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.