Sunday, January 18, 2015 | 4:00 p.m.

Can Anything Good Come out of . . . ?

John W. Vest
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

John 1:43–51

One time when I was in high school my family took a weekend trip to New Orleans and spent most of our time in the French Quarter. It was my first introduction to what has become one of my favorite cities in the world.

I was young and naïve. Back then I probably had the same habit I have now of making eye contact with people on the street. It made me an easy target for one of the classic New Orleans street scams.

A hustler comes up to you looking like a street performer or offering to shine your shoes. Without wasting much time, he tries to hook you: “I bet I can tell you where you got them shoes.” If you do anything but ignore him and walk away, he’s got you. You think there’s no way he can know where you got your shoes. But he does. “You got your shoes on your feet, and your feet are on Bourbon Street. Now give me $20.”

It’s a scam based on a simple yet clever play on words. But there’s some truth in there as well. Where our feet are, and where they’ve been, do in fact define us. Our journeys shape us. The road we walk becomes the life we live.

I’ve lived in Chicago for fifteen-and-a-half years. This is by far the longest I’ve ever lived in one place. Before Chicago I lived in Houston, Texas, where I went to college, though I spent one full year of that time living in Israel and studying in Jerusalem. Before college my family lived in northwest Florida in a town called Niceville. Before that we lived in Jonesboro, a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia. Before that we lived in Omaha, Nebraska. Before that we lived in a town called Nipawin in the northern part of the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. Before that we lived in a suburb of Atlanta called Morrow. Before that we lived in the state of Washington, where I was born in a town called Wenatchee. Before I was born my parents lived in Omaha and Puerto Rico, and before that they met and were married in Selma, Alabama.

My parents met just eight years after the famous civil rights marches from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, the events portrayed in the powerful new film Selma. If you haven’t seen this movie, please go see it tonight or tomorrow. It is a story that needs to be remembered. It is a story every bit as relevant today as it was fifty years ago.

Of the many memorable scenes of this film, one that has haunted me is the depiction of Bloody Sunday, when the first attempt to march from Selma to Montgomery was brutally halted by a wall of state troopers and a county posse who mercilessly beat down the marchers. Televised video and printed images of this horrific scene changed the course of the movement as people across the country came to a new understanding of the realities faced by African Americans in the South.

In the movie, as the marchers are crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge, a sign is visible. It is a slightly modified version of the actual sign that once stood there at the foot of the bridge: “The Selma National Bank Welcomes You to Selma, the City with 100% Human Interest!” The irony of this billboard is made all the more palpable by a homemade sign held up nearby by a group of angry white onlookers using that horrible, ugly n-word to tell the marchers to go home.

I’ve never been called something so hateful. Even as the son of a father from rural Arkansas and a mother from south Alabama, I’ve never been called “white trash” or “redneck” or “hillbilly.” I’ve never been targeted because of my race or my heritage. I’ve never been made to feel less than fully human because of where I come from, because of where my shoes have been. But I know it happens to others. I’ve seen it. I’ve heard it.

I want to suggest that this was the subtext of Nathanael’s question about Jesus, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Our Christmas stories tell us that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, but his hometown—the town where his parents met and the town where he grew up—was a little town in the region of Galilee called Nazareth. It was an insignificant village in the middle of nowhere. To someone from a city like Cana or Bethsaida or Capernaum or Tiberius or Jerusalem, Nazareth and the people from it were nothing. Nothing good could come from Nazareth. Who does this peasant son of a carpenter think he is?

Yet somehow Philip could see past the prejudice and discrimination. Somehow Philip could see that there was something special about Jesus. When Jesus invites him to follow, he does just that. Even more, he finds his friend Nathanael and invites him to come along too. “We’ve found what we’ve been looking for!” he tells his friend. “This is the one about whom the prophets wrote. This is him, Jesus son of Joseph from Nazareth.”

“Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” I can imagine a sneer on Nathanael’s face, a look of disgust.

But how does Philip respond to his friend’s condescending dismissal? “Come and see,” he says.

“Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”

“Come and see.”

Can anything good come out of Selma? Come and see.

Five years ago, I stood on the very spot where that sign once stood at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge. I was with a group of teenagers and adults from this church and from a few African American churches here in Chicago. We were several days into a pilgrimage that took us to key locations in the history of the civil rights movement. We had already been at the Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. We had visited the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham where four little girls had been killed in a bombing. And in Selma we once again found ourselves standing on holy ground.

That welcome sign is now long gone. In its place are several monuments. Among them is a stone fountain on which are inscribed these words of scripture from the book of Joshua: “When your children shall ask you in time to come, saying, ‘What mean these 12 stones?’ Then you shall tell them how you made it over.”

The inscription recalls the story of Joshua leading the children of Israel over the Jordan River into the promised land. Once across, they erected twelve standing stones, a common practice in the ancient Near East, to commemorate that event and that location. Joshua’s words speak powerfully to the purpose of such memorials: they are there to teach future generations about what happened in the past.

We gathered at that memorial and we told the story of what happened on Bloody Sunday. We remembered. We prayed. And then we walked across the bridge into Selma. One of the African American teens, a young woman, was afraid of the water so she reached out and took my hand. A white preacher and a black girl—residents of Chicago with roots in the South—walked hand in hand across that bridge where forty-five years before people who looked like me beat down people who looked like her.

Can anything good come out of Selma? Come and see.

There has been criticism leveled against the film Selma for its portrayal of President Lyndon B. Johnson as an obstructionist who had little patience for King and stood in the way of progress less than a year after signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The filmmakers have made it clear that this is not a documentary and that creative license was used in the telling of the story. I think the LBJ of the film represents any and all white leaders who were essentially sympathetic to the movement yet failed to act with any sense of urgency.

In the film, when a white sympathizer is killed in Selma after the second attempt to march to Montgomery, King is heartbroken and enraged and he calls up the president. Johnson protests that there is nothing he can do. “I’m just a preacher from Atlanta,” King responds. “You’re the president of the United States.”

Just a preacher from Atlanta. Can anything good come out of Atlanta?

Tomorrow our nation pauses to remember the life and legacy of the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. In some subtle and not-so-subtle ways, the film Selma reminds us of the humanity and the very real failings of King. He wasn’t perfect. He wasn’t a saint. Like all of us, he was flawed. In many respects he was a regular person like any one of us, yet he was thrust into extraordinary circumstances, and he seized the opportunity to make a difference in the world.

“Follow me,” Jesus says. King followed. He followed all that way to the end. And because of that, he changed the world.

Come and see.

Come and see that the world still needs changing. Come and see that the work of Martin Luther King Jr. and the women and men who walked with him is far from over. Come and see that there is still much healing to do. Come and see that there is still much peace to be made. Come and see a people divided and in need of reconciliation.

Nathanael didn’t think much of Nazareth or the people that came from there, so he didn’t think much of Jesus. He lashed out. He tried to write him off and ignore him.

I suspect that, like most bullies and bigots and racists, deep down Nathanael didn’t think much of himself either. His prejudice and condescension masked his own insecurity, his own sense of inadequacy.

He knew full well what was at stake in his world. He knew that his people longed for freedom and wholeness. He knew that his people desired a deeper sense of God’s presence and love in the world and in their lives. And in the face of this, he probably felt powerless and helpless. What could he do? What could this nobody from Nazareth do? Can anything good come out of Nazareth? Can anything good come out of me?

“Come and see,” says his friend. “Come and see.”

He saw something in Jesus, and it sparked something in him. Not only did he see Jesus in a new light, but I bet he started to think of himself differently as well. Not only could something good come from Nazareth—something good could come from him.

Friends, our world is hurting. You may be hurting too. We’re all longing for freedom and wholeness. Perhaps you desire a deeper sense of God’s presence and love in your life.

Yet perhaps you feel powerless and helpless too. Perhaps you don’t believe you have it in you to change, to grow. Perhaps you are paralyzed by fear. Perhaps you worry that nothing can be done in the world, that our problems are too great, that there is nothing we can do. Perhaps you wonder if anything good can come from this world. Perhaps you wonder if anything good can come from you. Perhaps you wonder if anything good can come from God.

Come and see, friends. Come and see.

Amen.