Where God Dwells

John 14:15-21

May 25, 2014

Where God Dwells. With apologies to Billy Jonas, who years ago wrote a fun song entitled “God Is In,” which actually was not at all on my conscious mind when I jotted these lines:

God is in the vastness of these clear skies.

God is in the deep beauty of my beloved’s eyes.

God is in the splendor of this day.

God is in the farmer gathering in the hay.

God is in the iPod, sorting through the songs

God is in the city streets suffering through the wrongs

That’s about all I’ve got when it comes to this mystical, cryptic passage from John’s gospel. I’ve long thought of this as the goo goo ga joob stage of the gospels. You know: “I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together. Goo goo ga joob.”

As least John Lennon and the Beatles had acid as an excuse for such lyrics. I’m not sure what excuse John of the gospels had.

OK. I mock, because I love. Actually, I really do love John’s gospel. It is richly metaphoric, deeply mystical, and manages a high-wire walk along the borders of Greek and Hebrew thought.

It’s worth noting, also, the particular context for the passage we’ve just read, and, more generally, what we have in this gospel of John. Our reading this morning is set in the midst of the lengthy “farewell discourse” that Jesus delivers – uniquely in John’s gospel – at the Last Supper. Thus, the narrative context is a long soliloquy meant to reassure a small community facing an existential crisis: they are about to lose their beloved leader.

The community to whom the author of John most likely wrote faced a similar crisis: they had been tossed out of the synagogue for proclaiming Jesus as messiah and lord.

While there remains disagreement among Biblical scholars on much about John, I am persuaded that the best dating for the writing of this gospel is somewhere in the last decade or so of the first century of the common era.

Think about that for just a moment: these words of scripture were written down at least a half century after the events about which they speak – a half century with no photography, no recordings, no journalism, no history. As we celebrate our 90^th birthday here at CPC this spring, it’s as if Jesus were born about the time this congregation was founded, and died during the time Peg True described a few weeks ago – the 1950s. Peg has a fantastic memory of those days, but I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that she probably doesn’t recall word-for-word much that was said here 50 years ago! It’s best not to hold her accountable to that.

Similarly, it’s best to read John not as history recalled, much less as news reported. Rather, the gospel is memory theologized, and, this is crucial, theologized for a particular community.

The brilliance of the gospels lies in their indisputable power to continue to speak profoundly to communities 2,000 years on. While that is, indeed, remarkable when you consider how unimaginably different our time is from theirs, the staying power of the gospels reminds us of the universality of some aspects of the human condition.

It seems that in all times and all places, people love each other, people struggle, people fight, people get scared, people seek after that which is holy, and while the only constant may be change, the fear of change is pretty close to constant across time and culture, as well.

John speaks to all of that, and while he does so to and for a particular community at a particular moment in its history, his words carry powerful truths across the centuries to other communities and other moments.

I love this passage, in particular, because it spoke powerfully to my father and thus always reminds me of him. It was among his favorites, and more than once he read it to me to explain how the triangle in the logo of the YMCA symbolized the Trinity, and, more to the point, how this passage from John was foundational for the theology of the Y. Given that dad credited the Y with saving his life as a young man, and given that it also shaped his education and the first half of his working life, you can understand a bit of why this passage was so important to him. It spoke across time to a young man in southeast Tennessee.

My dad found God at the YMCA. Personally, I found basketball at the Y, and there’s nothing wrong with that, but I’ve had to look elsewhere to discern the Spirit’s moving in my own life.

In John’s mystical words, Jesus promises that the Spirit will dwell among us all, so it shouldn’t surprise me that my dad discerned God at the Y. It certainly doesn’t surprise me that my kids have described discerning the presence of God in the woods of summer camp. Just as it never surprises me to hear people say they sense the Divine presence at the edge of the ocean or on the mountaintop.

Still, I wonder about the notion that something of Christ dwells within me and, in principle, within anyone else I encounter along the way. I get it that we might discern the spark of the divine in the eyes of the beloved or in the beauty of nature, but two questions still come quickly to my mind:

First, why do I have such a hard time discerning the presence of Christ within some folks?

Second, how hard do they have to search and dig and unpack, to discern that presence in me?

Some of us, sometimes, seem to do our very best to cover up that which is of Christ that dwells within us. Which might just be another way of saying that, sometimes, we’re just jerks.

All of which leaves me marveling at and wondering about those unexpected times when we discern that which is of Christ in people we really don’t expect to be vessels of the divine presence.

Has that ever happened to you? Have you ever confronted the Holy in a wholly unexpected person?

* * * * *

I’ve shared this story before, but it’s one that continues to resonate with me as a reminder about checking my own assumptions. We have a neighbor on our block who, back when we first moved in, owned a big boat which he regularly parked on a trailer in front of his house. If you’ve been to our house, you know the street is pretty narrow, and a big boat is well, like a boat. In fact, for the first year or so that we lived there, we called the neighbor, who is a rather large man, “boatman” with about exactly as much love in our hearts as you’d guess.

Then one afternoon I was getting out of our car, and the neighbor hollers across the street to me, “hey, y’all have a couple of dogs, don’t you?”

My immediate thought was – “oh crap, what have my dogs done that’s got the neighbor bent out of joint.”

So I said, “uh, yeah?”

He proceeded to tell me that his dog had just been diagnosed with a kidney ailment and could no longer eat dog biscuits. He had a couple of big bags and wondered if we’d like them.

Shortly after that, he knocked on our door one morning. I answered, and he said, “you’re a preacher, right?”

Too often, when people outside of church ask such a question it’s prelude to an argument that I don’t usually want to have – especially not on my front porch. Still seeing “boatman” more than the light of Christ, I responded with a hesitant, “uh, yeah?”

Then he told me about his dying father, who was Roman Catholic, and though our neighbor is not a practicing Catholic he wondered if I might know a priest who would visit his father in the hospital.

“On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you.” No matter who you are. The difficult colleague? The homeless guy? The classmate who cheats off your test? The absent parent? The neighbor who parks his boat in the street? The political opponent? The one we call ‘enemy.’?

That which is of Christ dwells within that one, each one. The Advocate? The Holy Spirit that Jesus promises in this passage? The movement of the Spirit in our midst is that which enables us to see the light of Christ in the other. The Spirit is what enabled me, finally, to see past “boatman” and see my neighbor.

Yes, God is in the beauty of my beloved’s eyes. And also in the neighbor, who will never be a close friend … but who will always be a beloved child of God. May the spirit of the living God give me eyes to see the presence of the Divine dwelling every child of God. Amen.

Draw the Circle Wide

Acts 2:42-47

May 18, 2014

It is good to stand before you again after almost a month since I last preached. I can barely remember the last time – and I’m reasonably confident that you can barely remember it either (though if you're reading this on the blog you can click back for a reminder if you like.)

That is the lot of preaching – most of what we say is quickly forgotten. That’s alright, because it has always been true that Christian practice matters far more than Christian proclamation.

At its best, our proclamation, our preaching, is about describing the circle of faith that we define with our actions and within which we live our lives, and it points us toward the God in the center of that circle.

The passage from Acts reflects this pattern.

The book of Acts opens, famously, with the surviving followers of Jesus huddled in a terrified little group, hiding out in an upper room, no doubt still grieving but, mostly, just hoping they don’t wind up next in line for a cross of their own.

All of sudden, a mighty wind blows through the room – the lively spirit of the living God – and then Peter, filled with the wind and fire of the holy, preaches. His proclamation, so says Acts, inspired 3,000 people to join the movement.

Talk about a church-growth tactic!

But hold on a second. If we’re honest with this text we must acknowledge that there’s no mention at all of “the church.” Indeed, nobody had even called these folks “church” at this point in the story.

No, here’s what the text actually says about them:

All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.

These folks – apparently moved by the story Peter shares – are nonetheless identifiable not by anything they say, or any belief they confess, but rather by this remarkable way of living together – as if there really is a God.

Running through my head for the past few weeks, I’ve had a piece of a Bryan Sirchio song that tells the story of a young couple who opened a childcare center and only charged people what they said they could afford to pay. Friends told the couple that was no way to run a business, and they would always respond the same way, “we’re only trying to live as if there really is a God.”

We’re only trying to live as if there really is a God.

That’s pretty much it, really. The sum total of any honest faith claim. We don’t know anything. We trust, and we live out of that trust – even – and this is the crucial part, the decisive part, the most important part – we live out of that trust even when we doubt it.

We’re only trying to live as if there really is a God.

That’s why we draw the circle wide. Because, if there really is a God, and if this God is like the God Jesus pointed us toward, than this God won’t fit neatly within a small circle.

God’s imagination is so much grander than ours, so we draw the circle wide.  God’s grace is so much grander than ours, so we draw the circle wide. God’s love is so much grander than ours, so we draw the circle wide.

Ever since I was a little boy lying on my back beneath clear blue southern skies I have wondered about the edges of the circle within which out lives play out. What lies beyond the edge of space? What occupies the mind of God? Cosmology has long fascinated me, and I am particularly drawn these days to mulitiverse theories – the idea that there may be an almost infinite number of other universes – not just solar systems or galaxies, but entire universes.

OK, it’s true that the first time I heard that articulated it was in terms of the bubbles in a glass of beer; each bubble being its own universe, and I kinda like that image.

But seriously, that’s the direction of some heavyweight minds in contemporary science. All of which leads me to conclude two things:

First, the mechanistic God of orthodox theology is utterly inadequate to the grandeur of contemporary cosmologies.

Second, because I have a preference for living in a universe with God, therefor I need to broaden and deepen the ways I think about God.

Before bringing this to a way-too-early ending – which is certainly not to say, a conclusion – I want to say a brief word about “preference.” This is the part about living as if there really is a God.

If creation is not conceived in and for love – and that’s my non-negotiable starting place for thinking about God – if that is not the case, then anything goes. That is to say, if we are not called to love by a voice beyond our own production, then no ethical, moral, political, economic, or broadly social arrangement is inherently better or worse than any other. There’s no time in a brief homily to argue this out, so I’ll leave it as a provocation supported only by a whole lot of blood, sweat and tears – OK, probably not actual blood – but a whole lot of years of studying deconstruction.

Give me any system, and a few hours to play with it, and I can deconstruct it such that it has no prior claim on my allegiance. That’s fine. It leaves me with just this thin thread to hold on to: preference.

I prefer to live in a universe with God, and I’m just trying to live as if there really is a God. Indeed, as if there is a God such as the one revealed in the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth, and in the living again of Christ.

When we draw the circle wide, we’re only trying to live as if there really is a God.

We do this drawing much better with actions than with words, and we do it much better when we remember that the church is not merely an institution, but it is also a movement in the world.

Look at those folks in Acts – they had no buildings, no membership rules, no formal budgets – none of the trappings of nonprofit institutions. But see how they loved one another, and see how that circle of love grew ever wider.

Having said all that, it’s also important to understand that the church is a movement that carries forth through history this widening circle of faith, hope and love. Yet, as nothing in recent memory shows more clearly than the Occupy movement, movements need some kind of structure of committed individuals to sustain them over time.

To my mind that is the only reason for such structures as membership. They are institutional forms that help sustain the movement of the Spirit in the world. They are important, but not decisive. Surely we should – as we have – revisit and reform them regularly so that the institutional structures serve the movement and the people drawn into it, and not the other way around. And we should celebrate when people feel called to the service of formal membership, as we did last week with confirmands, and will again in a moment as Mike Dunn joins the congregation.

But such commitments are important only to the extent that they help us continue to draw the circle wide, to build a house of prayer for all people, to proclaim the gospel clearly for a new time, and to live it out in the world for the sake of the world.

Such commitments are important when we choose to live as if there really is a God.

I’ll close reading from the liner notes of Bryan Sirchio’s Love and Justice.

"There Really Is A God" (The Daycare Song)

(by Bryan Sirchio, Crosswinds Music, 1999)

Michelle and her husband ran a daycare
They did it for love, and not much money
Word got around, they turned no children down
Even when their parents couldn't pay
And sometimes their friends would tell them
You know you can't do business this way
Michelle and her husband would gently respond
We're just trying to live as though
There really is a God

A mother of two kids, her name was Suzanne
She dropped off her children every morning
She never once paid, and at first that was O.K.
But after a while, Michelle felt used
And then one day Suzanne and her kids just disappeared
Michelle and the daycare got ripped off
Fine thanks for living as though
There really is a God

But not long after that, Michelle was praying one night
And this picture of Suzanne just flashed into her mind
And then this thought came out of nowhere, that said
"Find out where Suzanne lives,
and take a bag of groceries to her kids"

Well at first Michelle thought "no way"
"She ripped me off - why should I be kind/"
But every time she prayed, Suzanne came to her mind
So she finally said "all right!"
And she took those groceries by
There was no one at the door
She left the groceries on the porch

A year or so later, Michelle was driving
A couple of towns away one day
When to her surprise, some children caught her eye
And sure enough, it was Suzanne's kids
Well at first Michelle was tempted
To just keep driving on
But something deep inside said, "Stop"
Things like this happen when
There really is a God

Well the kids were glad to see Michelle
They gave her great big hugs
They said, "Michelle, come see where we live now"
Suzanne was at the door, and said
Michelle I'm glad you've come
Can I get you some coffee?
Please sit down

Then she said, Michelle, I'm sorry -
I never paid your bill
And you prob'ly won't believe me,
but I promise you I will
And I'd really like to tell you why things
happened as they did
Michelle said, there's no need
But Suzanne said, let me, please

You see I was married to a very angry man
He took all I had, I took his abuse
Then he just took off;
I was evicted with two hungry kids
I had no one that I could turn to
And I'm not proud of what I'm going to tell you now
But I was so hopeless and desperate
That I pawned my wedding ring,
and I bought myself a gun
And I planned to take my life,
and the lives of both my sons

But driving back home from the pawn shop
I cried out "Hey God, if you're really there!"
I need to know now! And God, I'm not messing around
And as I pulled into the drive
There were two huge bags of groceries on my porch
And Michelle, I know you prob'ly think I'm odd
But those groceries proved to me that
There really is a God

And believing God was with her, Suzanne was not alone
She grabbed the yellow pages,
and called a church up on the phone
And she says, from that day forward,
its like I've had a brand new life
And Michelle, well,
she never mentioned who brought those groceries by

Michelle and her husband run a daycare
They do it for love and not much money
And sometimes their friends still tell them
You know, you can't do business this way
But they just smile and gently respond
We're just trying to live as though
There really is a God