Category: Sermons

They said to him, ‘Rabbi’ (which translated means Teacher), ‘where are you staying?’ 39He said to them, ‘Come and see.’ They came and saw where he was staying, and they remained with him that day. It was about four o’clock in the afternoon.
This is a lovely detail: two of John the Baptist’s disciples, Andrew and his brother Simon Peter, have just been introduced to Jesus and he invites them round to his place for the afternoon. As an Englishman, I can’t help think that it must have been an invitation to afternoon tea!
           John’s gospel is the only one which records this event, what could be thought of as the day after his baptism scene. There are two things I’d like you to notice right away. Firstly it goes a long way to explaining why it is, in the other gospel accounts, that Andrew and Peter, as well as James and John – all fishermen on the Sea of Galilee – are so willing to abandon their nets and their fishing boats when Jesus comes walking along the shore and says ‘follow me’; they were already religious inquirers, having been followers of John the Baptist, and two of them, Peter and Andrew, had already met Jesus and spent time with him.

           The other point is a linguistic one, but it is an important one: ‘where are you staying’, ‘they came and saw where he was staying’, ‘and they stayed with him that day’. The Greek word for staying that John uses is menein, and it is one of John’s favourite and most significant words. Its carries the meanings of simple being somewhere, but also suggests permanence: hence we find it translated as staying, lasting, remaining, dwelling, enduring, and abiding. Menein returns in many different contexts.

As the Gospel proceeds, the meaning of menein and its derivatives broadens and deepens. The link with eternal life is made explicitly: the food that the Son of Man gives “endures for eternal life” (6:27). A little further on, the key idea of mutual indwelling is introduced: “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me and I in them” (6:56). Later, menein is connected with true, long-term discipleship: “Then Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in him, ‘If you continue [meinēte] in my word, you are truly my disciples’” (8:31). “In my Father’s house are many dwelling places” (14:2). Later, menein also describes the relationship of Jesus to his Father: “the Father who dwells in me” (14:10); as well as of the Holy Spirit to the disciples: “He abides with you, and he will be in you” (14:17). But the most intensive use of the verb, twelve times in twelve verses, is in the parable of the vine in chapter 15: that’s the one where Jesus says that he is the true vine, his followers are the branches, and only by remaining united with him (menein) can they bear lasting fruit.

At this point, it is worth pausing and noticing something quietly radical. The first thing Jesus offers these would-be disciples is not a programme, not a manifesto, not even a miracle — but time. “They stayed with him that day.”

Not for a lifetime. Not even for a week. Just for an afternoon.

Christian discipleship in John’s Gospel begins not with understanding everything about Jesus, but with staying long enough for something to begin to happen. They do not yet know who he fully is. They do not yet grasp what following him will cost. But they stay. And in staying, they are changed.

This is important, because many of us assume that faith works the other way round: that once we understand enough, or believe strongly enough, or feel confident enough, then we can commit. John quietly reverses that logic. Understanding follows abiding. Commitment grows out of remaining.

And that matters enormously for an international, mobile, restless Church like ours. Many of us live between cultures, between countries, between stages of life. Some of us are new to faith; others are tired by it. Some feel deeply rooted; others feel they are constantly on the move. To all of us, Jesus does not say, “You need to have it all worked out.” He says, “Come and stay.”

In John’s Gospel, to abide with Jesus means placing ourselves where he already is, and allowing time for his life to seep into ours. That is why abiding shows up later as prayer, sacrament, scripture, and love — not as anything spectacular or heroic, but simply as faithfulness. Think again of that vine and branches image in chapter 15. A branch does not strain to produce fruit. It does not anxiously perform. It simply remains connected. Fruit is the consequence of staying.

And this brings us back to that apparently throwaway detail: “It was about four o’clock in the afternoon.” John remembers the hour because it was the moment when everything quietly began. Not with drama, but with presence. And not with certainty, but with time spent together.

Perhaps the most hopeful thing this passage says to us is this: an afternoon with Jesus can change the direction of a life. Not because the disciples knew everything by the end of the day — they clearly didn’t — but because they had begun to abide.

So the question this text finally asks us is not, “Do you fully understand Jesus?” but, “Where — and with whom — are you staying?”
What do we give our time to? What shapes our loves? What do we remain with, day after day?

And if the answer is complicated — as it usually is — the invitation remains wonderfully simple: “Come and see.” Stay a while. And let time with Christ do what time with Christ has always done: quietly, patiently, transform.

As I’m sure you are all aware, we are waiting for there to be a new ABC: Dame Sarah Mullally, currently the Bishop of London is going to be formally installed in Canterbury cathedral in March.

 So I’d like you to imagine, just for a moment, that next Sunday she comes here, to HGG. She comes unannounced, sits at the back of the church, takes communion with us and leaves.

Sounds unlikely, doesn’t it? But that’s the kind of thing that happened at Jesus’s baptism. John is out in the wilderness, running his own baptism gig on the bank of the Jordon, when suddenly the great man appears. No wonder John is reluctant to baptize Jesus, and says, ‘but surely you should be baptizing me?’

There are two other things I’d like you to notice: firstly, that the account of Jesus’s baptism in Matthew’s account is different from the other synoptic gospels; in Mark and Luke it is almost a private moment for Jesus – yes, he goes to John to be baptized, but it is as though the coming of the Holy Spirit and the Voice that speaks over him is a personal experience for Jesus alone. Whereas in Matthew’s account, not only is it a witnessed, public event, but we have the dialogue, the exchange between Jesus and John.
  And secondly, we must notice the huge discrepancy between what John was expecting the Holy Spirit to be like – like a fire, like an ax, like a shovel – and how it actually comes: as a dove. Fire power is deadly and destructive; bring out an ax and something’s in for the chop. But the power of the dove? How does that work? Certainly it makes the Holy Spirit sound gentle: it conjures up that lovely image from the psalms of sheltering under the shadow of a wing – of an angel’s wing, perhaps. Given that humans have tamed doves, and built dovecots since the dawn of recorded history, dove power sounds rather domesticated, something to be invoked daily. Supremely, dove power is God’s soft power, and not at all what John the Baptist had been threatening.

And it is dove power, God’s soft power, and a domestic blessing I would like us to invoke this morning. May the Holy Ghost surround little Amelia, her parents Sarah and Jeffrey, and her sisters, Brenda and Lois, and Amelia’s godparents too, as we invite them in a moment to gather round the font.

But what about the rest of us?  As we once again listen to and celebrate the story of Jesus’s baptism, what are the implications of this event for ourselves? There are many, and I can only suggest a few directions that we might like to take as we step out into this new year.

One is that the voice that spoke over Jesus speaks over each of us, as God’s adopted children: we too are pronounced God’s beloved children through our own baptism, and through our own association with Christ: after all, Jesus’s righteousness is what gives us the “power to become children of God”.

Secondly, just as his baptism marked the beginning of Jesus’s ministry, so too our own baptism should stand as a symbol for whoever and whatever God is calling us to become. Baptism contains the promise -on both God’s part and our own – to become that better self that some nagging recurrent thought, some corner of the heart, knows to be our true calling. Let baptism stand for that: the clear-sky vision of our best self, aligned with the means – the dove power of the daily spirit – to achieve it.

Finally, baptism is one of the two sacraments instituted by Jesus himself (along with the Last Supper); not only was baptism central to the early church’s understanding of how the individual could be redeemed and transformed but it was also foundational for the way the church could become the engine of change in a fallen world. In consideration of this, we must take our own baptism seriously not just as a one-off event that happened perhaps long ago, but by remembering it as a continuing formative experience in our lives. There are a number of ways you might do this: by rereading our baptismal vows regularly; by acknowledging the font as well as the altar whenever we enter a church; and by recalling our baptism whenever we go for a swim, or even when we take a bath or a shower. It’s not so much the ‘how’ that matters as the habit of commemorating our baptism within us, and keeping its promise active and alive.