Sermon — January 14, 2024
The Rev. Greg Johnston
“Nathanael said to him, ‘Can anything good come out of Nazareth?’
Philip said to him, ‘Come and see.’” (John 1:46)
The last few years have seen a steady stream of celebrity Christian conversions. This fall, the “LA Ink” tattoo artist and Goth icon Kat Von D announced that she was turning away from her interest in the occult and had been baptized in a small church in Indiana. On New Year’s Eve, the child star Shia LaBeouf was confirmed into the Catholic Church at a Franciscan friary, and announced that he’s discerning a call to be ordained as a deacon. And of course many people have been baffled as the spiritual journey of the rapper Ye, a.k.a. Kanye West, has taken a strange detour into what seems to be a combination of genuine Christian faith and white supremacism.
But my favorite celebrity Christian conversion has to be the story of Father Deacon Mercurios, who was ordained a deacon by the Archpriest Saba, Bishop of the Georgian Orthodox Diocese of North America, and now serves at the Holy Monastery of Saint Iakovos in Oklahoma. You’ve probably never heard of Father Mercurios, a name he took when he was ordained. You might have heard of Zac Hanson, which is his birth name, and even if you haven’t heard of Zac Hanson, I can almost guarantee that you’ve heard the chorus of the song that launched him and his brothers to late-’90s boy-band fame: “MMMBop! Ba duba dop ba du bop, ba duba dop ba du dop…”
Of course, celebrities and quests for spiritual experience are like peanut butter and jelly. But often these celebrity journeys take them into more individual and internal practices of spirituality. There’s something almost funny about the idea of a celebrity joining an ordinary local church.
Imagine if Matt Damon decided to move back to Cambridge and decided to join St. John’s. He couldn’t roll on down to Charlestown on a Sunday morning and walk into church without being mobbed by paparazzi. He couldn’t chat at Coffee Hour or go volunteer in the Garden on a Monday without making it into the tabloids. Fame isolates celebrities from most of the ordinary experiences of community; and yet Christianity is a communal religion, and God’s call to us is always an invitation into community.
That’s certainly the case when God calls Samuel. On the surface, this is a very individual call. Samuel literally hears the voice of God calling him in the night, while he lies before the Ark in the Temple. But Samuel can’t understand this call alone. He goes, again and again, to his mentor Eli, before they realize together that it’s God who’s calling Samuel, not the priest. God is calling Samuel, the individual, but the call can only be answered in community, through relationship. And once they’ve finally understood the nature of the call, and Samuel can receive the full message, it turns out that God is not only calling Samuel in community; God is calling Samuel for community. Eli’s sons, who are priests working in the Temple, are committing some horrible crimes against the people, and God gives this message of judgment and destruction to Samuel as a warning to give to Eli, on behalf of the community. So yes, Samuel’s call is an individual call from God, the kind of call you or I or any celebrity could hear. But it can only be understood in relationship, and it can only be answered by serving the community.
The same is true when Jesus calls the disciples. They are called individually, but they answer in pairs. And what they’re being called into is a new community with Christ. When we sometimes say that we “follow Jesus” in 2023, it can only be a metaphor. Jesus no longer exists in geographic space. But when Jesus tells Philip, “Follow me,” it’s quite a literal thing. (John 1:43) The disciples leave their homes to join a wandering band. They leave their communities to become a part of a new community. Their faith in Christ is not an idea, some kind of cognitive theological belief. It’s not even an action, like being baptized or serving the poor. It’s an experience of community, of presence, that can only be understood by following Jesus wherever it is he’s going. When Nathanael asks for some justification or explanation—“Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”—Philip can only say, “Come and see.” (John 1:46) And it turns out that the community he’ll see is even wider than he could’ve imagined—it’s not just the disciples, Jesus says, but all the angels of God they’ll see with the Son of Man. (John 1:51) And after Jesus is gone, the community remains, and grows, and spreads throughout the world, greeting each new disciple with the same exact invitation: “Come and see.”
Within a few decades, it was clear to Paul how central this kind of community was. Paul writes all sorts of weird and wonderful things in his letters, but in 1 Corinthians especially you hear, again and again, this image of the “Body of Christ,” with each one of us as one of its organs or limbs or digits. Each member of the body, Paul says, serves a different function, has different strengths and weaknesses, different spiritual gifts. But what each member of the body does affects all the others. When one member of the Church is behaving badly, it’s as if one of your hands or one of your feet had gone off course. But when their gifts are all united and working together, they achieve a harmony that’s an order of magnitude greater than the sum of the parts. And by the way: Paul himself had a famously dramatic individual conversion, a blinding light shining from the sky and a voice speaking from the heavens. But he can only understand it with the help of another disciple, and he answers it by devoting his life to the nascent Christian community he had been trying to destroy. Are you seeing the pattern here?
I don’t think it’s a surprise that two of our celebrity converts feel called to the diaconate, the order of ministry that’s all about serving the community, all about bridging the gap between the church and the world. It seems to me that a lot of people in our culture are yearning for community: that the search for meaning is really a search for meaning in community. It’s hard to have a spiritual life in isolation that doesn’t go off the rails. Just ask Kanye West. Samuel and Nathanael and Paul knew that it’s hard to understand what God is saying to you on your own. It’s hard to do anything alone, actually. Maybe you can pretend to be self-sufficient, for a few years, if you’re young and healthy; but even then, just ask all the people who could go to the gym alone, but seek out CrossFit instead. This is why we read the Bible in community, why we pray in community. And this is why we try to serve our community as a community. And to be honest, that’s what’s most interesting to me in these stories of celebrity conversion—I don’t think it’s a coincidence that both Zac Hanson and Shia LaBeouf have felt God calling them to the diaconate in particular, to the order of ministry that is focused specifically on service and community, on bridging the gap between the church and the world so that the love we find and feel in this place might spill out into the world outside it.
There’s so much about spiritual life that can’t be looked up on a website or read in a book. There is so much we can’t understand on our own. There are so many questions about religion that can only be answered with the Apostle Philip’s words: “Come and see.” Because while personal prayer and meditation are wonderful things, real spiritual growth happens in community, and it happens for the good of the community.
I realize that I’m preaching to the choir. If you’re hearing these words, you already know some of that. But that also means that you have good news to share. Because you have come here, and you have seen, and presumably you’ve seen something good. And I wonder whether there are any Nathanaels in your life who need you to be Philip for them, any Samuels who need you to be Eli. In other words, I wonder whether you know anyone who’s searching for some kind of meaning or community but thinks they can’t find it in the church, whose response to the words “we’ve found something here” is the equivalent to Nathanael’s dismissive question, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” I wonder whether there’s anyone you know who’s hearing God’s voice calling them but thinks it’s something else.
And I wonder what it would mean to answer those questions like Philip does: “Come and see.” What’s that Centering Prayer thing about anyway? Come and see. How can you call yourself a Christian with all the awful things the Church has done, and still does? Come and see. What are you doing on this weekend? There can only be one answer that explains the hours we all spend in this church, and guess what: It’s “Come and see.”
In the name of the Father, and of the Son,
and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.