"The Great Invitation: Come and See" - Sermon, January 15, 2017
Community United Methodist Church, Quincy
“The Great Invitation: Come and See”
Pastor Andrew Davis
January 15, 2017
John 1: 29-42
What are you looking for? What are you after? It was a question that my mom or grandma
often asked me when I was younger whenever I started rummaging around the
kitchen, usually looking for a snack since I seemed to be
hungry all the time. But it’s also one
of those questions we get asked when rummaging around our office, our house,
garage or shop, or around the church when someone sees us trying to find
something we misplaced, or something we need right at that moment (which can
sometime result in a stress-laden tirade filled with colorful language).
Sometimes that search can be quite
frustrating and feel like it’s going in circles, and sometimes in a rare
instance, I won’t be able to find something leading to more frustration and a
little more colorful language. In fact,
when I got back to the office a couple weeks ago, I kept looking for one of my
extra phone/iPad chargers that I had in my office that I took when I made a
trip to Reno last month, but still haven’t found it. Luckily, I had two other phone/iPad
chargers. However, it didn’t mean I wasn’t
milling around the office like a headless chicken when I got back.
However, we might also be looking for
something else, something deeper, something that is not material. Perhaps, when we hear Jesus’s question
in our Gospel lesson this morning, “what are you looking for,” perhaps we are
looking for a relationship with God, a community, answers to life’s greatest
questions, or just answers in general.
As we continue with our series, “The Great Invitation” we encounter the
first disciples in John’s gospel this morning, who are invited by Jesus to come
and see when they approach him and ask where he’s staying. As we talked about last week, the great
invitation is an invitation to a deeper relationship with God, a deeper level
of discipleship by following Jesus closely through study, worship, small group
participation, our actions, and sharing that word of good news with others, and
inviting people we know into a relationship with God and into community. We are essentially inviting people to follow
Jesus. No matter where we are on our
faith journey, this is an invitation to come and see what following Jesus is
all about.
Last week, we were invited to think
about what it means to be a baptized believer and where the heavens open for
each of us, such as when we first encountered God or when we first decided to
follow Jesus. But this morning as we
just heard in John’s gospel, two of John’s disciples, my namesake Andrew being
one of them, who are curious and want to know more about “the lamb of God"
that John describes Jesus as. So they
set out after Jesus and when they catch up to Him, he asks them “what are you
after?" However, Jesus doesn’t tell them, “leave me alone, let me go home
and relax," but instead invites Andrew and the other disciple of John’s to
“come and see for yourselves” and they sit and learn all day, ultimately
becoming followers of Jesus (Jn. 1: 39, MSG). Of course, when Jesus says to “come
and see,” he is also inviting us to come and see for ourselves what following
him is all about. Our great invitation
is to come and see what Jesus is showing us, even in today’s world.
What are some experiences in your life
that led you to follow Jesus and why do you follow Jesus? It’s also a good question to be asked and a
good question to think about, as everyone will have a different experience and
perhaps a different reason for following Jesus.
Following Jesus has different meanings, yet this time is a great
invitation to have conversations with each other to flesh those questions out,
basically inviting each other to come and see why we follow Jesus. One of the reasons I follow Jesus is because it
keeps me grounded, as Jesus provides an example of how we should live and
relate with others, through love, service, peace, and and mercy. And trust me, it’s not always easy to love,
especially when I’ve been hurt by someone or whenever I see something happening
that just makes me angry. But following
Jesus helps me to stop, and think about what he would do and how he would
handle any situations, not to say that turning tables over is out the
question. Even when I was in a spiritual
desert ten years ago, I knew something was really missing when I took a break
from the church and thought I lost my faith.
Even then, Jesus will still invite us to come and see, even when we
think we’ve lost our faith. Jesus sets a
prime example of how we should live, but he also invites us and others to come
and see for ourselves what following him and learning from him is all
about.
What are you looking for? Or, what are you seeking when you are looking
for Jesus? Some other questions worth
pondering over. Again, people are
seeking different things in life and when it comes to a relationship with God
by following Jesus, you'll get different responses if you ask why people follow
Jesus. When Andrew and John’s other
disciple ask Jesus where he stays and Jesus invites them to come and see, Jesus
also invites each one of us to come and see for ourselves what following him
will be about. For example, Jesus’s
invitation to come and see entails the following:
If
you want to know the word made flesh, come and see Jesus. If you want to know
what love is like, come and see Jesus. If you want to experience God's glory,
to be filled with bread that never perishes, to quench your thirst with living
water, to be born again, to abide in love, to behold the light of the world, to
experience the way, the truth, and the life, to enter into life everlasting, .
. . if you want to know God, come and see Jesus.[i]
These are a few
examples of what Jesus brings us, mostly what we see from John’s
gospel, but following Jesus as 21st century disciples also has its
challenges. As the hands and feet of
Jesus in today’s world, we can invite others to come and see, but sometimes it
feels like extending the invitation is like trying to climb one of the higher
mountains out here, in which our invitations might be met with skepticism and
even suspicion. One group that has been
doing some extensive research on church attendance and religion in our culture
is the Barna Group. It’s not hard to see
that religious engagement in America is on the decline. A 2014 study by The
Barna Group found that 48% of people born between 1984 and 2002 and 40% of
those born between 1965 and 1983 do not affiliate with any particular church.[ii] And for many churches, including our own, who have a desire
to reach out to and develop relationships with younger generations and anyone
seeking Jesus for that matter, we have our work cut out for us. As David Kinnaman and George Barna put it, “the
younger the generation, the more post-Christian it is.”[iii]
This is
definitely some sobering information and easy to lament. However, despite these figures and detachment
from the faith, I actually see it as an opportunity to engage, to share our
stories and our faith, and to invite people to come and see why we
follow Jesus. You see, I am NOT going to
give up hope, as I still believe that we can connect with people, except it
takes being authentic, being real, being honest, and willing to listen, and
listen intently!! We can learn a lot
from each other, as I find myself learning a lot from the younger generations,
but I also find a lot of valuable wisdom from generations who came before me,
as the generations before me first invited me to come and see. Yet as I will keep harping on, our actions
need to match the story we tell because when people come and see what we are about
or what following Jesus is all about, whether it’s out of curiosity or because
we intentionally extended the invitation, people are going to have expectations
based on what they heard. On the other
hand, George Barna and David Kinnaman
point out that “even though the cultural trend is toward less
church-friendliness overall, the vast majority of [adults who do not attend
church] still have at least some level of personal experience in a church,” something
that might provide a glimmer of hope, and an opportunity for us to extend the
invitation to come and see.[iv]
One of our goals
as a church this year (and beyond) is to reach out to many of our families
surrounding our congregation and in this area.
This is where The Great Invitation really helps us think about how we engage and invite others to come and see what
following Jesus is about. We can spend
our time engaging in these demographic and sociological studies, like the Barna
Group has done, but for us as a community of faith, the best thing we can do is
to be out and about in our community, being willing to share our stories with
others who we encounter and get to know.
And if we want to dig a little deeper, we can be like Jesus and ask
people we engage with what they are looking for, except we also don’t want to
come across like we are trying to make a sales pitch either. People can spot fakeness very quickly!! Simply asking what people are looking for can
lead to some wonderful conversations, but we need to be real, we need to be
authentic, and we need to be honest, especially when we extend the invitation
to come and see, to come and follow Jesus.
It is even more interesting to hear what people have to say when we
intentionally listen to what they are looking for.
One of my friends in
Denver, CO, Rev. Jerry Herships is pastor of AfterHours Denver in the Rocky
Mountain Conference UMC, which is a church that is quite unconventional in what
you would expect to see when it comes to church and when they invite others to
come and see. AfterHours meets in
various bars around the Denver area on Monday nights for worship. Yet what is unique, besides meeting in bars,
is that AfterHours engages with and intently listens to the homeless community
around Denver, as a good part of their worship service is a hands-on time of
making sack lunches and collecting socks and other clothing items. When Jerry serves Communion in City Center
Park during the week and as volunteers hand out sack lunches, they are not only
embodying the hands and feet of Christ in the world by feeding the hungry and
providing clothes for warmth, they are also inviting people to come and see,
showing and sharing the love of Jesus, especially to a community that is
oftentimes looked down upon and ignored.
Along with rolling up
their sleeves and engaging in service, the people who participate in AfterHours
also provide an essential community. In
Jerry's book that was published in 2015, Last Call: From Serving Drinks to
Serving Jesus, Jerry writes that
Most
people I know who don’t go to church aren’t looking for a lot. They want community, they want to do good – maybe
help make the world a better place. That’s
kind of it. But it’s hard to find a
community that you like and that pushes you to be more like Christ – a church
that pushes you when you get lazy about following God and that will also give
you hope and hold you up when you’re about to fall. It’s not easy, and honestly, it’s easy to
give up. And that’s just the people who
are actively searching.[v]
I believe that there are people who are actively searching, but like others,
I too am seeking ways to engage and not necessarily trying to attract people
through programs or advertising. That
just doesn’t work the way it used to.
But more importantly, we need to “invest in relationships” even before
people “decide to follow Jesus.”[vi] As we saw in the text, Jesus invested in a relationship with
Andrew and the other disciple of John before they made the decision to follow
Jesus. And that's a big part of what
Jerry's church does and what we can do too.
So here at Community
UMC, what do we want people to notice about us if we invite them to come and
see? What do we want people to see if they take us up on that great
invitation? From what I’ve seen in my
six months here so far, I see a community deeply engaged in service through the
Community Supper on Wednesday nights, C.A.N., Rotary, P.E.O., helping at the
PCIRC, the volunteer fire department, the Plumas District Hospital Volunteers
Thrift Shop, involvement in the local theater, star follies (which I'm in this
year), and other organizations and groups that help make our community and
world a better place. I see a vital and
active music ministry in our choir and bell choir. I see a community of faith that loves one
another and respects one another and a community that might not think alike,
but still loves alike nonetheless.
At the same time, I
also see room for us to engage deeper in our discipleship through small groups,
which can simply take the form of three or four people meeting together to
check-in with each other weekly by asking “how is it with your soul,” or it can
be in the form of book discussion since we have a nice library on the
Fellowship Hall stage. Or, if you’ve
been on a three day weekend experience like the Walk to Emmaus, Chrysalis,
Cursillo, or Tres Dias, there are opportunities for reunion groups, which are
also not limited just to people who have participated in such a weekend. We're also starting a group called Fellowship
6 as a means of getting to know each other better. Such engagement in small
groups within the church can push us to be more like Christ and push us when we
start feeling lazy about following God, but also helps everyone we encounter to
come and see what we all may be looking for.
And after the participation we had in the children’s Christmas pageant,
we have the seeds planted to engage with the children we have right now, a
chance to share with them what following Jesus is about if people are willing
to help start and lead a mid-week gathering for kids, which allows them to be
kids, but also so that they can come and see what following Jesus is
about.
I could go on and on,
but when we extend The Great Invitation for others to come and see, I want to
invite you into discussion about what people outside the walls of this building
will see if they take us up on our great invitation to following Jesus, or what
we want people to see when we invite them to come and see. And as we think about what it means to invite
people to come and see, I also want us to think about why each of us follow
Jesus. As we go into this new week, who
do you find yourself having the most conversations about faith with? And, where have you seen the face of Christ and
heard the voice of God? These are all
things to think about in sharing our own experiences with the people we
encounter because they will no doubt have questions about why we follow Jesus
and why we are Christian. Just be real,
be authentic, and be honest when you share about your faith and experiences of
faith. Finally, invite those you know to come and see and to be a part of this
Great Invitation.
In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit, Amen.
[i]
Lewis, K. (2017) Commentary on john 1: 29-42 by
Audrey West. Available at:
https://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=3114 (Accessed: 12
January 2017).
[ii]
George Barna and David Kinnaman, Churchless: Understanding Today’s
Unchurched and How to Connect with Them (Austin, TX: Tyndale Momentum,
2014), 12.
[iii]
Barna and Kinnaman, 17.
[iv]
Barna and Kinnaman, 21.
[v]
Jerry Herships, Last Call: From Serving Drinks to Serving Jesus (Louisville:
Westminster-John Knox Press, 2015), 96.
[vi]
Ministries, D. (2017) Come and see — preaching
notes. Available at:
https://www.umcdiscipleship.org/resources/come-and-see-preaching-notes
(Accessed: 12 January 2017).
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