(Homily for Gayton Road Christian Church's Worship on January 14, 2017, Epiphany II)
Finding Yourself
“Finding yourself” is a cultural
trend in our world. At a
crossroads in your career? Take
some time off to find yourself.
Exhausted from years of school?
Why not get away from it all for a little bit, so you can find
yourself? In a rut in your
relationships? Allow yourself some
space to find yourself.
What does it mean to find
yourself? The phrase implies that
you are not completely yourself, that there’s at least a piece of you
missing. You have to find it. For many people, then, finding yourself
means traveling to new places, trying out new activities, making new
friends. The bestselling book Eat, Pray, Love has become an excellent
cultural symbol for what it means to find yourself. Dissatisfied with her life, the author embarks on a global
quest; she indulges herself in different activities, eating in Italy and
praying in India; and she makes new friends, ultimately meeting her new partner
in Indonesia.
As a cultural trend, finding
yourself reflects the values of our hyper-individualized, consumerized
society. It’s all about you. Have it your way. If it makes you happy. Finding
yourself is like a trip to the store, except on a global and existential
scale. You try things out. You decide what you like and what you
will discard. The customer, of
course, is always right.[1]
Finding God
Two thousand years ago, the world
was a little bit different. Life
was not the story of a privileged individual, a consumer ever on the quest for
a more satisfying product. Life
was the story of all the world, and the world was full of mystery. Dissatisfied people did not embark on
global journeys to find themselves.
That would seem rather short-sighted. Rather they hoped to find God. They hoped to unlock the
secrets and resolve the problems of the world.
That’s where our story today
begins. When Philip excitedly
exclaims to his friend Nathanael, “We have found
the one Moses and the prophets wrote about!” (cf. 1:45), what he’s really
saying is something like: we’ve found
God! We’ve found where God is
moving, what God is doing! Jewish folks like Philip and Nathanael believed in
an ancient promise that God would one day anoint a king to restore the kingdom
of Israel and usher in a new age of peace and well-being.
But Nathanael is a no-nonsense
kind of guy. News like this is almost
too good to be true. He responds
to Philip with a question not unlike the one we heard this week about Haiti and
El Salvador. “Can anything good
come from that outhouse of a town, Nazareth?”[2] Of course, we all know the answer to
that question. Our salvation comes
from that outhouse. Which raises
the question for me: Could it be that today our salvation comes from places
like Haiti and El Salvador?
In any case, they go and meet
Jesus. Before Nathanael can say
anything, Jesus empathizes with Nathanael’s honest approach to life. Nathanael cannot believe it. Jesus seems to know him already. Philip, it appears, was right.
Being Found
On the surface, then, this is a
tale of two men finding God—an ancient precursor to Eat, Pray, Love, if you will.
But the gospel of John is rarely as simple as its surface. It delights in symbols and hidden
meanings, in showing us that there is always more than meets the eye.
In this case, we have Philip who
first proclaims to have “found” the messiah and then suggests that he and
Nathanael go “see” the messiah.
These two words—“find” and “see”—are crucial. Because when we read the text more closely, we discover that
Philip’s story is backwards.
Philip says, “We have found
him!” but just before that, the storyteller reports that Jesus “found”
Philip. Philip invites Nathanael,
“Come and see,” but when Nathanael
and Jesus meet, the storyteller reports not that Nathanael saw Jesus but that
Jesus “saw” Nathanael.[3]
All of which is to say—before we
see Jesus, he sees us. Before we
find him, he finds us. Faith means
being found.
The problem with the modern quest
to find oneself, or even the ancient quest to find God, is that we’re the ones
doing the finding. We’re the ones
doing the seeing. And we’re
naturally self-absorbed creatures.
We will see what we want to see.
We will find whatever pleases us.
What we will not find, however, is something greater than
ourselves, something outside us that redefines us. What we will not find is the love that comes from being
found.
Seeing Ourselves as God Sees Us
There once was a notorious
woman. Whether her reputation was
justified, I cannot say. But the
facts are this: she had married five different times. And in the end, she lived with a man to whom she had not
committed herself. Why so many
husbands? One can only
speculate. Perhaps she was looking
for herself and caught satisfying glimpses of herself in each one.
What we do know for certain is
that one day, her life was transformed.
She went to draw water from the well in the heat of the day, which was
usually the most convenient time to draw water, because no one else would be
there. But this time there was
someone there. A man. And rather than keeping quiet or
averting his eyes or simply leaving, as most men would have done, this man
asked her for a drink. They got to
talking, and soon enough this man, a complete stranger, had told her her life
story. You may think that was a
miracle. But the real miracle was
that he said it without a hint of disdain or judgment in his voice. They started to talk of spiritual
things, and the woman speculated about the savior, the messiah, who would one
day come and make everything right.
And the man said, “I am he.”
That was crazy! But what was even crazier, was that the
woman believed him. Because
already she was beginning to feel different about herself, like he had made
something right within her. To
begin with, he had talked to her when no one else would. But besides that, he knew everything
about her, every unsavory detail.
Most of the time when someone else knew about her life, and especially
when they started to talk about it, she felt a deep shame. But with this man it was
different. He welcomed her as she
was. He loved her, as no man had.
This story from the gospel of John—the story of Jesus and
the woman at the well—is also our story.
It is the story of being found.
When Jesus finds us and sees us, we begin to see ourselves
differently. We see ourselves
honestly—all the unsavory and painful details, yes—but we also see something
deeper than that. When we are
found by God, we see that at the unchangeable core of our being, we are loved. And that love calls forth parts of
ourselves that we did not know existed.
The woman at the well did not leave Jesus ashamed of her past and still
trapped within it. She left
excited about whom she and all the world were becoming.
The God Who Finds Us and in Whom We Find
Ourselves
Right now in the church it is the
season of Epiphany, when we celebrate God’s appearing in our world. When God appears, there is often a
“aha!” moment or light-bulb realization—which is to say, we have an “epiphany.” Part of that epiphany has to do with
God. We see God in a new way. But part of that epiphany also has to
do with ourselves. Because
whenever we see God or find God, God has first seen and found us. And being found changes the way we see
ourselves. We “find ourselves” in
a way we never could have on our own.
We see what God sees. We see the bad parts, yes, and we see parts of
ourselves that are false, but we also see a person who is loved completely by
God and called beyond themselves to a life of goodness and beauty in the world. It is no coincidence that so many of
the characters in the gospels leave Jesus’ company rejoicing and with renewed
purpose.
I don’t think Eat, Pray, Love got it wrong. I don’t think our modern world has it
completely wrong. “Finding
yourself” is not a bad quest to go on.
Nor is finding God. But
these quests are misguided, or incomplete, if we do not relinquish ourselves to
the possibility that we cannot see everything on our own. If we are the masters of the quest,
then we will only ever find what we want to find, a self defined by our
fantasies and fears, or a God who looks like us. What we need—and what this world needs—is something much greater
and other than that. And that’s
precisely the truth that the gospels proclaim: In the end, what will save us is
not what we find. What will save us
is the God who finds us, whose love draws us and all the world out into who we
really are.
Prayer
God who finds us
Right where we are:
Disarm us of our false selves—
Our small selves—
So that we may be found
In the greatness and otherness
Of your love.
In the name of our “aha!” moment, Jesus
Christ. Amen.
[1] As a further
sign of its conformity to our market-based world, finding yourself appears to
be largely a privilege of the rich, a commodity that only the well-off can
afford. To find yourself takes
time and money.
[2] My
paraphrase.
[3] Jesus
himself insists that he “saw”
Nathanael before Nathanael had even heard the news about Jesus.
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