Rev. Tara Barber
The Community Church of Sebastopol
April 28, 2002
John 14: 1-14
Beyond Martha Stewart’s idea of a decorating dream come true, this understanding of heaven as a mansion in the sky with its many rooms has shaped many people’s view of the afterlife. This passage may be a familiar one. It is often read at memorials and funerals because it gives us a way of imagining life after death and it offers the ultimate comfort. We have a place with God, now and forever. And not just anyplace, this place has been lovingly prepared by Jesus, who went before us. Jesus went home to be with “the Father” and though John’s gospel talks in spiritual terms, it’s difficult not to hear and remember our physical homes and our fathers and families when these words are spoken. Maybe you are like me, and even though you were listening carefully to what Brian read, your mind wandered to recall where you have dwelled, and your relationship with “the Father” or with your father.
This is where my prayers and reflections have taken me. This concept of home has been a powerful idea for me over the past days and months. Home is that mythical place where we are loved and cherished. Where we are comfortable and free to be ourselves. Home for me has been in Seattle, and it felt like going home with the mission trip – it was a strange combination of the television show Cheers, “where everyone knows your name” and the spiritual place where God has lived so powerfully in the mountains and water and the people all my life. How ironic or how right it was that in Seattle – that place I call home - we met people on the mission trip who are home less, who do not have a sense of home or community, where people don’t know their names. And we found that there in Seattle, the place I call home.
Fredrick Beuchner has been my companion on this journey of life and homecoming. In his book, The Longing for Home, he writes, “To be homeless the way people like you and me are apt to be homeless is to have homes all over the place but not to be really at home in any of them. To be really at home is to be really at peace, and our lives are so intricately interwoven that there can be no real peace for any of us until there is real peace for all of us. That is the truth that underlies not just the news of the world but the news of every one of our own days.”
When we returned back here from our Mission Trip, to our new home, the news of my days also seemed connected to understanding home. In the past two weeks, I met several women and children asking me for help. Really, they were asking us for help because they needed to find a new home and they were hoping that we could help. These women were looking a home -- a home away from the homes where violence was an every day occurrence. These women, who dared to ask for help, were asking me and the church to help them financially so that they could find a new home. Each one described wanting a home for themselves and their children that would be safe and secure, couldn’t we help in some way?
My grandmother never would have asked for help so directly. It’s not in her nature. But when she called this week to tell me the news that her sons were moving her into a assisted living facility, she wanted to me to grieve with her over losing her home. Her home. The place where I sat on the step stool, and watched my granddad make biscuits for breakfast. Where the goody drawer was always full of treats – and we could take one home with us each time we visited. The home where I escaped to at 11, 12, and 13, to find love and comfort after my parents divorced and I was in that awkward stage. The place where I have been loved and cherished. Her home. My home. Would she be able to find home in a new place? Would I?
Home is what called me into the ministry. It’s been close to ten years now since I heard that preacher reflecting on Psalm 137 where the Israelites sat by the waters of Babylon and wept for Zion – they wept for their home. How could they sing their songs in a strange land? And for me it was an epiphany. Home for me had been the church, and I heard God calling me to stop weeping (at least for the moment) and to come home.
It’s even more complicated now for the Israelites and Palestinians. Both feel a sense of home on the same land. And the desire to have their home again has caused centuries of death and destruction. It’s not just the desire for home that causes this bloodshed. It is some of those other words in this morning’s gospel text. I’m referring to the words that say that no one can come to the Father except through Jesus. These words, this understanding that one religion has the way to God, has given people grounds to do terrible things, and claim that God is on their side. Another disturbing idea that has caused so much death and loss, is this understanding that leaving our world to be with God in the next, is worth sacrificing this life, by killing oneself and others.
In the book, The Longing for Home, Buechner describes a scene from Dostoyevsky’s, The Brother’s Karamazov. The man was in a duel. He allowed the other man to take the first shot. Luckily, the bullet just grazed his ear. Now it was his turn to shoot. Instead, he tossed his gun into the brush, much to the dismay of those gathered. They began to call him a fool and a coward. In that [very] moment, the man cried out, “…look around you at the gifts of God, the clear sky, the pure air, the tender grass, the birds. Nature is beautiful and sinless, and we, only we are sinful and foolish, and we don’t understand that life is heaven, for we have only to understand that and it will at once be fulfilled in all its beauty. [Then] we shall embrace each other and weep.” Buechner comments that, “the grace of God, which reaches this man through his vision of that beautiful day, opens not just his eyes to see that life is heaven but opens his heart where heaven has dwelled all along.” Life is heaven – and heaven dwells in our hearts.
This place, which is prepared for us, this place with many rooms, this home lives within. And it is our task to create this home, this heaven here. Right here, right now. For each one gathered in this room and in any room - and especially for Tyler and Logan.
Buechner describes our role like this. “In my books and sometimes even in real life, I have it in me at my best to be a saint to other people, and by saint I mean life-giver...Sometimes, by the grace of God, I have it in me to be Christ to other people. And so, of course, have we all—the live-giving, life-saving, and healing power to be saints, to be Christ's, maybe at rare moments even to ourselves.
I believe that it is when that power is alive in me and through me that I come closest to being truly home, come closest to finding or being found by that holiness that I may have glimpsed in the charity and justice and order and peace of other homes I have known, but that in its fullness was always missing. (He continues,) I cannot claim that I have found the home I long for every day of my life, not by a long shot, but I believe that in my heart I have found, and have maybe always known, the way that leads to it. I believe that (my friend George) Buttrick was right (when he said) that the home we long for and belong to is finally where Christ is. I believe that home is Christ’s kingdom, which exists both within and among us as we wend our prodigal ways through the world in search of it.”
And that is what I believe. Home is more about a longing, or a journey, than a destination. Home is more about a relationship - a relationship that we glimpse in Jesus relationship with God the father. Home is about a relationship in here and in here, where we feel loved and secure and connected, much more than it is about a mansion in the sky. And this relationship is really what I long for – for me and my family in this new place, for those who are homeless, for the men and women, the teenagers and babies I meet, for the people in this community and around the world who keep searching for that place with many rooms.
Life is heaven.
Heaven is here.
Believe and come home.
Believe and create home.
May our belief and our action make it so. Amen.
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