2nd Sunday after the Epiphany
Texts: John 1:29-42;
Isa 49:1-7; 1 Cor 1:1-9
YouTube: https://youtu.be/L0HghKJ5Nbc
Sermon Take-Home Notes
PREVIEWING GOD’S SALVATION: THE LAMB OF GOD WHO TAKES AWAY
THE SIN OF THE WORLD . . . AND WHOSE LOVE COMES TO ABIDE IN US
This sermon will feature one of my favorite all-time movies. But we need to do some work first. In our Call to Worship, we said that we are called to do work. It’s important work involving salvation itself and how we still are bungling it to this day. So I need to set it up with a primer on God’s salvation through Jesus. Behind our 14-verse Gospel Reading are the two main aspects of that salvation, which we can identify if we know the anthropology, if we understand the essence of what it means to be human which Jesus came to reveal to us. The first part: John the Baptist boldly proclaims that Jesus is the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Not sins plural. Sin in the singular. One big, ugly sin. You can see how that’s really important, right? If we have a Gospel anthropology, then we might be able to identify what that sin is. And the second part of a Gospel anthropology is in the second half of today’s Gospel: Jesus invites us to ‘Come and see’ where he is abiding.1 That’s really big, too, if we have a proper anthropology as revealed from by Jesus.
So let’s unpack this a bit, with the anthropology I’ve shared with you the last couple years.2 It’s laid out in your Sermon Notes in compact form. Here, I’d like to tell it more in story-form about our species, Home sapiens, albeit if it’s from 30,000 foot perspective. The first thing we need to understand is the number one problem of our species — we might call it, the sin of the world. Namely, violence. Humanity’s number one problem is violence. That’s why Jesus must die at the hands of violent human beings on the cross in order to save us. He didn’t just die of old age after a long teaching career. He died at the hands of violent human beings.
But it’s a problem that goes way back to our origin as a species. Anthropologists know that our species, called Homo sapiens, had many earlier, related humanoid species that failed to survive. There’s Homo erectus and Neanderthal and several more. What happened to them? Why did they fail to survive? We don’t know for sure, but I’ve come to believe that the best theory is that interspecies violence caused them to implode and violently die out. They kept killing each other.3 One thing we are learning is that there’s a problem with our bigger brain and its capacity to learn not by instinct but by imitation. Most everything we learn is by imitation, and most of that is very good. Learning by imitation gives us an advantage over other species. But there’s also one very big drawback: when we learn what to desire by imitation, we sooner or later find ourselves reaching for the same objects of desire. Which makes us rivals. And as rivalry escalates into conflict, the violence itself is imitated, spiraling into blood feuds of revenge. Can you see why the other humanoid species might have died out from a terrible violence of everyone pitted against everyone?
The question becomes, “Why did we survive? Why did Homo sapiens survive?” That’s where today’s Gospel gives us a glimpse of God’s answer to us revealed in Jesus. It is signaled by saying the lamb of God takes away the sin of the world. Lamb of God. Clearly a reference to ritual blood sacrifice. That’s what saved our ancient Homo sapiens ancestors! The everyone-against-everyone violence that we humanoids are prone to suffer is turned into an everyone-against-one scapegoating violence. Over and over again, it brought such a mysterious peace, tentative as it was, that our ancestors became religious. Religion was born by ritualizing the scapegoating violence into blood sacrifice. And with it was the birth of the culture of Homo sapiens, which so far has saved us from the fate of the other earlier humanoid species. We survived because ritual sacrifice turned the mimetic violence caused by the way we desire into a tentative way to keep peace. For millennia this has been the tried and true way to keep a tentative peace. We use scapegoating violence against some designated group in order to keep peace in our group.
We don’t even need the same kind of ritual violence any longer. We don’t go to temples and kill things on altars. Since we’ve graduated to larger civilizations, into nations and empires, we’ve graduated into using what we might call nationalistic violence, where our group experiences some measure of peace by being over against other groups. The ritual sacrifice morphed into wars, endless wars. This is the nationalistic violence that we are experiencing right now — even though the lamb of God came to take it away from us. Yes, the lamb of God did come to take away the sin of nationalistic violence from us. But two thousand years later, when the pressure’s on, human beings still regularly choose nationalistic violence as our way to peace. It’s what we’re seeing so clearly right now with Donald Trump as our leader, but he’s just the symptom. We all have accepted some measure of it for centuries.
You may have noticed that I said scapegoating violence has saved our species so far. Since nationalistic violence clearly has violence at its center, it will never lead to lasting peace. Human history should have taught us that by now. Jesus should have taught us by now, but since this round of nationalistic violence goes by the name of “Christian,” something has clearly gone off the rails with Christian messaging over the centuries. That’s why I’m so insistent that we need to do the work of learning what went wrong, why “Christian Nationalism” has been such a colossal betrayal of the sin for which Jesus gave his life to reveal to us. We need to understand the history of Christendom — the many, many centuries of the church allied with the nationalistic violence of nations and empires.
But there’s another reason why God’s project of salvation is taking so long since Jesus launched it two thousand years ago. So far this morning, we’ve identified two basic forms of human violence. There’s mimetic violence, the violence which descends from the rivalries created by our imitative desiring, the kind of violence that likely doomed our earlier humanoid ancestors. But, second, there’s the kind of violence that contains the mimetic violence, a scapegoating violence at the center of our cultures and nations. It has given us short-lasting periods of peace, but will never be the ultimate, long-term answer. This nationalistic violence is the sin of the world which the lamb of God gave his life for, in order to give us the lasting way to peace.
But do you see the other problem? What about the other category of violence, the mimetic violence? What did Jesus do to save us from the that? Well, that’s the second part of today’s Gospel. Jesus invites us to ‘come and see’ where he’s abiding. His first disciples are innocently asking where Jesus is currently “staying.”4 But Jesus’ response of “Come and see” points to much more than that. It ultimately means to abide not in a human-made structure but to abide in God’s love. That’s the answer to human desiring which abides in rivalry with others. Imitate someone else! Imitate God’s loving desire. Learn to abide in God’s loving desire just like Jesus did.
I direct you now to look at today’s Sermon Notes — at the passage from John 15. I won’t read the whole thing now, but look at the bolded word abide. Eleven times in the first seven verses. And then notice the italicized word love. Eight times in the last five verses. The transition from abide to love happens in verse 9: “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love.” In short, the ultimate salvation from human violence is for us to learn, guided and empowered by the Holy Spirit, to abide in God’s love. We know it’s possible, because Jesus did it. And he was fully human. That’s what we proclaim. We can imitate the loving desire of Jesus. We can abide in his love. “Come and see!” he says to us.
This morning I want to end with one of my favorite movies, which I see as a story of rather a scoundrel imitating a loving person so that he comes to abide in that love. The movie, you may find surprising, is the comedy Groundhog Day. Bill Murray plays Phil Connor, who is a Pittsburgh TV weatherman covering the Groundhog Day festivities in nearby Punxsutawny, PA. Mysteriously, he becomes trapped reliving this Groundhog Day hundreds and hundreds of times in a row, and he’s the only one aware of the seemingly endless repetition. Everyone else goes about their day the same way, except in reaction to the x-factor Phil. Poor Phil understandably gets despondent at one point, even resorting to taking his own life. Except he still wakes up at six o’clock each morning to relive Groundhog Day.
Things get better when he finally sets a goal. He really likes the TV news producer who made the trip with him, Rita, played by Andie McDowell. Phil has an advantage in trying to get Rita to like him because he can remember things she likes through all the repeating loops — while she is experiencing him afresh each time, not wise to his plan. Phil gets really close to having Rita kiss him, but alas, he always falls short. He, after all, is not a very kind person, as demonstrated by his manipulative efforts to woo her. And Rita is a very kind and loving person, who ends up seeing through all of Phil’s attempts to manipulate her, despite his advantage of memory in the previous loops.
Finally, Phil changes his goal once again. Instead of trying to manipulate Rita into loving him, he turns to simply imitating Rita. He strive with each reliving of that Groundhog Day to earnestly be kind and loving and caring to everyone he meets — like Rita. He seeks out people who need his help — with perfect timing, of course, since he can learn by almost endless trial and error. He learns, for example, exactly when and where to position himself to catch a young boy falling out of a tree. So at long last, after countless imitations of Rita’s loving desire towards others, Phil is a changed person. He has abided in her love through his relationship with everyone else in town. Rita can recognize him as the changed person he is and begin to let herself be attracted to him. They fall asleep talking in bed together, and Phil finally wakes up to a new day. “Today is tomorrow,” he says. “It finally happened.”
Groundhog Day, February 2nd, is two weeks from tomorrow. It’s a good time of the year to take in this movie, especially if you’ve never seen it before. I recommend it as a tale of what it means to abide in love by imitating a loving person. Even a scoundrel can do it and be changed, if you put in the work. It’s much more difficult to fall into rivalry and conflict and violence if we’re imitating a truly loving person. For Christians, that’s pre-eminently Jesus, of course, but there are many loving disciples we know in our lives. That’s one of the things I love about you all here at Bethania. I find you to be practiced imitators of Jesus’s loving desires and actions.
I need to end with a caution, however. The thing about Jesus was his ability to model loving our neighbors in ways that stretched boundaries — ultimately, beyond all boundaries into loving every human being. Raised in our scapegoating, nationalistic cultures, we sometimes manage being able to love our immediate neighbors, the ones most like us, just fine. But through most of history that love of our closest neighbors has been propped up by hatred against others we deem to be the enemy. When Jesus teaches us to love our enemies, he is teaching us God’s perfect love for the whole creation, which bursts beyond all boundaries. To catch that kind of loving desire, we have to abide in Jesus’ love. That’s what we’re here for. We have to keep coming and seeing — and practicing — where and how Jesus abides in love. Only then to find that Jesus abides in us. Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, January 18, 2026
YouTube: https://youtu.be/L0HghKJ5Nbc
Sermon Take-Home Notes
Notes
1. Most translations use words like “remaining” or “staying” in this passage to translate the Greek verb menō, one of John the Evangelists favorite words, so I read the five instances in this passage as “abide,” in anticipation of the onslaught of using this word in John 15, where it usually is translated as “abide.” That way the five uses of menō in chapter 1 more clearly connect with the eleven uses in John 15. In all, John uses the verb 40 times in the Gospel and 29 times in the letters, as well as two uses of the related noun monē in John 14. By comparison, Luke uses the verb 7 times, Matthew 3, and Mark 2. Do you see why I say this is an important word for John?! For a complete listing, see my webpage “Abide” in John.
2. I don’t often mention the anthropology of René Girard in sermons but have on occasion. More to the point were some adult education sessions using The Ideas of René Girard: An Anthropology of Violence and Religion, interviews with Girard edited, with elaborations, by David Cayley (2019).
3. A second likely step in this hypothesis of the extinction of other hominin species is that Homo sapiens ‘helped’ to kill off any further proto-human species that lingered as Homo sapiens evolved. I’m not sure Girard himself ever speculated on all the aspects of what I’m proposing here, but many of the elements are there in his theory. From Girard himself on the evolutionary process of hominization, see especially Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, “Book 1: Fundamental Anthropology”; and Evolution and Conversion. For more from others on the impact on human evolutionary theory Girard’s work represents, see the book How We Became Human: Mimetic Theory and the Science of Evolutionary Origins, edited by Pierpaulo Antonello and Paul Gifford (MSU Press, 2015), especially the essay by Melvin Konner, “Violent Origins: Mimetic Rivalry in Darwinian Evolution,” 137-60. Also, see Scott Cowdell, René Girard and Secular Modernity: Christ, Culture, and Crisis, ch. 2, “Violence, the Sacred Canopy” (Notre Dame, 2013), 57-82.
4. “Staying” is one of the instances where menō (see note 1) is translated as something other than “abiding.”
