Sermons

Many Dwelling Places

John Wilkinson                               Third Presbyterian Church
April 24, 2005                                John 14:1-14

We were in the Chicago Bears gift shop on Tuesday when a Spanish woman excitedly announced to her husband that a German cardinal had been elected to succeed a Polish pope! I rushed to find CNN to begin to see what the tea leaves were, and how they might be read.

I did not expect the College of Cardinals to elect a pontiff who would radically change his predecessor’s course, and they did not. What I was hoping for, as an interested outsider, was openness, collegiality, particularly when ecumenical matters come into play. John Paul II spent significant time building relationships with Judaism, Islam, and the Orthodox Christian church, in the latter case seeking to heal a 1000-year-old breach. There seemed to be less energy when it came to the Protestant world, which, in most reporting venues last week, was treated not as another branch of Christianity – which we are – but as another faith altogether. So I was curious.

The past written record of Benedict XVI has not been strong on that count; but as soon as I say that, I note what he has said since his election. In an address read to cardinals in the Sistine Chapel after his election the day before, the Pope said his "primary task" would be "that of working - sparing no energies - to reconstitute the full and visible unity of all Christ's followers.” Perhaps a promising beginning. Or at least a wait-and-see beginning.

The next evening, we were having dinner with an old friend, who happens to be Jewish. He is always playfully curious about my line of work. (He jokes, for example, that this is the only 60 minutes of the week that I actually work!) He mentioned the new pope in passing. It doesn’t really matter to you, does it? Well it doesn’t, I thought. And yet it does.

How other Christian communities govern themselves and make decisions is certainly their business, and we Presbyterians have no particular corner on the glass-house/stone-throwing market. And yet, if together we are the body of Christ, then what happens in the Roman Catholic Church matters to us, even as it matters to those we know and love who may be Roman Catholic. There are Roman Catholic partners in the Interfaith Hospitality Network, for example, and Bishop Clark has preached from our pulpit. Roman Catholic teaching is helping to shape public policy in this nation, on the matters that matter importantly to us. So it does matter, perhaps more than we, or they, would ever know.

And why it matters is addressed in this morning’s passage from the gospel of John, a passage as iconic as they come. Chapter 14 begins a long section in John’s gospel, what the scholars call the “farewell discourses.” It may seem an odd thing to read these so close after Easter, and yet these words, long, sometimes difficult-to-follow soliloquies from Jesus, answer questions about how the disciples are to live following his death.

“Do not let your hearts be troubled,” Jesus says. “Believe in me.” Belief in Jesus is the central message in John, belief made real, as we claimed repeatedly in Lent, through life-transforming encounters with Jesus.

And then Jesus tells his followers that in his father’s house, in God’s house, are many dwelling places, many rooms, and that he – Jesus – goes to prepare a place for us.

Further iconic language follows, including that high moment when Jesus says that “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.”

And yet this: many dwelling places, many rooms. The words are intended to calm and re-assure an anxious group of followers.

One place where these words take on powerful meaning for us is at the time of death. We read them at memorial services and funerals as a word of promise and hope, not so much for the one who has departed, but for those of us who remain.

But they are more than that. They imply a relationship, the residence we experience in God’s realm that moves beyond any limited understanding of physical place and transforms our relationship to God through Jesus even in the here and now. Because God and Jesus share this divine relationship, and because we share this relationship with Jesus, we are offered residence – room and board, if you will – in relationship with God.

And so it is that we read these words at the time of death, not only to suggest that the relationship with God and the departed one is real and true, but to confirm its realness and truth all along. That is to say, eternal life does not begin at the moment of death. It begins, rather, at the moment when relationship to God is established, the point of hope that we call grace. That is good news. But there is more good news.

This passage is read these days in other contexts as well. As I have said before, I would submit that the two most significant questions that we Christians face are this: what does it mean to follow Jesus, and what does it mean to follow Jesus in a world where many do not? These questions are corollaries to themselves, it seems, one facing inward and one facing outward.

If one reading of John 14 provides assurance to the first question – we are given residence in relationship with God in life and in death, then perhaps it can answer the second question as well. Many dwelling places, many rooms.

Those words have been given renewed meaning in recent times in ecumenical and interfaith circles. They have suggested possibilities in the Roman Catholic – Protestant dialogue, for example, or within a conflicted denominational family. They even have been used in the interfaith context, including the big three of Islam, Judaism and Christianity, and now as other of the world’s religions become more familiar to us.

Perhaps that is wishful thinking. But perhaps not. The specificity and particularity of what we who follow Jesus believe about the one we follow – the room in the house in which we will live – is not negated by the possibility that God has built other rooms, others forms of relationship. Paul says, for example, that the arrival of Jesus did not cut off Judaism from covenantal relationship with God, thank God.

Gail O’Day writes that theses words from John are distorted when they are used in a battle over the relative merits of the world’s religions. These words, O’Day writes, “are the confessional celebration of a particular faith community, convinced of the truth and life it has received in the incarnation…The theological vision articulated here expresses the distinctiveness of Christian identity, and it is as people shaped by this distinctiveness that Christians can take their place in conversations about world religion.” (The New Interpreter’s Bible, Volume IX, pp. 740 and ff.)

That is not theological relativism, or wishy-washy Christianity. It is, rather, hope placed in this relationship, and the faith that God is calling others into relationship.

What we believe about Jesus, his life, his death, is vitally important. And yet, theologian Douglas John Hall writes that this belief must be flexible, because, at its heart, this belief is about a relationship made real by the Spirit rather than human words codified in doctrine. That does not mean, Hall writes, that doctrine is “insignificant or incidental to faith.” (The Cross in Our Context, page 115 and ff.) It does mean, however, that doctrine must be modest, Hall says, and humble, I would say, because it “points to an ultimate reality that it can by no means contain.”

We live in a binary, cut and dry, absolute world, and yet our theology of the cross, our theology about Jesus, is modest and humble and evolving, not because the truth of the incarnation is any of those things, but because the specific context of our relationship to this Jesus is just that, specific and contextual.

My relationship to Jesus is different than yours, as it should be. And even then, we believe that the incarnation of God’s love in Jesus is working itself out in the world, with all people, all religions, many dwelling places, many rooms, in ways that are mysterious to us and in ways that we certainly cannot control nor command.

We don’t like that very much, not being in control. We want to be the architects. We are not the architects. We are the residents, the guests. Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi of London, makes such a claim in a powerful new book called The Dignity of Difference. “The one God, creator of diversity” Sacks writes, “commands us to honour his creation by respecting diversity. God, the maker of all, has set his image on the person as such, prior to and independently of our varied cultures and civilizations, thus conferring on human life a dignity and sanctity that transcends our differences…the great faiths (of the world) (must) not merely tolerate but find positive value in the diversity of the human condition.” Sacks continues: “There is nothing relativist about the idea of the dignity of difference. It is based on the radical transcendence of God…just as the human situation would be impoverished and unsustainable if we were to eliminate all life forms except our own, so it would be reduced and fatally compromised if we were to eliminate all traditions and cultures except our own.” (Pages 200-201)

Many rooms, many dwelling places, and a call to trust the architect to build such a house whereby all who are to be welcomed are.

The theological vision is followed by an ethical imperative. We are given residence by the grace of God, and we are to work in the present moment to ensure that all are able to live into that relationship.

The closing chapter of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s final book is entitled “The World House.” King told the story of a deceased novelist whose papers include suggestions for future stories. (See Robert M. Franklin, “The World House,” in Sightings, March 31, 2005) One story outline simply states, “A widely separated family inherits a house in which they have to live together.” Besides sounding, half in jest, like a plot for a reality show, what King does is describe the world in which we live. King called the notion of the world house “the great new problem of humankind. We have inherited a large house,” he wrote, “a great world house in which we have to live together – black and white, Easterner and Westerner, Gentile and Jew, Catholic and Protestant, Muslim and Hindu – a family unduly separated in ideas, cultures and interest.”

And King, a Christian minister, knew that this interrelatedness was not simply about politics and economics, but was, as Robert Franklin writes, a “profoundly moral and theological imperative.”

I believe that, and I believe it to be a faithful trajectory of Jesus’ simple, powerful vision. It has implications for how we consider our own residence in the house of God and our relationship to Jesus, but also how the world’s house is understood – race, religion, economics, politics.

It is not relativist or wishy-washy. It is the gospel, incarnated by the one who prepares a place even for us, and for all the world. As we have been welcomed and been given a home, so let us welcome, in the name of Jesus, who is the foundation and cornerstone. Amen.