The Hebrew and Gospel Readings for the Second Sunday after the Epiphany: Year B
First Samuel 3:1 to 20; and, John 1:43 to 51
“Nathanael asked him, “Where did you get to know me?” Jesus answered, “I saw you under the fig tree before Philip called you.” Nathanael replied, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!” (John 1:48 and 49)
What happened under that fig tree before Philip came to Nathanael? What was Nathanael going through? What was he caught up in? Was he planning some kind of sin? Was he planning to take his life? Unlike our First Samuel reading for today where we got to hear what went on between God and the child Samuel, and then Samuel told Eli; We don’t know what Nathanael was going through under the fig tree. The secret and sacred times with God still happen today. It has been said that these are the thin spaces. Let me share two more recent ones with you; one in which we do not know what happened and one in which we do.
C. S. Lewis is remembered as a Christian writer and spiritualist. However he was not always this way. He was a non believer of God, an agnostic. He later believed in God but had reservations regarding Jesus. And then he writes; “In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.” Two years later, his conversion was completed: “I know very well when, but hardly how, the final step was taken. I was driven to Whipsnade one sunny morning. When we set out, I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo, I did.” (Great Cloud of Witnesses for November 22) What happen in that vehicle? We don’t know.
This weekend we remember Dr Martin Luther King Jr. King lived in constant danger: his home was dynamited, he was almost fatally stabbed, and he was harassed by death threats. He was even jailed 30 times; but through it all he was sustained by his deep faith. In 1957, he received, late at night, a vicious telephone threat. Alone in his kitchen he wept and prayed. He relates that he heard the Lord speaking to him and saying, “Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness, stand up for justice,” and promising never to leave him alone—“No, never alone.” King refers to his vision as his “Mountain-top Experience.” After preaching at Washington Cathedral on March 31, 1968, King went to Memphis in support of sanitation workers in their struggle for better wages. There, he proclaimed that he had been “to the mountain-top” and had seen “the Promised Land,” and that he knew that one day he and his people would be “free at last.” On the following day, April 4, he was cut down by an assassin’s bullet. (Great Cloud of Witnesses for April 4) We know of his experience because he spoke and wrote of it.
What has happened in your life that sealed you to God in Christ Jesus? Tell somebody about it. Write about it. We need to hear it.
As we continue in this time of service in memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. let us understand that our Lord Jesus, still to this very day, visits us in our thin places. When this happens we are changed forever.
Please keep up your thoughts and prayers and hopes for Ukraine and Russia, Israel and Palestine, and our schools.
As we listen to what the Spirit of God is saying to us, let us live to love and serve, and to teach others to love and serve, while pondering anew what the Almighty can do. John
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