Submitted by Dr. Bobby J. Touchton
Ashland, Kentucky
“‘Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also. And you know the way to the place where I am going.’ Thomas said to him, ‘Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?’ Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’”
INTRODUCTION: Where are you from? I like to ask that during orientation? It’s one of our questions, the kind that we ask when getting to know someone. We figure it tells a lot about the person. Like when you hear me talk or the way I think and I tell you I’m from North Carolina.
Oh, well, that explains a lot of things, you say. Same way it makes sense Bill Clinton is from a small town in Arkansas. It explains why the Kennedy family members all talk with a Boston accent.
ILLUSTRATION: When Mikhail Gorbachev was serving as the last president of the Soviet Union, the Russian people used to make fun of his accent. We never understood or could quite grasp it because we always heard him through a translator. But he had a strong accent from the southern state of Soviet Georgia. We snickered the same way when we would see the bright smile and southern drawl of Jimmy Carter from Georgia, the American one.
We tend to say, “There’s that California, left coast thing coming out. There’s that Midwest farm belt thing. Look out, there’s that northeast intellectual thing, that northern industrial thing, and that southern Dixie thing, praise God.” That’s changing, of course, and certainly we are not complete products of where we grew up, but place does shape us. God put the first creatures in a place. Eden. Center of the world. When God cast them from their place, the world was off-center. They were displaced. Not only homeless, but eccentric, literally; sent off to search forever for what they lost — home, Eden, their Place. That is our lot too.
It’s harder for some people. Like when I ask that “where are you from” question of, say, a couple engaged to be married, I sometimes get sort of a vacant stare from one of them. I usually know why. Military brat. Moved around a bunch. No sense of place. Could have been the kid of a Methodist minister, too.
As a prison chaplain, there are times I ask the men where are they from and they tell me the very last place they were. “Ah, I’m from the kitchen. I’m from C Unit. I’m from the Camp. I just got here from the Atlanta Penitentiary.” I want them to tell me where their place is. But even for the rest of us, our society has become so mobile that we are losing our sense of place, our particular piece of dirt that is the intersection of our worlds.
ILLUSTRATION: We go back to North Carolina a few times each year and I often go by the house I lived in there in Burlington. It is a strange feeling. It has been quite a few years for me. Thirty some since I had lived there. I still have dreams of that small four room house. As small as it was, now it is all grown up; like me I guess. Which may account for why it is smaller. It was really big when I was a kid. The street, the neighborhood, the house. The road is now four lanes and the house was strangest of all. Two owners, maybe three, removed from when it was our place. Now it’s hardly recognizable.
When they widened the road, they cut down the huge pine trees that grew in the front yard. They have pulled down the post and rail fence that my father put around the back yard. The people have changed everything. I recognized the front porch and the big plate glass window. That was it, pretty much. That was my place. I learned to cut the grass there. My father built me a sandbox in the backyard. There was the swing set. I buried my pet turtle back there and conducted my first funeral. I played all over that place. Somebody gets the mail now at 377 West Harden Street, but its not my Place anymore. The world has shifted for me. I am trying to find my Place here now. So be patient with me. I am still in transition.
Of course transition is just what being displaced is all about. We experience it in all kinds and ever increasing ways. Used to be you could count on working for a good firm for your whole career, get the gold watch and the pension plan and read the stock market returns. Nowadays you might not only change companies several times, you might even change careers.
Some of you know this transitional feeling, this constant out-of-place-ness. Some of you feel that way about churches. You knew your place once, now you are trying to get your bearings all over again. You knew your place in grade-school and now you will have to find your place all over again in junior high. Junior high to high school, high school to college, college to the workforce. It doesn’t stop there. Singleness to marriage, parenting children to parenting your parents, work to retirement, life to death. Giving up your sense of place or especially having it taken from you against your will, as in a divorce or layoff is an unwelcome grief. You feel like you are being kicked out of Eden even if you are not the one who grabbed for the forbidden fruit.
ILLUSTRATION: I was with a lady several years ago visiting her in a health care facility. She was in lots of distress physically, and therefore spiritually, too. She knew how out of place she was in that bed. As we said the 23rd Psalm together, she said how she longed for that to be true for her. To be with God, in the house of the Lord forever. She knew she can’t go back, she can only go forward. Se is looking for her place with God. It reminded me of Frederick Buechner’s words in his recent book Longing for Home: We carry inside us a vision of wholeness that we sense is our true home that beckons us.
That is just what Jesus is trying to teach his disciples in John 14. Jesus has learned to think of his place not in Nazareth or with his earthly family, even with his closest friends. He understands that his place is not here. He is going to his place. But the disciples have left everything to follow him. They have left their sacred places and slept under the stars with him who said, Birds of the air have nests and foxes have holes, but the Son of man has no place to lay his head. They are feeling disoriented, dislocated, unsure. So Jesus assures them.
ILLUSRATION: Five year old Brian was impressed by the story of Simeon the Stylite, a Syrian hermit who lived in the 5th century. This man was admired as a saint because he lived for more than 35 years on a platform atop a high pillar. Determined to follow Simeon’s example, Brian put the kitchen stool on the table and started his perilous climb. When his mother heard some strange sounds in the kitchen, she came in, and shouted, “Brian! Get down before you break your neck!” As the youngster obeyed, he muttered, “You can’t even become a saint in your own house.”
Jesus tells his followers to trust him, that he is going to prepare a place for them and will come again and take them to himself. Back of this is the Jewish wedding custom of a bridegroom who goes off to his father’s house to add a room on or build another place altogether. The work is not finished until the groom’s father says so. The groom does not even know when that will be, let alone the bride. She has to wait and trust the groom that he is really preparing a place for them and not just going off forever. This transition time is agony, but the waiting is necessary. She has to trust his love. There is no other way.
ILLUSTRATION: In the magical movie “Contact,” based upon the novel by the late astronomer Carl Sagan, the dedicated scientist played by Jodie Foster has to learn that some things cannot be proven and tested and measured. Like belief in God, like her father’s love, like whether she is believable when she tries to tell a disbelieving world that there is both a world beyond our space-time horizons and a way to get there and back. No conclusive proof, only trust.
When you are feeling out of place in your life, you ought as a Christian to see this as a necessary and spiritual state of affairs, rather than as a sign of doom. It is an opportunity for you to get unhooked to dangerous ways we get attached to in this world. Jesus spent much of his ministry telling us not to allow ourselves to become too settled. Unless you are willing to leave father and mother, jobs and place, unless you are able to put your hand to the plowshare and not look back, you cannot be my disciple. What Jesus means by that is, you cannot find your place in the future with Him. With Him is the only place that is lasting and worth settling down to, unless you let go of the death grip that other places have on you in this world.
ILLUSTRATION: Eric Hill had everything you’d need for a bright future. He was twenty-eight years old and a recent college grad with an athletic frame and a soft smile. His family loved him, girls took notice of him, and companies had contacted him about working for them. Although Eric appeared composed, he was within by voices he could not control. Bothered by images he could not avoid. So, hoping to get away from them all, he got away from it all. On a gray rainy day in February 1982, Eric Hill walked out the back door of his Florida home and never came back.
His sister Debbie remembered seeing him leave, his tall frame ambling down the interstate. She assumed he would return. He didn’t. She hoped he would call. He didn’t. She thought she could find him. She couldn’t. Where Eric journeyed, only God and Eric knew, and neither of them had chosen to tell. What we do know is Enc heard a voice. It was in that voice he heard an "assignment" which was to pick up garbage along a roadside in San Antonio, Texas.
To the commuters on Interstate 10, his lanky form and bearded face became a familiar sight. He made a home out of a hole in a vacant lot. He made a wardrobe out of split trousers and a torn sweatshirt. An old hat kept the summer sun off of him. A plastic bag on his shoulders softened the winter chill. His weathered skin and stooped shoulders made him look twice his forty-four years. But then, sixteen years on the side of the road would do that to you. That’s how long it had been since Debbie had seen her brother. She might never have seen him again had it not been for two events. The first was the construction of a car dealership on Eric’s vacant lot. The second was a severe pain in his abdomen. The dealership took his home. The pain nearly took his life.
EMS found him curled in a ball on the side of the road, clutching his stomach. The hospital ran some tests and found that Eric had cancer. Terminal cancer. Another few months and he would be dead. With no known family or relatives, he would die alone. His court-appointed attorney couldn’t handle this thought. "Surely someone is looking for Eric," he reasoned. So the lawyer scoured the Internet for anyone in search of a brown-haired, adult male with the last name Hill. That’s how he met Debbie. His description seemed to match her memory, but she had to know for sure.
So Debbie came to Texas. She and her husband and two children rented a hotel room and set out to find Eric. By now he’d been released from the hospital, but the chaplain knew where he was. They found him sitting against a building not far from the interstate. As they approached, he stood up. They offered him some fruit, but he refused. They offered juice; he declined. He was polite but unimpressed with this family who claimed to be his own.
His interest perked, however, when Debbie offered him a pin to wear. It was an angel pin. He said yes. Her first time to touch her brother in sixteen years was the moment he allowed her to pin the angel on his shirt. Debbie intended to spend only a week. But a week passed, and she stayed. Her husband returned home, and she stayed. Spring became summer, and Eric improved, and still she stayed. Debbie rented an apartment and began home schooling her kids and reaching out to her brother.
It wasn’t easy. He didn’t recognize her. He didn’t know her. One day he cursed her. He didn’t want to sleep in her apartment. He didn’t want her food. He didn’t want to talk. He wanted his vacant lot. He wanted his "job." Who was this woman anyway? But Debbie didn’t give up on Eric. She understood that he didn’t understand. So she stayed. When she shared her story, someone asked what you might want to ask. "How do you keep from giving up?"
"Simple," she said. "He’s my brother."
Her pursuit reminds me of another pursuit. Her heart reminds me of another heart. Another kind heart who left home in search of the confused. Another compassionate soul who couldn’t bear the thought of a brother or sister in pain. So, like Debbie, he left home. Like Debbie, he found his sibling.
When Jesus found us, we acted like Eric. Our limitations kept us from recognizing the One who came to save us. We even doubted his presence-and sometimes we still do. How does he deal with our doubts? He follows us. As Debbie followed Eric, God follows us. He pursues us until we finally see him as our Father, even if it takes all the days of our lives. "Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life; and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever" (Psalm. 23:6 NKJV).
By the way, the last chapter in Eric Hill’s life is the best one. Days before he died he recognized Debbie as his sister. In doing so, he discovered his home, his place. We will as well. Like Eric, we have doubted our Helper. But like Debbie, God has followed us. Like Eric, we are quick to turn away. But like Debbie, God is slow to anger and determined to stay. Like Eric, we don’t accept God’s gifts. But like Debbie, God still gives them. He gives us his angels, not just pinned on a lapel, but placed on our path.
Most of all, God gives us himself. Even when we choose our hovel over his house and our trash over his grace, still he follows. Never forcing us. Never leaving us. Patiently persistent. Faithfully present. Using all of his power to convince us that he is who he is and that he can be trusted to lead us home. His goodness and mercy will follow us all the days of our lives.
Many of you have seen those great Nissan and Volkswagon commercials which remind us that life is a journey. That is the very nature of life. We can try to deny it, we can fight it, but sooner or later, we are going to have to accept it. The tidal wave of change is the nature of the day, and only if we get on the surf board and ride it out will we know the true thrill of it all. I was reminded of this fact last week as I sat at one of my son’s baseball games. People in eastern Kentucky take Little League Baseball very seriously. I was sitting there among people all from eastern Kentucky who were eating all of this up, along with their popcorn and corndogs. I tried to imagine what it would be like to be in my hometown in North Carolina and see my son play baseball in the same park I used to play in. For a moment, my heart skipped a bit.
ILLUSTRATION: Croatian native Miroslav Volf is one of the brightest minds in theology today. He took the pledge of allegiance to become a citizen of these United States on Good Friday several years ago. The irony was not lost upon him. But his in-laws sent him a card of congratulations that reminded him of his rightful homelessness. The quotation was from the early second-century church, Epistle of Mathetus to Diognetus: As citizens, Christians share all things with others, and yet endure all things as foreigners. Every foreign land is to them as their native country, and every land of their birth as a land of strangers. . . . They pass their days on earth, but they are citizens of heaven.
Ultimately our deep need for a place of our own is met in heaven. Heaven is our place. This world is not my own, I’m just a passin’ through. If heaven’s not my home, Oh, Lord, what will I do? You know the song. Now some people can be so heavenly minded they are no earthly good. I grant you that. Some people can live so much for later that the miss the now. No question. But Mother Teresa had it right when she said: “All the way to heaven is heaven.” Jesus said as much. I am the way. You know the way because you know me.
ILLUSTRATION: A well-known minister told the story of the most unusual thing happening as he was driving to Louisville for a meeting a few years ago. Somewhere along the Little Rock to Memphis to Nashville trail, he realized someone was following him. Every time he changed lanes, this car would stay with him. The more he thought of it, the more he figured, well, this guy just likes following him because he likes to go so slow, don’t you know! He figures he’ll be safe trailing me. Sure! Well, after a few hours of this, he had to get gas and take a bathroom break. So he put on his blinker and waved at him good-bye, but sure enough, he followed him off the exit and right into the gas station. They all get out of their cars and he said hello, “Sure good to have a traveling mate.” He smiles and asks where they’re going. Turns out he’s going to D.C. where he works at Walter Reed hospital. He ask him if he wanted to join him for dinner in Nashville. He says yes, so here they are this grubby-looking, travel weary family, and a thirty-something African-American stranger piling into a booth at Outback Steakhouse.
They have a good visit, found out he was an orphan, adopted by a couple in Arkadelphia. His adoptive parents are now dead and he only has two sisters. No other family. No sense of place. He latched on to them and we to him. Together they look for a place to stay that night, and when they parted, they exchanged addresses and all that. Since then they’ve talked on the phone and he may even come for the family’s Thanksgiving. Go figure. All the way to heaven.
We find our place not so much in real estate, but in the people we travel with from place to place. Which is what I felt there showing my daughter the place I grew up. She is always amazed when I tell her that growing up I lived in four towns and went to seven different schools. Still, I point out to her the first home I knew. The place she now says with a sigh, “And this is where Daddy lived.” When we were back there I realized it wasn’t my place anymore. But then I looked at her and realized, she is. My place that is. The relationships with those we travel with through life are our place, until we find our true place.
Robert Frost once wrote, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in.” One of the powerful names for God in Rabbinic tradition is, curiously enough, The Place. God is our place. God is our destination and our destiny. Our Place in the end is really a relationship. We are not talking about a house of the Lord so much as a home with the Lord. There alone is our rest. Until then, we pray with St. Augustine, Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee.
In the meantime, whom are you traveling with? Does the one you are following know the way to the place that is God? Jesus knows the way. Jesus is the Way. Follow him. To your Place, which he is even now preparing for you.
Submitted By Rev. Bobby J. Touchton, D.Min.
Ashland, Kentucky
This message may be used freely by others in any manner that promotes the Gospel of Christ. Over the years, I have relied heavily on other sermons, as well as, those from SermonCentral.com; this sermon is no exception.
