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The show Leverage centers around a group of 5 people, 4 former criminals and 1 former insurance agent, who come together to help people who have been victimized by “the rich and powerful” who get away with their crimes.
In one of the episodes, Nate, the Mastermind of the crew and former insurance agent, struggles to find anything outside the team. Hardison, the group’s Hacker, decides to reconnect Nate with Hurley, a former client whose life the teams helped turn around.
Unfortunately Hurley has, inadvertently, gotten himself into some trouble again. He finds himself chased by the Irish mob, and he and Nate find shelter in a church. One of the mobsters, Liam, wants to go after them, but the other, Connor, refuses because the building is a church. When Liam says they might be down in the basement, Connor chastises him for suggesting that the church is holy, the basement not so much, and then the ground the whole church is built on goes back to holy. Liam then suggests that groups like the Boy Scouts, who aren’t faith-based, meet in the basement. Connor then quotes the Boy Scouts Law, which ends with a statement of reverence before reiterating that he’s not chasing down Nate and Hurley in a church. Liam stops and wonders for a bit and then asks Connor how he knows so much about Boy Scouts Law. Connor merely replies with “We all had dreams once.”
Even Connor, a fallen gangster, recognizes the holiness of a church building. While he is willing to hurt, even to kill Nate and Hurley, he is unwilling to profane something sacred.
This sense of holiness doesn’t derive from the building of the church itself. It comes from what the building represents: the dwelling place of God.
As Raymond Brown reminds us in his commentary on John, our desire as humans is “to stay” or to “dwell, abide” with God. Brown shows this as the focus of our Gospel passage today and what Andrew and his companion are seeking from Jesus.
Andrew and his companion were disciples of John the Baptist, who in turn directs them to Jesus after the events of our Lord’s Baptism that we celebrated last week. John the Baptist points to Jesus as the one he has been called to bring others too: the Lamb of God, the Son of God.
Yet Andrew and his fellow disciple don’t ask Jesus anything. They follow Him at first. It is Jesus who reaches out and invites them with His question “What are you looking for?”, just like God does with us. It is then that they ask Jesus where He is stay. Jesus’ response is also inviting: “Come and see.”
Like Andrew and his companion, we too are seeking after God. We want to know where God dwells so that we can go there and so that we can be there with Him.
We see this desire throughout Scripture and in all of our readings today. As we begin our Post-Epiphany journey through the start of Paul’s 1st Epistle to the Corinthians, we see that Paul has been helping the Corinthians prepare for the day that they will be in our Lord Jesus Christ’s presence. They desire to be present with God and Paul wants to prepare them to do so.
Our Psalm today, a psalm of David, is bookended with waiting for the Lord and then asking God to “not withhold your compassion from me.” In the midst of David describing what God has done for him and all that worshiping the Lord entails, his chief desire is that he might be closer to God.
Just as Jesus is the first to make the move to John’s disciples in their desire to seek Him out, so too does the Lord make the first move with Israel. In our reading from Isaiah, it is God who cries out to Jacob, the Patriarch in the Tanakh, the Old Testament, who eventually takes the name Israel, to bring Jacob back to the Lord so that ultimately “Israel might be gathered back to” God. This all is said in the context of Israel’s exile from their homeland. This whole passage is spoken out of God’s great desire to come closer to Israel once again.
We see this ground, this place we worship in, as holy because it represents where God dwells. It represents the place we want to be, the place where we can be present with the Lord. Yet God seeks us too. God is the one to reach out to us first, when we are still too nervous and shy to even ask the question we want. We desire to be present with God, and God desires to dwell with us as well.
Don’t be shy or hesitant to reach out to God, because God reached out to you first. Don’t let yourself be found waiting outside the door feeling unworthy to come in. God has done the work of making us whole, for in truth we could not make ourselves worthy on our own. Just as much as you desire to be with God, God desires to be with you even more. Let it happen. Allow yourself to follow God to wherever it is our Lord leads. Answer God’s call to “come and see.”