22 May 2011

“Love is stronger than death”
John 14:1-14
5 Easter A
22 May 2011


Our Gospel text for today is, in some ways, a curious choice for the 5th Sunday of Easter. In the midst of this season of celebration of resurrection and new life, these are words we most closely associate with … death.
Many different images come to my mind when I hear these very familiar words … perhaps you, too, hear them in the King James English with its rich poetry … “In my Father’s house there are many mansions …”
… many rooms … many dwelling places ...
I remember the time, back in the 1980s, when I toured the world headquarters of a rather prominent religious organization based in Salt Lake City … on the wall in the visitor center, there was a wall of illustrations … depicting this scene which Jesus describes … the “many rooms” where he is going.
I had no idea heaven was furnished in Duncan Phyfe.
What about those of us who like Scandinavian Modern from IKEA???
But more often … these words remind me of the many, many funerals I’ve led and attended … the funeral home services to which I’d be called in Maryland, to perform a ritual for a family who had no religious community connection … the big church-filling funerals in rural Minnesota … each of them, having as a scripture reading, these verses from our Gospel reading today …

“… Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me … I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am there you may be also … Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’”

This is the way any number of us usually hear these verses … on a day of grief and sorrow, surrounded by a sad-sounding church organ playing “What a friend we have in Jesus” and “How great Thou art” … these verses, the Acme Lutheran Standard Scripture reading for funerals and related occasions (yes, they are listed that way in the pastor’s manual), chosen because they are to give both assurance and admonition to those in attendance on those days:
… assurance … don’t worry, all is well, your loved one is with Jesus in heaven right now because they were baptized and they believed in Jesus …
… and admonition … It says right there, no one goes to Our Father in heaven who doesn’t believe in him, so you had better believe and shape up, you heathen, or else you’ll never see your dear departed loved ones ever again.

It’s little wonder that one clergy friend of mine calls these verses “the most exclusive in the Bible.” When they are used that way, they surely are. Words used to kill healthy living human emotion (stop crying, grandma’s in heaven) – words used to kill relationship (One Way – Jesus, or else) – words only to be rolled out when there’s been a death.

And yet … this old chestnut of a text, it still has a lot of life in it. Much luster and gleam, if we but rub off the accretions of our sin and selfishness, that’s we’ve put onto it.

First of all, note the context of these words. It is a time approaching death … Jesus is speaking these words as the disciples are gathered together with him after sharing the Passover meal. Judas has just left them “to do quickly what he is going to do.”
The disciples are confused … questioning … wondering … worried. What’s coming? What’s going to happen?

So rub the tarnish off the very first verse.
Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me.
Do you remember that song, “Bridge over Troubled Water?” That’s the sense Jesus is using here. When he says “troubled” in John’s gospel, it’s the same meaning as when waters get disturbed … in a lake, a pond, a pool. Standing on the side, the shore, you get splashed, you are unsure if you should put your boat in … there’s a small craft advisory.
Certainly this was how the disciples were feeling there, with Jesus, on that night before his death. Troubled, unsure … unsafe waters ahead.
And so Jesus’ responds to their “troubled waters” … not with a hammer over the head “BELIEVE OR ELSE” … but with an invitation … to believe in, literally, to believe into him.
Believing into Jesus on this night when he was betrayed … that surely couldn’t be a one-shot, now or never, do or die affair.
It’s a process … an all-consuming business for the disciples which … Jesus knew … began back when he first called them to join him … continued through all the signs he did … turning the water into wine, healing the man born blind, and raising Lazarus from the dead … and which would next lead them to the cross and tomb.
That’s the way of which Jesus is speaking. Not a literal road, but the Way of the Cross, which he had been on ever since his ministry began.
The disciples surely knew this, didn’t they? They’d been on this way with Jesus for years, together.
So Jesus could say in truth, “And you know the way to the place where I am going.”
But it’s Thomas … yes, the same one who needs physical proof of Jesus resurrected a few chapters later … it’s Thomas who interprets “way” literally, like a road on a map.
So Jesus needs to set Thomas … and the others … straight.
The Way isn’t one which can be plotted on a map.
“I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”
The Israelites had been coming to God for centuries, through faith like Abraham’s, through experiencing the divine presence on Mt. Sinai like Moses and Elijah, through God’s presence in the holy of holies in the Temple in Jerusalem.
Here, though, Jesus was offering something different. The close, yes, personal relationship of Father and child like Jesus had, has, can only be entered into through Jesus.

And that word “through” … for that place and time, as close as they were to the events of the Cross … “through” for Jesus must have had painful irony, as he knew the only way he could achieve all this for the disciples, was to be pierced himself … “through” him with nails and spear … this would be the only way he could deliver what he promised … all that he lays out in the subsequent verses … the explanation to Philip … the explication here of what he has just said, earlier … it all will come “through” Jesus, though his death on the Cross, through his being raised again … through “the believing into” him which the disciples will be doing … once they encounter him in the garden that first Easter morning … on the road to Emmaus, in his sharing the bread with them … in his appearing to them and telling them, “peace be with you.”

And that “believing into” Jesus, it continues this day, even for us.
For our hearts, they are troubled too, just as Jesus saw the disciples were that night before he was betrayed.
We, like them, may be unsure of the days ahead … wondering, hoping, praying, “Does God really care for me … for us?’
We’d like that close, personal relationship Jesus had with his Father, too … that assurance that God is really and truly with us.
We would like that good word for our friends, our loved ones, too, that God is really and truly with us.
And so the Good News here, in this good word for us, is that through Jesus, through Jesus, all this comes to us.
Through Jesus. It’s not an exclusive word.
Through Jesus means, the Way of the Cross. Through Jesus … he calls us into his way, his truth, his life, walking the Way of the Cross with Jesus, living for others, sharing this life in all its rejoicings and yes, its pains and sorrows too, sharing with others. Through Jesus, in this Way, he is with us.
Through Jesus means, that through Jesus, we see, we feel, we touch and taste, the Father for us. The bishop sometimes jokes, who has the most authority in the Northwest Washington Synod office? Margaret, his secretary, because you have to go through Margaret to get to the bishop … to set an appointment, to get on his calendar.
In the same way also, we go through Jesus to “get to” the Father.
What Jesus says, goes.
As Jesus said in last week’s Gospel reading, “I am the gate.” We go through Jesus, through Jesus, to get to the Father, to get to life.
Now this is a freeing word!
Freeing, because we aren’t the gate.
We don’t decide who gets in.

Peter Rollins is a northern Irish poet-philosopher-theologian. His friends and colleagues are people such as Rob Bell and Jay Bakker – yes, that Jay Bakker, the son of the former televangelists Jim and Tammy Fay Bakker … they are all part of the “emergent” church movement that is breaking down barriers and trying to undo the damage that the fence-and-wall building thieves and bandits have been doing to the church for the past twenty or so years.
You know who they are, these thieves and bandits.
The ones who keep “troubling up the waters” for us, troubling up more suspicion and doubt among us.
Peter tells a parable – which you can go on YouTube and hear for yourself, just type in the key words “I deny the resurrection” – yes, you heard me right, “I deny the resurrection” – Peter Rollins … the parable goes like this:

A friend named Phil, on leaving church, dreamt that he had died and gone to heaven. And when he got there, St. Peter said, “Hello, it’s great to see you, Phil, welcome, come on in.” And the gates of heaven were opened.
But then Phil looked around, and he saw his friends on the outside … the ones who weren’t Christian … and he asked St. Peter, “what about them?”
St. Peter said, “sorry, Phil, you know the rules.”
So Phil thought of his reference point. He thought of Jesus the outsider. Jesus the friend of sinners. Jesus, the one who would stay with the oppressed.
And Phil decided, and said to St. Peter, “um, I think I’ll stay outside, here, with my friends.”
And St. Peter smiled, and said, “Ah, at last, you understand.”

And then on the video Peter Rollins goes on. “Someone asked me once if I deny the resurrection.” And I said, “yes, yes, I do … I deny the resurrection EVERY TIME I do not serve my neighbor … EVERY TIME I do not help the poor …. But I affirm the resurrection every now and again when I stand up for those on their knees, and I weep for people who have no more tears to shed.”

It’s in moments like those … when we go THROUGH Jesus … his word, his Way of the Cross … that we touch the Father. And we “get” faith. And we experience the Kingdom of Heaven … not just then, not just some far off place and time … but right here, right now.

THROUGH Jesus … we live like every day is our last day on earth … and our first. THROUGH Jesus … we are assured that the Father is with us in all that we do. THROUGH Jesus … we don’t put up more and more fences between us and others … but we point toward the gate … the gate who is Jesus … and HE who is the way, and the truth, and the life. And THROUGH Jesus … we receive the promise that he will go and come again and take us to himself … NOT on a day of our choosing and NOT on a day of someone else’s choosing … a fence builder’s day … a thief and bandit’s day … no, but on the day of HIS choosing, when all we need to know, and hear, is that it is THROUGH Jesus that we do have and we will have forgiveness, life, and a place to remain, with him and his Father, forever.

Amen.