Epiphany 2, Year B | John 1:43-51
St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church
January 14, 2024
the Rev. Jonathan Hanneman
To watch the full service, please visit this page.
Sometimes the Lectionary’s theme can be an enigma, but both this week and next it’s clearly leaning into the idea of “calling.” Today we have Samuel learning to hear the Lord and Jesus summoning Philip to follow him with Philip then quickly inviting his friend Nathanael; on the 21st we’ll watch as God tells Jonah to go to Ninevah (for the second time) and Jesus calls Andrew and Peter to be “fishers of men.”
Modern American Christianity has developed a kind of weird, unspoken mythology regarding the idea of a “calling” that makes it a lot more complex—or at least more confusing—than it needs to be. Some treat it as a sort of vision quest, sometimes waiting for years to glimpse a supernatural indication that will reveal their life’s one, true purpose or else eventually assuming it’s something that only happens for other, more special people. Then there are those who turn God into a micromanager, refusing to make the simplest of decisions until they know with certainty what “God’s call” is in the smallest of details, like what shirt to wear to class or which cereal to choose for breakfast.[1] It’s all sort of tied up in this legendary formulation of “God’s will”—the one, perfectly planned route for any particular individual’s life that, if they can just figure it out, will allow them to spend the rest of their days in peace and joy, knowing not only a personal sense of fulfilment but God’s unbroken presence and continual blessing.
Growing up in our culture, it can be difficult not to think along those lines. With our emphasis on the individual as the one who makes or defines meaning and our historic narrative of Divine favor extending all the way back to the discovery of the New World, of course that’s how God must work, communicating and guiding each one of us on a minute level, if only one could settle down long enough to “let go and let God.” But natural as those ideas are to us, they would have made little to no sense to either Jesus or his followers.
We’ve talked before about how the Bible isn’t about you or me as an individual. It’s about us—“you” as a group. Ever since the English language dropped the singular “ye” in favor of the already plural “you,” we keep running into more and more trouble understanding the New Testament. That’s because, the vast majority of the time, it simply isn’t attempting to address only you; it’s talking to us.
This comes up in both our John and I Corinthians readings today, each of which contains some intriguing contrasts addressing both the individual and the plural “you.” In John, Jesus is speaking to Nathanael as an individual until the very last sentence of our passage, when the “you” becomes plural, suggesting that he’s not talking about Nathanael having a personal experience or revelation but Jesus’ followers collectively seeing “heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.”[2] In Corinthians, the individual and group references are a lot more mixed up, with Paul switching not only between the singular and plural “you” but even messing around with verbs and whether he’s addressing multiple individual’s bodies (plural) or the Body of Christ.[3]
I think that plurality concept is especially important when it comes to our topic of “calling.” In our common way of thinking, my calling is between me and God: I receive some form of revelation that God wants me as an individual to do something, and once that happens, heaven forbid that anyone try to get in my way. “If God is for me, who can be against me?”[4] Having been set upon the hero’s pathway, the only way to remain faithful to God’s call is to keep heading down that pre-determined route until I either succeed or die. To do anything else would be to fail in my faith and dishonor God.
The Bible does occasionally show us instances of that sort of individual call to a specific task—take our Jonah passage next week. But a vast majority of the time, God’s call isn’t to a single person but to a group. Take a look at how often God calls a Moses or an Elijah or a Paul and compare it to the number of times God calls Israel or the people or the Church. And we should note that an individual call is almost always given for the benefit of the group. If God’s call to me doesn’t fit within God’s call to us, I might not be hearing God as clearly as I’d like to pretend.
Apart from a few cases, God’s calling almost always appears through community—becoming clear only through our interactions with one another. Nathanael and Philip didn’t just volunteer or force themselves onto Jesus. Jesus called Philip, and Philip, in turn, called his friend—the call was “coming from [outside] the house,” so to speak. And Samuel had no way of understanding who was even talking to him apart from Eli recognizing it and sorting him out. Likewise, we within the Church today most frequently hear God’s call through the voices or guidance of others. Someone asks you to help with a task, and something about the project just clicks with who you are. Another person notices your skill in a particular area and suggests you might want to focus more of your attention in that direction. And sometimes people do encounter moments where a little switch flips inside their head and they might think, “Hey, I could do that.” But without addressing those ideas within the context of community, it’s almost impossible to know the difference between calling and imagination.
We’ve only just started Epiphany, but Lent is coming up fast—Ash Wednesday is exactly one month from today! During Lent, our Diocese offers an online course of discernment that anyone is free to join. When we as Episcopalians hear the word “discernment,” we often associate that process with people interested in becoming priests or deacons. But the offering here in the Diocese of the Rio Grande is much broader than ordination. Led by the Commission on Ministry for the Baptized, our course is designed for anyone looking toward a major life decision or transition or even just wondering what might be next for their lives. Some of the participants may be considering holy orders, but others are wondering what they might do as they graduate from college or move toward retirement. It’s an open process where people anywhere from Farmington to Fort Stockton can listen to and learn from one another, where individuals can come together in extended community for the purpose of seeing how and where God may be calling them to grow.
Working through discernment together doesn’t mean that there won’t be challenges. Samuel’s first call resulted in some very bad news for the person who had just shown him how to listen to God in the first place. Even with a solid calling, the road forward can still be difficult, awkward, and even disappointing; calling is a process, not a one-time epiphany. That’s one reason that it’s important for us as Christians to gather on a regular basis, both so we can continue our process of discerning what God is asking of us and in order to receive the encouragement we need when our calling doesn’t go quite the way we had hoped or expected.
God is still working, and God is still calling. But God isn’t just calling me or you as an individual, instilling a single life with meaning by directing each of us to some greater personal purpose. God is calling us. Together, we learn to hear and see more clearly. Together, we invite one another forward and encourage one another in our strengths and giftings. Together, we learn to hear God’s voice and recognize God’s pathways. As individuals, we might get to “see greater things than these,”[5] but only together can we “see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.”
[1] Not made up examples—I’ve known people who did that.
[2] John 1:51 | All Bible quotations are from the NRSV unless otherwise noted.
[3] The modern claim that “my body is a temple” is especially egregious. Paul is clearly speaking about the collective body of Christ, not any one individual human body.
[4] Romans 8:31 | an intentional misquotation to reflect our common individualist understanding of the verse
[5] John 1:50b | NRSV