Who Did Jesus Eat With? Nathanael the Racist John 1:43-51

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1 Rev. Kathleen McShane September 23, 2018 Who Did Jesus Eat With? Nathanael the Racist John 1:43-51 Opening Sometimes our bodies arrive at a place long before our minds and our hearts are ready to sit down, to be present. Let this poem by Jan Richardson bring you fully into worship this morning. First we will need grace. Then we will need courage. Also we will need some strength. We will need to die a little to what we have always thought, what we have allowed ourselves to see of ourselves, what we have built our beliefs upon. We will need this and more. Then we will need to let it all go to leave room enough for the astonishment that will come should we be given a glimpse of what the Holy One sees in seeing us, knows in knowing us, intricate and unhidden no part of us foreign no piece of us fashioned from other than love 1

2 desired discerned beheld entirely all our days. This day, this hour, may you know that you are known, seen, beheld. Sermon In 1933, as this country was struggling to find its way out of the Great Depression, the Federal Housing Administration began a program that was designed to help people into home ownership. It may be changing now, but for most of the last century, owning your own home was the best way for middle class families to acquire financial stability, and to hold onto it. And so, to encourage economic development, FDR s administration set up structures to incentivize homebuilders, and to encourage banks to offer more home mortgages. If regular people could get loans more easily, they d be able to make an investment that they otherwise couldn t afford. The government went into the business of insuring home mortgages. They assured lenders banks mostly that if there was a default by the home buyer, the loan would still be repaid by federal home loan insurance. This was an important social program. It reshaped the economy of the U.S., as thousands of families moved from urban apartments into their own homes, mostly in the suburbs around major cities. But the insurance business is always about measuring risk. The government didn t want too big a risk; they really only wanted to insure borrowers who were likely to be able to pay off those loans on their own. And so, the Federal Housing Administration developed some theories about who the less reliable borrowers might be. They made generalizations about where those people were likely to live and buy homes. And the FHA began a system called redlining, publishing to banks maps that color-coded geographic areas by where they d concluded lending would be wise and insurable and where it was not. There was a whole color code designed to indicate the neighborhoods where it was safe to make and insure mortgages. Green area were hot spots good risks, where new, upscale suburbs were being built, good schools, upwardly mobile people. Red areas were places more likely to decline, where economic growth was a harder reach. Cities. Places where new immigrants were moving in. Anywhere where African-Americans lived, or where African-Americans lived nearby. Those maps told appraisers immediately that houses in red neighborhoods were dangerous to lend money on. They told lenders that without even looking at a loan application, they could tell that people from those neighborhoods were risky borrowers. And so, African- Americans and other people of color were left out of the new suburban communities and out of the greatest opportunity in this country to acquire economic equality. 1 1 Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America,

3 It has always been easy efficient to formulate opinions about people from a distance. That s the same human tendency we heard at work in the Gospel reading this morning. It s right there in the very first chapter of the Gospel of John. Jesus is just beginning to gather his followers, his team. He s called Peter and Andrew, and then he finds Philip, who s from the same town maybe a friend of Peter s from high school. Philip is a joiner. He s always up for an adventure, and so when Jesus finds him and says, Come along, Philip is right there. You might remember Philip from another story we ve talked about in the last few months from the Book of Acts, after Jesus died. Philip is the one who came across an Ethiopian eunuch driving down the road. When the Ethiopian said he was interested in the Christian story, Philip offered to baptize him right there, in a pond by the side of the road. You might say Philip is guileless. From the very beginning, he wears his enthusiasm and openness on his sleeve; later he will wear his faith the same way. So Philip not only follows Jesus; he goes and finds someone else to come along too. Philip finds Nathanael and he just gushes: Come on! We ve found the answer to all the questions our religion has ever asked. I just met him, but I m pretty sure he s the One God has sent. It s a guy named Jesus. His father s name is Joseph, and he s from Nazareth. Only Nathanael is not cut of exactly the same cloth as Philip. He s more cautious. He knows a little more about how the world works. And in a response that must have deflated Philip terribly, Nathanael answers, rather unkindly, Can anything from Nazareth be that good? Everybody knew Nazareth was a backwater town, full of blue collar workers, dense housing, crime. Compton. Richmond. Newark, New Jersey. Brownsville, Texas. Nathanael has done a little redlining of his own. Just come, Philip insists. Come and see. Jesus must have been standing nearby; he has overheard this exchange between Nathanael and Philip. And he seems not put off by Nathanael s slur. Instead he congratulates him on his honesty. Here is a genuine Israelite, Jesus says. There s no falseness in you, is there, Nathanael. You tell the truth, just as you see it. Nathanael feels complimented, seen. How do you know me? he asks. I saw you [Jesus says] even before Philip invited you to come and see me. I saw you under the fig tree. Which sounds like a totally weird thing to say. What s the deal with fig trees in the Bible? It s a metaphor, one of the central metaphors of the Hebrew Scriptures, the tradition that Jesus and all the disciples came from. So Nathanael would have known: a fig tree is a symbol: the symbol of comfort, God s blessing on the people of Israel. Standing under your own fig tree is about being at home. It s about the peace you find when you re in your place, surrounded by your people. Maybe what Jesus is affirming in Nathanael is not his honestly prejudiced comment about Nazareth, but his willingness to come out from under that tree. To come and see for himself, instead of retreating into his preconceptions about Jesus hometown, instead of relying on that redlined map. Because that s exactly what Nathanael did. For at least a minute, long enough to 3

4 step out of the safe shade of his fig tree, Nathanael stepped forward, toward someone whose life he thought was likely to hold no value for him, someone he had every reason to put into the toorisky file and dis-count. Nathanael appears just once more in the New Testament. It s after Jesus resurrection. He s there with the other disciples. They re out fishing and Jesus calls to them from the shore with a suggestion about how to catch more fish. (John 21:1-3) Nathanael is still there at the end of Jesus story. I guess he came. I guess he did see for himself. If you ve been around LAUMC longer than I have, you might remember Bob Goff, who wrote the book Love Does, and who was here for a weekend of workshops. In his book, Goff tells a story about his young children, right after 9/11. In a parenting move I really admire, he asked his kids that day, If you had five minutes in front of a group of world leaders, what would you ask them to help make sense of life [right now]? 2 Together, his three kids decided that the important question for those leaders was, What is it you are hoping for? They really wanted the world s leaders to all come over to their house in Los Angeles to talk about this. That way all the leaders could meet and get to understand one another better. But if the leaders wouldn t come to their house, maybe the children could go visit all of them, they thought. They could carry those leaders thoughts from one capital to another. Sort of pollinating the world with hope. The dad helped the kids put their invitation to the world s leaders into written letters. They mailed them, hundreds of letters, to the leader of every country in the world. They rented a post office box, and they checked it every day after school, to see if anyone answered. Really good parenting initiative. You knew no one would answer the letters, right? This was totally a character-building exercise. But they did write back. One Tuesday the kids picked up a bunch of letters from their box, and among the stack of politely worded no, thank you s there was a letter from the State House in Bulgaria, inviting them to come to the palace. They ended up getting twenty-nine invitations to foreign countries to meet important people there, and to hear those leaders hopes. This is the place where the story enters only-bob-goff territory. Because those parents actually took their kids out of school on an around-the-world trip to meet every world leader who had invited them. They went to European democracies, and Communist dictatorships, and even to a country that had been condemned by the State Department for its president s anti-american statements. Everywhere they went, the Goff children asked the foreign leaders questions about their children and grandchildren. They talked about their favorite foods. They asked princes and presidents what they hoped for. At the end of each meeting, the children gave the leader a gift. A little red box, and inside each box was a key to the front door of their house in Los Angeles. That family stepped out from under their fig tree. They stretched their regular life beyond all reasonable limits; they went to places no one in their right mind would take their children. They went with no agenda other than friendship and understanding. But they were changed by the experience, I have no doubt. And probably so were those leaders who invited them, world 2 Bob Goff, Love Wins, Chapter 10 4

5 leaders who now have a standing invitation to a middle class house in the suburbs of Los Angeles. That s the agenda at the bigger table, too: friendship and understanding. It doesn t matter to Jesus whether you re Philip the enthusiast, or Nathanael the hard-edged realist. Come and sit at my table, Jesus says. Don t just rely on your colored maps that show you what kind of people come from what place. Come and see. This week, as we walk out into the world for Compassion Week, much of what we do will start out feeling like service, us inviting people to share our table, the table where we ve already known God s love and generosity. Us giving away something we already hold. But the truth is, the opportunity to serve is our invitation to the table. When we leave the shade of our own fig tree, when we venture into redlined areas, when we let our very solid assumptions be challenged by people who we thought had nothing to offer us, when we go with no agenda other than friendship and understanding, then we too might find that the table isn t just here; it s out there. In fact, maybe it s everywhere. Come and see. 5

Popular Prejudice Message by DD Adams Providence United Methodist Church January 18, 2015

Popular Prejudice Message by DD Adams Providence United Methodist Church January 18, 2015 The gospel lesson for today is taken from the book of John, chapter 1, verses 43 through 51. I ll be reading from