Second Sunday in Epiphany: Relationships

January 15: Sam 3:1-10; Ps 139:1-6, 13-18; 1Cor 6:12-20 ; John 1: 43-51

This is the season in the church year which starts with Jesus baptism and goes to the beginning of Lent when we journey with Jesus to Jerusalem. In this season of the year, we focus on deepening our relationship with Jesus - who is he? how is he moving in our lives? How are we relating? Deepening our relationship/our friendship with Jesus is part of what it is to draw near to the fire that burns at the centre of the circle of life. For Jesus was and is all about the re-knitting of the relationship between heaven and earth/God and us/the Creator and Creator's creatures. Jesus is all about the economy – the movement between heaven and earth and ensuring that it is lively – healthy, growing, resilient.

Now Paul's fierce language in our second reading about our bodies has for years been taken so moralistically that it is very hard to hear it as an amazing image of this relationship between heaven and earth/God and us. Paul writes:
your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you which you have from God...
So this relationship between heaven and earth is not some other worldly thing. Even our blood and bones are part of the sacred commerce between heaven and earth. Our bodies are a temple filled with the Spirit – the breath of the Holy – the breath of life. Do we feel them, know them, care for them as if our bodies whether young or old, whole or flawed are temples of the Holy Spirit? And Paul goes on to say that in Christ we are not our own. We're not rugged individualists making our own way. In Christ we're part of a much larger whole – a community, a network that stretches around the globe, back through the ages and opening to the future that coming towards us. So in Christ we are invited into a oneness, a communion, a deep relationship with the Holy that makes all our culture's fascination with the power of sex seem trivial.

But relationships don't start there – in that place of deep communion. Relationships grow in depth, intimacy and familiarity over time. In our readings today, we're at the very beginning. We hear that beautiful story of Samuel learning to recognize and respond to God's voice, not just his master Eli's. We hear of Philip and Nathanael beginning to get to know Jesus. And in our Psalm we celebrate God's deep knowledge of us.
O LORD, you have searched me and known me... [indeed] it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother'swomb... Wonderful are your works...
God's knowing is so vast it is beyond comprehension, yet even when I surrender to the infinite scale and mystery of it all - “I am still with you.”

How does this getting to know beginning phase of a relationship work? Well on a very different scale, I had a wonderful encounter with the mystery this last week. I love to go to Fort Whyte, the nature centre on the south edge of town. They have 3 pairs of burrowing owls, a beautiful, small endangered species of owls that live with prairie dogs in their burrows [almost an example of lions and lambs making peace with each other but that's another story]. Now last Monday when I went to say hello to the owls one of them was sitting on the fence of the viewing platform. So there I was less than 3 feet away from a burrowing owl – no glass separating us, just air and fear and fascination. For 15 minutes I got to observe, and wonder and yes talk to this beautiful precious form of life ~ although our languages are so different. This encounter was an amazing invitation to pause and appreciate and deepen my love of these little ones. Later in the week, I heard of a person encountering and having quite an extended, en heartening conversation with a wolf. Interestingly it was a similar moment with a cat that led Martin Buber, a famous 20th century German philosopher, to differentiate between an I – it and an I – thou relationship. In an I – it encounter I sense the other as an object – some thing that I can manipulate, control, strategize about it's usefulness to me. In contrast, in an I – thou encounter I sense the mystery of interacting with another independent subject. I enter into that relationship with more humility, openness, and awareness of the freedom of the other to act independently of me. It is in that space that empathy, compassion, respect, wonder can grow. In a world today many if not most of our relationships are I – it. We tend to evaluate everything on its usefulness [even church, even God – what good does it do, we hear]. Can we even imagine the openness and delight in the mystery of I – thou relationships.

In our gospel this morning we hear Philip excited about his encounter with Jesus inviting Nathanael to: "Come and see." But Nathanael, like many of us, tries to stereotype Jesus based on his home town: Nazareth. “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” He imagines he knows something about Jesus. Jesus, of course, invites him into the mystery. He invites him on a journey.
You will see greater things than these...Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man."
Jesus promises that in their relationship Nathaneal [and with him us] will see heaven and earth connected, in conversation, in communion. And most often that is how we come to faith, to a living relationship with Jesus, to seeing the Holy at work in our lives. Our friends introduce us.

Yet in these days when the Holy is unfamiliar to many, when folks are preoccupied with I – it relationships, it's easy to miss the moment of introduction, the moment when God is present to us and addresses us – albeit always in God's way -God's language. We're told that:
In those days [the days of Eli], the word of the LORD was rare; visions were not widespread. At that time even Eli's eyesight had begun to grow dim so that he could not see.
It was a sleepy time. All this to explain that, even though Samuel was lying down in the temple of the LORD, where the ark of God itself was and heard himself addressed: "Samuel! Samuel!", he assumed it was Eli, his master calling him. He mistook God's voice, God's presence for the familiar human one. I wonder how often that happens to us? Finally, with Eli's help, Samuel could respond 'Speak, LORD, for your servant is listening.'

Do we not live in times like Eli and Samuel? Do we or those around us actually expect to be addressed by God? Do we expect to encounter the Holy living, moving, being in the most ordinary places – those places we sometimes call 'god-forsaken places' like Nazareth? Well in Christ we can say that no place is God-forsaken. We are not God-forsaken. We may need to be introduced. We need to listen, to learn God's language. We need to be open to the mystery and engagement of an I – Thou encounter. If an encounter with an owl, wolf, or cat opens us to wonder, imagine the invitation Jesus offers - an ongoing relationship with the very Heart and Wisdom of our universe. In that relationship, if we could for instance see the streets of our community as holy ground, would we not care differently, see and pay attention differently. It is these new eyes and ears and hearts that we nurture every week at this table as we are fed with the very stuff of life – bread & wine, body and blood of Christ.

Thanks be to God for God's commitment in love to all of God's beloved creation.