Being You And Being Me

"Being You And Being Me"

John 1:43-51
January 18, 2008

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 toward him, he said of him, “Here is truly an
Israelite in whom there is no deceit!” 48Nathanael asked him, “Where did you get 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.”

Tomorrow is the day we as a nation celebrate the birthday of Martin Luther King, the
great Civil Rights pioneer, a celebration we have grown accustomed to acknowledging,
even though it is a relatively new national holiday. But it’s the day after MLK’s birthday
that will certainly be amazing—think about it: a little over 50 years ago, King was
assassinated, and yet on the day after his national holiday we will be swearing into
office the first African-American President in our history. Whatever your politics, that
really is an amazing thing, and I think that says something about the promise and
greatness of this country, even though the demons of racism still plague as a people,
and as the Christian church.   When I was in Chicago a few months ago, there were a
lot of African Americans wearing Obama t-shirts, and often some of the more locally
produced ones also had a picture of King alongside Obama. So many people have
their hopes and dreams wrapped up in what Obama represents, and what he might
represent for the future of this country, but for those who experienced the civil rights
struggle personally, in ways that most of us can never understand, it must be a
tremendously proud moment.

And yet, I was also thinking the other day that it also be quite a burden for President-
elect Obama to carry those kinds of expectations and to be handed the mantle of
someone like Martin Luther King. Certainly, we all need Obama to succeed, for the
sake of our country, and for the sake of the larger world, but its different, isn’t it, for
those who couldn’t have imagined a day when someone of their own race would be the
President of the United States. Some even want him to be the second MLK, the next
great civil rights pioneer, something that no one else has really been able to do, and to
be frank, is simply impossible to do, if you think about it. I mean, we know that there
are no second Roosevelts, no second Eisenhower’s, no second Lincolns—great
figures, important figures, for good or ill, are always just themselves, and though there
may be imitators throughout history, there can be no “second anyone,” no second
Kevin’s, no second Julie’s, no spiritual twins for anyone.   We are each meant to be who
are—not a pale imitation of someone else, but who we are, created by God for the work
that is before us, for us in particular , not anyone else’s work. If President-elect Obama
can ignore the voices that want him to be something he cannot be, and can focus on
what he has been called to do, which is to lead this country during these difficult times,
then we’ll all be fine.

But that temptation to be something you aren’t, that is strong, for most of us. I’ve
shared with you a few times about my personal sin of envy, especially when it comes to
the preaching skills of a few folks I’ve heard in the past—I wanted to preach like them,
to have the emotional and spiritual power that so obviously drenched them, and yet it
can never be—I am not them—I am me, for better or worse. Likewise, I think sometimes
when we read stories like the one we have before us today, we often think that Jesus is
asking us to be like him—you know, like those commercials for Nike with the Michael
Jordan—be like Mike. Well, if you look really carefully, Jesus never asks them to be like
him, he never calls them to be a carbon copy of himself, as if that was ever possible,
really. What he does do over and over again is to tell his disciples to follow him—
“follow me,” he says to Phillip, right after his encounter with John the Baptist in the
wilderness. Jesus wasn’t looking for carbon copies himself—he wasn’t looking for a
twin of himself in those men and women he called thousands of years ago.
But we keep being told that we ought to be like Jesus, and I get where people are
coming from when they say that, but have we really thought this through, this belief that
Jesus didn’t just call us to follow him and to enact his principles and his
commandments, that somehow we are to be miniature versions of Jesus? Charles
Sheldon, the famous Congregationalist, wrote the bestseller IN HIS STEPS which gave
rise to the idea that to follow Jesus was to imitate him, to be like him. The whole craze
in the late eighties and nineties around WWJD—What Would Jesus Do?—those set of
letters one found on everything from wristbands to coffee mugs came out of a revival of
interest in Sheldon’s book. Don’t get me wrong—I think the idea is great, in theory, but
in actual practice, it just seems like a set-up for personal failure.

And the reason why is that none of us can ever be like Jesus, and, for that matter, we’
re not asked to be. When Jesus turns water into wine in chapter 2 of the very Gospel
we just heard from minutes ago, he is not giving us a model of how to take care of a
wine shortage crisis at our friend’s wedding! As much I would like to save a few dollars
on wine, I’ve simply not been able to turn water into wine, or walk on water, or heal
anyone of you of your sicknesses, though I would love to have that particular trait, or
even be as brave as Jesus was in the face of all he had to face in his life. And unless
someone needs to share something with all of us right now, I suspect that none of us
can be like Christ was and is…and when we are told by others to imitate him, to be just
like him, to be his twin, I think it just leads to a sense of failure eventually…because you
know what—I’m not Christ, and you’re not Christ. I’m me and you’re you, and we aren’t
supposed to be anyone other than who were created to be.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I don’t think that by saying we aren’t meant to be the spitting
image of Jesus that somehow we are just perfect the way we are, at this very moment.
No, I think everyone knows they aren’t perfect, that there are things that we each need
to work on, emotionally and ethically and personally—we’ve all got work to do here and
there, and some more than others. But I don’t think putting up the perfect model of
Jesus and saying that we should be like him will help us make us better people—for
many of us, it actually ends up discouraging us, because, who really could be as good
as he was, and if we can’t be that good, why try? I know some people say that we
ought to set our sights high, and I’m all for trying hard, and being as good as we can
muster in any given moment, and always looking to be better people than we were a
moment ago…but perfection as a goal for human beings…well, that is recipe for deep
disappointment but only for 100% of us mere mortals. Jesus was the way, the truth and
the life…and you and me…we are none of these, but we can be and should be more
and more faithful disciples of the One who called us to follow him, to go with him, into
life, into that truth.

And there is one person in this story I want to point out and who might further clarify
what we are to do as disciples of Jesus. Nathaniel in our story today was a lot like a lot
of us—he had no dramatic conversion story, no divine rescuing from this or that
particularly notorious vice. Nathaniel is so good that Jesus instantly recognizes it—he
is without guile, without pretension, a thoroughly good man even before he began to
follow after Jesus and his ways. And yet, he is the one who voices skepticism that
anything good could possibly come out of the small town of Nazareth, Jesus’
hometown. We don’t know what particular reputation Nazareth had in the first century—
perhaps the Nazarenes were simply on nobodies radar, and the ridiculousness of the
Messiah coming out of some nothing town—it just seemed absurd to Nathaniel. Or
perhaps it had another kind of reputation—some scandal, maybe it was crime-ridden,
or especially poor, as a suburban ghetto of capital city of Sepphosis, the capital city of
Galilee. Whatever the case, Nathaniel is very skeptical that such good news could
come out of such a bad news or no news town like Nazareth, and he says so explicitly.
What is so amazing is the assumption behind his skepticism, this idea that nothing good
can come out of Nazareth: the assumption Nathaniel is buying into is the prejudice that
everyone in Nazareth is the same—that they are all alike, each and every one of them,
the citizens of Nazareth, and what they are, are simply no good. They are all twins of
each other, in a way, mirror copies of each other, and the faces and the lives of the
people in those mirrors are not all that attractive to look at, according to our friend
Nathaniel. Once again, the mistake is made that we’re really not all that unique, that we’
re not really all that special—that we really can just class people together, and say they
are all the same, and will always be that way, whatever way “that” is, though it is usually
a way we don’t like. The point is that even a good man like Nathaniel can make the
mistake of thinking that we humans beings aren’t all that unique, that you can just put
people in a convenient and predictable pigeonhole, and trust them not to stray from the
image we’ve decided they’re supposed to live up to or down to. So, yes, Nathaniel,
good things can come from Nazareth, just as bad things can come from Bethseda, your
own hometown.   We are all individuals, uniquely created by God for something, some
purpose that is different than the purpose of the one next to us, something that only we
can do and only we can add to the realm of God, the kingdom of God.

Edith Wharton, in the poem “Vesalius in Zante” writes: “There are two ways of
spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.” For us Christians, Jesus
is the light of the world, according to the Gospel of John, a saying that is one of my
favorites. And there is nothing wrong with doing some reflecting here and there—this
divine light is a good light, a gentle light, but as disciples of Jesus, we’re not just called
to be mere mirrors, mere reflections of God. We are called to be our own unique
candles, to be disciples of Jesus in our own unique ways.   Even humans twins, those
who are said to be identical to each other, are unique—they share the same genetic
code, but they are different, unique, even in their sameness. The universe, the
universe that God has created, is one full of diversity, of different races, and religions
and political persuasions and different ways of loving, so it shouldn’t surprise us that
sameness doesn’t seem to be what Jesus is calling us to be when he asks us to be his
disciples. I don’t have to be Jesus, I don’t have to be the Messiah, and neither do you—
that job is taken already, and God already sent someone in the world to do that work—
and that really is good news. What I need to do and you need to do and Obama needs
to do, is to be the unique disciple and person that we are each created to be. It should
make us breathe a little easier to know that we are chosen as we are, chosen to go on
the journey as we are, knowing that, of course, just following after the Christ will change
us in ways that we never expected.

But I know that we struggle with being chosen, with being asked to be disciples of Christ
as we are—we so often feel unworthy of God’s choice of us to be a part of kingdom of
God.   Garrison Keillor tells a story from his childhood, a story about choosing up sides
for a sandlot baseball game. Daryl and David were always the captains of the teams,
as if they had born to the positions, and they would pick the popular ones first, with the
rest being picked later. Keillor writes:

“After the popular ones got picked, we stood in a bunch looking down at the dirt,
waiting to see if our rating had changed. They took their sweet time choosing us; we
had plenty of time to study our shoes. Mine were Keds, black, though white ones were
more popular. Mother said black wouldn’t show dirt .... Nine boys to a side, four already
chosen, 10 positions left, and the captains look us over. They choose the popular ones
fast (‘Brian!’ ‘Bill!’ ‘Duke!’ ‘John!’ ‘Bob!’ ‘Paul!’ ‘Jim!’ ‘Lance!’), and now the choice is hard
because we’re all so much the same: not so hot — and then they are down to their last
grudging choices, a slow kid for catcher and someone to stick out in right field where
nobody hits it, except maybe two guys, and when they come to bat, the captain sends
the poor right fielder to left, a long, ignominious walk. They choose the last ones two at
a time, ‘You and you,’ because it makes no difference, and the remaining kids, the
scrubs, the excess, they deal for as handicaps (‘If I take him, then you gotta take him’).
Sometimes I go as high as sixth, usually lower. Just once I’d like Daryl to pick me first.
‘Him! I want him! The skinny kid with the glasses and the black shoes! You! Come on!’
But I’ve never been chosen with any enthusiasm.” —Garrison Keillor, Lake Wobegon
Days (Viking, 1985), 180-181.

And yet I just want to say to Garrison Keillor that there is One that has chooses us with
enthusiasm, great enthusiasm, actually, just as we are, skinny and with glasses, and
black shoes. You don’t have to be Daryl and David—you just need to be you, and if
you are, then the One who chooses us will use our uniqueness for great things in the
life of this world. Amen.