At Home in God
Highland Avenue Church of the Brethren
Pastor Katie Shaw Thompson – May 14, 2023
At Home in God – John 14: 1-3
Today’s scripture selection takes place directly after Jesus has washed his disciples’ feet in the Gospel of John’s version of the last supper. Even though we’re reading from chapter 14, the setting hasn’t changed since chapter 13. Those chapter breaks were added long after the work of the original scribe. So, it is in that immediate context that Jesus teaches about the dwelling place he prepares for the disciples whose feet he has just washed.
That context adds something to my understanding of what kind of dwelling place Jesus may be talking about. The feetwashing Jesus, I imagine, prepares any place with a vulnerable feetwashing love and hospitality. It’s a place where sandals can be removed, where we give and receive care, and where we feel we belong and we are loved. It’s a place we can truly call home.
Maybe it’s a home that will never be fully perfected in this life, but if what Jesus says about the disciples knowing God because Jesus has been known by them is to be believed, then it seems this place Jesus prepares is a home we can experience at least fleetingly, in the here and now, too.
Personally, I can be guilty of wishing I could control a lot more things in my life in order to feel at home more often. But I am trying to continue learning how to find myself at home in that feetwashing presence of God even amidst all that is outside my control.
The Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron gives a great lesson in a video still available on YouTube called Lousy World.[1] Brene Brown also excerpts it in Braving the Wilderness, which some of us read together last fall.[2]
Chodron starts by imitating the way so many of us walk through life bemoaning everything around us: “This lousy world, these lousy people, this lousy government, this lousy everything… lousy weather… It’s too hot... It’s too cold. I don’t like the smell. The person in front is too tall and the person next to me is wearing perfume that I’m allergic to.”
Pema continues: “It’s like being barefoot and walking across blazing-hot sand or across cut glass or a field of thorns. But then you have a great idea! You’re just going to cover everywhere you go with leather. Just pave it all in leather. Of course some things and some people will be in the way. So, we’ll just get rid of them. Get rid of her. Get rid of him. Get rid of them. Things we don’t like will be much easier to ignore paved in leather, too. And while we’re at it, we’ll get the temperature just right–and the weather,too. And we’ll ban perfume (Pema seems to really not like perfume) and we’ll ban anything else that bothers us–including and especially mosquitoes. (Soon here in Northern IL we’ll remember the bane that is mosquitoes. It just has to get warm enough first.) Once we’ve banned everything we don’t like and covered everything else in leather, we won’t have to be in pain anymore. Life will be just right. And we can walk barefoot everywhere.
Or instead, Pema quotes the classic Buddhist teacher Shantideva, we could just put the leather on our feet. We could just wear shoes to walk across the boiling sand and the cut glass and the field of thorns. It’s a metaphor, of course, for the way we can practice knowing ourselves to be at home in this heart and head and skin of ours wherever we go and whatever we encounter. It doesn’t mean we’ll always be happy or that we can’t say ouch. But it’s a different way–maybe a more accessible way–of being at home without having to fix the whole world first. It’s something we can practice as individual Christ-followers. And it’s a way of being at home in God that we can practice as a collective church body, too.
In fact, New Testament scholar Angela N. Parker[3] points out that the Greek behind Jesus' word of comfort to his disciples is actually “Do not let your (plural) heart (singular) be troubled.” In other words, “Jesus’ statement in the Gospel of John highlights the idea of the disciples possessing one singular heart as a collective group of people.”
In the 2022 Tom Hanks film, A Man Called Otto, the title character’s main physical problem is that his heart is too big. His emotional problem is that he lost his wife six months ago and the grief is too big. He wants to join her but people–mainly his neighbors–keep getting in the way of his attempts.
He’s not what you’d call a friendly guy. But if you can get past the gruff exterior, he is the guy who will bleed his neighbor’s radiators to get the heat going, who will teach another neighbor how to drive and then babysit that same neighbor’s children, and take in a trans neighbor who’s been kicked out by his own dad.
I don’t want to spoil too much of the movie for you. But I will say that although Otto’s grief doesn’t go away, as he renews relationships with longtime neighbors and begins new relationships with brand new neighbors, he begins to find a way to live with the grief and to enjoy the community he creates with them.
The movie brought me to tears several times but one of my favorite scenes is near the end when Otto and his neighbors’ have just celebrated a big win together. They’ve just exposed the corruption of the company that was trying to force senior residents from their homes and in doing so, saved two neighbors from eviction.
It happens in the background. A journalist asks if neighborly neighbors aren’t just a thing of the past. She asks Jimmy what he meant when he said he would take care of his neighbors Anita and Reuben, because they are like family to him and Jimmy answers, “Well, I have dinner at their house almost every night.” It’s a glimpse of the collective heart and the collective community home we can make when we share the sacred gift of connection with each other.
Imperfect as it may be, our collective heart when we knit it together in our homes and neighborhoods and here in church can better withstand the trouble that comes our way, because together we are the body of Christ. Together, and with God’s help, we prepare a place that we can call home in the collective here and now.
It’s only a glimpse of the one that is to come but it is one in which, at its best, we can dwell and find sustenance even now. That’s what we do together here. We remind each other that we are loved and that we belong in a sacred story.
Baptism is one way of claiming that sacred story as our own. It’s one way of responding to the love God has for all of us and the way that love was embodied by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Baptism is one way of saying my home is in God now and forever, and these people in this church are a kind of home for me, too. Whatever comes my way I know I am loved, and I will do my best to live out that love in the world so that others, too, can come to dwell in the place that Jesus has prepared.
As Eugene Peterson’s Message version of the Bible renders this scripture, Jesus tells his disciples, “There is plenty of room for you in my Holy Parent’s home. If that weren’t so, would I have told you that I’m on my way to get a room ready for you? And if I’m on my way to get your room ready, I’ll come back and get you so you can live where I live. And you already know the road I’m taking.”
There’s some confusion that follows next. Thomas wants a literal road map. But Jesus is being metaphorical again. He is the road map. If you follow him, the teacher who has just humbly knelt to wash the feet of his disciples–if you love others as Jesus loves you–then you’ll get there. You’ll experience it. You’ll learn how to dwell now fleetingly and then forever in this love that wraps us all up and calls us all home.
May it be so. Amen.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buTrsK_ZkvA
[2] Brene Brown, Braving the Wilderness, (Random House: New York, 2017), 118-120.
[3] Accessed 5-12-23. Angela N. Parker. Working Preacher Commentary. John 14: 1-14. https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/fifth-sunday-of-easter/commentary-on-john-141-14-6
