How you get there

• Acts 7:55-60
• 1 Peter 2:2-10
• John 14:1-14
• Psalm 31:1-5, 15-16

 “I am the way, the truth, and the life.  No one comes to the Father except through me.”

This is one of those gospel verses that seems to give Christians an exclusive privilege, like, I don’t know, the right to issue religious ultimatums.  It’s a passage often read at funeral services, to give hope to the grieving, so it’s strange when you hear, as I did not long ago, a preacher use it to harangue a crowd of mourners, warning them against being insufficiently convinced of the exclusive privilege of the Christian, and thus disqualified from joining their departed loved one in heaven.  And when you do hear something like that, it makes you wonder--what did the author of the Gospel had in mind? 

I took the opportunity this week to really dig into this scripture, more than I have before, and so I packed a little more Bible interpretation into my sermon today than usual—I hope you won’t mind.  I’m not going to cite verse numbers, but if you want to keep your lectionary insert handy, and refer to the gospel lesson once in a while as I’m preaching, I won’t be offended.  And I’m going to go back a little bit into the 13^th Chapter of John, so if you’re so inclined and want to pull one of those black bibles out of the pew rack, go head.  

Because the most important thing I think we can do with a scripture like this is to put it into context.  In the story of the Gospel of John, Jesus speaks these words after supper on the night before the day of preparation for the Passover, after he had washed his disciples’ feet, after his betrayer had left the table and gone out into the night, after he had predicted that Peter would deny him three times.  And Thomas, that tactless disciple, asks him a question about how and where to follow him, now that he was about to die.  

And our reading today begins with Jesus telling his disciples that it’s going to be okay—“do not let your hearts be troubled.”  It’s going to be okay because his death will not mean the end of their relationship.  And it will not mean that the knowledge of God that they have received through him will be lost.  In fact, that relationship, and that knowledge, are about to shift into a higher gear.  Because Jesus is going away, but he is going to the one he calls “my Father”, to be in an even more intimate and equal relationship with God.   

And this will change the way that the disciples relate to Jesus, but it also will be a change toward greater equality and intimacy.  He has already shown them this change, that very evening, by getting down on his knees and washing their feet.  And when he finished inaugurating their new relationship of intimacy and equality with him, he told them that this was now how they were to relate to each other: “Where I am going” he said “you cannot come.  I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.  Just as I have loved you, you should love one another.”

I don’t think we can over-emphasize the importance of the connection between this commandment and the scripture we are talking about today.  Before Jesus promised to go and prepare a place for us in the house of his Father; before he promised to come back for us, he told us that we cannot come where he is going.  Because we still have work to do.  We have a commandment to obey.  That’s why when Philip follows up on Thomas’ question by saying, “Show us the Father, and we will be satisfied,” Jesus gets a little testy: “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me?”  Because “No one comes to the Father except through me,” is not permission for us to be satisfied.  It is a reminder that we have seen all we need to see, in order to believe in Jesus and get to work.  We already know all we need to know, to keep his commandment, and love as he loves—that is how you come to the Father.

But don’t take my word for it; look at the Gospel, where Jesus goes on to talk about works.  “The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own, but The Father who dwells in me does his works.  Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; but if you do not, then believe me because of the works themselves.”  It is the works of Jesus, even more than his words, that show us the Father in the Son.  And the greatest of his works is the one he is about to do as he speaks these words, which is the work of the cross.  

It is on the cross that Jesus manifests most clearly and unmistakably the love of the Father, love so great that he gave his only Son to an uncomprehending world, to the end that all who believe in him should have eternal life.  The way that leads to the Father is the way of the cross.  The truth that Jesus is, is the truth that Pilate scorned when he said, “What is truth?”  Eternal life is the life of the Good Shepherd, laid down for his sheep.  It is this kind of love that Jesus commands us to have for one another.  No one comes to the Father any other way. 

So now that we’ve seen the context of this saying, we understand.  Jesus has not given us an exclusive privilege, but an all-embracing responsibility.  Because it is our love that shows the way, the truth, and the life to those whom the Father loves in the world today: so that they might see his glory; so that they might believe that we were sent, as the Father sent the Son, and believing, have eternal life in his name.  Now for many in the world today these are just words, empty of any meaning.  But works—works they might just believe. 

“Very truly, I tell you,” says Jesus, “the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father.”  And we say to ourselves, “What?--You’ve got to be kidding!  Me…you…do the works of Jesus?  Do greater works than Jesus?  Greater than changing water into wine?  Greater than giving sight to a man born blind?  Greater than raising Lazarus from the dead?  Greater than dying on the cross?” 

I guess it all depends on what Jesus meant by greatness.  Is it the power to work miracles, or command armies? Is it charisma, or fame?  Or is Jesus talking about greatness of faith, greatness of hope, greatness of love?  Maybe we can do works greater than his because he, after all, was Jesus, and you and I are just you and me.  Jesus was the only-begotten Son, who shared his Father’s glory before the world was made; all we share are some old stories in an old book, and some bread and wine and water.  Jesus knew everything that was in the hearts of men and women.   All we know is that the rent is due on the first of the month, and that some people are just hard to love.  All that the Father has he gave to the Son.  All we got is our own modest gifts, precariously balanced against our deficits.    That, and the faith that Jesus is in the Father and will give us whatever we ask so that we can do our works. 

They may not be spectacular: raising an autistic child, or tending to a failing parent; planting a garden in waste ground, or organizing a rally for justice; surviving an addiction, perhaps, or a bereavement, and helping a neighbor to do the same; helping resettle a family of refugees from war.  Often they are works we didn’t choose, and we feel like Jesus at the wedding in Cana, when he said to his mother, “Woman, my hour is not is come.”  But it precisely because we do them out of love, in obedience to Christ, with no power but the strength that comes from God, in just the right measure at just the right time to get us a little further along the way—just because of this, these works manifest the very highest truth.  They are signs of the glory of Christ, and they point the way to the Father.

    

How can we know the way?

Acts 7:55-60
Psalm 31:1-5, 15-16
1 Peter 2:2-10
John 14:1-14 

I have preached many times on today’s reading from the Gospel of John.  It is one of the passages that the Book of Common Prayer recommends for funerals.  For those who are grieving, it is reassuring to hear the words of Jesus that there are many dwelling places in his Father’s house, and that he is going there to prepare a place for us.  It is good news, under those circumstances, and my job is to proclaim it, for strength and consolation. 

But it is a little different to read this passage today, on a Sunday morning in Easter season.  Granted, the spring it not as fresh as it was five weeks ago, when the green on the hills had not begun to fade, and the roses that are losing their petals now were just breaking their first bloom.   Maybe the light that burst forth from the empty tomb has dimmed just a bit, and the shadows are stealing back in around the edges of the world.  But when Thomas says to Jesus, "Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?" he is not yet thinking of the martyr’s death that he will someday die.  That is still far away. 

Thomas asks this question because he has learned that Jesus, whom he followed along the roads of Galilee, Samaria, and Judea, out across the Jordan and back again, who has led him and his friends here to Jerusalem, whom Thomas was ready to follow even to death, is going away, and leaving him behind.  Thomas’ question is not about the fate of Jesus’ soul, or about how to cope with his own grief and loss.  It is a question about how to continue the journey they have begun.  It is about carrying on in Jesus’ absence.  It’s a question about discipleship. 

It is a question we might ask, knowing that Christ is risen, but our lives are still in the midst of death.  Where we live, the Father’s house seems far away.  Jesus says he is going there to prepare a place for us, but there’s no getting around the fact that he is going and we are staying here.  He says he’s coming back for us, but he doesn’t say when.  And then he tells us that we know the way to the place where he is going, as if to say it will not be enough for us to simply wait around for him to get back, but we need to keep moving forward and he’ll meet us on the way. 

 

"Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?"

It is a good question for a group of people, like this one, that is in a year of discernment about its future.  God seems to have some purpose for us at St. John’s because, in spite of innumerable obstacles, we are alive, after decades of debilitating conflict and the death of schism.  But the time is upon us when the miracle of our existence is no longer enough to give us a sense of direction.  We are asking to know the purpose for which God called us back to life.

For the church, the answer to that question will always have something to do with remembering.  We know where we are going, at least in part, because we know the way that we have come.  But there is a danger in this, the danger that we will be satisfied with the answer that has already been given.  We might believe we have already arrived, when the answer that Jesus gives is about being on the way.  “I am the way,” says Jesus, inviting us to keep moving, trusting his guidance;  “and the truth,” he adds, not a truth cast in bronze, or set in stone, but the truth that lives and grows as we journey further with Christ.  And finally “the life”— life that is, by definition, dynamic, and changing, and ever renewing itself, or it is not life at all. 

We are justly proud of the long history of our congregation.  Our parish archives contain handwritten minutes of vestry meetings and ledgers of accounts that go back to the pioneer days of Petaluma.  We also have a collection of old parish newsletters that is not quite that old, but covers the first four years of the 20^th century, not long after this structure was built.  And what strikes me, reading those papers, is how entirely focused they are on churchly concerns.  There are little notes about parish life and reports of the rector’s travels, and appeals for the support of missionaries in Yreka, and Alaska and China.  There are long articles about ancient church history, and summaries of doctrine and biblical texts, but not a word about the social changes that are radically transforming everyone’s lives.

In those years this valley, like all of America, was rapidly urbanizing and industrializing, integrating into an expanding national and global system.  Her people were embracing the habits and values of the modern consumer society, but the only clues in the parish newsletter that all this was going on are the paid advertisements in the margins of the page.   It is as if the church lives in a different world, one that looks backward to simpler times, and forward only to heaven.  The unspoken message is that the modern world knows where it is going, and the church is just along for the ride.  And even if the world is not following Jesus, it is not for us to resist or critique.   Our role is to stand on the sidelines, keeping open a place apart for rest and inspiration, where religious culture and family tradition, and beauty, decency, charity and reverence are not completely lost.

The world still needs this from religion, but by itself it is no longer enough.  On Monday, scientists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory released a report on the melting of glaciers in the Amundsen Sea region of West Antarctica.  Their observations show an ongoing collapse of the ice in the region that has passed the point of no return.  Just this one source is causing a rise in global sea levels of about four feet.  The thing that alarms the scientists the most is that these are changes that used to happen in geological time, in hundreds of millennia, and now they take one or two or three human generations. 

In the face of runaway change, the church can no longer sit on the sidelines.  We must get out on the way.  We have to bear witness, like Stephen in the Book of Acts, that our leaders they do not know what they are doing.   Our civilization does not know where it is going.  It has no map, but is too proud to stop to ask for directions.   Of course, some Christians have been saying this for a long time.  They say, we know a different way, the way to the exits.  We believe the truth—the unchanging, fixed, literal truth of the Bible, and its iron jaws are closing on the world.  We hope for the life, the life that is death.  We know where we are going—to heaven, and you and your world can go to hell.

But there’s another way of being Christian, one that doesn’t hope for the destruction of the world.  It’s a way that reveres what God has created out of reverence for a wisdom and design that we do not understand.  It’s a way of loving what is passing, because it is not passing away to eternal death, but passing over into the house of God.  And wherever that is, we say, with the author of 1^st Peter, that it is a house that God is also building here, from living stones.  This place is not forsaken, not if we are to believe what Jesus says about his own future.  Because he doesn’t say that he is going to the Father to chill out, in a state of endless bliss and eternal rest.  He’s says he’s going to get busy. 

“Because I am going to the Father,” Jesus says, “I will do whatever you ask in my name.”  His priestly work, reconciling the world to God, making the love and wisdom, the compassion and justice of God come true and come alive in the world—the work that he used to do, so to speak, from our side, Jesus promises to continue from the other side, the side of God.  So what about us, we who are still here—what do we ask him for?  It’s a good question, since we don’t know where we are going.  I guess we ask him to show us the way.

A dream partly come true

Isaiah 1:1, 10-20
Psalm 50:1-8, 23-24
Hebrews 11:1-3, 8-16
Luke 12:32-40

The first time I ever set eyes on Petaluma I was farming down in Marin County.  Part of my work was to make a trip every month or two up to Harmony Farm Supply, outside Sebastopol, where I’d buy fertilizers and irrigation parts and tools.  And on one of these trips I was nearing Novato when the traffic report on the radio said that a tanker truck had tipped over on 101 just south of Petaluma, and the freeway was closed in both directions.  Any sensible person would have turned around and gone home, but instead, I headed west, out into the country, to try my luck on the back roads.  I didn’t have a map, just a good sense of direction, and somehow, by a long and roundabout way, I found myself at the junction of Gravenstein Highway and Stony Point Road, a place that I recognized. 

In the process I got a nice tour of the countryside to the south and west of here, and my first glimpse of downtown Petaluma.  It was a time in my life, my mid-twenties, when I was thinking a lot about my future, and the uncertain prospects for society-at-large.  And I thought the best thing I could do, for myself and for the world, was to be a farmer.   I liked to dream about finding a place somewhere to settle down with some friends and family, and get back to the land.  And I remember thinking on that particular day that I was glad to know about Petaluma, that this was a place I’d like to come back to sometime, that it might even be the right place to stake my claim.

So here I am, only somewhere along the line I went off on a different kind of journey, so I’m not a farmer living and working on my agrarian commune out on Chileno Valley Road.   I’m an Episcopal priest, living in a tract house in a subdivision near Casa Grande High School.  It’s funny how nothing happens the way we expect, even when our dreams partly come true.  And how, when we get to where we thought we are going, we find it’s not the place we thought we’d find.  

These experiences, the expectation that turns up the unexpected, and the  journey to a destination you don’t really know, appear in the scripture readings this morning as images of the life of faith.  Jesus tells his disciples to be always on the alert, always ready for action, because the thing you’re waiting for is going to come when you least expect it.  And the author of the letter to the Hebrews holds up the example of Abraham, who wandered off in search of a land he’d never seen, following a promise to a place he’d never really call his own.

Both of these examples are about receiving a gift from God.  It is a gift that is gratuitous, that depends solely on God’s will to give, but it also depends on human faith; it is our willingness to receive the gift that makes all the difference.  It is the gift that makes faith possible, and it is the faith that makes the gift real.  For Abraham the gift is the promise of a homeland, and of descendants “as many as the stars of heaven and the grains of sand on the seashore,” but its his faith that sets his feet on the road.  

The faith that Jesus commends to his disciples is also founded on God’s gift—“Do not be afraid, little flock,” he says, “for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom.”  But this kingdom is not a place on the earth, it’s not a homeland you can journey to.  It’s a kingdom that comes upon us, that catches us by surprise.  Jesus’ teaching career begins with his appearance, as if from nowhere, announcing that “the Kingdom of God has come near.”  His parables point to the unexpected signs of the kingdom in everyday happenings and ordinary things.   And today we hear the surprising news that this kingdom is given to us, and that having it, we have nothing to fear.  God’s good pleasure to give us the kingdom is the promise of a treasure more worthwhile than the things we thought were valuable, an invisible treasure nothing on earth can take away.  

These words rang true for the disciples of Jesus because he said them.  And that was perhaps the most surprising thing of all.  All their lives they had heard about the power and the goodness of God.  All their lives they had heard about the Spirit of God that anointed the prophets, putting words of truth in their mouths and power to heal in their hands.  All their lives they had heard how God had promised a homeland to his people, a place where they could dwell in safety and plenty, where he himself would be their shepherd and their righteous king.   

And they may have believed in the old stories; they may have hoped and prayed fervently for such things to be revealed in their own day.  But they probably didn’t expect that they actually would.  They didn’t expect that they would have first-hand experience of the presence of God and the power of the Spirit.  They didn’t expect to be called irresistibly away from their homes and their former occupations to be sent wandering through the towns and the villages on a mission to heal and forgive.  They didn’t expect to find that when they did, they did not go hungry, but their needs were all supplied.  The disciples of Jesus didn’t expect to see lives transformed, the broken fragments of society made whole, or to see and to know, in a land seething with violence and oppression, the peace and justice of the Kingdom of God.  And they certainly didn’t expect that all this could flow from one person, a person like them, a carpenter from Nazareth in Galilee. 

When I had my dream of a little place in the country, it was, at the most basic level, a dream of peace.  It was a dream of building a private little homeland, where I could be safe.  Surrounded by people I know and trust, and supplying my own needs, I could live in minimal dependence on the world of stock market bubbles and nuclear meltdowns, Mexican drug gangs and government surveillance.  But instead I ended up here, with all of you, squarely planted in the middle of that world.   I ended up giving my life, not to building myself a separate little homeland of safety and peace, but to our shared project of showing the turbulent world the kingdom that God is building there. 

My job here may look at times like it’s about building up our institution, so it’s stable and secure.  But my real work is to take risks, to encourage us all to take the risks, of receiving the gift of God that is Jesus Christ.  It’s a gift that we receive on behalf of the whole world, and that is a risky proposition, because it’s a gift the world isn’t sure it wants to have.  We’re not so sure we want it ourselves, when hear things like, “sell your possessions, and give alms.”   This is not the charter for our Rummage Sale, but words that put us at risk, the risk of admitting that all we can really count on is our relationships, and no one is a stranger in the kingdom.  

The world remains deeply ambivalent about such words, unsure whether Jesus is the master of the house or a thief come to break in and steal the things we prize.  That is why it is mostly content to leave him where it saw him last, hanging on the cross.  But we persist in praying for the kingdom that is still to come.  We insist on acting as if Jesus has a future.  And that means staying awake, of being alert and on the lookout for the unexpected.  It means remaining hopeful, not just of finding our own private homeland of safety and peace, but of meeting a person, the truly human being.  He may come at midnight, or just before dawn, like the master of the house returning from a wedding feast, or like a thief coming to break in, but either way, the point is to be ready, because we won’t want to miss him when he comes.