The Rev. Dr. Pamela Dolan
January 15, 2023
Text: John 1:29-42
“There was a time when the church was very powerful–the time when the early Christians rejoiced at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. Whenever the early Christians entered a town, the people in power became disturbed and immediately sought to convict the Christians for being ‘disturbers of the peace’ and ‘outside agitators.’ But the Christians pressed on, in the conviction that they were ‘a colony of heaven,’ called to obey God rather than man. Small in number, they were big in commitment.”
These words were written by a man sitting in a jail cell in Birmingham, Alabama, after having been arrested for leading a protest through the streets of the city. That man, of course, was the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. His Letter from a Birmingham Jail, written nearly 60 years ago, has been rightly hailed as one of the cornerstone writings of the Civil Rights movement and is well worth revisiting this weekend and even more than once a year.
It may be easy to forget, if you haven’t read it for a while, how much of Dr. King’s letter is about the church. He was writing at a time when the church still held a central place in American society; people didn’t need to ask if you went to church but only where went to church, because attendance at some religious institution or other could safely be assumed. Many American Christians look back on those mid-century decades as a heyday, a golden age. Whether we were even alive then or not, we “remember” it as a time of burgeoning attendance, of being at the center of civic life, and of rollicking potlucks and full Sunday School classes. Those were the days!
And yet, the Letter from a Birmingham Jail, written at the height of those heady times, is a song of lament for the church. Those words I just read about the power of the early Church, when it was an outlaw affiliation of a few courageous and God-intoxicated souls, are quickly followed by words of condemnation for the church in King’s own time.
Speaking of that very same era that we tend to look back on with rose-colored glasses, King wrote: “Things are different now. So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. […] The judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today’s church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century.”
Of course, it is easy to romanticize the early church and use it as a foil for whatever ails us now. But it’s hard to listen to King’s words today and not recognize in them the voice of a prophet. Sixty years on and much of our society does view the church as inauthentic, hypocritical, and irrelevant. The situation is sad ,and complicated, and there’s no one single answer to how we got here. And yet, King’s words underscore that at least some people were able to see it coming.
When Jesus began gathering the people who would go on to become the early church, he did not gather them into beautiful buildings or offer them the coolest programs for all ages and inclinations. His invitation was simple, uttered in phrases like, “Follow me” and “Come and see.” They followed him on dirt roads and through dusty villages, among people who were afraid, angry, skeptical, or even just bored by it all. They followed him into hostile territory, risking rejection, arrest, and persecution. In some few cases, they followed Jesus all the way to the Cross. None of this looked like comfort or success or even personal growth.
And yet, I wonder. Those people who followed Jesus through all that peril, discomfort, and even suffering—what did they see? What did they see that gave them so much courage, so much conviction, so much hope and perseverance?John the Baptist was surely one of the first to see something remarkable when he looked at Jesus. In today’s Gospel we hear that “John saw Jesus coming toward him and declared, ‘Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!’”
While in Matthew’s version of the story only Jesus sees and hears the manifestations of divine blessing at his baptism, in this Gospel it is John who hears the voice of God and sees the Spirit descending on Jesus. This revelation is so extraordinary that John cannot stop himself from sharing it with others: “I myself have seen and testified that this is the Son of God.”
During the season of Epiphany, we focus a lot on how the divinity of Jesus is manifested into the world, such as at his baptism and again at the transfiguration. But we also dwell on stories about what others see when they are in the presence of Jesus and his followers. People might see water turned into wine, or a hurting person healed, or a shunned person welcomed back into their community. They would almost certainly see acts of courage and grace, forgiveness and hope—not just acts performed by Jesus, but acts inspired by Jesus, acts that result from lives transformed by love.
And so it also seems a good time to ask: What do people see when they come to church today? Do they see the Jesus movement, the Beloved Community in action? I believe that in St. Martin’s people see a church that is trying to follow Jesus, in our own flawed and beautiful way. I believe they see a church filled with people who care, a lot, and who work hard to put that caring into action. I know that I see that. We might even sometimes try too hard, work too hard, and forget to stop and see Christ in one another, and in that face we see in the mirror, all of us forever claimed as Christ’s own beloved ones.
When Jesus invites us to come and see, he is not only inviting us to see him, but to see the world through his eyes, indeed to see him in the very act of attending to the world around us. Brother Curtis Almquist, a member of the Society of Saint John the Evangelist, writes:
“The world is an icon. We will see and sense the glory and majesty of God, the presence of God, through God’s creation. No one thing is God: no one person is God, nor a flower or leaf, nor a mountain or an ocean, nor an animal or bird. But in every creature we find traces of the Creator, and the experience is absolutely amazing.” His advice for how to see the world in this way is simple: take the time to look at it carefully, with attention and love. He concluded, “Gaze at something long enough until you can see through it to its source: God, so majestic and infinitely creative, and miraculously generous to share these traces of God’s glory with us.”
The world is an icon that God invites us to come and see. We can see God through the beauty and wonder and strangeness of creation and in so doing learn to see the way God sees. And prophets like Martin Luther King, Jr. are icons, too, icons that help us see the world and the church the way God wants it to be, the way that will lead us into fully inhabiting the Beloved Community. The church, too, can be an icon, helping us all see more clearly the God we worship, the God who made us and loves us and will never leave us. And each one of us can be an icon, a person through whom others seek God at work in God’s own “infinitely creative and miraculously generous” way. Amen.
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