Second Sunday after the Epiphany
“See, Learn, Do” – Rev. Brent Gundlah
First Reading (Isaiah 49:1-7, NRSVUE)
Gospel Reading (John 1:29-42, NRSVUE)
I love old books, so I spend a lot of time wandering around Salt Lake City’s wonderful used bookstores. I especially enjoy perusing the new arrivals section because it’s always changing, and because what you find there is eclectic and often intriguing.
After doing this for a while you start to notice things and, rightly or wrongly, draw inferences from them; for example, I once saw a bunch of theology books and biblical commentaries sitting there on the new arrivals shelf and immediately assumed that a fellow minister just retired (okay, what I actually thought was, “another one bites the dust”). One time I looked through someone’s lifetime collection of — I kid you not — horror fiction and Disney children’s books and the conclusion I reached was that this was super weird.
On a recent exploration of one shop’s new arrivals I stumbled upon a giant medical textbook called “Rhinoplasty;” you know, surgery to reconstruct or repair what’s in the middle of your face — in other words, a nose job. This book caught my attention because it was so random; there was absolutely nothing around it that helped put it in any sort of context. But I have to tell you, it really piqued my interest — not because I have any plans to take up rhinoplasty as a hobby, but because it got me wondering, at least for a second, whether one could learn how to do that kind of thing just by reading a book about it.
Look, I never went to medical school, but I feel pretty confident in saying that you can’t learn how to do that kind of thing simply by reading a book about it. Sure, when you’re learning how to do something you often start out by doing that, but then you typically observe someone actually doing that thing and, eventually you move on to doing that thing while being mentored by someone who has experience doing that thing before you go forth and do that thing on your own. This is the way it works in all sorts of life’s endeavors — not just medicine, but also teaching, trades like plumbing and carpentry, and ministry – as we learn in today’s passage from John’s Gospel.
Last week, we heard Matthew’s account of Jesus’s baptism and this week we hear John’s, though they’re quite different in some respects. For example, in today’s reading, John the Baptist tells his listeners how he ended up baptizing Jesus; in other words, in John’s Gospel we don’t learn about the Baptism of Christ as it’s happening (like we do in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke); we learn about it from the one who did it after it’s already happened. And the voice from the heavens that speaks either to Jesus or to the crowd in those other three gospels, here speaks only to John.
As today’s story begins, John the Baptist is just standing around when Jesus suddenly shows up. At that moment, John proclaims to no one in particular, “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” before recounting what happened at Jesus’s baptism. And this “Lamb of God” talk definitely would have gotten people’s attention.
You see, anyone who’d either read their Hebrew Scriptures or heard them read aloud, which was pretty much everyone there, would have understood that this statement was a reference to the sacrifice of the Passover Lambs that God had commanded Moses and Aaron to organize way back in the book of Exodus. And John will allude to Jesus as the Lamb of God, albeit in a roundabout way, near the very end of his Gospel, right after Jesus has died upon the cross.
But this image of the Lamb also comes up again just a few verses later in today’s reading. It’s the day after John the Baptist tells Jesus’s baptism story and he’s standing there with two of his disciples when, lo and behold, Jesus walks by. “Look, here is the Lamb of God!” is what he proclaims to them; and no sooner has he said this than the two disciples stop following him and start following Jesus instead, which kind of makes sense.
Earlier in this first chapter of the Fourth Gospel, John the Baptist declares that his is the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, making straight the way of the Lord; he’s there to set the stage for Jesus, and he’s apparently taking that role pretty seriously. His mandate, such as it is, is to announce the arrival of the Lord, to pave a path before the Messiah that God had promised so long ago, and to encourage people to follow him. And sure enough, when John points out Jesus to those two disciples, that’s exactly what they decide do.
Jesus turns around and sees these two guys following him, so naturally he asks them, “What are you looking for?” They respond, “Teacher, where are you staying?” Or as the King James Version puts it, “Where dwellest thou.” Or, as I’m about to put it, “Where can you be found?” Jesus’s reply? “Come and see,” which, of course they do (as do a whole lot of other people) and this is pretty incredible.
Think about it for a second: They’ve heard and read about this moment in their scriptures for as long as they can remember and while they’re still not totally sure that Jesus is, in fact, the Lamb of God, the Messiah that God had promised them (even though the one named Andrew tells his brother, Simon Peter, that they’ve found the Messiah, the Anointed One), they’re curious enough to follow him; they want to find out more about him and what he represents.
And so Jesus calls them to the next phase of the learning process; he invites them to come and see what he’s all about, to come see what servant leadership means, to come and see what discipleship entails — which is what they and the rest of Jesus’s followers will do for the rest of the gospel story.
They’ll not only watch Jesus do God’s work in the world, but also soon become his partners in doing it (feeding people, healing and casting out demons under his tutelage), until the very end, until Jesus can’t be there to do it with them any more, at which point they’ll end up doing it themselves — “As the Father has sent me, I am sending you,” is what Jesu says to them right before he tells them to go feed his lambs and tend his sheep.
You see, what they’ve really learned from all of this (even if they don’t necessarily realize it) is that they’ll find Jesus wherever people love their neighbors, wherever people work for justice, wherever people provide food for the hungry, wherever people care for the least of these. And that’s where we still find him two thousand years later.
Read and hear the Word. Behold the Word in action. Live into the Word together. This is what discipleship — what being Christ’s hands and heart in the world — is all about, really.
Consider it in the context of our church in 2026. These days, people often learn about us online. They go to our website to find out what we stand for and, when they do, they see right there on our homepage what some of our key commitments are: Open and Affirming, Creation Justice, and Compassionate Action.
Then they click on the “Learn More” button and are taken to our covenants so they can read more about what matters to us and why; they click on the “Get Involved” button to understand how we’re actually living into our commitments through what we do, and to see how they can be a part of it.
Perhaps they look for us on Facebook or YouTube and tune in to what we do here on Sunday mornings in order to find out how we think and speak about God and about Jesus and about our neighbors. And then maybe, just maybe, they decide to come to worship in-person so they can meet all of us, and get a sense for whether everyone is truly welcome here like we say they are.
And if they happened to do so last Sunday, they were invited by Nan to come and see what it’s like to be a part of Operation Sandwich. And perhaps they took Nan up on that invitation (which is always open, by the way), deciding to come and witness it firsthand, to learn about what’s involved in doing it from people who’ve done for it some time, to roll up their sleeves, to grab some peanut butter and jelly and bread and participate in the work.
This is how discipleship works, you see. It’s not rocket science and it’s not rhinoplasty either (though, at some basic level, that’s how rocket science and rhinoplasty work too). But discipleship is often hard and tedious and thankless work. And it’s also necessary work if this hot mess of a world is going to be any better than it is right now.
So learn about it. See how it’s done. Then do it.
And if you’re curious about all that this means here, in this place at this time, come and see.