January 14, 2018 – “Known. Loved. Every One.” from John Knox Kirk on Vimeo.
A sermon preached at The Kirk of Kansas City, Missouri, on January 14, 2018.
Scripture readings (which you may wish to read prior):
John 1:43-51
and Psalm 139:1-18
I think about this Psalm every single time I go to the airport
and have to go through the TSA security line.
You have searched me and known me.
Your luggage gets scanned
You empty your pockets into those buckets
And hope you get all the loose change
They ask you if you have any metal inside your body
Then whisk you through the machines.
If you’re lucky, you sometimes get a perfunctory pat down.
“I’ve searched you and have known you,
And you’re safe, good to go, have a happy flight.”
Gee, thanks, sir. Have a good day yourself
As I put back on my belt and my shoes
And try to make sure I have my wallet and my cell phone.
///
That encounter is sometimes an intimate one
Maybe overly intimate
Not the kind of intimacy we invite.
Its something we endure because we have to get somewhere
And we’ve given up a measure of our privacy for safety
Shoes off. 3 ounce bottles of shampoo only.
We’re going to run your C-Pap machine and your laptop separately.
All of that.
There are other moments we give up this privacy.
At the doctor, or the hospital
Though rightly they do what they can
to maintain the dignity of the encounter
as they do what is necessary for our health and safety.
There’s a massage, which can do wonders for an aching back
Or even a haircut has this sort of exposure to intimacy
Hands running through your locks as it is washed
revealing moles or freckles on your scalp usually unseen by the masses
As they run conditioner through your hair…
Those can be enjoyable.
I love having my hair washed.
And while I’ve spoken about it before at a Maundy Thursday service or two
The intimacy of Jesus’ act of washing the feet of his disciples
That last supper of his,
I personally love having someone pamper my hands or my feet
Even though looking that closely at your hands or your feet
Is also a quite personal thing.
At other times, this intimacy is taken from us, however,
In a way that shames and hurts and humiliates us. That’s just awful.
That’s never ok.
We can understand those times, such as in the news this week,
When there’s a controversy
About possible intimate pictures being used for political blackmail
The victim asks for privacy, to be left alone. We can understand it.
Being known in that way is hurtful, unwanted.
Or sometimes we see and know more of someone else
than we ourselves want. That violation sadly happens sometimes too.
///
This can get quite tricky, very quickly, I think.
We are often navigating between exposure and privacy
Modesty and freedom.
WE are private creatures, for the most part.
This varies among us, it is true,
And regularly varies with age and confidence and self-image.
But we all have a measure of being guarded, kept to ourselves.
But even for all of these exposures,
all of these encounters
every negotiation of privacy and self-respect and modesty
There’s a hope within us, that WE can be TRULY and AUTHENTICALLY known.
///
The essence of love for another
Is seeing them for what they are, what they really are
And asserting care and compassion and good for them.
That is what LOVE is: to SEE another truly and to care for them.
Love moves outward.
Its not possessive.
Its not consuming.
Its not selfish.
Love, as the Apostle Paul would famously say
Is patient, and kind, and not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude.
It bears all things, Hopes all things, endures all things.
And insofar as we ALL want to be loved
We all want to be known, truly known
Seen as we are, and when seen,
Then assured that we are in fact loved and cared for.
///
So it is that this passage from the Psalms literally saved me, I think.
I remember being an awkward kid with a self-esteem problem
With my own gifts and talents, sure,
But one who struggled at times to fit in and to make my way in the world.
As an adult, I look back and know that all kids feel that
Every single one of us have felt that struggle…
And some of us harnessed that into self-assertive bravado
And others of us into passive-aggressive angst
And still others muddle away somewhere in between
But all of us struggle with this yearning to belong
And the doubts about whether we’re worthy of belonging.
And most of us construct ways of protecting ourselves from these doubts
That fear
Layers of personality and decisions that shape a lifetime.
///
Into all of that
Comes this assertion of our faith
That for all of this
For every worry that we are not understood
That no one quite gets us
That no one wants to see us for what we really are
or understand us, not just as we aspire to be
but sometimes at our low and petty and hurting moments
Into that moment, comes this assertion of our faith:
1 O Lord, you have searched me and known me.
2 You know when I sit down and when I rise up;
you discern my thoughts from far away.
3 You search out my path and my lying down,
and are acquainted with all my ways.
4 Even before a word is on my tongue,
O Lord, you know it completely.
Or, to put it another way
God knows us. God sees us.
God understands us.
God cuts through all of the defenses we establish
All of the lies we tell about ourselves
All of the fears and the jealousy and the hurt
And God looks.
And God smiles.
And she opens her big, broad arms, and shows us what love is all about:
Where can I go from your spirit?
Or where can I flee from your presence?
8 If I ascend to heaven, you are there;
if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.
9 If I take the wings of the morning
and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,
10 even there your hand shall lead me,
and your right hand shall hold me fast.
11 If I say, ‘Surely the darkness shall cover me,
and the light around me become night’,
12 even the darkness is not dark to you;
the night is as bright as the day,
for darkness is as light to you.
13 For it was you who formed my inward parts;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
14 I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Wonderful are your works;
that I know very well.
///
This might be the most basic affirmation of our faith:
That you are known, and loved, and there ain’t nothing you can do about it.
And knowing that, can quite literally save us.
It has done that for me, as an awkward teenager
Navigating what it means to build an authentic sense of self worth
Upon not some façade of false bravado
But the assertion that I am worthy of self worth, you know,
Because God loves me
That the image of God is inside of me
Just as it is inside of you
And that each of us, for all our missteps, our hurts and our hurtful deeds
We are nonetheless human because God has made it so.
This is an important understanding.
It can comfort us when we’re not feeling loved
It can assure us when we feel alone, or unloved, or exposed, or humiliated
It can affirm our very humanity,
when other people want to say
Because of skin color or sex or orientation or gender identity or nation of origin
Or any other condition of birth
That someone is less than, not worthy, inferior, unlovable
We know that is a bald lie
Because each person, all of us
Are fearfully and wonderfully made
As the children’s tune goes:
Red and yellow, black and white
We are precious in His sight
Jesus loves the little children of the world….
Known. Loved. Every one.
///
So according to John,
Jesus is walking around Galilee
Just after his Baptism.
He’s called a disciple or two already
and word is spreading.
There is this teacher, this Rabbi
Who John the Baptist, you know
THE John the Baptist,
The guy we all look up to
That guy John, pointed at this Jesus-teacher-fella
And said we ought to take a look at him and pay attention to what he is doing.
And in Galilee there is Philip and Nathaniel
Who hear this
And who talk more about this teacher, this Rabbi
And they wonder what it could be about.
Who is it?
It’s the one who the law and the prophets wrote about, we think
Jesus, son of Joseph, from Nazareth.
Nazareth? That backwater, no good, flea-ridden, nothing of a town.
Can anything good come from Nazareth?
As an aside, can you hear the resonance of that question
In the news of this past week
About certain countries in Africa, or Haiti, take your pick….
As if, knowing what we know about God’s love for each human being
Each community of people, there could be any truly backwater, no good
Flea-ridden, nothing of a place
And, as if to put a punctuation mark on that point
God had God’s very own self born into THAT very sort of location.
Can anything good come from Nazareth?
That’s what Nathaniel asks…
Come and see for yourself, Nathaniel.
And Jesus comes to them,
and says of Nathaniel “Look, here is someone in whom there is no deceit”
and Nathaniel is taken aback:
What? How do you say something so personal about me, stranger?
It’s a play on words, really.
The name Israel goes back to the story of Jacob and Esau
When Jacob stole Esau’s birthright for a bowl of lentil stew…
But it’s also a keen insight for Jesus
To look at Nathaniel and to say that he sees truth and honesty in him.
But how?
How do you know that, stranger?
Nathaniel wants to understand.
The language of the gospel says he asks directly:
“Jesus, where did you get to KNOW me.”
And Jesus tells him:
I saw you, Nathaniel,
under that fig tree, before Philip called you.
And for the writer of the Gospel
There is something significant going on here
That being SEEN by Jesus is being KNOWN by Jesus
That Jesus sees Nathaniel and cuts through all the stuff
To understand who Nathaniel truly is
And seeing all of that, invites him to come and follow him anyway.
The most important assertion of the Christian Gospel
Is that, in Jesus Christ,
We are known and seen as we are
And that, in spite of this or because of this, however you want to look at it
We are loved, and invited, and given purpose.
Thanks be to God.
///
Our family saw a movie this weekend.
The Greatest Showman is a musical imagination of the life of Phineas Taylor Barnum.
There’s a rule somewhere about not talking too much about current movies
Spoiler alerts and all that
So I won’t give anything away
But P.T. Barnum’s circus was well known
As being a sort of carnival of the bizarre,
And the movie, which is a film about a lot of things
Is in part a story about how we label some people as different, less than others.
The bearded lady
The 750 pound man
Conjoined twins
A little person
People with physical deformities
At that time, set in the 1870s, black trapeze artists
Each of them defined as “freaks,” or worse.
It’s a great movie.
Particularly if you like musicals or Hugh Jackman.
(And I do)
PT Barnum sought about to create a place where each of these outcasts could shine.
And without giving away how the movie debates Barnum’s motives
Or the prejudices of society about these performers
One of the major takeaways from the movie is how human each one of them is.
Theologically, we understand this.
For in God, there is no one who is unworthy, or unloved, or less than.
There are no throwaway people.
Everyone matters. You matter.
You have the very image of God inside of you.
So that when the Psalmist declares that
“I am fearfully and wonderfully made”
He’s talking about you, and he’s talking about me, he’s talking about them, too.
///
We’re in an age where we have to assert this once again
Not just for ourselves.
That will always be useful, I think
The reminder for each of us
That God knows us and loves us and wants us to build our self-esteem
On that affirmation.
But the assertion that each person matters
And that a society that fails to build access and welcome for each person
Is failing to live into its calling.
This is a particularly appropriate weekend to be affirming all of this
With the recognition of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Junior, tomorrow.
Fifty years ago, this coming April, King was assassinated
At the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee
Where he had gathered to address the conditions of
black sanitary public works employees as part of the Poor People’s campaign.
I think that, if he were alive today,
King would make note of the fact that this weekend
Is also the eighth anniversary of the Haitian earthquake
that killed some 200,000 people.
That they are not throw away people.
Or would note that 40% of Puerto Rico doesn’t yet have power
From this summer’s hurricanes
And that they are not throw away people.
King knew the biblical imperatives to treat the sojourner and immigrant in the land
As our very own kin
And regardless of the mess of an immigration system
that good people are trying to make better
King would challenge any suggestion that immigrants are throw away people.
King is particularly remembered today for his struggle for racial equality
And maybe less so for his abiding advocacy for the poor, against the war in Vietnam
And as a challenge to moderates who want to take social progress slow.
The time is always right, for doing what is right, King would say.
We are challenged to rise above
the narrow confines of our individualistic concerns
to the broader concerns of all humanity…
Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.
(King, I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches that Changed the World. Harper San Francisco 1992. 19-20)
What are we supposed to do when our leaders want to dismiss entire countries
As backwater, no good, unworthy.
I don’t even have to go there with the actual profanities uttered this week
And splashed all over the news.
What are we supposed to say when the fires of racism, and religious bigotry
Of sexism or mocking of the disabled are rekindled in our land?
How do we respond in the face of any efforts to deny the equal status of another?
With God’s answer: that each and every person is known by God
And known by God, is loved by God
And that no matter where they go or who looks down on them
There is a God who cares for them no matter what
And more than that, a God who wants us to care for them to.
Red and yellow, black and white
We are precious in His sight
Jesus loves the little children of the world….
May we, dear friends, marvel at God’s boundless, endless love.
May it be so.
Amen.
——
Image Credit: “Baby Jesus” by Nikkolas Smith: https://www.nikkolas.art/prints/baby-jesus
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