Come and See

A “Come to Jesus" moment

Richard Smith

Second Sunday after Epiphany

Year A

The term “Come to Jesus moment” has seeped into everyday conversation. Back in my days in Silicon Valley, whenever a manager faced a rapidly approaching deadline and wanted to be sure the product would be ready for delivery on time, they’d gather the team for a “Come to Jesus meeting”. It was a moment of reckoning; each team member would have to report on the status of their deliverables; would they pass Quality Assurance; would everything be ready to ship on time. A Come to Jesus moment.

I’ve heard the phrase used in other contexts, like when friends and family need to confront a loved one who is abusing drugs or alcohol or engaging in some other destructive behavior. They sometimes call that intervention a “Come to Jesus moment.”

As I understand it, the phrase originated in the evangelical revival camp meetings of the 1920s when evangelists exhorted people to “come to Jesus.”  Sinners would walk down the aisle and come to the altar to repent of their sins, and ask Jesus to come into their heart.

In its purest form, it’s the kind of moment you realize what’s most important in your life--an Aha! moment--in which you reconnect with those basic values you may have lost sight of in the daily grind of making a living, deciding what to have for dinner, folding the laundry. It’s the clarifying of priorities that can come with a brush with death, say a car accident or a sudden health problem. In its purest form, a Come to Jesus moment brings you back to what you know is true and beautiful and good.

Welcome to today’s gospel. Two of John the Baptist’s disciples follow Jesus. Jesus asks them, “What are you looking for?” It’s not a question about finding lost car keys or a misplaced cell phone. It’s rather about their deepest desires, what they most want from life, what they most cherish and long for. “What are you looking for?”

Because our deepest desires have something to do with what God is calling us to. To paraphrase a popular theologian, “The place God calls you to is where your deepest desire meets the world’s deepest need.”

What are you looking for? Underneath all the surface wants to be billionaires, with looks like George Clooney or JLo--underneath those surface wants, what is your own deepest desire?

The disciples reply they want to know where Jesus staying, where he lives. This is code, a way of asking not only where he lives physically, but more: what drives him, what is he about, why does he do what he does? We might say colloquially today, “Where are you at?” or “Where’s your head at?” It’s the right question to ask of Jesus, the right thing to be looking for.

That’s when Jesus turns their following him into a calling. “Come and see,” he tells them. They came and saw and stayed. It was a come to Jesus moment. A calling.

Sometimes, as for these disciples, a calling can be a bit dramatic, involving an actual displacement, physically moving from one place to another.

But more likely it’s a matter of recognizing and embracing the displacements that have already occurred in the ordinary course of our lives: a discouraging report from the lab, the loss of a job or a loved one, the birth of a child, or taking up new and exciting responsibilities. Or maybe as the years go by, we realize ways of thinking or rituals or family traditions that once helped us understand our lives are no longer appreciated, leaving us lost and alone.

The task is to allow these actual displacements to become places where we can hear God’s call.

The fact is, God is always active in our lives, calling us, asking us to follow. And usually that call comes not in some dramatic moment, but much more subtly in the ordinary stuff of our lives.

But do we see, feel, and recognize God’s call, or do we keep waiting for that illusory, dramatic moment when it will “really” happen? Can we embrace the displacements that have already occurred in our lives and discern the callings they hold for us?

This weekend, we’re celebrating Martin Luther King. Like us, he had to navigate a time of great polarization in the country. At a time when the Civil Rights movement was struggling to make gains, the Vietnam War was also in full swing. Although it was very controversial among his followers, he discerned a calling, a vocation, to speak against the war even as he continued his struggle for civil rights.

Here is how he put it at the time, in words that could have been written just last week:

Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation's history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movement well and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.

In the chaos and polarization that history had bequeathed to his generation, King discerned a vocation. It was for him a Come to Jesus moment, to reach deep into his heart and his faith tradition and speak a prophetic word.

Perhaps the coming week with its inaugural celebration, is our Come to Jesus moment. Perhaps in this moment, we, like Dr. King, need to reconnect with our own deepest values and desires and discern our own vocation. Whether we join a march, or call our representatives, or hold a sign for Amilcar at Mission Police Station, the questions that Dr. King wrestled with are ours as well. How will we speak? How will we break the silence of the darkness that seems so close around us?