Easter 5
May 7, 2023
I don’t know what you were talking about this week, but I overheard
conversation about King Charles III, freshly crowned yesterday. The topic was
not the coronation ceremony, which was opulent, extravagant, and included more
fancy hats than the Kentucky Derby. No, there was curiosity about where the
King would reside.
Buckingham Palace is the official royal home in London. It’s
a modest residence of 829,000 square feet and has 775 rooms. Sadly, it’s going
to be renovated for the next three or four years, so the King and his bride
need another place to live.
Fortunately, he has some options. There’s Balmoral Castle,
up north in Scotland. That’s a family house which he inherited when his mother
passed. When Charles visits there, he becomes a temporary Presbyterian. The
house is smaller, but there are 150 other buildings on the 50,000-acre estate.
Lot of room if he chooses to go.
There’s also the Windsor Castle, a favorite residence of his
mother, the Queen. Or there’s the Holyrood house in Edinburgh, the Highgrove House
in Gloucestershire, among others. In all, King Charles now owns seven palaces,
ten castles, twelve homes, and 56 cottages. And I’ll bet he has enough money to
afford a night in any Holiday Inn he desires. Frankly, I don’t care.
Yet when Jesus says his Father has a big house, I lean
forward. Why? Because he promises a place there for you and me. It’s an
extraordinary promise. For many of us, it was fueled by the King James Version
of that verse, “In my Father’s house are many mansions.”
Wow, just imagine that! If it is God’s house, it must be a
magnificent house. Extravagant, opulent. Marble staircases inside, sidewalks of
gold outside. It must be enormous, if as the King James Bible said, it’s going to
contain many mansions within.
That word “mansion” has sparked a lot of wishful thinking, especially
for those who live in a shack down here. How many sermons have preached heaven as
a reward? You can hear them now: “Life may be difficult this time around, but
when we get to heaven, it will be magnificent. You may be poor, needy, or sick,
but after you die, welcome to Downton Abbey.”
This hope has fueled all kinds of Gospel songs. Here is one song from the 1880’s:
A mansion is waiting in glory, My Savior has gone to prepare;
The ransomed who shine in its beauty, will dwell in that city so fair.
Oh, home above, I’m going to dwell in that home;
Oh, home of love, get ready, poor sinner, and come.[1]
Yet imagine the dismay when the National Council of Churches
commissioned a new Bible translation in 1952. The Revised Standard Version
rendered the verse differently. Instead of offering many mansions, the RSV
promised “many rooms.” In my Father’s house, there are many rooms. That makes
more logistical sense. A house has a lot of rooms. In an ecumenical age, there
can be a Presbyterian room, a Roman Catholic room, a Baptist room, and as many
rooms as God will provide.
For some believers, this had to be a letdown. Just imagine
some poor soul inquiring at St. Peter’s gate, “Where is my mansion?” And Peter
replies, “Sorry, pal, all you get is a room.” The reservation has been downgraded.
Oh, it’s still a luxury resort: the food is fine, the weather is magnificent,
and every golf swing makes a hole in one. And it is God’s house. It must be
better than our houses. The hope is still there.
And yet, did you hear how the verse was translated today?
“In my Father’s house, there are many dwelling places.” Dwelling places – that’s
how the 1990 New Revised Standard Version renders the text. “Many dwelling
places.” Where does that come from? Where indeed?
Here’s the answer. It comes from the rest of the Gospel of
John. If you read the book, John is always talking about dwelling places.
It’s there as early as chapter one. Two of John the
Baptist’s disciples see Jesus. They ask, “Rabbi, where is your dwelling place?”
He invited them to come and see, so they went to his dwelling place and there
they dwelt with him (1:38-39). It is the same terminology as our text.
And it emerges from a central theme in the Gospel of John.
In the opening paragraphs of the book, the Gospel writer says Jesus didn’t stay
far off in heaven. No, he came down here. Quite literally it says the Word of
God “pitched his tent among us.” His dwelling place is right here. That is the
great truth of John’s Gospel – the incarnation, the Son of God
dwelling with us.
When the word translated as “dwelling place” becomes a verb,
it becomes one of John’s favorite verbs. He uses it no less than 41 times. To
dwell means to abide or stay or remain. So, Jesus looks at his disciples on
their last night together, and says, “I am the Vine, you are the branches. Stay
with me and I will stay with you (15:4-7).” It’s the same word. Stay with me,
dwell with me, remain with me.
You may notice that Jesus is not deferring a promise until
we die. He is making an invitation here and now, a present-tense offer to live
with him, and for him to live with us. What Jesus offers is not a reward but a
relationship. He is not pitching an imaginary castle on a cloud. Rather he
invites us to a continuing friendship as One who loves us.
There is a dwelling place because Jesus goes to prepare it
for us. The words we hear today are Last Supper words. In that context,
his “going” means his going to the cross. His “coming again” is his return after
the resurrection. He goes to prepare for us, and returns to claim us as his
own. His cross and resurrection are the Way he welcomes us to share his
life.
Does this mean we don’t get a castle after we die? I can’t
say; answering that question is way above my pay grade. What I hear Jesus
promise is what the scriptures have promised to us elsewhere. Like the last
line of the beloved 23rd Psalm: “I shall dwell in the house of the Lord
forever.” His promise, his invitation, is to live with God.
Now, when I heard that verse as a child, I groaned. “Dwell
in the house of the Lord forever”? My parents were among the last to leave
coffee hour on Sunday mornings. I never thought I would get out of that church.
It seemed I would dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
What further study revealed is that is the Jewish way of
describing the relationship between the Eternal God and God’s people. It doesn’t
mean you will be crazy-glued to a pew and stuck there forever. No, no, it is a
way to speak of living in “the Way” of God, elsewhere described as a “walk.”
Walking in God’s Way is the way we live. God’s life becomes our life. All other
distractions fall away as we dwell in this truth.
For the Gospel of John, the central invitation of Easter
truth is dwelling with Jesus. He goes to the cross to prepare a dwelling place
for us. He comes back, back from the grave, alive to invite us into his life. If
we dwell with him here and now, we live with him forever. Life goes on,
eternally with Jesus. We live with Jesus - who came from God to live with us.
The promise begins now and continues even when this life concludes.
So how do we do this? How do we make our dwelling place with
Christ? Not later, but now? How do we walk in the Way, receive the Truth, and
live the life? The answer is not complicated. He has already given us three
clues.
The first thing we do is listen to
him. We listen. We pray to screen out all competing voices, and we listen.
Today his opening word is, “Let not your hearts be troubled. Trust in God, trust
in me.” This is where abiding begins. We listen to him. His Word gives us the
freedom to look over the shoulder of all our pressing concerns.
Worry and fretting are natural human reactions to trouble, but God has befriended us in Jesus. As real as our worries may be, we hand them over to the God who is greater than ourselves. Trust is a matter of the heart. Trust can inform the mind and direct the will. So we listen, and we trust.
There’s something else we can do, something more than listen. We can dwell. We can inhabit his words. We must stay where we are. There is a profound spiritual lesson, in an American culture that tempts us to flit around and never sink our roots into a single place. What if we were to inhabit the “dwelling place” Christ offers and truly sink into his words?
We might find that, rather than be confined, we are deepened. I like what Henry David Thoreau wrote about sinking into his hometown: “I have traveled widely in Concord.” Abiding there meant paying attention there. He noticed what he previously had missed. Imagine sinking into the words of Jesus, savoring a phrase at a time, chewing on each metaphor, receiving the wisdom. As we dwell in his words, we discover what the speeding tourist will never see.
One thing more: we live the life. We welcome the living Word of Christ, let it dwell in us. Then we get on with living. There are friends to love, enemies to forgive, bread to bake, music to create, lawns to mow, e-mails to answer, a forest to enjoy. Next week, we have mothers to remember and cherish.
I like the story the late Eugene Peterson told about his grandson. A preacher and a scholar, Peterson was highly regarded as a spiritual writer and Bible translator. His young grandson would visit and ask, “What are you doing, Grandpa?” He would tell him, and the boy would tootle off. After a while, the grandson returned with a baseball and glove, and said, “Come on, Grandpa. No more God-talk.”
They would go outside and play catch. Or go kayaking. Or go for a long walk. Or watch the bald eagles and the rough-legged hawks. No more God-talk. Let’s get on with living.
This invitation lingers for you and me. We can let our hearts be troubled, or we can trust God who comes before, dwells in, and follows after, all things. We dream for an escape from the troubles of this world, or we can welcome the One in our midst who still speaks in the power of his Word. We can jump around from place to place, looking for something, somewhere, that can give us peace, hope, and joy. Or we can sink our roots into Christ and find our home.
For as Jesus declares, “Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them. And we will come to them and make our home with them.” (John 14:23)
Easter reveals this promise. We don’t have to wait until the afterlife to dwell with Christ. Jesus Christ is our true Home. We abide in him, with him, forever. Can you trust that?
[1] “A Mansion is Waiting in Glory,”
D. S. Warner. https://hymnary.org/text/a_mansion_is_waiting_in_glory
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