Remain

“What are you looking for?”

Maybe it’s a question you have asked yourself from time to time. You are searching for something but then halfway through the search you forget what it is you are even looking for.

Or you are driving and your GPS takes you to the wrong place and you stop for help and get the question “what are you looking for?”

I would be rich if I had a quarter for every time the girls asked me where something is or to help them find it, as if I my brain is a tracking device for each and every item within the house.

But what if we are looking for hope? That can seem even harder to pin down, like a thread that keeps slipping through our fingers or a glimpse of something but not the full picture. We say we will know it when we see it, that there will be signs. We long for it. But how do we really know?

Last Sunday, we celebrated the baptism of Jesus as viewed from the lens of Matthew’s gospel. By that account, John instantly recognized Jesus and they had a whole sidebar conversation before John baptized him. By that account, John knew what he was looking for.

But in John’s gospel it’s a different story. We don’t get John the baptizer. We get John the witness. John sees Jesus get baptized and witnesses the Spirit descend on Jesus. He had been on the lookout , but his only clue was “He on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.” Well that seems clear as mud. So John was looking for someone, but who? But then he witnesses it. The Spirit descends on Jesus and from then on whenever he sees Jesus he calls him “Lamb of God.”

What does John mean by lamb of God? This imagery and language was loaded with historical importance. Did he mean the suffering servant from Isaiah or the paschal lamb of the Exodus story where the lamb represents liberation and protection. Or did he mean the lamb offered up for temple sacrifice as an offering for sin?

What kind of lamb was he looking for? What kind of lamb were the disciples looking for?

Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!

But what does that mean? In John’s gospel, sin isn’t just teaching us about the right moral code. That was already in place. Nor is it about each of our own specific sins as it is a singular term. Taking away the sin of the world in John’s gospel is about a radical reorientation of our relationship with God through God removing the disoder of the world and setting it right again. As Robb McCoy says, “the Lamb of God removed anything which would get in the way of our full and open relationship with God.” Derek Penwell says “Because what John announces here isn’t just another sacrifice to add to the temple’s endless cycle of extraction. It’s the end of sacrificial logic itself.

John’s announcement challenges every system built on someone else’s suffering. If Jesus is the final lamb, then the economy of sacrifice is obsolete. God’s realm operates on abundance, not extraction. On gift, not payment. On liberation, not transaction.

This is epiphanous good news , the light and hope in a world addicted to making others pay.”

When John pointed. When he witnessed, the disciples paid attention. They turned their attention to Jesus. It says they began to follow them. How about you? Is your life one that is pointing to Jesus, bearing witness and saying Behold the Lamb of God? But then we get that question “what are you looking for?” They respond this time not with a what but a where, asking “where are you staying?” Jesus then extends an invitation “Come and see.” And so they follow Jesus to where he is staying and there they remain.

What does it mean to really remain with someone?

The word for remain is used four times within this passage in verses 32,33,38, and 39. First it references the Spirit remaining on Jesus and then the disciples remaining with Jesus. To remain is to abide or stay or stick with, but does it mean you are stationary? Can you remain in Christ and be on the move? When considering the word remain, Rev. Derek Penwell says “In an imperial world marked by instability, displacement, and the ever-present threat of state violence, remaining becomes its own kind of resistance: a commitment to abide with Jesus and with one another, forming an alternative community that empire cannot easily scatter.”

We know that the disciples and Jesus don’t just remain in one place. Jesus doesn’t just get baptized and stay there forever. He is always on the move as are his followers. So maybe being grounded in Christ is more than staying put. Maybe remaining, staying, and sticking with Christ this year is less about our location and more about who we are traveling with. Maybe remaining with Jesus is simply going to the places where Jesus would go, remaining with the people Jesus would be with. Who does Jesus want you to come and see? Where does Jesus want you to go with him? Are you willing to go where Jesus is and remain? What if it is somewhere you’d rather not go? What if it is someone you really don’t care to interact with? Maybe we need to follow Jesus, see where he is rooted, and remain there.

So what are you looking for? Who are you choosing to remain with? How are you witnessing to the hope that is in Christ? Tomorrow is Martin Luther King Jr. Day. A day in which we remember a man who chose to remain with, to walk with, to stand and speak up for so many others during the Civil Rights Era. He remained, but he was on the move. Similarly, James Baldwin was very vocal in how he testified on numerous accounts on behalf of others during Civil Rights, remaining in his own right to bear witness. James said ““if one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policeman, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected- those, precisely, who need the law’s protection most!- and listens to their testimony…ask the wretched how they fare in the halls of justice, and then you will know, not whether or not the country is just, but whether or not it has any love of justice, or any concept of it.”

How do we really remain?

Amy Allen says “Face-to-face with the disorder of a world they want so deeply to be neat and ordered, with a Messiah who doesn’t act at all as a Messiah should act, a teacher who has vowed his allegiance to another, and competing claims of what is “right” and “moral” all around, even within their own religious point of view, these disciples don’t give up.” The disciples remained with Jesus even they didn’t fully get him or have all the answers or knew how things would work out. They trust in what John had seen and testified to and turn and followed.

Think about the ones who have remained with you. No matter what, they’ve stuck it out with you. Or maybe there is someone you have remained with. All the way to the end. YMaybe you even had a choice. Not to engage. Not to care. To walk away or unfriend or ignore or pass the burden to someone else. But you stayed. You saw. And you bore witness to something new when you…remained. In the act of remaining, you were transformed.

As Kate Bowler shares in her Blessing for the Ones Who Stay:

Blessed are you who stay. Who sit beside pain that cannot be fixed. Who choose presence over platitudes, and silence over shallow comfort.

Blessed are you who ask hard questions without rushing toward answers. Who bear witness to the kind of grief that rearranges the world.

You who try. Try to imagine. Try to listen. Try to love in the absence of tidy outcomes.

May your staying be its own kind of balm. Because it says: your pain matters. You matter.

And may you feel, even now, that this, too, is holy. To stay. To try.

To say yes to life in all of its complexity. And to love each other all the way through.