[Sermon preached on 22 April 2018, 3rd Sunday after Easter / 3rd year, ELCF Lectionary]
Last week Saturday I conducted a funeral. It was a bright sunny day. Mostly, when I attend a funeral the weather is gloomy, windy and cold. But over the years, I have also attended funerals of some very special people. And often at their funeral the sun was shining, and the weather was beautiful. It was almost as if God was smiling.
Well, this woman was a very special person. And the more I learnt to know about her, the more I understood why God was smiling at her. She was only 55 years old when she died of cancer. Definitely too young to die. But for 55 years, she had lived her life for a full 200%—all the time. The more I found out about her character, her skills and her dedication not only to her loved ones, but also to the poor and disadvantaged in the world, and to justice and equality, the more I stood in awe at the thought of this woman and her impact on tens of thousands of people worldwide.
And at the same time, I asked myself the same question that so many others asked: Why was she taken away from this life so early, while her task was still unfinished—when she could have spent dozens of years more in service of humanity and of God.
It is just too easy to say that we should be happy that she has gone home to be with God forever—no more tears or pain or suffering. We know that, because she has been taken away from us, others must suffer more—like the women in many African developing countries whose human rights and gender equality she promoted. As I prepared my funeral sermon, I realized how easy it is to just focus on the hereafter as the place we are heading for, and to overlook the importance of the journey we are making to get there.
There is an old Gospel song that comes to my mind every time I read Bible texts about going to heaven. I learnt it as a young kid, when good old Jim Reeves sang it on the radio. The first stanza goes like this:
This world is not my home—I'm just a-passing through
My treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue.
The angels beckon me from heaven's open door
And I can't feel at home in this world anymore.
Whoever wrote these lyrics was homesick for heaven. Now I am sure that many of us know all too well from experience what it is like to feel homesick. We have come from other parts of the world to Finland. And it may take years or even decades before we start to feel at home in this country. Or maybe we never will. Or you are a Finn and you have lived abroad for some time. You know what it feels like to be homesick.
It certainly isn’t bad to be homesick for heaven. But we must be careful not to get detached from our lives here and now as we crave for a future “beyond the blue”.
The truth is that the journey is just as important as the destination. Our life here on earth is not meaningless. We should not live our lives sighing impatiently because we still have such a long time to go before we cross the final frontier and we can start our “real life” in heaven.
My mother used to say: “I love to go to heaven, but I am not in a hurry.” She made the most of life here despite a lot of grief and loss, despite handicaps and diseases. And she managed to spend 95 meaningful years here on earth before moving on.
At my mother’s funeral we read Psalm 23: “The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want.” The same Psalm we read at the funeral last week. The next day, last Sunday, I preached about Psalm 23 in our service.
Psalm 23 is known as the Shepherd’s Psalm. David describes his experiences with God in terms of his experiences as a young shepherd of his father’s flock. But in the Psalm, God is the Shepherd, and David the sheep.
But in the second part of the Psalm, the image of the Shepherd makes place for an entirely different image: that of a Host who treats David to a fantastic banquet, his cup overflowing. It is a celebration of peace, security, and abundance. And David closes with the words:
“And I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”
It is not surprising, then, that Psalm 23 is read in so many funerals. It provides us who are left behind with comfort: One day we will be with God. There will be no more tears, except perhaps tears of joy. And we will be reunited with our loved ones forever.
Today, we read another Bible passage that is read very often in funerals: John 14. In a sense, it picks up from where David left us in the end of Psalm 23, and it echoes the same message: We will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
What Jesus says here in John 14:2–3 can be a great comfort not just for those who attend the funeral of a loved one, but also for those who face death themselves.
“My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am.”
Those words can be very comforting. But to the disciples of Jesus they were so confusing. Their hearts were troubled. They were anxious, depressed, maybe even panicking. They knew something very distressing was going to happen, but they could not put their finger on it.
They were having supper with Jesus. It was going to be their last meal together before Jesus’ death. While they ate, Jesus revealed some disturbing things to his friends. First, he told them that one of the Twelve was going to betray him and give him over to his enemies to be killed. Then he told them that he was going to be with them only a little longer. And they would not be able to go with him or follow him, when he was leaving. And when Peter protested and said that he was ready to go anywhere with Jesus and would even lay down his life for him if needed, Jesus predicted that Peter was going to disown him three times before dawn. Reason enough to be depressed, don’t you think? So, Jesus was really trying to comfort and encourage them, but they only got “confused on a higher level”. They just didn’t know what to make of Jesus’ words.
As modern Christians, looking back at what happened to Jesus after that last supper, we have patent explanations of what Jesus is saying here. We hear him saying that he will die and go to heaven to prepare a place where our souls go when we die. And he is the only way that leads to heaven.
But there is more to it than that. In order to hear what Jesus is saying to his disciples, we need to put ourselves in their sandals, to learn to hear with their ears, and to grasp with their minds. Their understanding of eternal life—of life after death—was so different than ours. And so was their understanding of heaven.
When Jesus uses the images of “my Father’s house”, what did the disciples hear him say?
We read in the Gospel of Luke that, when Jesus was twelve years old, he and his family went on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. But on the way home his parents noticed that Jesus was not travelling with the crowd. So they went back to Jerusalem and eventually found him in the temple. There he was debating with the teachers of the law. And what did he tell his parents when they scolded him?
“Why were you searching for me? Didn’t you know I had to be in my Father’s house?”
When Jews spoke about the house of God, or “the house of the Lord”—as we read in Psalm 23—they thought first of all about the temple. For them that was the place where God lived among his people, and that was where people went to celebrate him and to offer him sacrifices. And as a child, even Jesus thought and spoke that way. The temple was his Father’s house.
For the Jews, it was the sacred place where heaven and earth meet. It was the place where the spiritual world, where God and the angels dwell, touches the earth, the physical world, where we as bodily humans live. So it would be a mistake to say that the Father’s house is the same as heaven the way we as Christians often understand it: as the place where the souls of the believers in Christ go when they die.
It would make things easier if we could learn to think of the Father’s house simply as the “place” where God lives, the dwelling place of God. Thinking of it that way will help us to see where Jesus is heading here.
When Jesus grew up, he became increasingly critical about the temple and its rituals. He made it clear that God no longer lived in the temple. When Jesus came, God lived in him. He was called Immanuel—God with us. And John writes in the prologue to his Gospel:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. [— —] The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.
You see: God became flesh in Jesus Christ. In him heaven and earth met. He was the new temple that made the old temple with its sacrifices and rituals obsolete. God made his dwelling among us in Jesus. But in John 14, Jesus looks to the future to a time when he will not be with his disciples any longer, at least not in the body—a time that would come soon and that would last “almost forever”. So the question is: What did he mean to say to his disciples? How did he want to be understood?
The answer to this question has two dimensions. Why? Because the return of Jesus would take place in two stages. First, Jesus returned in the Spirit on Pentecost, fifty days after his resurrection. He came, not in body but in Spirit. And where did the Spirit take his dwelling? Exactly: in those who believed in Jesus Christ. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 6:
Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit?
And in Ephesians 2, he shifts focus from the individual Christian to the Church when he writes:
And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.
So here is the first answer to the question: what and where is “my Father’s house”. It is first of all the body of Christ, the church, the “communion of saints”, as we call it in the Apostles’ Creed. It is in us, the community of believers in Jesus Christ, that heaven and earth meet. Because the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God, lives in us as individual Christians and as a Christian community.
Even in the closing chapters of Revelation, which speaks of the end of times when Jesus will return in his resurrected and glorified body, and a new heaven and earth will come down from heaven, what does John hear the voice from heaven say?
‘Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people,
and he will dwell with them.
The voice does not say “Look! The people’s dwelling place is now with God in heaven.” No! It says: “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people.” The logic is quite different from what we as modern Christians often think. Primarily, we don’t go to where God is, but God has come to where we are. He came to dwell among his people in the body on Christmas. And he came to dwell among his people in the Spirit on Pentecost.
Now I am sure that for many of us the Christian community is very far from heaven on earth. We may be born again believers and temples of the Holy Spirit. But that does not make us perfect, neither as individuals nor as a community. There is a lot of hurt and conflict and hatred and abuse between those who make up the community of Christ. That is the reality. We may have the Holy Spirit in our hearts, but that doesn’t mean that we actually allow him full control over our lives. In fact, mostly we are very far from that. And that’s why the church of Christ is often such a miserable place.
The great Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi was a great admirer of Jesus. But his experiences with church leaders and members in South Africa were so frustrating, that he decided he could not join the community of those who call themselves disciples of Jesus.
But on the other hand: If God is willing to make his dwelling place among us and in us just as we are, who are we to be more picky and critical in choosing whom we worship with and whom we accept as our family members than he?
We live right in the middle of the tension that characterizes the kingdom of God in a wider sense. It is the tension between the “here already” and the “not yet”. The kingdom of God is here already, but it is like the seed that is still in the ground, or like the small and feeble plant, either hidden from our sight, or at least weak and bearing hardly any fruit yet.
But there will come a time—and that is where the second and more complete meaning of the Father’s house comes in—when we become fully a new creation; when the old has completely passed away. That will happen at the resurrection on the day of the Lord. What we often think of as heaven: perfect union with God and perfection of our lives—life without sin, tears or death—that will be the final dwelling that Jesus left to prepare for us. It is the new Jerusalem, that will come down from heaven, and in which we will live in the light of God’s presence forever.
As we look forward to that life of perfection, let us not forget that the journey is just as important as the destination. We are not called to withdraw from the world in which we live and wait for heaven to come down, or for our spirits to go up to heaven when we die. Instead, we are called to live out our calling to the fullest, inspired and empowered by the Holy Spirit. For if God has made is dwelling place in and among us, why not let the whole world know, that God wants to dwell in each and every person on the face of the earth.
When Jesus was taken up to heaven, he did not tell his disciples to lock themselves up and enjoy each other’s company while waiting for Jesus’ return. He told them to go out into all the world and to make disciples of all nations. And the promise that he gave his disciples then, is still valid for us:
“I will be with you always, to the ends of the earth.”
Amen.
