“Come and See”
Psalm 40; John 1:29-42

 A climber fell off a cliff. As he tumbled down into a huge canyon, he grabbed hold of a branch of a small tree. "Help!" he cried as he hung over the chasm. "Is there anyone up there?" A deep majestic voice from the sky echoed through the canyon. "I will help you, my son. But first you must have faith and trust me." "All right, all right, I trust you," answered the man. "Just get me out of here." The voice replied, "Let go of the branch." There was a long reflective pause, and then the man shouted again, "Is there anyone else up there?"

A year ago Pastor Judy and I were hanging from that branch, and so when this week's Psalm came up - Psalm 40, which you haven't heard yet - it caught my attention. A year ago last Tuesday, we flew out of Tanzania for the last time. And it was an uncertain feeling, because at that point we were heading into the unknown; back to a land of uncertainty; back to America. With no call and no clear picture of what we would be doing once we got here. A month or so earlier, we had written our letters of resignation from Makumira University College, sensing that now was the time to close that chapter of our ministry. But writing is one thing; actually carrying the letters over to the office and turning them in was like … letting go of the branch. With the letters inserted into the provost's mail slot, there was that moment of hesitation when God had to say, "Let go of the envelope."

It was an uncertain moment. A moment of swallowing and saying, "Well, OK, Lord." And I'm not telling you anything most of you don't know or haven't at one time or another gone through. Many of you have had such trying, testing moments over the past year. Some of you are going through them right now; and such times are always - always - very stressful. Mentally stressful and often spiritually stressful. Is there anyone else up there?

That's why the Psalm jumped out at me when I read it a couple of weeks ago as I was considering what to preach this weekend. Our worship pattern usually skips the reading of the psalm [on communion Sundays], so I continued to look at the other texts. Yet I kept coming back to the psalm. Psalm 40. Let me share the opening verses with you.

I waited patiently for the LORD; he turned to me and heard my cry. He lifted me out of the slimy pit, out of the mud and mire; he set my feet on a rock and gave me a firm place to stand. He put a new song in my mouth, a hymn of praise to our God. Many will see and fear and put their trust in the LORD.

That's how the psalm begins. Have you had that kind of experience? I know I have. Life just seems to be closing in on you. It may be an unexpected medical report; a broken relationship; a buyout of your company in which your job suddenly becomes threatened with redundancy. Suddenly you have that feeling where the blood seems to drain from your face and the quicksand seems to suck at your feet. The slimy pit; the mud and mire; here's a Psalm perhaps written by David some 3,000 years ago, and we find ourselves connecting. David - and those around him - went through the same kinds of things then that we go through today. And God reached down and lifted them up.

What was David's problem? We don't know. Did God make it go away? We don't know that, either. Sometimes it's not that the problem goes away, but rather that God just lifts us up and we are able to rise above the moment as God plants our feet on the rock.

And how does God do that? At this point, I know I could step down and turn the sermon over to any one of a number of you who have gone through such times and who could tell us very clearly how God steadied you at some point when you were sinking into the mire and he planted your feet firmly on rock. And at that moment you knew, regardless of how the details were to work out, that you were going to be OK. Because God showed you at that moment that your life was in his hands and those hands don't drop things. That's the rock we're talking about.

And then there's our Gospel lesson. This past week I found myself sort of backing into the Gospel lesson from the Psalm - a rather unusual route for a sermon, but sermons often take rather unusual routes in the preparing. Planting our feet on the rock. First there's the rock, and then there's the planting. And our Gospel lesson talks about both.

In our Gospel lesson, John the Baptist sees Jesus coming and tells those around him, "Behold, the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world." Well, what in the world did that mean? Most of us adults don't feel real complimented if someone calls us a lamb. And "sheep" and "goat" aren't any better.

But when John says that Jesus is the "lamb of God," we're just expected to know what this is all about - just as the people who came out from Jerusalem seemed to know. They came out confessing their sins. That's one clue. They had this gut feeling that their feet were in unstable places - Psalm 40's "slimy pit" and its "mud and mire" come to mind. Another clue: John was not in Jerusalem, but out in the wilderness. And then he doesn't call Jesus a "lamb" because he was meek and mild - far from it. He says he's a lamb "who takes away the sin of the world." Passover lamb? Perhaps, though they didn't take away sin. Rather, they reminded of what God did in the Exodus.

Anybody know what a "scapegoat" is? Sure, a scapegoat is someone we blame when things go wrong. Something goes wrong at school or at work, and somebody gets blamed. Maybe they didn't actually do anything wrong, but they gets blamed and then everyone else is off the hook. That's a scapegoat. Did you know that comes from Leviticus chapter 16? Third book of the Bible. The day of atonement; Leviticus 16. The priest puts his hands on the head of a goat, called a scapegoat, transferring the sins of all of the people to the goat, and then the goat is not sacrificed but rather sent off out into the wilderness, never to return.

I like that picture. Think of that, my friends. All those things you wish you'd never done, all those words you wish you'd never said - stuff them into a couple of garbage bags and throw those bags across the back of a scapegoat who takes them all away forever. John, already out in the wilderness just to make it more clear, points to Jesus and says, "Behold, the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world." And that's who Jesus is, my friends. That's what the cross is all about. When everything is going wrong - and we sense that perhaps it's because of us - when the psalmist talking about the slimy pit and the mud and mire no longer seems poetic but seems to describe our life about the way it is, then God sets our feet on the rock and that rock is Jesus whom John calls the lamb of God. Because he knew the people would know what that meant.

And they did. As I mentioned, first there's the rock, and then there's the planting of our feet. John had disciples before Jesus had disciples. But John knew it was not all about John, and so he pointed to Jesus. Two of his disciples then turned and started to follow Jesus. "Where do you live?" they asked. "Come and see," Jesus replied. One of those disciples, who now became Jesus' disciples, was a man named Andrew. We don't know a lot about Andrew, but Andrew did one very important thing. He went and found his brother, and his brother was Peter. Whatever else Andrew did in life, nothing was going to beat this. Andrew brought Peter. Now Peter was in the mix.

And that's how it happens. When you experience your life getting back on track, because of the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, because of the rock, you, too, are then given the responsibility and the privilege of saying to others, "Come and see." That's how feet get planted on the rock. First there's the rock, and then there's the planting. And we're part of that. "Come and see."

And so it went. We stopped reading at verse 42 this morning, but in the very next verse Jesus finds Philip and Philip goes to find Nathaniel. And what does he say to Nathaniel? "Come and see." Come and see. That's how God does it. That's how he gets muddy feet planted on solid rock. God uses you and he uses me. Sometimes we need to receive hope and healing; other times we need to share it.

The other day, we received an e-mail from a friend of ours; I'll call her Sue. Subject line: "Normal is a setting on your dryer." Sue and her husband Bill were in Tanzania with us for a time and have a very young daughter. Sue is now working toward her PhD in OT studies. But they'd just came back from another trip to the specialists to deal with a recurrence of Bill's brain cancer. What were the reports? What are the statistics? How does Bill fit into the range of normal for someone in his situation. Well, "normal" is one of those words that just stops applying in situations like this. Normal, Sue writes, is a setting on your dryer.

But Sue and Bill are convinced, as are we, that in spite of the slimy pit there is a rock under them. They're convinced that John's pointing to Jesus as the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world is a big deal, an important thing, a thing that can be trusted. It shows us God's intentions toward you and toward me, that it's God's hands which ultimately grasp us and lift us up during times of crisis. Sue wrote something else: Worry, she says, is prayer to the wrong god. I like that. Worry is prayer to the wrong god.

We've gone through times like this with other friends in recent years, and I'm sure many of you have, too. First there's the rock, and then there's the planting of the feet. We need to know the rock in order that God might plant our feet and then use us to help other feet get planted. Or remain planted. That's what evangelism is all about my friends. Not pestering and haranguing people but helping them find the rock. And then the day may come when they help you keep your feet planted; days when even we who know Jesus, the scapegoat who takes away our sin - when even we need some reinforcing, some steadying of our own slippery, muddy feet upon that rock.

That, too, I have seen and experienced. It was another time another place. A hospital bed, almost 40 years ago. A young girl in the Midwest, I'll call her Mary, had become pregnant and her parents, perhaps meaning well, perhaps not, had sent her out west to go to the Lutheran Bible Institute. And to deal with her "problem." Alone, at 18 years of age. We, her fellow students, knew what she was dealing with, and did our best to support her. The day came when she went to the hospital to await the birth. She was not alone now, because students were visiting her, and it was on one of those visits that we found her deeply despondent, going again and again through Psalm 38:

O LORD, do not rebuke me in your anger or discipline me in your wrath. For your arrows have pierced me, and your hand has come down upon me. Because of your wrath there is no health in my body; my bones have no soundness because of my sin. My guilt has overwhelmed me like a burden too heavy to bear. My wounds fester and are loathsome because of my sinful folly.... My friends and companions avoid me because of my wounds; my neighbors stay far away.... O LORD, do not forsake me; be not far from me, O my God.

That's Psalm 38, and that was the day I first came to know Psalm 40, the Psalm we have before us this morning. Because at that point, a good friend named Steve, who was then far better equipped than I, put his hand over the page and said, "Mary, I think you have spent long enough in Psalm 38. Turn the page. Your Psalm is Psalm 40." And one of the most uplifting moments I have ever known in life came as we heard Mary begin to read, with a strength and conviction that increased with every word:

I waited patiently for the LORD; he turned to me and heard my cry. He lifted me out of the slimy pit, out of the mud and mire; he set my feet on a rock and gave me a firm place to stand. He put a new song in my mouth.

The solid rock. The planting of feet. A new song. Come and see. God knows where you are, my friend, and what your needs are at this very moment. Know that Jesus is, indeed, the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. And when your feet are solidly planted on that rock, then God would have you turn to others and call them to "Come and see." Amen.