Oak Chapel United Methodist Church

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Jesus finds Philip, signs him up, and Philip immediately seeks out his friend, Nathanael. Philip and Nathanael, most likely, were two young men of deep religious persuasion, who had surely discussed many times the coming of the Messiah, the Promised One, the One Philip, when he finds his friend, describes rather cryptically as "him about whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote." Picture the scene: Philip comes to his friend and says, preposterously, "I've found him. He is Jesus, son of Joseph from Nazareth." And Nathanael, startled and bemused, I'm sure, answers, with exquisite cynicism, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" And Philip says, simply, "Come and see." Later, as Nathanael approaches Jesus, the Master says to those around him, "Here comes an honest Israelite." Nathanael hears it and says, "I beg your pardon! Have we met?" Jesus says, "I saw you sitting under that fig tree before Philip called you." Nathanael is stunned. Jesus wasn't anywhere near that fig tree! "Wow," he says. "You are the Son of God." Jesus says, "You believe because I said I saw you under a fig tree? Let me tell you, you ain't seen nothing yet….Before this is over you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man."

I like the story. Nathanael's cynicism ("Can anything good come out of Nazareth?") is so characteristic of our age. Can politicians be honest? Can a marriage be based on true love? Can government play a helpful role? Can history be told honestly? Can we know the Word of God? …the implied answers to all these questions being "no." "Cynicism" is almost synonymous with "wisdom" today - and that's a bad combination. Theodore Roosevelt, such an optimistic person himself, warned that the easiest way to view this world is through a cynic's sneer. (And today we make Teddy Roosevelt into a comic figure, a blusterer, a buffoon on the world's stage.)

The problem is we cannot build on cynicism, on distrust and suspicion - whether it is justified or not. My college professors, in the 1960s, were determined to tear down all the values and ideals of the past. But they offered nothing in their place. Professors who professed nothing! A healthy skepticism is good. But ongoing cynicism and distrust provide no foundation to build upon. Give us reasons to live, professor. Do your job!
Of course, the world always meets our expectations, whether they be optimistic or pessimistic. The world looks back at us with the same eyes we look at it. If we expect nothing good to come out of Nazareth, nothing will. Anthony De Mello tells of a woman who went to a psychiatrist suffering from stress and strain. The doctor prescribed tranquilizers and rest, and asked her to return in two weeks. When she did, he asked if she felt any different. "No, I don't," she said, "but I have observed that other people seem a lot more relaxed." Cynicism is a self-fulfilling prophecy: the more we expect not to find, the less we find.

Nathanael, however, is not just a cynic. Watch him closely. Although he is unwilling to stick his neck out and believe that anything good might have come out of Nazareth, when he meets Jesus he believes too much too easily. "You call me 'Son of God' and 'King of Israel,'" Jesus says, "because of what I said about the fig tree?" This easy belief in things not carefully considered, this dumbing down of faith, ironically, is also characteristic of our age. And there may be some logic in that. Perhaps the cynicism of the twentieth century, which left us nothing to believe in, also left a spiritual deficit, a void in our hearts which we are desperate to fill, and which, therefore, makes us spiritually gullible. We're like the Queen of Hearts who "believes a thousand impossible things before breakfast." It's amazing to me. The same person who steadfastly refuses to believe that Christ rose from the dead, will believe (apparently with no effort at all) that magnets in his shoes will cure arthritis, or that space aliens built the pyramids, or that you can make millions in real estate with "no money down!" Bogus beliefs rush in to fill a vacuum.

There are people who make health and physical fitness into a religion. Doesn't anyone think these things through? Let's see, we exercise more and eat less, so that we can live longer, so that we can exercise more and eat less, so that we can live longer….That's not going any place. It might be good advice, but there's no salvation in it. Bogus beliefs rush in to fill a vacuum. Half of all Americans read their horoscopes at least twice a month. That outnumbers Bible readers two to one. And astrology doesn't even pretend to offer salvation. But it fills a vacuum. Likewise, status, rank, standing in life is a religion to many. I keep getting offers in the mail, not simply for a new credit card, but for a gold card, or a platinum card, so that I, presumably, can go into debt in an extremely impressive way. Status, prestige, titles are such ephemeral things. Most of them die before we do. "There are no pockets in shrouds," as they say.

We grasp at these false and empty religions, these reasons-to-be, while all the time there is a full, rich and time-tested faith - the Jesus faith - a faith for which thousands have died and by which millions have lived -- which is ours for the coming. It's a faith worthy of our lives. It doesn't whitewash our problems. It claims it can change us inside and out, and show us God in Christ Jesus. What more could we ask? And it's ours for the coming.
Which brings me to Philip's invitation: "Come and see." We needn't argue the merits of Jesus, and we shouldn't. Our job is to extend an invitation for people to come and see for themselves. You should have known Mae Caple. She was a lovely, gracious and Christian woman. When she died several years ago, in her eighties, we offered people at her funeral an opportunity say a few words about their memories of Mae. One man, who I knew very well (He was a fine, committed Christian, and he had been an active member of that church for years) stood and told how when he was a young boy, with no church connections, his parents were going through a bitter divorce, and Mae came by, and offered to do what she could, and just before she left, standing outside the barn, she invited this boy to come to Sunday School. She and Ken would come and pick him up, she promised. All through his youth, the man said, (as the result of that invitation), the church was the one stable thing in his life. He came to know Jesus. He married a Christian girl, and raised his family in the faith. And to the very day of that funeral, he testified, Jesus had been the strength of his life. All because of a simple invitation extended to him in a barnyard. I knew them both, well, but never suspected what one had done for the other.

Scot Levy tells of a Sunday when, as a young minister, he was substitute-preaching for a friend, He arrived at the church early so he could walk around and get a feel for the place. He had his robe over his shoulder and his hymn book in one hand, and was walking down an empty hall, when he looked into a large room, which was obviously a nursery, and saw one little boy, three or four years old, sitting in there all by himself. "Hi," the little fellow said, "My name's Tommy and I'm all alone in this big room." Levy said I realized he was frightened, and I told him I was sure an adult would come along soon and keep him company. And then Tommy said, "Why not you?" Levy stayed with the little boy until someone came, but, he says, the question never left him, and it has echoed through his life? Why not you? Why not you to become a disciple of Jesus? Why not you to reject the cynicism and gullibility of this age and to accept the claims of the real Jesus? Why not you to bring others to the Lord? Why not you?