Love is a house
John 14: 1-14
New Ark United Church of Christ, Newark, DE
May 10, 2020
I believe in a group of high school gamers who threw an online birthday party for a solo gamer they had just met who was turning 11, taking him on adventures, giving him as much online loot as they could, staying up with him until midnight so they could sing ‘happy birthday’ to him.
I believe in big burly guys who post a sign on a college campus that reads “We will walk with you” for anyone who needs to feel and be safe.
I believe in the man who hangs out every weekend on the Nanjing Yangtze River bridge and saves people from jumping.
I believe in the 5,000 people who showed up to get tested to see if they were a match to help save the life of a 5 year old boy with a rare cancer.
I believe in the soccer team that all wore hijabs when the ref disqualified their Muslim team member.
I believe in all of the high school students who wore a skirt to school after a boy was sent home for wearing one.
I believe in people who show up at the Red Roof Inn to give away meals and socks and personal hygiene items and those who show up to receive them, everyone wearing a mask and hanging out six feet apart to visit with each other.
I believe in the Sikhs serving hot meals in Riverside, CA to anyone who wants one.
I believe in the Poor People’s Campaign that demands our government address the intersectional injustices of poverty, racism, climate crisis, militarism, and how religious nationalism has warped what is moral.
I believe in Native people’s sovereign right to protect themselves from the virus rather than obey a white governor’s demands to remove health checkpoints.
I believe not only in anti-racists but those who call out the racism of others.
I believe in men who are not only feminists but who call out misogyny.
I believe in anyone who calls out transphobia and ableism and fatphobia and any behavior that dehumanizes another human being.
I believe in risk-takers and vanguards, truth-tellers and underdogs and collective acts of solidarity, in those who share power, in those who make a way out of no way by moving forward one small step at a time. I believe in community wherever and however it is formed—the mystery that holds us together even in the worst of times.
The community to which John’s gospel was addressed—most of them probably had not yet been born when Jesus lived. And so the author has Jesus leave a path, a way for this community to find its way without him; a way to invoke his presence, to calm their troubled hearts, that Jesus has made a home within them when they live as he lived, when they love as he loved.
Love is a house in which there are not only many rooms but also many doors. In John’s gospel Jesus says that he is the door but we all come to some kind of faith, some kind of truth each in our own way. What makes us Church, what makes us a Body is not uniformity of belief or faith but a covenant of care and a common purpose and that we make it, we find it, we live it together. Near as I can tell, our purpose is to love our neighbor as ourselves, love being what justice looks like in public, and to love with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength.
Some of us have found our door, our room, and we live from there. Others try every door, look in every room. Some outgrow one space and move on to another. Some of us got kicked out, were asked to leave because of who we are and we still carry the wounds. Some of us are working up the nerve to knock. And some have left home altogether in search of adventure. The beauty is when we can offer grace to each other to be Church together no matter where we are on life’s journey, to give each other the freedom to grow each in our own way while still holding fast to the bonds of love.
Right now we are homesick—for each other, for our worship space, for tearing off a chunk of a common loaf, for singing together and holding hands in a circle, for the ease and freedom of it all. Not only that but we’re grieving what was, what we’ve always known and wondering where all of this is leading. Sounds an awful lot like the disciples in the gospel of John. “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?”
The way of Jesus has always been the way of the cross. We thought we knew that way but we are now on the inexorable road and there’s no turning back. And yet this way, this way of loss and grief and pain, is also the way to resurrection, which is why we have to practice it every day. So that each of us in our own way and together we can find the way home.
Poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote:
“God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.
These are the words we dimly hear:
You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.
Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.
Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.
Give me your hand.”
New Ark United Church of Christ, Newark, DE
May 10, 2020
First, I need to make a confession. I don’t believe in a supernatural god, but I do believe in a god that is real.
I believe in the mystery of a friend and I confessing to each other that poetry is one of the things that’s getting us through, then the next day a book of poetry arriving in the mail that I had pre-ordered months ago, with these words for my troubled heart on the back: “You may have to break/your heart but it isn’t nothing/to know even one moment alive”, the next day that friend and I meeting for tea in my driveway six feet apart.
I believe in that same poet who wrote, “I’m old/enough to know there’s nothing/we love without incurring/the debt of grief.” (Ellen Bass, “The Long Recovery”, Indigo, 2020) Who could also write about attempting to feed her aging father: “I left him there. This was my first/entrance into the land of failure, a country/I would visit so often/it would begin to feel like home.” (“Failure”)
I believe in our tremendous capacity for kindness and forgiveness. I believe in our ability to adapt and change and innovate and make due and make yet another attempt after failure.
I believe in the resilience of the human race, how we can exercise restraint and yet also charge ahead, though the odds may be against us; how we can experience one loss after another, none really less than the other, it’s just we were ready to leave some things behind and some we were never really prepared to let go of.
I believe in the one in 400 trillion chances that any one of us was born.
I believe in that same poet who wrote, “I’m old/enough to know there’s nothing/we love without incurring/the debt of grief.” (Ellen Bass, “The Long Recovery”, Indigo, 2020) Who could also write about attempting to feed her aging father: “I left him there. This was my first/entrance into the land of failure, a country/I would visit so often/it would begin to feel like home.” (“Failure”)
I believe in our tremendous capacity for kindness and forgiveness. I believe in our ability to adapt and change and innovate and make due and make yet another attempt after failure.
I believe in the resilience of the human race, how we can exercise restraint and yet also charge ahead, though the odds may be against us; how we can experience one loss after another, none really less than the other, it’s just we were ready to leave some things behind and some we were never really prepared to let go of.
I believe in the one in 400 trillion chances that any one of us was born.
I believe in a group of high school gamers who threw an online birthday party for a solo gamer they had just met who was turning 11, taking him on adventures, giving him as much online loot as they could, staying up with him until midnight so they could sing ‘happy birthday’ to him.
I believe in big burly guys who post a sign on a college campus that reads “We will walk with you” for anyone who needs to feel and be safe.
I believe in the man who hangs out every weekend on the Nanjing Yangtze River bridge and saves people from jumping.
I believe in the 5,000 people who showed up to get tested to see if they were a match to help save the life of a 5 year old boy with a rare cancer.
I believe in the soccer team that all wore hijabs when the ref disqualified their Muslim team member.
I believe in all of the high school students who wore a skirt to school after a boy was sent home for wearing one.
I believe in people who show up at the Red Roof Inn to give away meals and socks and personal hygiene items and those who show up to receive them, everyone wearing a mask and hanging out six feet apart to visit with each other.
I believe in the Sikhs serving hot meals in Riverside, CA to anyone who wants one.
I believe in the Poor People’s Campaign that demands our government address the intersectional injustices of poverty, racism, climate crisis, militarism, and how religious nationalism has warped what is moral.
I believe in Native people’s sovereign right to protect themselves from the virus rather than obey a white governor’s demands to remove health checkpoints.
I believe not only in anti-racists but those who call out the racism of others.
I believe in men who are not only feminists but who call out misogyny.
I believe in anyone who calls out transphobia and ableism and fatphobia and any behavior that dehumanizes another human being.
I believe in risk-takers and vanguards, truth-tellers and underdogs and collective acts of solidarity, in those who share power, in those who make a way out of no way by moving forward one small step at a time. I believe in community wherever and however it is formed—the mystery that holds us together even in the worst of times.
The community to which John’s gospel was addressed—most of them probably had not yet been born when Jesus lived. And so the author has Jesus leave a path, a way for this community to find its way without him; a way to invoke his presence, to calm their troubled hearts, that Jesus has made a home within them when they live as he lived, when they love as he loved.
Love is a house in which there are not only many rooms but also many doors. In John’s gospel Jesus says that he is the door but we all come to some kind of faith, some kind of truth each in our own way. What makes us Church, what makes us a Body is not uniformity of belief or faith but a covenant of care and a common purpose and that we make it, we find it, we live it together. Near as I can tell, our purpose is to love our neighbor as ourselves, love being what justice looks like in public, and to love with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength.
Right now we are homesick—for each other, for our worship space, for tearing off a chunk of a common loaf, for singing together and holding hands in a circle, for the ease and freedom of it all. Not only that but we’re grieving what was, what we’ve always known and wondering where all of this is leading. Sounds an awful lot like the disciples in the gospel of John. “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?”
We can believe in a God who is all-loving and all-giving but what good is our belief when we limit our love to certain people, when we withhold what we have?
We can believe in a God who makes justice roll down like a mighty stream, but what good is a God like that when we persist in a racist, classist system in which the vulnerable continue to die for the privileged?
We can believe in a God made flesh in Jesus, but if Jesus’ flesh is white, we worship only ourselves and our ability to do greater works is worthless.
We can believe in a God in whom we make a home and who makes a home in us but when people continue to suffer the violence of eviction and the slavery of poverty, we have forgotten that our well-being depends on the well-being of others.
We can believe in a God who makes justice roll down like a mighty stream, but what good is a God like that when we persist in a racist, classist system in which the vulnerable continue to die for the privileged?
We can believe in a God made flesh in Jesus, but if Jesus’ flesh is white, we worship only ourselves and our ability to do greater works is worthless.
We can believe in a God in whom we make a home and who makes a home in us but when people continue to suffer the violence of eviction and the slavery of poverty, we have forgotten that our well-being depends on the well-being of others.
The way of Jesus has always been the way of the cross. We thought we knew that way but we are now on the inexorable road and there’s no turning back. And yet this way, this way of loss and grief and pain, is also the way to resurrection, which is why we have to practice it every day. So that each of us in our own way and together we can find the way home.
Poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote:
“God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.
These are the words we dimly hear:
You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.
Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.
Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.
Give me your hand.”
Amen.
Benediction
Let not your hearts be troubled.
God has chosen to make a home in us.
In a way, the whole cosmos,
everyone we have ever loved,
everyone who is still yet to be,
all that is birthed by life and love,
abides in us.
There is nothing around us that is not
also within.
And so we are sent to practice love
towards every living thing,
knowing that all is connected,
and our hope rests in each other.
—©
2020 enfleshed.com
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