Not for Funerals Only

5 Easter a         May 18, 2014

Acts 17:1-15       Ps. 66: 1-8  

1 Peter 2:1-10     John 14:1-14   

 Lectionary Link           

  We have read today something of a farewell discourse of Jesus from John’s Gospel.  Do you know perhaps the most common liturgical setting for this Gospel reading?

  If you’ve been to memorial services, requiems or funerals, this Gospel lesson is often the Gospel of choice for the celebration and thanksgiving of the life of a faithful departed loved one.

  The liturgical use of this Gospel reading, I fear, has fixed its meaning to death or the event of death and departure.  And the liturgical use of this Gospel has so fixed the meaning of this Gospel with the event of the death and departure of Jesus and our faithful departed, we perhaps have been given a habit of misreading this Gospel.  Or we have established a habit of  limiting the meaning of these Gospel words.

  I would suggest for today, that these words involve the Gospel writer throwing of the voice, like a ventriloquist into the narrative figure of Jesus in order to teach the community of John another one of the many metaphors of spiritual transformation which are a part of the Gospel of John.  This Gospel is chock block full of metaphors of transformations to represent the state of living in this world in a much altered state of being because of one’s relationship to God through Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.

  How many metaphors does the writer of John use?  Born again, born from above, Living Bread, Bread of Life, Living Water, Truth, Life, Light of the World, One with the Father,  The Way, Lamb of God, Good Shepherd, the Gate, the Vine, One with the Father, The Resurrection, The Word from the Beginning and more.  To be indelicate as I often am, John’s Gospel gives us a presentation of metaphors on steroids.

  And today I mean to free our Gospel lesson from it being limited to use at funerals and burials and memorial service.  Our reading presents profound metaphors representing the experience of one who has such an enhanced relationship with the sublime God that it needs to be shared as a possible invitation for every human person to know as well.

  Being a lower middle class person with aspirations for the socio-economic higher mobility, I always preferred the King James Version of this passage.  “In my Father’s House there are many mansions.”  Those subsequent egalitarian translators have shattered my hopes by evicting me to a seeming lower rent district with a different translation:  “In my Father’s House there are many dwelling places.”  Mansions or dwelling places?  Which would you choose?

  I think that the King James Version with the word “mansions” is what caused this passage to be so associated with the afterlife.  Of course heaven for English citizenry would involve mansions to go along with the streets of gold.

  As much as we love the imaginations of mansions and streets of gold to envision the afterlife, I actually believe that “dwelling places” is truer to the themes of the writer of John.  And this reference has a credible reference to a very this worldly state of being in relationship with God rather than referring to the imaginations of the afterlife.

  In my Father house are many dwelling places.  And where is the most obvious dwelling place of the Father on earth?  In the same passage we find that Jesus and the Father are One.  So Jesus is the most obvious dwelling place of the Father on earth.  This is consistent with the “body as God’s Temple, Body as Temple of the Holy Spirit” theology of the early Christian community.  Forget about the mansions in heaven, as Disneyesque as that might be in its appeal; the Father’s dwelling place is within you and me.  The words of Jesus might be read as “I go to because I have prepared you be a dwelling place of the Father.  Your being is made ready to be a room of dwelling for God as Father and Holy Spirit.”

  And this is not other worldly, it is very much here and now in this world.  As we know our bodies to be a location and dwelling place for God, we let our lives be expressive of the state of a transformed life touched by and in touch with the sublime presence, so magnificence we only humbly confess, “O, my God.”

  You and I, as dwelling places for God; this is a meaning which I would like for us to embrace as Gospel for us today.

  The second meaning that I would like for us to share today is the continual presentation in the Gospel of John of Jesus and the Father being one.  Jesus is a totally father-ized being.  It sounds a bit too patriarchal in our age of sensitivity about something we all know, namely, that Mother too is formidable in nurturing formation as well.

  What are some possible meanings of this notion of Jesus being a radically Father-ized being?  One of the insights which we have received from the psychoanalytic tradition is that the holy family of “mommy, daddy and me” is quite formidable in one’s psycho-social formation as a person, even to the point of making us feel as though we have been over-determined by mom and dad.  For most people, in their twenties or thirties, they have to grapple with the praise-worthy or blame-worthy sense of having been over-determined by mom or dad.

  Becoming a God-Father-ized person, a God-Motherized person,  a God-Parent-ized person means that one plumbs an underneath depth of being to be open to fresh and new determinations in one’s life such that one gains a freedom from mom and dad without being too critical of one’s parents and even forgiving of all figures in one’s life who one once held personally responsible for not being perfect to one’s need.

  To know one’s deepest parent aspect of personhood dwelling in one’s holiest center of being is to know the freedom, the peace and the joy of a new kind of creative freedom in one’s life.  It is an experience and an initiation into a state of being which can only be called transformational.

  The writer of the Gospel of John indicates that  Jesus is not calling us to mansions in the sweet bye and bye; the writer of John is calling us to a transformational state of being where one can feel indwelled by a Higher Determining Power.  And this is a heavenly state that can be known before death.

  So next time you hear this Gospel read at a memorial service, remember it is not for the sweet bye and bye, rather it is for a transformational state of being in the here and now.  Why? Because our bodies can be known as God’s dwelling and as such we can access a different kind of determining power, which can rightly be called a new Parent, a divine Parent who has become the new factor in our lives.  Amen.