The long life of discipleship; John 1:29-42; January 18, 2026
Scripture Reading John 1:29-42
The next day he saw Jesus coming toward him and declared, “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world! This is he of whom I said, ‘After me comes a man who ranks ahead of me because he was before me.’ I myself did not know him, but I came baptizing with water for this reason, that he might be revealed to Israel.” And John testified, “I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him. I myself did not know him, but the one who sent me to baptize with water said to me, ‘He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.’ And I myself have seen and have testified that this is the Chosen One.”
The next day John again was standing with two of his disciples, and as he watched Jesus walk by he exclaimed, “Look, here is the Lamb of God!” The two disciples heard him say this, and they followed Jesus. When Jesus turned and saw them following, he said to them, “What are you looking for?” They said to him, “Rabbi” (which translated means Teacher), “where are you staying?” He 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. One of the two who heard John speak and followed him was Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother. He first found his brother Simon and said to him, “We have found the Messiah” (which is translated Anointed). He brought Simon to Jesus, who looked at him and said, “You are Simon son of John. You are to be called Cephas” (which is translated Peter).
Sermon The Long Life of Discipleship Pastor Anne Nelson
I picture John standing with his disciples in a very ordinary place. Say - outside of a humble dwelling, or in a small marketplace, in a village — or even further into the margins, on the edges of the wilderness, near the Jordan River.
Scripture tells us that people had to leave Jerusalem in order to hear and see him, had to travel, between 5 to 20 miles or so in order to go out to him.
Imagine leaving the noises of city life behind, leaving the crowds, swirling colors and motion, leaving the smells of food and animals and humans, traveling into and through smaller towns and villages, longer stretches of open road, hearing wind, feeling the ground bumpy on the way, dust accumulating over the miles. All to reach a small enclave where John was, improbably, declaring extraordinary revelations about the person and nature of God.
Imagine the most - out of the way place you can remember. Some place that seemed to exist on the other side of your daily habits, or on the other side of what you thought was habitable. Imagine arriving at this far-flung location and finding it to be the place where someone says — I’ve found God here. I saw a new revelation of the Spirit. I saw the one who will save us all.
What would you do? Laugh nervously and shrug it off? Entertain this idle thought and forget it soon after?
At least some of John’s disciples are deeply moved by John’s words. So moved that as they watch the man Jesus walking by, they look at each other, nod to John, and set out, beginning to trail after Jesus. Upon catching up to him, a charged exchange unfolds, rapid fire, between them — Jesus asks, “What are you looking for?”
A loaded question if there ever was one.
What were they looking for?
Were they looking for personal spiritual fulfillment? Or maybe a political answer to the problems they faced? Were they looking for self-justification? For wholeness and healing? Were they looking for definitive answers?
Whatever they carried in their hearts – something about Jesus’s piercing question lands for them, some sort of hunger called forth, or met.
“Teacher,” they answer, “where are you staying?”
A question for a question. “Come and see,” says Jesus.
They never left Jesus’s side after that moment. At first compelled by some unspoken compulsion, then convinced that this person, Jesus, had what they needed and was worth following, these men are noted as the first two disciples - one named, Andrew, and one unnamed.
Having received an extraordinary call to follow Jesus, much of what happens in the lives his disciples is, again, very ordinary. The disciples walk - and walk - and walk. They listen, and are often very, very confused about what Jesus is saying or doing. And yet, the result of all of this walking and watching and listening and confusion is — life-changing. Earth-shattering actually. The ministry of Jesus Christ shakes the foundations of the world. After three short years with Jesus, the disciples carry on the ministry of Christ so that it takes root in the lives of more ordinary people in more out of the way corners of the world, and they, named and unnamed, in their own daily faithfulness, pass the baton of discipleship from one journey to the next, across time and space.
This strange but necessary juxtaposition of the every day and the extraordinary seems fitting as we contemplate the life and work of a modern day saint, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.. The Rev. Dr., whose life we now hallow, could still be someone whose life began in relative obscurity. To be sure, Atlanta, Georgia is a great city, and Dr. King grew up in a lovely two-story home, but these were ordinary circumstances. And not only ordinary, but fraught. For as we well know, Dr. King came up in an age of racial animus, experienced in daily life through limited opportunity, physical danger, and oppressive hatred, generated from white supremacist American people and laws, against Black folk, (as well as Brown folk, and Indigenous Americans).
Throughout his life, Dr. King was gathered into a fellowship of preachers, writers, organizers, and artists, lawmakers and activists, who perceived and nourished God’s own truth. That truth that all children of God, dearly beloved, that every body is worthy of safety, dignity, and flourishing. Since this truth was denied to so many people, it required a mighty effort of visibility, peace-making, coalition-building, and perseverance to make this truthful perception materialize. Such perseverance, to try make God’s vision more faithfully and justly realized here on earth.
This perseverance was accomplished, often, through walking. Through journey.
We know many of the names of the moral and spiritual giants who ultimately won the day for a whole raft of legal reforms and protections we now think of under the umbrella of the Civil Rights Act. We know this legal framework would not have been possible without Ralph Abernathy, Stokeley Carmichael and Bayard Rustin, Fannie Lou Hamer and Medgar Evers, John Lewis and James Meredith and Rosa Parks and Billie Holiday and Malcolm X. There is a long, long list of people whose names we know, who forged this movement for the dignity and peace of all people. Yet the list of names of the ordinary people, unnamed, is far, far longer. Unknowably long.
So many names of the people who suffered humiliation and violence on bus rides and at lunch counters are perhaps only known to their own families. We do not have, hallowed, in a museum, all the known names of the people who walked to work or gave each other rides during the Montgomery Bus Boycott. We do not know the names of all the people who walked across the Edmund Pettis Bridge on Bloody Sunday.
We do know that without these disciples of peaces, these foot soldiers for love and dignity, we would likely still be living with the injustices of Jim Crow and its horrors. For even now, this truth of the preciousness of all people, remains contested. The work carries on. It has become out work.
Sometimes the ordinary journeys of every day disciples are set into the extraordinary moments of history, the years of Jesus’s ministry and the foundational days of the early church. Or the extraordinary luminosity of the Civil Rights Movement - its sacrifices, principles, mighty faith, and lasting achievements.
Sometimes though, the ordinary journeys of every day disciples remain quiet and unhallowed. That’s OK too.
The important part is that we heed our longings, the yearnings that bring us to follow after this Lamb of God, the God who satisfies our vision.
Our faithfulness is sacred. It does not matter that one disciple is known as Andrew and the other disciple is unnamed. They both contributed to the faith that sustains us today. It does not matter than some people who contributed to the Civil Rights movement are known only to their families. Their faithfulness to the dignity and peace of all God’s children helped make the world that we now live in.
This insistence on the beloved community, the insistence that everyone is loved by God and infused with inherent dignity, is sometimes lived out professionally, sometimes personally, sometimes in the context of a faith community, and sometimes through actions of active resistance. Sometimes it will be lived out through the positive exercises of our brightest gifts. Sometimes it will be lived through the entertainment of our bitter doubts, through the perseverance of self-sacrifice, even through the sharp discomfort of self-renunciation and repentance.
Therefore we too follow. We follow the way of peace and equity out from the noise of the city center, with its obsessions about power and hierarchy and accumulation. We renounce dog-eat-dog apathy toward the brutalized, the suffering, or the marginalized. Instead we follow Jesus’s way of peace out to the rivers of repentance, where we are changed by the love of God. Immersed in this baptism of love, we journey with other disciples through the ordinary faithfulness of best efforts, confusion, weariness, watching and waiting.
Putting one foot in front of another is the best way to respond to the extraordinary revelation of God’s great love for you, for your neighbor, for all the children of the world.
Therefore, prayerfully, let us receive this astonishing love, let us hold firm to the fact that all God’s children are worthy, are precious. Let us renounce whatever pride, whatever superiority, whatever coldness comes between us and this perception, this reality. We are loved. We are all loved.
