Inching towards Alleluia

May 18, 2014

John 14:1-14

This is our 5^th week starting the service shouting out:  

“Alleluia!  Christ is Risen!  The Lord is risen indeed!  Alleluia!” 

But what does that mean?  It’s my 7^th Easter season as an ordained person and my 39^th Easter as a baptized Christian, and I’m still not sure I can pin down what it means to say that.  I know it has something to do with me, with all of us.  I know it contains a promise of Jesus somehow with us even now.  But I can’t pretend to always feel or live that way.

In my experience as a parent, priest, and Sunday School teacher, I find that one of the most common questions from kids has to do with the idea of God/Jesus being with us now.  The old stories aren’t so much a problem (even the really outrageous ones).  Hearing about the bread and wine as Jesus’ Body and Blood doesn’t really seem to faze them.  But start talking about God as really present with us, and you get questions.  Questions that are hard to answer.  Where is God?  Where is Jesus?  Why can’t I see them?  How do I know they’re here?

            And so I struggle to find ways to help open up that mystery for them, and for myself. 

I use words to talk about how God is all around us, even when there is nothing to see.  In love and light and nature and community and in our hearts and in other people.  We are never alone, never forgotten, never unloved. 

I read Lawrence Kushner’s kids’ books, like Where is God? and What does God look like?, hoping that his words will help fill in some of the blanks.

I tell Godly play stories that help us wonder about this question.  Right now the Godly Play kids are in the midst of a beautiful series of stories about how Jesus’ friends stretched their minds to learn to know Jesus in a new way after he died and rose again.  And here we are, more than two thousand years later, still stretching our minds to grapple with this mystery. 

I experiment with prayer – drawing, imagining, sculpting.  A few weeks ago in the EYOA class for the older kids we took our own Emmaus walk on the labyrinth, trying to imagine Jesus walking beside us, open to whatever we might have to say to him.  

And I share my own experiences of knowing God was close, even if most of them only make sense to me because words somehow aren’t big enough to really describe them.

            Truth be told, most adults have the same questions the kids do, although sometimes the words are different.  Where is God when someone I love is dying?  Where is God during a war or natural disaster?  Where is God in the lives of those girls kidnapped from their school in Nigeria?  Where is God when I’m busy and distracted or when I don’t feel like I have any purpose?  Where is God all those times when I feel alone or mired in grief?  

            The disciples are also asking those questions in our reading today. 

            Our Gospel reading this morning is from Jesus’s Farewell Discourse – a long 4 chapter monologue by Jesus as he tries to prepare his disciples for what is coming next.  Jesus has just washed their feet and his next act will be to go out to pray and get arrested.  And we all know what happens after that.

So Jesus is sharing all this beautiful sounding stuff.  “Do not let your hearts be troubled.  Believe in God, believe also in me.  In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places.”  This is a common funeral reading because this promise about there being many dwelling places sounds so comforting.  And, Jesus assures them, you know the way to the place where I am going!

But instead of being reassured, the disciples are full of anxiety about what is going to happen to their beloved teacher.  And they are worried about what the future will hold for them when he goes away.  Their hopes and dreams about Jesus did not involve him dying.  The disciples need something concrete to touch and point to.

And so, like us, they struggle to try to put this into words.

“Lord, we do not know where you are going.  How can we know the way?” asks Thomas.

“Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied,” says Phillip.

            Just like we so often do, the disciples are clinging to a perception that if they can just iron out a few more details, this following-Jesus business will make more sense, be more do-able. 

            But their questions aren’t really about the details, and at their heart I’m guessing neither are ours.  Frederick Buechner wrote that what the disciples were really asking here was “Are you going anywhere at all or just going out, like a light?"  How can we know God is still with us in this time after Easter when sometimes all signs seem to point to the contrary?  How can we see God?  Where is God?  Why isn’t God fixing the parts of the world that are so broken?  Why can’t we feel God with us more often?

            It takes the disciples a while to realize Jesus’ message and their hope can continue even after everything they know seems to have come to an end.  It takes them a while to begin to understand how to live into that new reality.  It takes us a while too.  Maybe even our whole lives.

            That is what these Sundays after Easter are all about.  These Sundays that keep cycling back with our pseudo-confident Alleluias.  These Sundays with their readings of disciples meeting Jesus in new ways after the resurrection and asking un-knowable questions.  And readings about the early church trying to make its way.  These Sundays that are all about how they, and we, live as Jesus taught without his physical presence.

            These Sundays are about discovering Easter inch by inch.

I just read an article written by Heidi Neumark in the Christian Century about living with regret.  She kept reliving an episode of unkindness towards her mother living with dementia that she couldn’t shake after her mother died.  She knew that her mother would forgive her, had forgiven her.  She knew that if she were looking at her situation as an outsider she would offer absolution.  But she was incapable of feeling peace. 

And then she found herself in the midst of these post-Easter stories.  She noticed how slowly the disciples move into the reality of Easter.  After Jesus dies, they have trouble accepting the news of his resurrection.  They struggle with recognizing him when he appears among them.  They doubt and they continue to hole themselves up in locked rooms.  But just as Jesus left the dark tomb, the disciples learn to leave the locked room, and that is our post-Easter work too.

            As Neumark puts it: “These post-Easter days, I am thinking that if my mind and heart are not yet in sync with what should be … perhaps mere inches matter.  [It’s] like the giant stone that sits at the mouth of the tomb. The stone is rolled aside, not away. It’s still there, inches from the entrance, … heavy as a regretful heart can be, but it’s not blocking anyone’s way forward.” 

            Maybe what Jesus is promising the disciples isn’t about getting some fancy digs in the hereafter, or reaching some place of absolute certainty where all our questions are answered and everything makes perfect sense.  Maybe Easter isn’t about crossing a finish line where we know we’ve arrived.  Maybe that heavy stone (in all its varied forms) will be in our peripheral vision all our lives. 

Maybe what Jesus is telling his disciples (including us) is to keep moving forward inch-by-inch.  To keep daring to venture slowly out from the tombs that don’t allow us to live fully into who we are created to be.  Tombs like regret and grief and fear and worry.  Tombs like not measuring up.  Tombs like the loneliness of suffering.  Tombs like the inability to forgive or be forgiven. 

Maybe the dwelling places that Jesus promises are places we can rest as we inch forward along our journey.

            In our reading from John there’s a Greek word, monai, that gets translated here as “dwelling places,” but you’ve probably heard it translated as “rooms” or “mansions” too if you’ve heard this read at a funeral.  Jesus promises the disciples that in his Father’s house there are many monai, and we tend to hear that as a promise in the future – that someday after we die we’ll be with God in God’s house.  But maybe it’s just as much a promise for the here and now.

In my research for this sermon my favorite description of monai was of something impermanent - a temporary resting place, associated with traveling caravans.  Maybe what Jesus is promising is that there is always a place for us in the heart of God, even right here on earth.  That along this journey in life we will find resting places wherever and whenever we need them – we’ll find moments of resurrection in this life that bring love, forgiveness, joy, healing, and new possibilities.

May you find moments of rest with God as you inch along your journey.

 

(You can read Neumark’s article in Christian Century here.)