In the Gospel
of John today, Jesus tells us he is going to prepare to a place for us and that
God’s house is made up of many rooms. And before that, in Acts, we heard that Stephen,
the first Deacon of the Church and its first martyr, who was being confronted
by his angry neighbors, describes a vision of Jesus coming to earth from his
throne in heaven to come get him. Saying that vision out loud was the last
straw for the otherwise respectable religious folks who seized him and picked
up stones to kill him.
The Book of Acts
tells us that the Church was growing in leaps and bounds. Stephen got into
trouble for doing "wonders and signs." He is hauled into court for
telling people about Jesus. You can read his testimony in Acts chapter 7. But
before he launches on his re-telling of the history of God and Israel and the unflattering
account of the people’s response to God, we hear that before he speaks,
"his face was like the face of an angel."
But an
angelic countenance did not save Stephen from trouble. In those days, when
someone said something outrageous, they did not drag him before John Stewart
and the internet for ridicule. Nope, in those days when someone said something
like “God requires us to change,” or “In Christ, there is no nationality or
gender or race” and so on, they did not make jokes or post snarky memes on
social media. They took him out and killed him in the most up close and personal
way possible.
Notice that Stephen’s
message of salvation through Jesus Christ was intimately tied to mercy. He
helped the Church give to widows and orphans--people who were tossed aside to
fend for themselves with no family, no identity and no hope. His vision of
Christ coming in glory was also a vision of God ready to forgive everyone, even
those who were about to kill him.
There is
another vision of heaven in today's lessons. In the Gospel of John, Jesus is
talking to his disciples, in particular Thomas and Philip, about where Jesus is
going. But he’s not talking about GPS coordinates but the way we make the
journey...and what God has in mind for us when we make it. Jesus says something
outrageous: that when we see Christ, we see God. If we want to know what God is
like, look at Jesus.
But if you
want to see what Jesus is like, look at the people who follow him. Now, if that
doesn’t leave a lump in your throat, it should. Because, well, I don’t know
about you, I’m not terribly good at this imitation of Christ thing. It’s
stumble, get up, stumble again, get up again, stumble some more and getting up
once again, all the way for me. As Saint Benedict says, “Always, we begin again.”
So it’s okay
that we aren’t there yet. We are “on the way.” That’s what some people called
early Christians… people “of the (or on the) way!” Not there yet. On the way. And where are we
going? To the place God is preparing for us. We are going to a home inside of
God's home. When Jesus says "in my father's house there are many
rooms" he is saying there is room for all of us.
Our lessons
today give two startling visions of God; and in both, it is Jesus who comes to
us, not we to him. Jesus tells us that God is making room for us. Stephen saw
that God is ready to forgive. In both lessons we learn that God is present to
us even when things are going wrong. God is bringing heaven to earth.
For a long
time, there was (and still is) a whole industry dedicated to telling us not
only that Jesus is coming again, but that we should get our reservations in for
one of those rooms in the Big Jesus Mansion in the sky. Too often, the image is
that place Jesus is preparing for us is a fancy, gilded country club in heaven,
where we’ll be waited on hand and foot by angels while Jesus will go back to
earth to knock heads and take the names of everyone outside the club. And who
are they? Well, that’s easy: it's everyone who looks different from ""us,
or loves differently, or lives in the wrong country or neighborhood, or who doesn’t
do religion "our" way! The list of who’s not in “our” Jesus Club is long -- if we choose
to go there. All we have to do is focus on our grievances and deficits to write our own little book of judgement. Of course, this kind of pop theology fixes nothing but instead blesses our worst tendencies
all while missing the whole point of why Jesus comes to us in the first place, which was
to bring God down to earth…to be God is with us.
Retired Bishop
and New Testament school, Bishop Tom Wright, described heaven this way:
… in the Bible ‘heaven’ isn’t ‘the place
where people go when [we] die.’ In the Bible heaven is God’s space while earth
(or, if you like, the ‘cosmos’ or ‘creation’) is our space. And the Bible makes
it clear that the two overlap and interlock. For the ancient Jews, the place
where this happened was the temple; for the Christians, the place where this
happened was Jesus himself, and then, astonishingly, [in] the persons of
Christians because they, too, [are] ‘temples’ of God’s own spirit.
In Christ, heaven comes to earth. God’s
space and our space meet. And as Christians, as God’s people, we are the ones
who show off God’s presence in the world. As people who are baptized into
Christ’s body, we are ones who discover and communicate God’s transforming
love.
We think of
judgement kind of like a celestial wrecking ball and power shovel, knocking
down creation on piling it in a dumpster. But God is not out to destroy an
irretrievable creation and replace it with a new, improved model. And creation
isn’t buffering while we wait for the new creation to download. No, God—who called
the cosmos ‘good’ at creation—is right now restoring humanity and creation to
what God made it to be. Instead, I think that Jesus’ preparation of a place for
us looks more like an episode of “This Old House.” Taking something ramshackle and
making into something both beautiful and useful.
As we meet
Christ in the sacramental life, as we yearn to know God more and more, as we
look for Christ in the face of the people we meet, we develop a different kind
of vision of heaven; vision that knows that in Christ God is with us, and as we
see Christ at work in us and in the world we live in, that vision that changes
us and makes a real difference in a world desperately in need of healing.
Instead of
waiting to be snatched up to heaven in a second, most believers do great things
and often unnoticed things that show us how heaven and earth intersect every
day.
Look at what
Jesus did and what we do: Jesus taught; we teach. He healed, we heal. He fed, we
feed. He transformed, we are being transformed. He challenged, we challenge. He
reached out to people beyond his own cultural, ethnic, and religious circle, we
reach out. He made faith real to people who were lost by showing them the way, and
we make faith real to people who are lost as we learn to live and walk the way,
a step at a time.
Every week,
we witness a miracle—if we choose to look. Every we see Good Neighbors make sure
hungry people all over Tampa Bay are fed through feeding programs and food
banks by gathering up food other people might throw away. It’s just as amazing
as if we took two fishes and five barely loaves and fed a multitude. In our
case, it’s sometimes cans of tomato sauce and lots of pasta.
Every week,
we witness another miracle—if we choose to look. Addicted people walk into our
building and support each other in the AA/NA meetings here as they reach and maintain their sobriety and
look to their Higher Power in the process.
We witness a
miracle—if we choose to look, in the ways you assist your partner school,Belcher Elementary in providing a safe, nurturing school and, with every lunch
partner and story read out loud, show kids that people care for them as they
are..
Every week,
in great and small ways, there are people who give themselves to prayer,
service, who visit the sick and care for the homebound, who care for the
environment, work for justice, who study and listen for God and support each
other as they transcend life’s everyday challenges and discover the
transforming love of God.
Are you an
ethical and just employer? You’re doing a great thing! Do you do your work with
integrity and faith? You are doing a great thing! Do you make the hard choices
to raise your children well? You are doing a great thing! Do you care for your
neighbor, or your sick friend, or give of your substance to forward God’s
kingdom? You are doing a great thing! Do you find ways to help people, young or
old, express themselves musically or artistically? You are doing a great thing! When you see an injustice, even as small as a person being treated badly because of their race, gender, ethnicity, their place in society, or how they dress or who they love? Your voice has done a great thing! Of course, all these things seem small. Conventional wisdom says that they are insignificant in the Grand Scheme of Things. But you know what? I think that these acts, however small, are the grand scheme of things! And taken
together they become a mighty force for good that repairs the breach, transforms creation, and shows
that Christ is alive and well and living in our community today.
The
temptation is to sit on our thumbs until Jesus returns. The implication is that we are helpless until Jesus can ride down on a cloud and straighten things out. The challenge for we people of faith is to
trust God enough to put aside the distractions and get past our hesitations so that what we all do, both great and small, demonstrates the transforming power of God in
the everyday lives of people like us. We won’t always get it right, but even
when we mess up, when we tell the truth, take responsibility, and start again,
we demonstrate how God’s transforming power works.
In the Gospel
today, we discover that Jesus’ promise is kept. We followers of Jesus are also his friends and apprentices—every one of us—and in reality, we do greater things than even he did because we are doing what Jesus does. Jesus is telling us
that we are all the useful, living signs of God’s love and power right here, right
now. If people want to know what Jesus is up to—look at the many ways that his followers
are learning and doing the work of Jesus every day.
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