they’ve all been praying and waiting for. He quickly realizes that something good can, indeed, come out of Nazareth, a place he obviously never expected.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this sermon, there is a lot going on in this short passage, and one of the other very intentional references that pops up in this passage are references to Jacob and the story of Jacob’s ladder. At the end of the passage, Jesus makes mention of “angels…ascending and descending,” which is a direct quote from Jacob’s vision of the ladder—this imagined structure that was a connection between earth and the heavens. The inference here is that Jesus is now that connection. Both human and divine, he knows all of our joys and sorrows, and he is how we are connected to the good that is possible… but it’s only possible when we actually learn and grow from our changed expectations, from the lessons we learn.

So here we are, in the season of Epiphany, in this new year, and we have a perfect resolution. We have to be intentional and observant and find the good that can come out of the bad. We have to think a little differently, more creatively in order to learn and grow. We have to work together and trust each other, and see what is indeed possible when we change our expectations and when we realize that it is actually possible to make this world better, though the powers that be would rather us not believe that. We saw it during covid—we have the resources to keep people housed, fed, and safe—we’re just not using them. And on a more immediately doable scale, we can change and adapt due to our own circumstances, and we can find small but mighty ways to build one another up, find new and unexpected ways to support one another. And we can begin to build that bridge, and to make that connection between this earth and heaven. Amen.

[i] https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/01/18/tools-to-end-the-poverty-pandemic-the-viral-underclass/