Molders of Consensus

John 1:29-42

The next day he saw Jesus coming towards him and declared, ‘Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world! This is he of whom I said, “After me comes a man who ranks ahead of me because he was before me.” I myself did not know him; but I came baptizing with water for this reason, that he might be revealed to Israel.’ And John testified, ‘I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him. I myself did not know him, but the one who sent me to baptize with water said to me, “He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.” And I myself have seen and have testified that this is the Son of God.’

The next day John again was standing with two of his disciples, and as he watched Jesus walk by, he exclaimed, ‘Look, here is the Lamb of God!’ The two disciples heard him say this, and they followed Jesus. When Jesus turned and saw them following, he said to them, ‘What are you looking for?’ They said to him, ‘Rabbi’ (which translated means Teacher), ‘where are you staying?’ He said to them, ‘Come and see.’ They came and saw where he was staying, and they remained with him that day. It was about four o’clock in the afternoon. One of the two who heard John speak and followed him was Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother. He first found his brother Simon and said to him, ‘We have found the Messiah’ (which is translated Anointed). He brought Simon to Jesus, who looked at him and said, ‘You are Simon son of John. You are to be called Cephas’ (which is translated Peter).

It really is incredible, isn’t it? how John can say so much, but so little. Preaching on the gospel of John is really complicated, and I admit, I’ll be happy to get to back to Matthew next week. But sequentially, this does make sense—after the baptism of Jesus last week, we have a pretty by-the-book a rehashing of it after the fact and then John exclaiming that Jesus is the true messiah, or, as he and only he puts it, the “lamb of God.”

So in thinking about the fact that the writer of the gospel of John says so much but so little, I’m finding myself kind of hung up on the “so little” part. I’m wondering about what’s between the lines here, what’s remaining unsaid. I’m specifically wondering about these first disciples of Jesus. Because the gospel of John is the only of the four gospels in which Jesus’ earliest disciples were defectors from being followers of John the Baptist. I’ve mentioned before that at this time, many believed John to be the messiah rather than Jesus—he had quite a following. So regarding what’s not said here, I’m wondering that caused this unnamed disciple and Andrew to follow Jesus. I mean, sure, if we want an easy answer, we can assume they just took John the Baptist at his word and followed him because their current leader was telling them that Jesus was the Lamb of God, not him—but I have to imagine that it would take a lot to break off from someone you had already dropped everything to follow—because let’s think of John the Baptist was living. He was a very eccentric fellow. In Matthew and Mark, he was known to wear uncomfortable clothing of camel’s hair, lived in the wilderness on bugs and wild honey. In Luke, he was a miraculous birth, the son of Elizabeth who became pregnant with him when she had already passed menopause, and in Luke, it’s specified that he did not exclude anyone in his baptisms— he baptized everyone from tax collectors to soldiers. So it would take a lot of conviction and a lot of guts and a lot of commitment to follow someone as strange and passionate and out-there as John the Baptist, and I have to wonder if they had some apprehensions about going from John to Jesus after giving much of their time and resources to this one very specific man.

When they begin to follow Jesus, in fact, Jesus stops them and asks them, “What are you looking for?” Presumably, they don’t know! Because they don’t answer the question, they just call him “rabbi” which in this case, John specifies that this can be translated as “teacher” and ask him where he’s staying. Now, an aside here that I find to be actually be pretty important, is that in this time in history, rabbi wasn’t often translated directly or literally as teacher. It was a more general term for someone with authority to speak—it wasn’t even related to being a religious leader. So while the writer of John seems to put his own interpretation in here, I do believe that since these disciples didn’t know quite what they were getting themselves into, they simply referred to Jesus by this sort of vague term that could mean many things. They’re trusting John the Baptist to give this Jesus guy a chance, but I don’t think they’re fully convinced yet.

And I really love this so much—I think this shows Jesus’ humanity, his humility, his humbleness. This, I believe, shows he’s not some charismatic cult leader drawing just anyone in for his own gain. He’s willing to speak with people, to ask questions, to answer questions. He tells these two men, “come and see,” and leads them to where he’s staying.

Now we come to the next unspoken part. It states that they remained with Jesus for the day, and then late in the afternoon, they emerge and make it clear that they’ve officially defected from John the Baptist to Jesus.

But Church—I’m dying to know what was said during this day. I’m imaging a really cheesy movie montage with some kind of epic music playing over Jesus and these two disciples with pensive faces, acting out exaggerated hand gestures—talking and debating, questioning and wondering. What could they have talked about? What would two working-class young man who were attracted to someone as eccentric as John the Baptist have to say to Jesus? What do you think they asked him? What do you think Jesus asked them? Was Jesus his normal cryptic self, talking in riddles and parables? Or was he clear with these two about where he stood in terms of justice, in terms of the law, in terms of God? And what was it about what Jesus said that convinced these two, not only to decide to follow him, but to immediately run to Simon and say, ‘we’ve found him—we’ve found the messiah!’

Sadly, we can only speculate about what was said over that fateful day. There’s nothing we can hang on or dissect to explain why Jesus proved himself to be who these disciples were looking for. But what I think we can infer from what is unsaid here is that these two were looking for a brand new thing. I would imagine that only disillusioned folks would be following a bug-eater in the desert, so these are not people who are looking to go with the flow. These are not people who are satisfied with the status-quo, or are happy to bend the knee to the Romans or whoever is calling the shots. They’re people who know something is off and things shouldn’t be the way they are. They’re people who want change. They’re people who want justice. So whatever Jesus said to them on that day, I think we can assume that he made it clear he was going to really shake things up—they he came to this earth, as he says in Matthew 10, with a sword. He came to change the way people think. He came to make things right.

Now, it’s Martin Luther King Jr. Sunday, so what better day to wonder about what makes a savior, or, maybe more accessible for our everyday lives, what makes a good and true leader? What qualities do we look for in a leader? What convinces us that someone is worthy of praise, that someone is worthy of our time and commitment? King Jr. himself is quoted as saying, “A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.”

So a true leader is someone we look to as an example, a standard bearer of what is right, regardless of how unpopular or radical or against a general consensus their ideas may seem at the time. I’ve said this before, and not just in MLK Day sermons, but it bears repeating, Martin Luther King Jr. was not popular in his day. Even after his now-universally beloved “I have a dream” speech, his disapproval rating was 63%. And as he continued to fight for what some saw as radical racial and economic justice policies, the numbers only got worse. The year of his assassination, it was 75%. Three quarters of this country disapproved of what Martin Luther King Jr, the man we celebrate on a national level tomorrow, was fighting for, and how he was fighting.

But now, when we look back at what he did, when we take stock of how he changed this country, when we are honest with ourselves about the shameful history, past and sadly, present, of racism in this country—from slavery to Jim Crow to segregation to police violence—we see clearly that King was on the right side of history. We can see that he changed the consensus instead of just falling in line with the status-quo of his day.

A few months ago I joined a book club, and the pick for this month is Octavia E. Butler’s dystopian sci-fi classic The Parable of the Sower. Now I will tell you, I had been avoiding this book for the past three years. The book’s had a well-deserved resurgence because of how eerily prescient, and honestly, prophetic, it is for today’s uncertain times, which I think is why I had been avoiding it for so long. But I’m glad I’m reading it, and I have a feeling it’ll be inspiration for sermons now and then. At the beginning of each chapter, the narrator sometimes writes little musings about God, about her version of God. At one point she writes, “God is Power— Infinite, Irresistible, Inexorable, Indifferent. And yet, God is Pliable— Trickster, Teacher, Chaos, Clay. God exists to be shaped. God is Change.”

I can’t help but believe that this concept of an ever changing, pliable God is something that these earliest disciples were drawn to—if seeing Jesus, human and divine, hearing the mind-blowing things he was saying, understanding that he was doing this brand new thing, that he himself embodied this brand new thing, made them think so profoundly differently, and made them realize what could be possible even in such a broken world. These were people who weren’t looking for consensus— after all, according to the gospel of John, they were originally following John the Baptist, this strange, eccentric man who was both feared and persecuted, and eventually murdered by the Romans. They were looking for a savior who would mold consensus, who would change the way people thought, who would change the way the world worked. They wanted to think of God differently, they wanted to think of their faith differently—they knew that God, that the society, that the laws had been corrupted and they wanted a new way of life that would be mean justice for all people. And so I believe that whatever Jesus said to them on the day that’s described in this passage gave them what they were looking for. They knew that Jesus was going to create a brand new consensus, that Jesus would truly change the world.

And so in thinking about change, about justice, about leadership, I want to hear from you all—what do you look for in a leader? You could be thinking of our savior Jesus, or you could be thinking of what you look for in modern-day leaders, you could be thinking of ideas or qualities, but I’m curious of what kind of consensus-molding you’re all looking for.

***this section not transcribable*** 

So, with all these qualities in mind, in thinking of who is a molder of consensus, and in having the confidence to be a molder of consensus, let’s remember, in the words of MLK: “There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must take it because conscience tells him it is right.” Amen.