Sermon for the Second Sunday of Epiphany, 2018 (Year B)

Jesus decided to go to Galilee. He found Philip and said to him, “Follow me.” Now Philip was from Bethsaida, the city of Andrew and Peter. 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.” Nathanael said to him, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Philip said to him, “Come and see.” - John 1:43-45 (NRSV)

Outside of the New Testament, there is no mention in the historical record of the town of Nazareth until about the mid 2nd century A.D. when the tiny town had already become a place of Christian pilgrimage. Some scholars have even suggested that the area of Nazareth was uninhabited during the time of Christ. Archaeological evidence, however, suggests that Nazareth has population of around 400 people during the lifetime of Jesus. Nazareth, you see, was an insignificant town in an obscure part of the Roman Empire. It was not the sort of place that people who mattered came from. It was the kind of backwater that people associate with ignorance, poverty, and, maybe even, cultural conservatism. Nazareth was what we sometimes call fly over country.  It was the kind of place that we pass on the highway and don’t think three seconds about. Nazareth was like those countries we see on the map whose names we can’t remember; or even, pronounce correctly. It was the kind of place we assume we know all about despite never having been. Nazareth was the kind place where those people lived - those poor people, those uneducated people, and those people we are thankful we’re not.

Nazareth was the inner city where we lock our doors and drive quickly through. Nazareth was the old mining town where the mining has left and meth and heroine have come in.  And Nazareth was much like the places where our present day migrants and refugees come from. Nazareth, you see,  is all those places that we’d rather shut our eyes to.

For Nathanael, and likely others, Nazareth was not a place where one would expect anything of consequence to arise. And here Philip was saying to him, “Yes, out Nazareth has come the person who the scriptures - both the books of Moses and the Prophets have promised will come. And that out of Nazareth, God will renew the face of the earth and inaugurate his Holy Kingdom on earth. And that out of small, insignificant, and provincial Nazareth, has come someone who is of universal significance. If you don’t believe me, come and see.”

What Philip was saying sounded patently absurd to Nathaniel and it likely would sound absurd to us as well.  It does not make much sense that God, who is universal, could be embodied in something so particular God, the creator of all things, has become truly human and more specifically has become a mere carpenter’s son from tiny Nazareth. How could the universal become something so particular and how could the creator of human kind become a lowly human being?

And even if God, were to do something like that, wouldn’t he have chosen to become something a little more grand than a 30 something from a po’dunk little town out by the see of Galilee? Wouldn’t he be a king or least someone at least moderately respectable. Wouldn’t God-made-man look a little more like me and less like people I pity or disdain?

By the particulars of his coming; by the fact that God’s light broke into the darkness of this world in Nazareth of Galilee in the Roman province of Judaea, we are taught a powerful lesson as to who God is and what God cares about. You see, God came to bind up the brokenhearted, to heal the sick, teach the ignorant, and give sight to the blind. He did not come to make us feel good about ourselves and to affirm the status quo. He came to organize a conspiracy, a revolution of love. He came to lift up the poor and to topple the rich and powerful.

Liberation Theology, especially the thought of Fr. Gustavo Gutierrez, teaches us a powerful concept that we would do well to remember. Echoing the social teaching of the entire Bible, Gutierrez teaches that we are called to have a preferential option for the poor. I will repeat that; we are called to have a preferential option for the poor. That is, our human society, ought to be organized in such a way that the needs of the weak, vulnerable, and marginalized are prioritized ahead of everything else. If we systematically fail to care for the poor, the vulnerable, and the marginalized and fail to seek ways to end poverty, vulnerability, and marginalization of any kind, then our whole political and economic system has failed. If we fail to challenge injustice in our community, in our nation, and our world, then our Christianity is worthless. One of our fellow members of this St. Thomas community recently said to me, “If we fail to promote justice, the Church has no real purpose.” She was right. Being Christian is not mere hobby that we attend to on Sunday morning or during weekday devotions, it is the center of being and the bedrock of our entire worldview- moral, political, and everything else.

All of us are called to work and strive for justice. Last week, we prayed together the words of the Baptismal Covenant and I asked you on behalf of the Church, “Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?” And we all responded, “I will, with God’s help.” With God’s help, brothers and sisters, we are called cast off our prejudices and fears. We are called to “Come and See” what this Jesus of Nazareth is up to. We are called to margins of the Empire, to serve our Lord Jesus among the weak and the vulnerable. We are called reach out rather than to enclose ourselves is walls of our own making.

I close with a few words from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, whose life and legacy we celebrate this weekend. He wrote so many years ago.

“Any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually moribund religion awaiting burial.” 

(http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/documentsentry/pilgrimage_to_nonviolence/) 

So let us recommit ourselves to a living faith and care for those who come from Nazareth, wherever that Nazareth may be.

Amen