John the Baptizer, John the Baptist, did not baptize Jesus. Not according to the Gospel of John at least. Oh, everything else about the story is pretty much the same. John and Jesus meet. A few verses before today’s gospel, John asserts Jesus’ superiority to him. We heard John say that he saw the Holy Spirit come like a dove and remain on Jesus; he heard a voice from heaven identifying Jesus to him. So, everything is there except what we most expect to see—the baptism.

There are important reasons for this. As I used to ask my students when we talked about the story of Jesus’ baptism in the gospels, “Why is Jesus’ baptism by John such a problem for the gospel writers?” There are at least two reasons for this. First, according to the gospels, John’s baptism was a baptism for the forgiveness of sins and Christian theology asserts that Jesus didn’t commit any. Second, who is more powerful in the ritual of baptism, the baptizer or the baptizee? Well, if the latter is a squirming two-year old, perhaps she is, but otherwise, and ecclesiastically, of course, it’s the one doing the baptizing.

John’s very different version of the encounter of Jesus and John the Baptist is intended to reveal to the reader something quite different and quite new. John, the gospel writer, uses the story of the encounter of Jesus and John the Baptizer to tell us something important about who Jesus is. The season of Epiphany is somewhat like a prism. Each Sunday we see a different facet of Christ revealed to us; each week, the light of Christ is reflected back to us in slightly different ways. In today’s gospel, John sees clearly who Jesus is, identifying him as “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” He sees the Holy Spirit like a dove. He seems to know that Jesus is the Son of God, and even seems to point that out to two his disciples.

I would like to draw your attention to this interchange between Jesus and these two disciples of John the Baptist. Again, the gospel writer takes what on the surface is a very simple story of Jesus calling the disciples and reshapes it for his own purposes, to tell us something about who Jesus is, and how we ought to respond to him. Unlike the story of the disciples’ call in the Synoptics where Jesus initiates the relationship, here there is a completely different dynamic. John the Baptist draws his disciples’ attention to Jesus, by pointing him out and saying, “Here is the Lamb of God.” Then they leave John and follow Jesus. Jesus asks them, “What are you looking for?” And they respond oddly, by asking “Where are you staying?” To that question, Jesus answers, “Come and see.”

“Where are you staying?” What kind of question is that? What might the disciples learn about Jesus by staying with him for the day? To understand what’s going on we need to put this question, and the event itself, in the context of John’s gospel. Staying… to use the traditional language of the Authorized Version, to abide… is one of those themes that is repeated throughout the gospel. In fact, we heard the theme sounded already in John’s testimony about Jesus. When he reports that he saw the Holy Spirit come down like a dove, he says that “it remained on him.” In today’s gospel the words is used at least four times in quick succession. Much later in the gospel, in the lengthy farewell discourse that John puts in Jesus’ mouth at the Last Supper, he says, “Abide in me as I abide in you.”

The call of the disciples in John may be unlike the call of the disciples in the other gospels. It may be strange and puzzling. In the reading from Isaiah, we are presented with another story of a call, one that is much more in keeping with our assumptions about call: “The Lord called me before I was born, while I was in my mother’s womb he named me.” ‘

We tend to think of call as something dramatic—something like the story Luke tells about Paul on the road to Damascus. Sometimes it is of course, some times we know like a bolt from the blue what is going on. But sometimes, often, call is something quite different, something subtle that emerges over a long time, something that becomes clear only as we live and grow and mature.

I know from my own call that the process can be long and frustrating. We want clarity in our lives but often, things are “clear as mud” as one of my teachers used to say. But call to ordination is not the only call. All of us, lay people as well as clergy, are called by God. We are called to be the people God means us to be, we are called into deeper relationship with Jesus Christ. We are also called as a community, to be God’s people in this place.

In today’s gospel, we hear a very different understanding of call than the certainty of the bolt of lightning. There is a powerful dynamic that John describes. First, John the Baptist identifies Jesus to the disciples—the Lamb of God. Then, for whatever reason, they leave John and follow Jesus. I’ve always wondered what John the Baptist’s reaction was to that? He points somebody out to two of his followers, and immediately they go off and leave him. Then Jesus notices them, and asks, not “what do you want?” but “what are you looking for?” They address him as Rabbi, teacher, a title of honor and authority, and tell him that they want to hang out with him for the day.

After that, Andrew goes to his brother Simon, and tells him that they’ve found the Messiah. By abiding with him, by staying with Jesus for the day, let’s use our language, by hanging out with him, they find out who he is. What do they learn? How do they learn it? The gospel doesn’t tell us. There’s not a hint of what Jesus might have done or said that day. And to ask those questions is to miss the gospel’s point. What’s most important about Jesus is not what he said or did, it is who he is and was. That we can only learn by hanging out with him.

When’s the last time you did something like that? Nothing more than be with a friend, a relative, a spouse or partner for the day, with no agenda, with nothing planned? Can you remember doing it? It’s something I used to do years ago, when I was in my twenties with college friends or friends from grad school—pretty much just wasting time, perhaps drinking a few beers and listening to music, telling stories, you know what I’m talking about, being with someone. Occasionally Corrie and I do something of the same, sit around the house all afternoon or evening, listening to music, talking about things, but most of the time, she or I or both of us have tasks that we need to be taking care of and that take us away from being fully present to each other.

Now I don’t know what Jesus did with those disciples that day, but my guess is that they pretty much just hung out together, and in doing so, they began to experience and know who Jesus was. They learned so much in fact that at the end of the day, Andrew tells his brother that they had found the Messiah.

Yesterday, we had our vestry retreat. For six or seven hours, we met together, ate, talked about all manner of things related to Grace Church, and we worshiped together. We got some work done. We made some plans for the coming year, discussed weighty matters like finances and stewardship. But we also got to know each other a lot better, developed relationships with one another and as a group.

To build those relationships is one of the primary goals of any such day-long experience. It’s important in the life of a vestry. It’s also of crucial importance in the life of a congregation. Our lives today are fragmentary, filled with random encounters with people we’ve never met before, with people whose names we don’t even know. I was reading something this week by a commentator who observed that as he got to know the names of the people who worked in the stores he shopped, he began to enter into their lives, as they did in his. To be the body of Christ means creating the kind of community in which we abide with one another, we develop deeper relationships across generations and across the divide of class and race.

Jesus bids us, “Come and see.” That is an offer to enter into ever-deepening relationships with one another. It is also an offer to enter into an ever-deepening relationship with Christ,  a relationship that depends not on whether, or how much we believe. It depends, rather, on our being willing to abide with him, to stay a while and learn who he is. It is an offer not of easy answers, but an offer of a journey into the heart of our faith, into the heart of ourselves where we will encounter Christ, already abiding in us.