Second Sunday after the Epiphany

Second Sunday after the Epiphany (B)

January 14, 2018

Text: John 1:43-51

            First, there is the call of Jesus: “Follow me” (John 1:43; ESV).  He takes the initiative.  He seeks His disciples.  He chooses you.  You did not choose Him.  He chooses you, and He seeks you, and He calls you.  A disciple is one who follows in the discipline, the teaching, of the Teacher.  You follow Jesus, and the reason you do that isn’t because you decided to do it, but because of His call.  His call is nothing less than the speech of God that does what it says.  And so here is the point: Jesus’ call to follow Him creates the faith in Him that does just that.  And where does this happen for you?  It’s easy to see how it happened for Philip at the beginning of our Lord’s earthly ministry.  Philip could see Jesus with his eyes and hear His Middle-Eastern voice, probably calling in Aramaic.  We don’t have that benefit.  But we do hear the voice of Jesus in His call.  For many of us, that happened when we were babies, when our parents brought us to Holy Baptism.  There Jesus called us as He was in the water, with the Spirit descending upon us and remaining with us and the Father declaring to each one of us, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased” (Mark 1:11), as we heard last week.  Others of you came to faith later in life, which is to say that Jesus called you to faith by His Word, by preaching, by evangelism efforts of a Christian God placed in your life to confess Christ to you, to invite you to Church.  So you came to faith by Jesus’ call to follow Him, just like Philip, and then you were baptized into Christ after coming to faith.  But notice that in either case, Jesus takes the initiative.  He does it.  Not you.  You don’t get the credit.  Jesus does, through His Word, by His Spirit.  Believing in Christ is the work of God. 

            And now as one called to faith, faith bubbles over into your daily life and conversation.  You can’t help it.  You don’t even realize you’re doing it most of the time.  This is why I hate it when pastors and Synodical bureaucrats guilt you for not witnessing enough.  How do they know?  You don’t even know.  But I’ll bet you people know you’re a Christian.  And how do they know it?  You’ve undoubtedly said something somewhere along the line about Jesus, about Church, about the Bible.  And they’ve seen evidence of the hope that is within you.  Now, do you do it enough?  Of course you don’t.  None of us do.  We should all do it more often and more intentionally.  God open our eyes to the opportunities to speak the truth of Jesus in love to our neighbor, and the courage to take advantage of those opportunities.  Repent of the missed or ignored opportunities, and actively look for occasions to confess Christ.  But don’t sit around worrying about it.  God will put people in your path.  God will put you in the paths of others.  He already has.  Your family.  Your friends.  Your coworkers or school chums.  They all need Jesus.  And this is a vocational thing.  God has placed you in a specific context, a specific time and a specific place with specific people.  There is your mission field.  Go do it.  And let God worry about the results.  You aren’t called to convert people.  You’re called to speak Jesus to people.  The results are up to God.   The Holy Spirit works faith where and when He pleases in those who hear the Gospel (AC V), those who hear the call of Jesus, “Follow me.”

            Actually, you do what Philip does after he is called to faith.  Philip immediately goes to find Nathanael to tell him the good news that Messiah has arrived.  And there are at least two important things to note about the way Philip does evangelism.  First, he isn’t all that creative.  He doesn’t try to be clever and there’s not much of a program to follow.  No, what does he do?  He points to Jesus through the Scriptures.  “We have found him of whom Moses in the Law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph” (John 1:45).  Remember all those Scriptures we learned and memorized in Hebrew school?  About the Prophet, Abraham’s Offspring, the Son of David, the Seed of the Woman?  Yeah, we found Him!  He’s here!  And then Philip does a second very important thing.  He invites Nathanael to come and see.  So there’s your evangelism method.  First you speak what God gives to speak from the Scriptures, that Jesus is the one God promised from the beginning would come and save us from our sins.  And then you invite the person to come and see, which for you means you invite them to Church.  It’s so easy that we miss it.  Here’s how you do it: “Jesus is your Savior.  Come to Church and hear Him for yourself.”  That’s it.  And then you let God do the rest.  The worst that can happen is they say no.  But they might just come.  Because the Word of the Lord never returns to Him empty.  It always accomplishes His purpose (Is. 55:11).  He’s in the driver’s seat on this.  Trust Him to do what He says. 

            The key is the encounter with Jesus.  That is why you speak God’s Word from Scripture and invite the person to Church.  Because in the living Word of God, you meet Jesus Christ.  Nathanael didn’t believe Philip’s witness right off the bat.  Philip rightly says, “Come and see” (John 1:46).  And it is in the encounter with Jesus Christ that Nathanael comes to faith in Him and confesses, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God!  You are the King of Israel!” (v. 49).  So in evangelism, we always want to connect the person to a congregation where Jesus is speaking His Word and giving His Baptism and Supper, the means of grace.  Preferably, we want them to come to our own Church, but if we’re talking to someone far away or who cannot come to our congregation for some reason, we want to help them find a congregation where God’s Word is taught in all its truth and purity and the sacraments are rightly administered (AC VII).  Because in that way, they meet Jesus.  They hear the voice of Jesus in the preaching and teaching of His Word.  And through Baptism and teaching, they come to the Supper to be fed with Jesus, by Jesus Himself, His very body and blood, given and shed for them and for you, for the forgiveness of sins.  Jesus gives you the marvelous privilege of facilitating this as one who is called to follow Him.  He gives you His Word to speak and His house to come to and invite your neighbor to. 

            Do you see how He’s the One actually doing all of this, though?  And that takes all the pressure off.  And so also does another precious article of doctrine we learn about through our text.  That is the teaching of eternal election to salvation.  This is, by all accounts, the most difficult doctrine to teach or understand.  Because you can’t entirely grasp it.  It’s on the edge of God’s hidden will.  But this is it, in a nutshell: God, from all eternity, before the foundation of the world, chose you in Christ to be His own forever, to come to faith in Christ and be saved.  Wow!  That is an incredible comfort.  Because it means that God has accomplished your salvation from start to finish.  He chose you.  He sent His Son for you.  He sought you and called you to faith.  He gave you the faith to believe His Word, to believe in His Son.  And He will keep you in the faith to the end.  That’s what it means that salvation is by grace alone, apart from any effort or merit on your part.  Jesus demonstrates this in what He says to Nathanael: “Before Philip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you” (v. 48).  Now, Philip wasn’t just over there, down the way a few yards when Jesus saw Him.  Jesus is talking about something much more significant.  He is first of all demonstrating His divine omniscience.  He knows all and sees all, including Nathanael under the fig tree, though Jesus was not physically in his proximity.  But then this, too: He sees Nathanael because He has His eye on him.  He’s chosen him.  From all eternity the plan has been to call Nathanael, to bring Nathanael to faith, to make Nathanael an Apostle, so that Nathanael will do what Philip did in calling others to faith.  It’s marvelous.  By human standards, Philip failed in his evangelizing Nathanael.  Can anything good come from Nazareth?  But then the miracle.  Nathanael meets Jesus.  Jesus speaks.  Jesus calls the one He’s chosen from before the foundation of the world.  And Nathanael believes, and so Nathanael confesses.

            The doctrine of election is so hard because we very quickly come to the end of our ability to know it, and we want to know so much more, particularly the nagging question, “Why are some saved and not others?”  We don’t know.  We aren’t given to know.  We know from the Scriptures that God wants everyone to be saved, but not all are saved.  We know from the Scriptures that many are called, but few are chosen.  We know the Gospel is for everyone, but not everyone believes it.  We know that not everyone is elect to salvation, but God elects no one to damnation.  If you are saved, God gets all the credit start to finish.  There is the comfort.  But if you are lost, that is entirely your own fault.  There is the warning.  There is a logical conundrum in this that we find intellectually unsatisfying.  But God’s logic is infinitely higher than our own.  Let’s do Him the favor of acknowledging He knows what He is doing, and He doesn’t owe us any answers.  Let us not try to guess beyond what He has told us in the Scriptures, but put a finger to our lips and confess with Moses, “The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever” (Deut. 29:29).

            And here is what is revealed: God loved the world in this manner, that He gave His only-begotten Son into the death of the cross, that whoever hears His call and believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life (John 3:16).  Jesus says, “Truly, truly, I say to you, you will see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man” (1:51).  What’s he talking about?  He’s talking about the cross.  The cross is Jacob’s ladder.  The cross opens heaven.  The cross brings the angels of God to your aid.  The cross is the revelation that God is for you and not against you.  The cross is our theology, as Luther says, because the cross is our salvation.  And so, with St. Paul, we preach Christ crucified (1 Cor. 1:23), and invite others here to the Church, where together we encounter our crucified and risen Lord Jesus Christ.  Beloved in the Lord, Jesus says to you this morning, “Follow me,” and you do, through the Red Sea of Baptism, through the valley of the shadow of death, into the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come.  Take up your cross.  Let’s go.  Jesus leads us.  In the Name of the Father, and of the Son (+), and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.