A Sermon on John 1:43-51

Preached January 19, 2003

First Christian Church, Corpus Christi, Texas

By Donald M. Tuttle

Do you remember Tom Vu?

Chances are you don’t recognize the name, but you may remember him. In the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, this small Vietnamese immigrant appeared on TV promoting his guaranteed get-rich system. He would stand in front of one of his "Tom Vu mansions" or on his "Tom Vu yacht," surrounded by beautiful women in very skimpy bikinis, offering to share the secrets that had made a poor immigrant wildly rich.

As far as I know, not a lot of people became wealthy in the Tom Vu way. Vu himself ended up in legal trouble and has reportedly retired in California. But he remains a significant footnote in media history because Tom Vu was the first big infomercial celebrity. His success spawned the infomercial age—the one that has given us Buns of Steel, The Hair Club for Men and Tae Bo 2: Get Ripped. Now, day or night, you can find infomercials on TV. And according to one report, 50 million people tune in to at least one of them a week.

I don’t know how many of these you have seen, but virtually all have at least one thing in common—"the convert." Tom Vu’s was a baldish, middle-aged man with a mustache and glasses. He would testify to the fact that he had tried other wealth-producing systems, but only Tom Vu’s worked. And that is typical. The infomercial almost always includes people who found just what they were looking for in the product or plan being offered. They are offered as proof that it works.

Of course, I suspect you are as I am when it comes to these testimonials—and that is skeptical. Most of us probably don’t believe what those converts say. We are just not willing to take them at their word.

I share this with you because our response to infomercial testimonies is not all that different than the way many people today view the claims made by Christians. In the past, many people simply took for granted the claims we made about God and Christ, the way of life we proposed, the view of the world we possessed. But today they are skeptical. And that skepticism doesn’t just arise from the sexual or financial misconduct of Catholic priest or televangelists. It has deeper roots. In a wonderful book entitled Humble Apologetics, John Stackhouse Jr., suggests such skepticism is rooted in our culture, in the very assumptions by which people now live.

What assumptions?

One is pluralism. Pluralism simply means the existence in nation or society of various groups with differing ethnic origins, cultural patterns, religions and so on. Although the way the term is used, one might think pluralism is new, it is not. The United States has always been pluralistic. Although most were English, by 1780 the New World had people from Spain, Portugal, France, Holland, Germany and Sweden, not to mention the Native Americans who were already here. Of course, there were the Africans, brought unwillingly to these shores as slaves. In the mid-1800s, the Irish came in great numbers to escape starvation in their homeland, while Germans emigrated to escape revolution. Between the late 1880 and the 1920s, 2 million Jews came to call the United States home. Hispanics, Asians, Middle Easterners and a host of others have followed them. All brought their ethnicity, culture, and religious understandings with them.

The difference today is that many people understand pluralism as relativism. For example, since there are various religions, they figure they all must be the same. In popular form, such relativism gets expressed as, "It doesn’t matter what you believe as long as you believe something," or as "All religions are just trying to get people to the same place." In a culture that has adopted a relativistic mindset, Christianity is considered just one of many religions—no better or worse than the rest. That is certainly different than it was 50 or 75 years ago.

But there are other reasons people are skeptical. Stackhouse says that the emerging post-modern mindset is one. At the heart of post-modern thinking is doubt. People today are being taught that there is not such thing as truth, that truth is whatever one wants it to be.

Os Guinniss offers an interesting example. Twenty-some years ago, Rigoberta Menchu wrote a book supposedly detailing her life under the hostile military regime in Guatemala. In the book she recounts witnessing her brother’s death. She says that he was captured, accused of being a rebel, tortured for weeks, then publicly doused with gasoline and set afire with 21 others. So powerful was the book that Menchu became a media icon and even won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992.

The only problem was that it was mostly a lie. Oh, her brother had been killed by the Army, but not in the way she described. In fact, no one had been burned alive as she "witnessed." Much of her book was simply fiction. Yet when Menchu and her supporters were confronted with these facts, they dismissed them. "It was her truth," they said, regardless of what actually took place.

That is the post-modern mindset. Truth is what one makes it. So the Christian claims of truth are greeted with, "That may be your truth, but that doesn’t make it true."

Stackhouse also offers a third reason people greet the Christian story with skepticism. They believe it lacks plausibility.

We are right between the two great celebrations of the Christian faith. A few weeks ago we celebrated Christmas, the incarnation. We declared that God became flesh, took on humanity, and dwelt with us. In a couple of months, we will celebrate Easter, the resurrection. We will declare that God in Jesus died and, on the third day, rose again, opening the door to eternity for us. Having embraced the Christian faith, those teachings make sense to us, but they don’t to some others. Many people find the idea of the incarnation or the resurrection, well, incredible, implausible. Science or logic or the like tell them that gods don’t become human beings and human beings don’t come back to life after three days. The claims of the faith seem to many in our day and age simply impossible to believe.

Relativism, doubt, implausibility all challenge the Christian faith today. All of them make it difficult to speak about, much less defend, the faith. For some folk, Christians seem no more credible than "the converts" who give their testimonials on infomercials.

So what are we to do? How can we respond to such skepticism? How can we fulfill our calling to share the faith when we know many people find it hard to believe?

Certainly there are answers we can offer. Books like Stackhouse are a great help in addressing people’s doubts. But there is a more important and effective response. It is to simply invite people to come and see, to invite people to try the faith, to test its claims in their lives, not from the outside but from within, from a place in the presence of Christ and his people.

This was ultimately Philip’s strategy. It was in Galilee that Philip met Jesus. It was a powerful encounter for him because when Jesus invited him to come and follow, Philip did. He became one of Jesus’ students. He committed himself to learning how to live from our Lord. He did so because he recognized Jesus as the Christ, as the Messiah, the one set apart by God to lead the people of Israel.

Obviously the coming of the long-awaited Messiah was news to be shared. It meant a new life for Philip, for all of Israel, for the world. It meant a new day was dawning. So Philip did what any such convert might do, he ran to tell Nathanael the news. But Nathanael was a skeptic. "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" he chided. And he had reason to be skeptical. Nazareth was not a city of any importance. Unlike Bethlehem, for example, it was never mentioned in the Old Testament or the early rabbinic literature. There was no reason to imagine that the Messiah would hail from there. Besides, Nazareth was a town full of people with mixed blood. Jews like Nathanael prided themselves on maintaining a pure ethnic identity, but the people of Nazareth had no such lineage. They had been forced to become Jews some centuries before. Any claim that the messiah would be a common carpenters son from an unimportant, ethnically questionable community seemed highly suspicious. For Nathanael, it just wasn’t possible.

Yet how did Philip respond? Did he quote Old Testament proof texts? Did he offer rational arguments? Did he threaten Nathanael with eternal damnation should he not believe?

No. He invited Nathanael to "Come and see." He invited him to come to Jesus, meet him, experience him, and then decide if he was the one. Philip did nothing more than offer his friend an enthusiastic invitation to come and find out more.

And it worked. Nathanael came along, met Jesus, and knew he was, after all, the Son of God.

Too often we tend to think that it is our job as Christians to make people believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the Living God. Too often we assume that we are to "convert them," to make sure their lives are re-directed to follow Jesus. But that’s not the case. We are called to show and tell people what God has done for us and the world and to invite them to come and see. We invite, then leave the rest to God.

D.W. Cleverly Ford is a British preacher of some note. He tells the story of one such invitation. It was offered casually, almost without thought, over the back fence one day. The woman who was invited to come and see was doubtful. Christ, the church, faith--none of it had meant much to her before. But she was hurting. Her husband had died a few years before in the influenza epidemic of 1918. In the years since, she not only struggled to rear two sons but with the haunting feeling that she had not been all that she should have been to her husband. So that Sunday, after a neighbor invited her, she went to see. And there, spoken by an ordinary preacher, she heard that Christ died for our sins, according to the Scriptures. Ford said that the woman--his mother--reached out and grasped that message and nothing less than a miracle took place. Oh, it was not instantaneous, but gradually she was released from her burden of guilt and set free to rear her children.

That morning, Mrs. Ford, encountered Christ, all because someone invited her. And what happened to her happens all the time.

In his book Proclaim Good Tidings, Vernard Eller says that authentic evangelism consists of just two things. First, true evangelism consists of the congregation, of the people of the church, projecting the truth of what God has done by the way they live together. Is there love? Is there grace? Is there service? Is there hope? And, second, authentic evangelism consists of the people of faith actively inviting others to come and see, to join with Christ in his body, the church.

No matter how skeptical our culture may become, it will never be able to resist an invitation to be a part of a community that embodies Jesus Christ.