I preached this sermon at St. Lydia's on Sunday, March 11, as part of our exploration of the Gospel of John. The text is John 14:1-7; read it here.
After Jesus kneels in front of the disciples and washes their feet,
after he shows them how he loves them,
he tells them that he’s going to die.
And there are those two words again,
the ones that keep coming up in this gospel:
love and death,
together at one table,
held together by Jesus.
After he kneels in front of them and washes their feet,
he says,
Where I am going, you cannot come.
I’m leaving.
That’s what it amounts to.
I’m leaving.
They are words that perhaps each of us have heard
and each of us have said,
in different contexts throughout our lives.
It feels like something’s tearing, doesn’t it,
when someone leaves?
Like a piece of fabric being rent,
however needed or deserved the leaving is.
It doesn’t happen all at once, either.
There’s the saying you’re leaving,
the talking about leaving,
the in-between time of not quite leaving.
You can leave someone for years.
Or you can leave in a moment.
I left a partner of three years once.
It happened more suddenly than either of us was prepared for,
in a busy square on a city street,
and after we had both cried more than either of us prefer to in public,
we discovered we were both incredibly hungry.
So ended up at...Chipotle.
Because we both liked Chipotle,
and there was one there.
Your life is in the midst of being rent wide open,
and you’re ordering a burrito bowl with white rice and chicken.
with a man who, just a few minutes ago,
was your boyfriend.
And now is suddenly not.
There’s that feeling of wondering if you’re still allowed to hold hands.
It feels like the whole world has suddenly shifted.
It felt that way for the disciples,
who had been hanging onto Jesus’ every word.
And most of those words were about how Jesus was with them.
He told them that he is the good shepherd
there to tend to them, the sheep.
He told them that he was the light of the world
there to shine in the darkness,
that they might follow him.
And then he tells them that they will betray him.
And then he tells them that he’s going away.
And the world suddenly shifts.
Tears apart.
He has a lot that he needs to tell them
about what’s about to happen
in the following days.
And he begins with these words of comfort.
Do not let your hearts be troubled.
In my Father’s house,
there are many dwelling places.
I am going ahead, to prepare for a place for you.
You know the way to the place where I am going.
But their hearts are troubled.
And ours are too.
What are we to make of a Jesus who disappears on us?
I spend a lot of time standing up here
talking about Christ’s presence
in the bread when its broken,
here in our midst at this table.
But how can we speak of Christ’s presence
and fail to speak of Christ’s absence.
What does it mean that he leaves us?
How are we to understand the rending,
the tear,
the separation,
the moments of distance.
How are we to understand,
I’m leaving?
There’s a pop theology that’s common in relationship to this text.
Commentator Jamie Clark Soles refers to it as the “cots in heaven” concept.
The idea that, “when we die, our souls are immediately whisked to heaven
to a mansion of some sort where our personal cot is waiting
and where we FINALLY get to encounter God intimately after spending a lifetime of ‘seeing through a glass darkly.’”
“That would be a great sermon,” she tells us,
“if Paul had written John, but he didn't.”
John is a gospel of the here and now.
A gospel that is imbued with the notion
that we don’t have to wait to
“achieve full intimacy with God,”
but can be fully know by God,
right here, in this very moment.
So even as Jesus is telling us
I’ve got to go,
and telling us that he is preparing a place for us,
he’s also telling us
that we already know the way to the place that he’s going.
He’s also telling us
that everything we need to know him, to know God,
is right here, in this moment.
Here, and now.
And he has to go.
Right here, in this moment.
Here, and now.
The story that we tell each week
is a story of a God who is,
at once,
among us
and leaving.
Who is, at once,
dead
and living.
The story that we tell each week
is a story of a God who is
here
and gone.
That this dwelling place in God’s house,
this room in heaven
that has been prepared for us...
...we imagine it waiting for us, our name on the door...
we are already there.
We are standing there right now, in this moment.
In the here and now.
Perhaps that is why this life,
this process,
the struggle of faith
makes us feel as if we are tearing apart.
That the whole world has shifted,
and yet we’re standing in line at Chipotle,
ordering a burrito bowl with white rice and black beans.
Wondering if we can still hold hands.
My impulse is to say that
all of it,
all of it, is sacred.
The glimpses of Jesus that we encounter,
and the times of profound absence:
all of it is sacred, and all of it is faith.
And I say this, not to make myself feel better about doubt,
but because it’s the story that we tell,
every week.
And it wouldn’t be the same story
if he didn’t leave.
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