Come and See
by the Very Rev. Peter DeVeau, Dean
It is good to be with you here today. It is good to welcome the Chamber Choir from the University of Missouri to sing today. It hardly seems like fifteen years have gone by since I served among you as priest. For those of you who are newer to this community or may be worshiping here for a first time, I was on staff here from 1990 through 1996. The years have flown by since Mary, Matt, and I moved to Seattle.
It is a blessing to be with you now as Dean of this Cathedral. I am grateful for the activity of the Spirit in joining us again in mutual ministry in this great cathedral church. Frankly, being called to be your Dean is not something I would have even thought possible when I was contacted by the Search Committee last April and invited to join the discernment process with you. And, I wasn’t so sure it was going to be possible the day in July when I interviewed with the Vestry and Search Committee, if only due to the fact that the outside temperature was a searing 116 degrees Fahrenheit, as opposed to the 60’ something degrees I had left behind in Seattle. You need to know that in Seattle 75 degree temperatures elicit exclamations of “Whew, it’s hot today” and, sandals are typically worn with woolen socks- always to the curious consternation of tourists from California.
It is an unexpected juxtaposition that leads Nathanael to ask Philip the question “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Philip has just exclaimed to Nathanael, “We have found him about whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus son of Joseph from Nazareth.” Nazareth was not the place from which Nathanael, nor anyone else, would have expected anyone of any merit to come. It was a village of no particular consequence.
Philip answers Nathanael’s geographical skepticism with the invitation, “Come and see.” He goes with Philip to meet this Jesus, and as the gospel story tells, Jesus tells Nathanael something about himself, of who he is and where he has been, “Behold, an Israelite in whom there is no deceit” “I saw you under the fig tree before Philip called you.” Nathanael says to Jesus and to all who will hear, “Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!” Nathanael words fill out more of that great statement made in the opening lines of John’s gospel, “and the Word became flesh and made a dwelling with us.” John, in his telling of the gospel, would have us know that God has inaugurated a new age in the coming of Jesus Christ into the world.
“It’s hard to tell when you are living in a golden age,” wrote Hampton Stevens in yesterday’s Kansas City Star. Stevens lives in Kansas City and writes for The Atlantic, ESPN, and other national publications. He holds that 2011 marked the golden year when Kansas City came of age — a critical mass was reached in this city with the opening of both the Livestrong Sporting Park and the Kaufman Center for the Performing Arts. Kansas City, he writes, “has come of age, and mostly through the arts . . . (in 2011) it felt as if Kansas City had gone almost overnight from a city always trying to convince others how good life is here to a city that simply knows it to be true.”
The experience of this great city, in discovering a deeper soul in the cultivation of the arts and the renewal of civic infrastructure, may provide a window into understanding what it means to be called as a follower of Jesus. A critical mass of art and culture is changing this town. What Philip and Nathanael discover is the critical and transforming presence of Jesus. They begin to understand what it means to live in this age when the divine takes on our humanity.
In this Jesus things change and are transformed. That’s a piece of what John would have us know. What does it mean for us in this cathedral community as we come to realize what it means to live in the golden age of Christ?
In returning to this city and cathedral with fresh eyes I am truly amazed by what has taken place here in a decade and a half. The life that has been generated through the building of Founders’ Hall and the revitalization of downtown are encouraging signs right here on our campus and at our doorstep. I also have become deeply aware that all around us there are things that need to be confronted and changed:
We live with the seemingly insurmountable problem of providing quality and equality in education. It’s not a problem unique to Kansas City. Schools are an issue in Seattle, too. In my former parish we lost families with children every year when they moved to the suburbs for better schools. Surely there are enough smart people around to fix the problem in both places- but that problem has to do with economics, and stable households, and issues of race and equality. We have found that money and computers cannot save education. But, surely we can do something.
We look warily over our shoulders when we consider the high murder rate in this city. Yesterday, Saturday shopping turned into a lockdown in Independence as shots fired out. Two people were wounded. Yet, how is it that we address violence as a solution on so many levels in our society? Surely we can do something about affirming that the dignity of every human being is upheld through an ethic of peace and justice.
I listened more intently earlier this week as the governor in our neighboring State of Kansas in giving his state of the state address talked about the conservation of water for future generations. Now there’s an issue that transcends party politics — water is such a precious and renewable resource. Surely we all can and must be better stewards of resources.
Really, what does faith and Christian community have to do with this? Shouldn’t we just worry about shoring up a church budget or reversing eroding membership? I’ve got my religion, or my Jesus, or my own way to look at the world.
The morning of snow this past week I attended the Men’s Bible Study. This study that day was a “group read” of Martin Luther King Junior’s sermon given at Washington National Cathedral in 1968, not long before he was assassinated. I was struck by his prescient admonition to see the world as interrelated. Back then things were seen more as separate pieces. In his sermon addressing the tragedy and sin of racism, King spoke of the great revolution taking place in the world of the late nineteen-sixties. He called it a triple revolution of technology, of weaponry, and of human rights.
In the intervening years this triple revolution King spoke of has been unfolding before us — it has been progressing both for good and for ill. Our smart phones connect us to just about everything, yet loneliness and estrangement persists. We build smart everything, including bombs, but cannot get education on equal footing and increasingly reserve it only for those of means. Human rights are extended to more and more people worldwide, but try to explain that to women in all too many parts of the world, or to a young black man a mere mile away. There is a disconnect.
What happens here affects what happens over there and halfway around the world. What happens on this side of the border, is related to what happens across the line — whether it is State Line Road, Troost Avenue, across a legislative aisle, or over in Afghanistan, Sudan, Somalia, China, the Koreas, Haiti, Greece, or the United Kingdom to name a hot spots of global concern.
Today’s gospel passage may help us ask the question, “Can anything good come out of this or that?” It may help us to ask that same question of ourselves, “Can anything good come out of my life?” Such questioning, as was the case with Nathanael is based in experience and expectation. For Nathanael, Nazareth was not the place to look for a leader. We do the same. We have our perspectives and prejudices through which we filter the world. We seem to be bound by factors such as chance or privilege or ability, of available resources, and of self-confidence and self-worth.
We sang earlier of the Lord’s anointed who comes to break oppression, to set captives free, to take away transgression, to rule in equity- This is the place, the mind-set, the spiritual country in which you and I are called to dwell. As Philip invites Nathanael, you and are invited to “Come and see.” Come to that place of being that, as John tells it, finds its expression and enduring fulfillment in the self-giving love of God- of the God who takes on our flesh and reigns from a cross and gathers a beloved community at its foot. Of the Come and see the One who models that love to the world by washing the feet of his followers in humility, who by his abiding presence transforms the world.
As Christ’s beloved community, as a cathedral community, you and I are called from merely hoping that things can be better, to believing that they really can be and are transformed by the critical mass of God made flesh in the world.
