Kendall's Notebook, Page 73

Sermon: “A Place For You”

Date: April 20, 2008

Text: John 14: 1-7

(powerpoint images)

(graveside service) Today’s Scripture lesson contains one of the most beloved verses and one of the most contentious verses in all Scriptures. First, the beloved: “Let not your hearts be troubled…In my father’s house there are many rooms…..I go to prepare a place for you.” How fitting it is that this verse follows last week’s reading of the 23^rd Psalm. On a daily basis for 2000 years at a funeral service somewhere, those two passages have been read as companion pieces. The words from John have been words of hope and promise in the presence of death since they were written and shared by the early community.

(crusade shot) Amazingly, a few verses away in the same passage, is one of the most damaging and troublesome Scriptural verses in all the Bible. Verse seven reads: “The only way to the Father is through me.” The physical closeness of those two verses in today’s lesson is symbolic for how quickly Christians are capable of turning love into hate. Verse seven has been used to justify crusades, not just the Billy Graham kind of crusade but the type of crusade carried out with weapons of war and instruments of torture and death against all who are not with us.

(sacred space) Let us reflect first on the verses of comfort. My thoughts this morning take their lead from the idea of “place” found in these verses. I have had some email correspondence with an old friend these past few weeks. I told him how I had recently been in Maine for my aunt’s funeral. In my email, I casually mentioned how my aunt was the last in line on that side of my family. With her dying, I wrote, that might mean that I am now the next in line given my medical history of late and that only my sister is older than me and women generally live longer than men.

(an anchor) My remark inspired a train of thought and he wrote back reflecting on his mother’s death about ten years ago. Being an only child in a family tree with lots of only children, his mother’s death suddenly left him with no one in his family who had known him all his life. We live for many years before our children, and our children don’t know anything about our previous lives except what we choose to tell them. Our spouses don’t know us the way our older brothers and sisters do and so forth. My friend shared that he felt orphaned in a way that he had never felt before. He used the word unanchored, detached from his roots, and very unsettled to describe his feelings.

(uprooted tree) My aunt’s death did not shake me quite as much as the death of my friend’s mother did him, but his note brought back a memory. I recalled the months after I resigned from my Massachusetts’ church where I had been for 22 years and where our daughter grew up. I had a couple months to wait that summer before moving to St. Louis. To top it off, our daughter, finished college that spring and was moving to Boston. The separations were all around us. I suddenly felt totally unanchored, unanchored is a good word, totally adrift, without roots and very alone. We all felt the earth move under our feet, or more likely under our beds, a few days ago. It was unsettling. I felt like that for three solid months until the moving van came and we finally were on our way to a new life.

(text – I go and prepare a place) Perhaps there is some divine knowledge of a very human need behind those words, “I go and prepare a place for you.” We all need a sense of place. The earth was shaking under the disciples feet when Jesus gave them this loving promise. They didn’t know which end was up or where or how they could be safe. In that moment of insecurity, Jesus offered then the promise of a safe place.

(room with furniture) Growing up on the rockbound coast of Maine, I never knew what an earthquake was. Friday, we had to straighten out every picture on every wall in our house. In fact, there are quite a few shook up pictures on walls in this house here. If you feel the urge, do be free to straighten some out if you notice something ajar. We didn’t need earthquakes in my parent’s home. We had my mother! Churches used to take John 14:2 very seriously when choosing parsonages. Houses with many mansions! We had many rooms in that old three-storied parsonage. My mother didn’t just occasionally succumb to the urge to change the furniture around a little. She would swap whole rooms around. My father would come home to discover that his study, which when he left that morning was on the first floor just off to the right of the front door, was now on the second floor where once there was a spare bed room. With six bedrooms my mother had plenty of spare rooms for company even after her redesigns. Dad would have to reconnect with his sense of space in his new place.

(disciples) The furniture was getting rearranged for the disciples as Jesus met with them that night before he was crucified. They didn’t like it and were even horrified by what they were hearing. For the most part most of them did a pretty good job of zoning out for the next few days and in a period of total denial. Denial is one of Kubler/Ross’ stages of grief. It was grief that was hitting them as they heard about Jesus no longer being with them. But his leaving was a part of his preparing a whole new place with them.

(Victorian mansion) In today’s lesson, the new place is referred to as God’s house. There are many other references to God’s place in the Scriptures. The metaphors hardly end with house. God’s place is every where. And every where, you can either be in God’s place or out of it. The difference is a matter of loving God and serving God. When you are loving God, and serving God you are in God’s place or house.

(Moving furniture) The furniture is being re-arranged for us in another way today. There are many changes taking place in our lives, our world and most especially in our church. Like the disciples, we don’t necessarily like it. It leaves us feeling unsettled and unanchored. Like the disciples we too can bury our heads in the sands of denial. The unsettling times call us to deepen our sense of our true home, the home of our hearts and spirits, and remind us to dwell in our spiritual home by continuing in our loving and serving God.

(rock on beach) I recall another image of houses and mansions. Some of you probably played king of the castle as children. Sometimes I am inclined to believe that our life together in the church is one big game of adults playing king or maybe queen of the castle. Anyhow, as a boy I had a little different experience of this game. On the beach where we swam there was a huge boulder. Indeed, it was the size of a small house and had been dropped their thousands of years ago by a receding glacier. At high tide, it was completely covered by water. You could sail a boat over it and not know it was there. At low time, you could walk to it and way beyond it out onto huge mud flats where the clams lived. The sides of the rock were made slippery by clumps of attached seaweed, which when dried and thrown on a fire crackled with an intense fierceness. When the tide was just right coming in but not yet over the top of the rock, we would swim out to the rock and climb on. Then as the tide continued to rise and the space got smaller and smaller, the game of king of the castle would commence. There was a lesson in that game. Quite often by the time the king had conquered his rock, there wasn’t any rock left to stand on. The tide always won. And the tide always does win. The changes of the tides of time, the hands of time cannot be turned back. In the process of life, it is a good thing to know what your real rock is, where you real place is, what is indeed your spiritual home. Jesus calls us to it in service and love. The Jesus of Nazareth who talked about a house with many rooms became the risen Christ who told his disciples on a beach, maybe there was tide coming in, “Feed my sheep.”

The king or queen ends up having the castle all to him or her self. This is called winning. And people make the mistake of thinking that winning is what life is all about. There are many Christians who think that in the world of religion there is only one castle. It is called Christianity and John 14:7 is the proof of the pudding. “The only way to the Father is through me.”

(Jesus teaching) There is truth in that verse. No other religion leads a believer to a loving parent-God. No other religious leader leads followers to a loving parent-God. Jesus does, and the words, attributed to him in John, claiming that are quite unchallenged. Through the great religions of the world there are many ways to experience the spiritual dimension. There are many thin places – I had to get that concept in today in this message about a place. As long as we do not add all sorts of other meanings to this phrase, the phrase remains words of loving counsel from Jesus to his followers. When we apply his words to discussions of interfaith relationships, we end up adding a meaning to these words that were not there in the first place.

(Jesus, John) Neither Jesus nor John ever heard of Muslims. And it was quite likely that neither of them knew very much about either Hindus, Buddhists, or Confucius, if anything at all. Consequently Jesus wasn’t making a negative statement about Hindus, or Muslims or Buddhists when he made this positive statement about his faith. We are the ones today, often getting caught up in our own little king of the castle games who put words into Jesus’ mouth that weren’t there in the first place.

(castle) Here is an old story about the king of the castle game.

“Seems this man died and was ushered into heaven, which appeared to be an enormous house. An angel began to escort him down a long hallway past "many rooms". 
"What's in that room?" the man asked, pointing to a very somber-looking group of people chanting a Gregorian mass. "That's the Roman Catholic room," said the angel. "Very high church."
"What's in that room?" the man asked, pointing to a group of half-naked dancers gyrating their hips and occasionally shrieking out loud. "That's the Balinese group," said the angel. "Very lively."
"What's in that room?" asked the man, pointing to a group of bald-headed people meditating to the sound of an enormous gong. "That's the Zen group," said the angel. "Very quiet. You would hardly know they were here."
Then the angel stopped the man, as they were about to round a corner. "Now, when we get to the next room," said the angel, "I would appreciate it if you  would tiptoe past. We mustn't make any sound."
"Why's that?" asked the man.
"Because in that room there's a bunch of very heavy-handed Christians; and they think they're the only ones here."

(From “Keeping the Faith in Babylon: A pastoral resource for Christians in exile” by Barry J. Robinson, found at:

http://www.rockies.net/~spirit/sermons/a-ea05-keeping.php)

(sunset) Our place is with God and we are in our place when we serve and love God. Christians are assured of having a place with God and never have to worry about putting someone else in their place. “In my father’s house, there are many rooms,” said Jesus.

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