Text: John 14:1-14
The verses that we heard today, so familiar to us from their frequent use at funerals and at cemeteries, contain another one of those verses that cause modern, thoughtful Christians—exposed to other world religions, and to biographies of transformative people in history like Gandhi, or the Dali Lama— to stumble over: words like verse 6 in Chapter 14: “no one comes to the father except through me.” I promise that later this summer I’ll try to address this issue of Christian exclusivity in a sermon or two. Today, I don’t want us to get sidetracked on such concerns.
We are in the season of Easter. John was writing to a post-Easter community trying to learn how to live without Jesus, and which was experiencing the terrible rift between the religious community out of which they had developed and the new communities centered around Jesus. In the midst of that terrible controversy and schism, some in the community found it helpful to articulate a very high Christology. So John is the Gospel where the worship of Jesus as divine begins.
John’s audience was not only dealing with conflict and alienation within their religious communities, but facing increasing possibilities of persecution from the secular powers as well. The fear of isolation and death must have been the dominant emotions of the audience for whom the 4th Gospel was written.
It is no wonder, then, that we read this passage at the graveside. The promise of eternal life, and God’s expansive hospitality for us in this life and beyond our deaths does help in times of awful grief. But I’m inclined to think that apart from those moments of fear about our own mortality—most of which we shrug off—and those times of gut-wrenching grief at the death of one we love—that we don’t hear or even want to hear what this passage is really saying to us.
John ‘s Jesus says to the community: don’t be anxious about these matters. Believe in God, Jesus says, and also in me. Credo: Give your heart to me and get on with it—get on with following me on the way that I live, molding your life like the life I have lived, and believing that in my teachings and my way and my life there is truth about how you should live, and what you are called to do.
Unlike Harold Camping and his group that convinced too many people, even if the majority of us saw it as a wonderful time for jokes– that the end of the world would happen yesterday, I think John is saying to Harold Camping’s believers, to us, and to his own community long ago: You are wasting your energy, your passions, your talents, your humanity. Get on with it, he says. Do not be anxious about end times. Do the works that I do, he says.
Well over 60 years ago a man named J.B. Phillips wrote a book called Your God Is Too Small. It was a good book, making the often forgotten point that God is not only our God but the God of every one well…not a god of the few or of the many, but the God of all.
Lately, I think too many Christians have the opposite problem: they make their God too big, and assume that God is going to take care of all their problems, that God will protect them from all evils if they are just good enough, if they just pray hard enough. A god too big, you see, allows us to be passive, to have no responsibility, and to be SO big and SO omnipotent, omniscient, omni everything—that whether we accept this God or not hardly matters.
I remember some marvelous lines from one of Bill Coffin’s Lenten sermons: “Maybe we want to think of God as powerful so that we can be like God, feeling as we so often do that only power impresses, only success succeeds. So we dehumanize ourselves by idolizing power, thereby making it necessary for God to come to earth in human form, to take our inhumanity upon [God self] in order to make us human again. Or maybe,” he went on, “we like to think of God as powerful so that we can be weak, whereas God wants to be weak so that we can be strong. Or maybe we want to keep God up there in the heavens where we can praise [God], far away from where we might have to follow him.” [Coffin, Wm. S. “Your God Is Too Big”, April 5, 1981. The Collected Sermons of William Sloane Coffin, Vol 1, p. 418]
It never ceases to amaze me how so many people who profess that Jesus has taken away their sins, also seem to have given their minds away as well. I know people, as I’m sure you do as well, who feel they must believe that every word of the Bible is factually, scientifically, historically true. I have neighbors who do believe that the world was created only 4000 years ago, and that dinosaurs roamed the earth with people. They say: “My God is an awesome God, and could make all those fossils just to test our faith.” Huh? My God is an awesome God too and gave me and all of us minds and expects us to use them, and not abdicate their use to a God who will relieve of us of all our problems.
Jesus says to his followers in the context of complexity, of threat, of difficulty: “Look, don’t be anxious about all this.” The exhortation is “believe in God, believe in me also.” Give me your heart. Give God—that holiness that abides at the core of all that is—your heart, and work to see it expand. Make eternal life—the fourth Gospel’s substitute for the Kingdom of God as Luke and Mark call the central theme of Jesus’ preaching, or the Kingdom of Heaven, as Matthew puts it because he is unwilling to casually use God’s holy name—something that dwells in your midst. The leap of faith is rarely a leap of thought, the abdication of doubts into certainty, but is the leap into action.
Thus, John concludes these words of comfort by Jesus to his followers with an exhortation to get on with doing the works that he has been doing: feeding the hungry; healing the sick; opening the eyes of those who are blind; teaching, welcoming any person who is seeking the way to wholeness. Greater works than these, he says, you will do.
Most of the time we do not believe that. We believe the world is as it is, that we can do little to bring about world peace, or to feed the hungry; or heal the sick. Our faith belies God’s faith in us, and is blasphemy of the worst sort. Because we can’t do it all, or accomplish the whole thing, we don’t try to do anything. There’s an song that is kind of sappy, but sappiness is often truth at its best: “it only takes a spark to get a fire going.” The world, our world—here in Woodford County, in Kentucky, in the U.S. of A.—needs sparks to start fires so that children don’t have to go without ever seeing a doctor or a dentist. We need a fire of outrage that, as Lynn Luallen told me the other day, we have more children in Kentucky on Medicaid than we have enrolled in school. We need library workers and prison workers who help adults who are illiterate learn how to read, critically important in our Commonwealth where at least 40% of our adult population cannot read at even a 4th grade level. We have people who never have a regular visitor who need a friend. We have middle aged folks who have lost their jobs who need encouragement and contacts, too, so that they don’t give up hope. We need voices to speak up that unregulated greed in our financial market place, is destroying the fabric of opportunity, and who are willing to call their senators and representatives at state and national levels, to do something about the outrageous usury practices of the payday lending institutions. We need people to volunteer at schools; mentors for young people who are struggling. The earth itself needs advocates and people who see that food production and eating are ethical and moral matters. And God knows, we need more beauty in this world and less trash.
If there are authentic words of Jesus in this passage, it is likely that they are these words: “Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these.” Mark, a gospel written far closer to the time of Jesus’ life and death, reports that Jesus told his followers; “Have faith in God. Truly I tell you, if you say to this mountain, ‘be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and if you do not doubt in your heart, but believe that what you say will come to pass, it will be done for you. So I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.”
Greater works than these, he said. The pre-Easter disciples and the post-Easter community might have needed a little comfort; but most importantly, Jesus saw that they needed to be galvanized. They—and we don’t need the leap of faith so much as the leap of action. That handful of followers of the one who showed in his living the way, the truth, and the life turned the world upside down. Jesus says we can do the same. So what are you doing these days to turn the world God-side up?
