Preacher: Revd Canon Karen Schmidt
Date: 15/01/2023
Isaiah 49.1-7
1 Corinthians 1.1-9
John 1.29-42
If John the Baptist were to write an autobiography he might be forgiven for using the title ‘Spare’. People heard of John first; they went out into the desert to see and hear this strange looking man and to respond to his invitation to be baptized– and then, on his advice, began to wait for someone who was more important. John said of this person who was about to appear, that he ‘ranks higher than me’. In his mind John knew that although he had come first in the story chronologically he was in fact more of a sign-post than a spare. Like a pace setter in a race, his job was critically important in its own right, but his task was to create the environment into which Jesus could fulfil God’s hopes for him and for humanity.
John the Baptist wouldn’t have called his autobiography ‘Spare’ because it would never have occurred to him to write an autobiography. Being second, or first or anywhere else in the pecking order didn’t matter to someone who knew his role in God’s plan.
We are still in the Epiphany season – hence the ongoing presence of our Christmas tree and crib. Epiphany is the season in which we reflect on the manifestation of Christ – how God reveals himself to humanity in and through Jesus. On the feast of the Epiphany on 6th January we heard the story of the Christchild drawing the foreigners to his crib – God is the God of all humankind, no longer confined to his chosen people. We then moved on to the Baptism of Christ in which God revealed Jesus as his Son, “the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased”, and on the final Sunday of Epiphany we shall be hearing the story of Jesus at the wedding reception turning the water into the finest wine and what that reveals of the nature of God as revealed in Christ.
But today we are reflecting on how God calls us to reveal him to our world. John knew his given role of acting as a signpost and letting go of two of his disciples that they might fulfil their roles of becoming followers of the one to whom John was pointing. One of those disciples, Andrew, brought his brother Simon to Jesus – two brothers, two very different roles in God’s plan. Andrew was much like John. He was the enabler, enabling his brother Simon to take on God’s mission for him – to become Peter, the rock on which Christ would build his church – an unimagineable role on the day Simon was brought to Jesus by his brother. There was nothing spare about Andrew. Each brother had his work in revealing God to their world and the one wouldn’t have happened without the other.
Today’s passage from Isaiah is also our call to mission – to make God known in our time and in our place. Isaiah’s vision was that God’s light was no longer confined to shine on his chosen people, but now they were to take that light to shine on the ends of the earth. It’s quite a vision that Isaiah holds before us – the image of this world’s kings and princes prostrating themselves before the true King of Kings as they respond to God’s light shone on them by those who in turn have responded to his call to them to be his messengers of his light.
So how do we respond to God’s call to us to spread his light in the darkness of our world today? It can seem that we are living in a culture in which God is irrelevant. But just think of those Corinthians to whom Paul was writing. How counter-cultural was their work in making God as revealed in Christ known to their communities. Corinth, the multi-cultural and cosmopolitan city, the city drawing much of its wealth from the commerce that passed through the ports it controlled between the Adriatic and Aegean seas, a city of Jewish communities alongside followers of Greek and other gods. And into this world the early followers of the Way of Christ were called to shine the light of the seeming nobody from a land far away who had died an ignoble death but who had risen again to take his place at God’s right hand. That was quite some story to sell. But shine his light they did, so much so that in his letter to them Paul rejoices in the testimony of their lives and reminds them of God’s faithfulness as he encourages them to continue in their work to the end.
If the early church in Corinth could do it, so can we – we, too, can be spreaders of God’s light and builders of his kingdom. We are not all called to be Peters, but we each have our gifts and no-one is spare to God’s plan.
This week I heard of a clergy friend who was told that a clergy colleague was dying in a hospital on the Isle of Wight. Now my clergy friend no longer lives on the Island but on receiving the news he first thought about making the visit the following day, the better to fit in with his diary but then decided to set aside his plans for that day and set out straight away, having to travel some distance quite apart from a bumpy crossing over the Solent.
On arriving at the hospital the dying cleric was unconscious but my friend sat by his bedside, reading Psalms and passages of scripture. My friend was not the only one ministering to his former colleague, as he found a cross lying on the pillow and bibles on the bedside table open at the psalms and New Testament. Someone else had also been caring for the dying man. On returning home that evening, my friend received the news that his colleague had died. My friend had brought the light of Christ to his colleague’s bedside in his care for him.
In a very different way I met a lady, also this last week, who was buying a card in our church shop for her grandson’s wedding. This lady was happy for her grandson but saddened that the wedding was to take place in a wedding venue and as the ceremony was to be conducted by a Registrar there would be no mention of God. And this is what grieved the grandmother. And so she had alighted upon the idea of buying a card for the wedding couple which contained a blessing. She was not going to allow God to be squeezed out of her grandson’s marriage. That lady was shining the light of Christ into a situation in which he would not otherwise have been acknowledged.
We are called upon to walk in the light of Christ and to shine that light around us. We each have our role to play in the many different contexts in which we live our daily lives – no context is greater than another, more significant than another, no one person has a higher calling than another – we are all builders of God’s kingdom and no one is spare to that task. Knowing that God is faithful, may we by his grace know his presence with us, know his encouragement as we walk in and spread his light day by day.