“We Have Found Him”

John 1:35-51; Psalm 139

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.

⁵ You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me.

⁶ Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is so high that I cannot attain it.

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.

¹⁵ My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth.

¹⁶ Your eyes beheld my unformed substance. In your book were written all the days that were formed for me, when none of them as yet existed.

¹⁷ How weighty to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them!

¹⁸ I try to count them—they are more than the sand; I come to the end—I am still with you.

³⁵ The next day John again was standing with two of his disciples, ³⁶ and as he watched Jesus walk by, he exclaimed, “Look, here is the Lamb of God!”

³⁷ The two disciples heard him say this, and they followed Jesus. ³⁸ 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?” ³⁹ 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. ⁴⁰ One of the two who heard John speak and followed him was Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother. ⁴¹ He first found his brother Simon and said to him, “We have found the Messiah” (which is translated Anointed). ⁴² 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).

⁴³ The next day Jesus decided to go to Galilee. He found Philip and said to him, “Follow me.” ⁴⁴ Now Philip was from Bethsaida, the city of Andrew and Peter. ⁴⁵ Philip 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.” ⁴⁶ Nathanael said to him, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Philip said to him, “Come and see.” ⁴⁷ When Jesus saw Nathanael coming toward him, he said of him, “Here is truly an Israelite in whom there is no deceit!” ⁴⁸ Nathanael asked him, “Where did you get to know me?” Jesus answered, “I saw you under the fig tree before Philip called you.” ⁴⁹ Nathanael replied, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!” ⁵⁰ Jesus answered, “Do you believe because I told you that I saw you under the fig tree? You will see greater things than these.” ⁵¹ And 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.”

The Sermon

We can’t tell each other how to feel, what to think, or what to believe. We try awfully hard. But we can’t tell each other what we’re supposed to think or know or how we’re supposed to feel.

All we can do is speak for ourselves.

I can’t tell you what it should be feeling like to you. But I can tell you what has happened to me.

I want to take a minute to salute the young people, known variously as Middle School students and High School students, teenagers, adolescents, youth.

And not just the ones who are here—or who are not here, as the case may be. I salute teenagers everywhere, and I salute the teenagers you and I once were, or that you younger children will be, one day all too soon, as far as your parents are concerned.

In some ways, youth is the most over-romanticized part of our lives; but in some ways, you could never strongly enough acknowledge the aching sentiment of it all.

For many or most of us, youth is a time of profound searching. We’re looking for something tangible, and something visionary. And in some ways that search continues throughout our whole lives.

We search for belonging. We search for our place, and we look for a way to make our place in the world.

And, arguably, all the myriad other things we look for might be said to be subservient to those needs. We want to be fit, we want to be attractive (or at least non-hideous), we want to fit in;

we want to do well, get good grades, but we don’t necessarily want to have to work too hard;

we want to find our way to fulfillment and income;

we want to find someone to make a connection with; we want to find love, acceptance.

And in different ways we take those searches with us for the rest of our lives. Even after we’ve found our happiness—in our relationships, in our vocations, in our lifestyles, in our religious beliefs—there is still and always something in our hearts that keeps us looking, keeps us dreaming of pushing the boundaries, either seeing what’s out there, or searching ever deeper within, trying to find that place, in the world or in our hearts, that is truly home.

We saw two disciples of John the Baptist standing there with John when Jesus walked by. John had been preaching a baptism of repentance, and he had been saying, “Look, I may seem to be powerful, but don’t think this is about me. Someone is coming who will baptize you with the fire of the Holy Spirit.”

And now here they were, and as Jesus came by, John’s two disciples, one of whom was Andrew, heard John the Baptist say, “Look, here is the Lamb of God!”

So the two followed after Jesus, and when he turned and saw them following, he asked them, “What are you looking for?”

And all those dreams and memories from their childhood and youth rushed past them…What are we looking for?

Answers? Truth? Beauty?

Hope for something better?

Love? Dialogue?

Peace? Security?

Home?

They said, “Where are you staying?” And he said, “Come and see.” They came and saw where he was staying, and they stayed with him for a while that day.

Then Andrew went to get his brother, Simon. He finally caught up with him and said, “We have found the Messiah!”

He brought Simon to Jesus, and Jesus looked right at Simon and said, “You are Simon son of John. You are to be called Cephas,” which is translated Peter, which means rock. And only much later, after they’ve begun their long journey together, will Jesus turn to Simon Peter and say, “You are Peter, and on this Rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hell will not prevail against it.”

But at this first meeting, he simply identifies someone who has never met him before, but whom Jesus has known all his life.

At no time here has anyone said anything about how you were supposed to feel, or what you are supposed to think and believe.

John the Baptist just said, “Here is the lamb of God,” but nobody had ever said that before; it’s not in the Old Testament, and Revelation hadn’t been written yet, so they didn’t know to think that way yet.

And anyway, other than that, nobody has said anything about how someone else is required to feel when they see Jesus for themselves. Andrew and the other disciple of John the Baptist just followed—nobody said they had to—and when Andrew went to get Simon, all he had to say was, “We have found the Messiah.”

Apparently, that was enough. They had been waiting for something, looking for something, and they knew that if this was real, they had found it.

John (the gospel writer) doesn’t even tell us what we’re supposed to feel. All he’s asking us to do is see what happened to Andrew and his brother Simon, and how they responded. Maybe John knows that anything beyond that, and this becomes a “You Had to Be There” experience.

Newsweek ran an article a few years ago about a survey that Baylor had done on the “twelve most effective preachers in the English language.” (I guess I must have been #13. Maybe I'd just had an off-year or something.) But anyway it was the luminaries--Fred Craddock, Barbara Brown Taylor, Tom Long...

One of the ones they identified was James Forbes, who, the article said, “became the first African-American to serve New York’s prominent Riverside Church in 1989. Before that, he served at Union Theological Seminary, where one of his early sermons became legendary in the trade. Forbes mounted the pulpit and silently held out two tuning forks. After an excruciating long pause—‘we could hear our hearts beating,’ recalls one witness—he set one humming, then slowly brought the two together. ‘Would that we had this kind of relationship with God,’ he thundered. And the congregation gasped for breath.” [1]

That’s what the article said.

I have to tell you that in reading that story, I cringe a little bit in sympathy, because when I look at any one of my sermons in print, it never looks the same, and I imagine James Forbes himself reading this article, and thinking the same thing I did: in cold print, that sermon illustration doesn’t do a whole lot for me. Just looking at it in print, it almost seems kind of trite. It's not that it’s dumb or anything, but I’m like everybody else: there are elements of darkness in my life, and I’m not particularly left feeling like they’re all bathed in a healing light as a result of hearing that story.

But the point is it had a huge impact on somebody—if not the reporter, then someone who was there, and felt it, and told it to the reporter. “We could hear our hearts beating, and when he brought those tuning forks together, and said that one sentence, we were left gasping for breath.”

Sometimes, you just had to be there. But if you weren’t there at the time, you can still see how someone else reacted.

The testimony of what happened to those who were there tells us that something deep, and powerful, and life-changing is going on.

The next day Jesus decided to go to Galilee. He found Philip and said to him, “Follow me.”

Right away, when Jesus “found” Philip, Philip went and found Nathanael, and said to him, “We have found him!”

What?

“We have found him about whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote—it’s Jesus, the son of Joseph, the carpenter from Nazareth.”

But Nathanael wasn’t there. He wasn’t feeling anything special about this.

Nathanael said, “Let me ask you something, Phil. You ever seen anything good come out of Nazareth?”

Nathanael was having a classic case of You Had to Be There.

But Philip took him up on it, and said, “Come and see.”

When Jesus saw Nathanael coming toward him, he said, “Here is an Israelite in whom there is no deceit!” Nathanael said, “Where did you get to know me?” And Jesus said, “I saw you under the fig tree before Philip called you.”

And Nathanael said, “You are the Son of God, the King of Israel!” Jesus answered, “You’ll see a lot greater things than this.”

We have found the one. We had been searching all our lives, from our infancy, from our formative years, looking for something.

And it turns out that, all the time you were trying to find him, God was carrying your picture around in his wallet. God was the Mom who has been putting your artwork up on the fridge since you were old enough to draw, and has been setting the table with an extra place, just in case you would show up for dinner unannounced—which is exactly what God wanted the most.

When you gave your presentation to only polite and scattered hand claps, God was the one giving you a standing ovation.

When you had your private moments of quiet triumph over adversity or temptation, God was the one who was beaming with pride: “That’s my daughter! That’s my son!”

The good news, from John to Andrew, from Andrew to Peter, from Philip to Nathanael, from the Bible to you, from you to your neighbor, your colleague, your family, your friends:

We have found him.

And you can say to them, I can’t tell you how to feel, what to believe, what to think. If I did, it would probably just sound kind of trite, and it probably wouldn’t bring too much light into your darkness.

But I can tell you what has happened to me. And what has happened is: I have found him.

I once was lost, but now am found—and he knew me all along.

[1] Woodward, Kenneth L. “Heard Any Good Sermons Lately?: Even In The Age Of Sound Bites, The Pulpit Still Has Its Great Performers.” NEWSWEEK, Mar 4, 1996