Our reading from Samuel is set in dark times for the people of Israel: the word of the Lord was rare in those days and visions were rare. It’s not hard to feel that we are living in times like that today. Every day brings a new dose of bad news: fighting in Gaza, more businesses fail and jobs are lost, record cold weather in many parts of the country can bring us close to despair.
But, the lamp of God had not yet gone out. And God remained connected with his people, calling out to Samuel by name. Even in times of fear and sorrow, God remains connected to us, calling us by name. Our challenge is to hear that call amidst the noise and bustle of daily life. And when we hear that call, we answer, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.”
We don’t tend to listen very well—to people or to God. God has a habit of challenging our preconceptions and prejudices, just as he did with Nathaniel’s prejudice—“Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”—in our reading from John’s Gospel. We tend to see what we expect to see and hear what we expect to hear and we filter out what doesn’t match up. These perceptual filters can be strong and can keep us from seeing new things.
Fortunately, Nathaniel was willing to discard his prejudice against country bumpkins from Nazareth and accepted Philip’s invitation to “Come and see!” What he heard and saw was enough to cause him to proclaim to Jesus, “You are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!”
Jesus responded in two ways, first, by saying “You will see greater things than these” (or as we might say today, “You ain’t seen nothing yet!”) and by saying that Nathaniel would see heaven op
ened—again, language of unveiling as we heard last week at Jesus’ baptism—and that the angels of God would be ascending and descending upon the Son of Man. This is the language of the revelation to Jacob at Bethel, where the angels are ascending and descending a ladder to heaven. The difference is that Jesus is the ladder; Jesus is what connects heaven and earth.This connection—this ladder—has always been there. The means for us to connect to God has always been there. It’s we who have failed to see it or ignored it. As Verna Dozier writes in her book The Dream of God, “Both the people of the Torah and the people of the resurrection were escaping from God’s awesome invitation to be something new in the world.”
“To be something new in the world!” To be new by being always open to the needs of God’s people, to be new by being open to the new directions our lives will take if we are willing to become that ladder ourselves. For that is what God offered Jacob and Jesus offered Nathaniel and offers us today. Not just to be connected, but to be the connection between God and the world.
In his letter to the church in Corinth, Paul talks of another kind of connection—our connection with each other. In our culture, we revere individualism. The one clearly American form of fiction is the western, whose hero is normally the strong, silent loner. In the United States, we often think of religion in the same way. We often focus on an individual relationship with God and tend to overlook our membership in the common Body of Christ. Each one of us is a part of that One Body. What is important is that we not become so focused on ourselves and our individual lifestyles to do things that are not beneficial to the community.
This week we begin the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. We are called to be one “so that the world may believe.” Like Nathaniel, we are called to overcome our long-held prejudices and re-examine our assumptions. We are called to respond as Samuel did, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.”
We are invited by Jesus to “Follow me.” Not to a calm and static life but to a journey of risk and discovery, sometimes sacrifice.
And we are invited in the words of Philip to Nathaniel to “Come and see.”
“Speak, Lord, for your servants are listening.”
Give us ears to hear Jesus calling, “Follow me.”
Help us find ways to “Come and see.”
That the world may believe!
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