Sermon for the Second Sunday of Epiphany

The novel, Quo Vadis, was published in Polish in 1896 by Henryk Sienkiewicz, who would go on to win the Nobel Prize in literature in 1905. It has been translated into more than 50 languages, including English, and was subsequently made into an epic 1951 Hollywood film starring Robert Taylor, Deborah Kerr, and Peter Ustinov as the emperor Nero. Sergio Leone was an uncredited assistant director of Italian extras—-future star Sophia Loren appeared as an uncredited extra, as an extra bit of fun film lore. The film, Quo Vadis, was nominated for eight Academy Awards and was such a huge box-office success that it was credited with singlehandedly rescuing MGM from the brink of bankruptcy. It is one of those classic-era films that have the Christian faith as their subject matter. Another of those was Lloyd Douglas’s historical novel of 1942, The Robe, made into the 1953 film, starring Richard Burton. The book itself was one of the best-selling titles of the 1940s, holding the no. 1 position on the New York Times Best Seller List for nearly a year. And Ben-Hur, adapted from Lew Wallace's 1880 novel, became, in 1959, the second highest-grossing film in history, after Gone with the Wind. It won a record eleven Academy Awards, and starred the young Charlton Heston. ’51, ’53, ’59. We are seventy years along now—we live in a different time. When did you last see a major commercial film based on any part of the Christian story? Those that have the Christian faith as their explicit subject matter are not culturally correct in our time: they don’t make it to the big screen. (Actually, you might count Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ that dates from just 2004; you can tell me if you saw it at coffee hour afterward!)

It’s a pity, this general lack of blockbuster dramatic retellings of the Christian story, as I think we lose the excitement, the largeness, of these grand, sweeping epics that cover the whole range of human emotions and experience: the passionate conviction of faith, the conflict between the power of the realm and faith, power of any kind set over against the great Christian virtues of love, tenderness, pity, and sacrifice. Because in real life, these emotions, these conflicts, are still, also, very real. Quo Vadis, translated, where are you going? is a reference to an event in the apocryphal book of Peter. From early days, a legend grew that Peter was fleeing persecution in Rome, rushing out of the city south, along the Via Appia, and at a certain juncture of the roads saw a vision of Jesus there. Peter asked him, Lord, where are you going? And Jesus answered, I am going to Rome to be crucified again. Peter understood this as a rebuke, and so he turned and went back on that road, back to Rome, to meet his own crucifixion as he plunged back into the dangerous business that it was, then, to witness to that same Lord.

I find myself coming back again and again to the two great questions that the title of that film raises:

who are you? And where are you going?

Where are we going? If we know who we are, we also know where we are going, because the answer to this second question is bound up in the answer to the first. If we take on the identity of a Christian, we are not creating something out of nothing. God has already called us and named us before we were born, as Isaiah says. And if this is so, we know who we are, and whose we are; we are set on a path that gives our lives meaning and purpose—-an ultimate direction that frees us from the anxiety that modern life brings to many people—the lostness—the lack of hope.

In all four Gospel accounts the narrative concerning Jesus runs like this: birth, baptism, wilderness, calling, ministry. This narrative doesn’t waste words!

In the Gospel of John it is even more concise: you have one of the most beautiful mystical-theological expositions of the birth of the Christ ever set down in writing. Then John the Baptist baptizing the Son of God; then our passage for today, the calling of the first disciples. That’s it. Birth, baptism, calling.

John’s account, here, is a fascinating sequence of questions that are only answered with more questions. Here is the exchange:

John is standing by the road and Jesus walks by. He says to two of his own disciples who are standing there with him: There He is. That is the One, the Lamb of God!

Those two disciples waste no time. They hear this, they leave John, they follow Jesus. When Jesus turns around he sees that now two of John’s followers are following him and he says to them, What are you looking for? But they don’t answer, You! They give him another question; they ask him: where are you staying? And he doesn’t answer them by saying, At the house in the village on the corner, he doesn’t really answer. He simply says, Come and see.

Jesus doesn’t recruit, doesn’t rally them round, doesn’t compete with his predecessor prophet John by answering, I am better than John I have more to offer: defect from John and come over to the new group I am forming that will be better than John’s! He doesn’t answer anything at all. He invites them to come and see.

One of the many things that attracts me about this account is that these first-to-be-called, they go and stay with him. They have time; they take time. They remain with him the rest of that day. And then they remain until the end. To follow meant to sit at the feet of, be attentive, listen, hear. Walk with this Rabbi, keep listening, keep hearing, keep walking: follow him all the way to Jerusalem. As to where they all went after the Resurrection, it is only legend. But once called, they knew they were His, and they then knew The Way.

What does it mean, to be called? What does it mean for us, you and me, to be called? It means to be wanted, to be asked, to be missed, to be loved. God, the Ancient of Days, has already called us, us modern people, rushing here, rushing there. We have been called in the womb, before time, named by this creator God who is above all things, named as God’s own beloved children. We have just to hear it and to say, Yes! God is the end-point, the embracer of all that God ever created: when any irreplaceable part of Creation is maimed or damaged or destroyed on this earth and dies it goes back to the God who made it.

God is the Mother and nurturer; Jesus is the radical.

Jesus was sent as a radical attempt by God to wake us up. Jesus came to re-issue God’s call to us in this brief moment of our own here and now: to wake us up to God’s own eternal reality. So, all that’s left, after this brief blaze of light on earth of Jesus in the flesh, is for us to claim Jesus’s re-calling of us, the calling of our daughtership and sonship!

Slow down! Let us live into our calling as the light and life of the world!

As Paul says in this letter to those fractious Corinthians, the grace of God has already been given you in Christ Jesus. As we wait for the coming of Christ in glory, like those Corinthians, we, also, are not lacking in any spiritual gift; we have only to wake up to their bountiful presence in us.

Slow down, be quiet, pray. Remember your calling.

No amount of evil in the world can take that calling from you, and every moment that you live out what you have been called to do changes this world and helps bring God’s kingdom closer.

Amen!