There’s a saying that comes out of the Buddhist tradition about encountering one who claims to be the Buddha. “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.”
Because he is not the genuine article, the Real McCoy. Nothing but a fake and an imposter – demonic.
Likewise, it is no wonder that Nathanael is quite skeptical when Andrew and Peter inform him that they have found the Messiah, the One of whom the prophets and writings testify.
With a feeble half shrug, he responds, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” A valid question.
Can anything so momentous come out of such an out-of-the-way, nowhere place? Out of such meager beginnings?
If your answer is “no,” you need a refresher course in the history of God and God’s people. For this is how it seems to work all the time. Just so that we don’t think that such wisdom came from our own cleverness or brilliant intuition. Inch by inch out of nothing.
It’s out of the seemingly trivial things that the biblical writer proclaims God’s mighty acts.
It was out of seemingly nothing that the Big Bang erupted into our known universe. From an infinitesimally small speck, entire galaxies, stars, planets, dark matter, centipedes and my lovely wife. And all of you. The whole shebang!
It was out of a meager group of hominoids in Africa, at one point on the brink of extinction themselves, that the entire human race has covered the planet, bringing most other lifeforms to extinction.
Welcome to the Anthropocene Era. Yes, indeed — what can come from such seemingly happenstance early genetic mutations on the African Velt? So long, long ago.
Look at that genealogy of the birth of the Messiah in Matthew.[1] This lineage traces the birth through the male line. Except! Four women are mentioned in all this begetting. All women considered to be of questionable morals or questionable pregnancies, women seemingly of no account.
Again, look at Matthew’s record of Jesus’ family tree.
Tamar, Rahab, Ruth and Mary. All women associated in gossipy minds as women of questionable character. Loose morals. Read of the scandal around Tamar, circulated by wagging tongues. It’s all there in Genesis 38. Likewise, with the other three women of this genealogy. All to show that God does wonders through those who in the eyes of the powerful are considered of little worth, no account. Out of little, a great blessing to all.
Yes, the men involved get off scot-free. Nothing is new under the sun here. Of course, these guys would question, could anything good come of any of this? Out of this sort of women?
Yet, WE, of little account, would boldly proclaim, “We have found Him.”
Mustafa Suleyman, in his new work, The Coming Wave, lays out how wave upon wave of technological achievement, often from what seems insignificant at the time, tends to mushroom into great promise or threat, often both.[2]
What he terms “proto-general-purpose technologies” – pervasive and engendering new, follow-on technologies, beginning from insignificance — have shaped and continue to shape humanity. The human animal is an “innately technological species.”[3] Start with fire, to coal extraction, to the Saturn rocket. Then, the stone ax.
Suleyman notes that “proliferation is the default.” One example, computers.
When mathematicians, mostly underpaid, unrecognized women began using a crude version at Bletchley Park in Britain in the 1940s to crack the German Enigma Code, the computer had its first rude use.
By 1945 a new generation called “ENIAC, an eight-foot-tall behemoth of eighteen thousand vacuum tubes capable of three hundred operations per second,” was crunching data.[4]
Then came the transistor, “comprising a paper clip, a scrap of gold foil and a crystal of germanium that could switch electronic signals.”[5] The birth of the digital age.
Finally, Moore’s law which proclaimed that every twenty-four months, the number of transistors on a chip would double. Now, a 10-million increase on one chip! Exponential growth beyond imagining — a seventeen-billion-fold improvement.
The then-president of IBM, Thomas J. Watson, was said to have predicted that the entire world would probably have no need for more than five or six computers. Now there are more computers than there are humans – in your ubiquitous smart phones. More computing power in your hand than those filling entire warehouses which were used to solve the first atomic equations. For better, and often worse.
Could anything good have come out of such a niche toy? Inch by inch, so it goes.
Can anything good come from the inklings of the Spirit that on most mornings awaken my heart?
Each day with the rising of the sun, I find just enough of Him in my heart to dispel the gloomy clouds of night. Just enough to pull back the covers in Hope that it is worth getting out of bed today.
And usually, this Spirit brings work to my mind before the end of that first cup of coffee. By late morning, all is rich with blessing beyond my poor imagining.
Barbara Brown Taylor, in her book, Leaving Church,[6] describes listening to one’s primal intuition. All of which, led her to leave an insanely busy 80-hour-a-week schedule at a large, downtown Atlanta Episcopal parish for a position in a small, rural Georgia parish in the northern hill country of the state.
Listen to how she describes this leading of the Spirit.
“Intuition may be one way of speaking about how God does that – takes things from here to there, I mean…when I cannot sleep because the rational decision seems all wrong to me, I start paying attention to the gyroscope of my intuition, which operates below the radar of my reason. I pay attention to recurring dreams and interesting coincidences. I let my feelings off the leash and follow them around. When something moves in my peripheral vision. I leave the path to investigate, since it would be a shame to walk right by a burning bush. At this point reason is all but useless to me. All that remains is trust.”[7]
The decision for a move was a life-saver for both her health and sanity and that of her husband. They had arrived exhausted. In that move she found herself, her husband, and in new, unexpected ways, found Him whom she would serve as Lord of Life. New beginnings out of the scrap of a notion, she found.
As the song goes, “See him at the seaside, talking with the fishermen, making them disciples. Amen. Amen.” A seemingly insignificant, rather puny start. Yet, now — spiritual riches let loose for all humanity that would bind us together as one heart. An ethic of equity and mutual regard that is our Guiding Star.
Yes, we mostly fall short. A large part of the Jesus Movement has deserted and succumbed to one of the most corrupt men ever to attain to the American presidency. They gather around the Former Guy as if the leader of a cult. A total perversion of the Word Incarnate – a corruption doomed to pass away. We pray!
But the memory of that distant blessing by the Galilean Sea lingers till this day. It erupts from time to time in unbelievable grace and in incredible sacrifice. Grace upon Grace. Mustard seed Grace. And the hearts who have found Him are filled to overflowing with love and kindnesses for self and stranger. And for the Author of this Mystery.
Indeed, “can anything good come out of Nazareth?”
Can anything come out of any of this, out of any of us? Where might your dreams be leading you? Let fear and hesitations off the leash. Taste and see for yourself. Into Epiphany Light, let God’s Holy Spirit lead you where it will. What do you find when you push back the covers? I find God’s whole people as the entire House of Hope, companions on the way.
My Evangelical friends are wont to say, “Name it and claim it!”
My friend Jim Strathdee’s riff on the summons in a Howard Thurman poem beckons:
“I am the Light of the World
You people come and follow me.
If you follow and love, You’ll learn the mystery
Of what you were meant to do and be.” Amen.
[1] Matthew 1:1-17, NRSV.
[2] Mustafa Suleyman, with Michael Bhaskar, The Coming Wave: Technology, Power and the 21st Century’s Greatest Dilemma (New York: Crown Publishing, 2023).
3 Ibid., 26.
[3] Barbara Brown Taylor, Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 2006).
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid. 32
[6] Barbara Brown Taylor, Leaving Church: a memoir of faith (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 2006).
[7] Ibid., 8.
January 14, 2024
2 Epiphany
The Rev. Dr. John C. Forney
1 Samuel 3:1-10, [11-20]; Psalm 139:1-5, 12-17;
1 Corinthians 6:12-20; John 1:43-51 “We Have Found Him”
