Second Sunday after Epiphany
Year A
RCL
What Are You Looking For?
By +Brian Ernest Brown, CWC
Every single one of us, at some point in our lives, has sat down, looked at our hard work, our relationships, or our spiritual lives, and felt a heavy, sinking feeling. It’s the feeling that despite our absolute best efforts, we aren’t getting anywhere.
We find an incredibly honest moment of this in our reading from Isaiah today. The prophet has been called by God from before his birth. He’s been shaped, hidden away like a polished arrow in God’s quiver, ready to be used. He’s done everything right. But then he looks at the reality around him and says: “I have labored in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity.”
Can you relate to that? That feeling of pouring your energy, your prayers, and your time into a child, a marriage, a career, or a ministry, only to look around and think, “What was the point? Did any of this actually matter?”
What makes this text so beautiful is how God responds. God doesn’t scold the prophet for being discouraged. God doesn’t say, “Try harder” or “Work faster.” Instead, God basically says, “Your view of success is way too small.”
God tells him: “It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob… I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”
When we think we are failing because things aren’t going according to our specific blueprint, God is often preparing to do something vastly bigger, deeper, and more expansive than we could have ever dreamed.
That pivot from frustration to deep trust is exactly what Psalm 40 is about. The Psalmist sings:
“He lifted me out of the desolate pit, out of the mire and clay; he set my feet upon a high cliff and made my footing sure.”
Notice the order here. The Psalmist doesn’t climb out of the mud by their own willpower. They wait. They cry out. And God stoops down into the mess to lift them up.
And what does God require from us in return for this deliverance? Is it bigger sacrifices? Is it perfect performance? The Psalm tells us plainly: “In sacrifice and offering you take no pleasure… Burnt-offering and sin-offering you have not required.”
God doesn’t want our religious checklists or our frantic attempts to prove our worth. God wants our hearts. God wants us to be able to say, “Behold, I come… your law is deep in my heart.” God wants relationship, not a transaction.
This brings us straight into the Gospel of John, where we see exactly what this relationship looks like in shoe leather.
John the Baptist points out Jesus to his own disciples, calling him the “Lamb of God.” Two of those disciples immediately turn and start following Jesus down the road. Jesus hears their footsteps, turns around, looks them in the eye, and asks the ultimate human question: “What are you looking for?”
It’s the question that sits beneath everything we do. What are we looking for when we scroll through our phones late at night? What are we looking for when we overwork ourselves, or when we seek validation from others? What are we looking for when we walk through the doors of a church?
The disciples don’t give a deeply theological answer. They are caught off guard. They just say, “Rabbi, where are you staying?” In other words: Where do you live? We just want to be where you are.
And Jesus gives the invitation that defines the entire Christian life. He doesn’t hand them a syllabus. He doesn’t demand a statement of faith. He simply says: “Come and see.”
He invites them into His life. They go, they see where He is staying, and the text notes this beautiful, ordinary detail: “They remained with him that day. It was about four o’clock in the afternoon.”
That moment was so profound, so deeply personal, that decades later when John was writing this Gospel, he still remembered the exact time of day his life changed forever. It wasn’t because he heard a brilliant lecture; it was because he spent an afternoon sitting with Jesus.
This ordinary, relationship-first reality is exactly what Paul is writing about to the church in Corinth. Now, if you know anything about the Corinthian church, you know they were a total mess. They argued, they split into factions, and they had massive moral failures.
Yet, look at how Paul addresses them. He calls them “those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints.”
Paul reminds them that their standing with God doesn’t depend on them having everything perfectly put together. He tells them: “God is faithful; by him you were called into the fellowship of his Son.” The baseline of our faith is not our faithfulness to God—it is God’s faithfulness to us.
So, how do we live this out this week?
First, when you feel like you are “laboring in vain,” take a deep breath and hand the results over to God. Your value is not measured by your productivity, or even by your visible success in the spiritual life. Your cause is with the Lord, and He is doing a work in you that is “too light a thing” to be measured by a checklist.
Second, listen to Jesus asking you today: “What are you looking for?” Bring your real, messy, exhausted desires to Him. You don’t have to clean them up first.
And finally, accept the invitation to just “come and see.” Christianity is not a set of rules to be mastered; it is a person to be known. Spend time remaining with Him this week in quiet prayer, in the scriptures, or in the face of the person sitting next to you.
Like Andrew, who went running to find his brother Simon, and like Simon, who received a completely new identity as Peter, we never leave an encounter with Jesus the same way we entered it. Let’s step out of the mud, trust His faithful hand, and walk the path He is showing us today.
Amen.