over the water

Eli was not the perfect priest, by any means. When we first meet him at the high place in Shiloh, he fails to understand Hannah’s prayer; he thinks that she is drunk and tries to put her out of the presence of God. Later, we learn that he has not prevented his own sons from abusing the altar of the shrine for their own appetites; although he knew of it and asked them about it, he did not put a stop to it (1 Samuel 2). By the time we meet him in the night, as Samuel sleeps before the ark of the covenant, Eli has turned a blind eye so often and so long that he is blind himself.

Yet when the voice of God comes, to one who does not know it, and does not recognize it, it is Eli who tells Samuel, “It is the Lord.” And when God’s righteous judgement is revealed, Eli does not resist it, but says again, simply, “It is the Lord.” Eli, for all of his failings and faults, knows and trusts that whatever God has in mind will be just, and merciful, and worth his faith.

When Philip first told Nathanael that they had found the Messiah, the one “about whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus son of Joseph from Nazareth,” Nathanael was at first disinclined to believe him. “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” he grumbled. And Philip responded simply, “Come and see.”

“It is the Lord.” “Come and see.” Two responses from two people separated by millennia, who recognized the Lord, and who were willing to share that vision with others, to pass on their faith, hard to come by and hard to hold on to in a world where visions are rare and the word of God rarely heard, where disappointments abound and the stain of sin clings and seems to resurface again and again even in our own well-meant lives.

“It is the Lord; come and see.” Two responses full of hope and trembling, full of the fear of rejection and the promise of fulfillment.

Philip was young and eager and bold. I like Philip. I remember being young and eager and still a little shy. I remember meeting a woman, a mother like me, with babies and small toddlers slung all over our shoulders and whatever else they could get a foothold on. This was long before I became a priest. We met at a playgroup held in a community hall. As time went on, she opened up about the ways in which church had let her down in the past. Not let her down, broken her heart, opened up a pit in her stomach and her soul which had not yet healed after years. “I will never darken the doorstep of a church again,” she said. It was my church, she was talking about.

Over time, I shared with her some of the ways that our church had repented and had recovered from some of the sins that had hurt her and harmed her. That the priest who had – I hope unwittingly – pierced her soul had moved on, and that in his wake, we were working on healing. That she was not alone in her hurt, nor in her judgement. I hesitated, knowing that our church was still far from perfect, that there would be plenty of thorns and thistles still to navigate, should she choose to darken our doorstep. Still, I could tell that she knew what she was missing, in the sacrament, in the word of community; otherwise her exile would not still sting. “If you ever want to come and see,” I told her, “I’ll bring you with me.”

And then there’s Eli: older, unsure if he’s any the wiser for it, worn down by battles he could never win against his own sin and the sins of his sons, and still waiting by night for the voice of the Lord. Instead of hearing it himself, he recognizes it in Samuel’s dream, and he is ready. “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening,” he tells Samuel to say, and he means it for himself as well as for the boy.

A few years ago I had a phone call from a stranger asking about baptism. This person was asking for a grown child who had developmental difficulties. One church had declined to baptize her because she could not make a profession of faith. “She may never understand what it means,” the father on the phone told me. We talked a little while, and I explained that we are far from perfect as a church ourselves, and that while we prepare as best we can for baptism, whether as adults or on behalf of our small children who do not yet understand, we know that we can only approach the mystery of the sacrament, that it is God who does the rest, grace upon grace, and that we do not need to understand it all to know that God is love, God is mercy, and that in the waters, God pours forth grace. And we wept together over the phone. I invited him and his daughter to come and see us; to my knowledge they never did, but I trust that those tears watered something in him that needed it. They did for me.

Many years after my children graduated playgroup, I heard from an old friend back at our old church about a woman who had come seeking baptism for her children. She did not bring them to the doorstep we knew, but under the parish system asked our priest to sign off for them to be baptized at the next church down the street. I recognized her story, and I rejoiced at the long arc of God’s love.

Church, we are not perfect. We do not understand it all, and sometimes our vision is dim. But the word of God is not rare in this place, and the mercy of God that passes understanding abounds. In the sacrament, we are reminded regularly that the stain of sin cannot cling to us more closely than the grace of God. And in community, at its best, we find that rippled reflection of the love of Christ that binds us together.

Whether we identify with Philip, eager and enthusiastic, or with Nathanael, a little jaded; with Samuel, new to it all and bewildered, or Eli, old enough to hope only for mercy, we have the vision and the word of God to share with those who so need it. So here’s my invitation, to think about to whom will we say, this week, this year, in this life, “It is the Lord! Come and see.”

Year B Epiphany 2: 1 Samuel 3:1-20, John 1:43-51