God Makes A Home With Us 5/26/19 Easter 6C

5/26/19    Easter 6C

God Makes a Home With Us

Rev Dr Rebecca L. Kiser

My children and foster son Billy all graduated from Maury High School in Norfolk, a common alma mater.  They all had the shared trauma of learning this ting called THE MAURY PARAGRAPH that the Maury English teachers taught, …and me, too, as I had to endure 4 children learning it. The Maury Paragraph started with a succinct opening sentence, included at least three points, and then concluded with an effective segue sentence to the next Maury Paragraph. They had to outline it, show their 3 points, and then write it.  This was supposed to help them on their college essays. 

We ALL hated The Maury Paragraph.  Sometimes I still remember it when I hit the return key on my computer for a new paragraph, although its not required in my sermons nowadays.  I think what it taught the kids was to organize their thinking, and stay on one subject at a time while they say what they have to say.  So that’s not a bad thing…

This text from John would flunk The Maury Paragraph rules.  It sounds like it joins together a group of Jesus’ sayings that may have a word or two in common, but really its rather disjointed, with multiple emphases. They’re kinda loosely joined together, but its not a linear thought process.  That’s okay - John wanted to get all Jesus’ important sayings into his gospel, I get that.  He and the other gospel writers tried to group things in ways to hang together, and sometimes they were more effective than others.

Seminary didn’t care so much about paragraphs, but they did care about your sermon hanging together and not going off in all directions.  A professor told us that the point of a sermon should be able to be summed up in one sentence.  Trying to cover too many points in one sermon was the mark of a novice.  This passage from John has way too many ways a sermon could go, so I decided to go with what captured my meditations and ponderings, which was what Jesus means when he says, “we will make our home with them.” The point of this sermon is to explore what that means.   I noticed that there is Trinitarian thing going on about who will make a home with those of us who love Jesus - there’s Jesus, and who he calls my Father, then there’s the Advocate who will be sent to us in Jesus’ name. This unity, this oneness, which grows to include us believers, is a hallmark in the gospel of John.  This rather mystical concept of a oneness and an indwelling of all that is God, and within us, is important to the way he sees us believers as Christ’s body.  John says it in other places, too – Himself in God, us in him, God in him, God in us…All connected, united, joined.

So what does it mean to us? That’s another concept our profs at seminary pounded into us - the question, “So what?”  Sermons are not to teach a set of facts, so much as to apply the Word of God to our living.  So what does this oneness, this unity, mean in our living in the kindom of Christ, this earthly place where God’s will needs to be done on earth as in heaven?  What does it mean that God makes a home with us? 

We can ponder now that if God is with us, within us, and made a home with us, that therefore God goes with us wherever we go.   Our bodies have become God’s temple as the scripture says elsewhere; God has taken up a dwelling in us.  So we carry God to the Food Lion, and our interactions there; we carry God when we drive to Florence to Costco, or the mall, or the movies.  God is with us when we eat out or eat home.  God is with us when we’re at work, in whatever we do there, the clients we see, the deals we make, the way we talk with our co-workers.  God goes with us to dance recitals and competitions.  God goes with us to the doctor’s, or to the hospital, or when we drive our spouse, children or parents there.  God drives with us when we’re going to Atlanta for a conference or a mission trip to Greece.  God is with us when we prune flowers or rake leaves.  God goes to school with us, and out to recess with us.  God is with us when we sit at Session meetings and interact with each other and think of the church’s work.  God is with us when we read posts on Facebook or send tweets.  God is with us when we’re getting married or freezing strawberries.  We are now joined with God, and God with us - the overwhelming Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer of all that is - and us, the creation, the work of God’s hands. We are now connected. Not that this makes us God - yet God lives in us and with us - guiding us, available to us, wanting to be more manifest in us, wanting to transform us so that Christ will show in us.  Encouraging us in our struggles, caring for us when we hurt, opening our eyes and ears to how God sees and loves the world. 

A modern word would be “interconnection,” or perhaps “interdependent.” We study that in school, too, when we study habitats and how everything in that habitat balances together, interconnected in minute ways so that it all works and prospers. We might study it in regards to our planet, where oxygen and carbon dioxide are balanced in a way that supports life; where water currents affect temperatures; where deforestation and emissions on a land mass can affect temperatures, which affects currents, which affects the polar ice caps, which affects how high the tides rise.  Our planet is a habitat, and balanced for life to prosper.  Our ozone layer protects us from the sun’s rays which can damage us, and our unconcern for how we change the atmosphere has affected the ozone.  God has so ordered the life on this planet so that life as we know it thrives and prospers - our scientists are discovering just how this all works together, and how much  humanity need to live and act in this knowledge, and live in this awareness.

Ah, ‘awareness’ is a good word – “awareness” is a word perhaps more familiar to Eastern religious traditions than to ours, although its a good word to describe what Jesus is getting at in his words about our unity and oneness with God, Jesus and the Advocate.  Its not just a nice concept to read about at church and forget for the rest of the week - this is what God tells us about our spiritual reality - in our following of Christ, in our living in Christ’ kindom, this awareness of how we are united to God is vital to our attitudes, our actions, our living.  This awareness of our interconnection to God - and to each other, by the way, and to the planet of which soil we are made, - this is the awareness of who we are and what life means that informs the rest of our living.  It runs counter to the culture that tells us we are independent, we pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps and our hard work, we are individuals, the planet here for our use, people here to be winners over and be used.  We see where that kind of worldview is getting us - pollution, suffering, ghettos, divisions - this is not God’s design; this does not help life thrive. 

Once again, Christ’s kindom runs counter to what we absorb from the very systems in our culture. A worldview based on this kind of human understanding is not the kindom of heaven!  And the worldview that God teaches is different on a deep level, an understanding that we walk and live and move and have our being embedded in God’s creation and embedded with God as well.  The development of western Christianity missed this, in my opinion - we emphasized tasks and behaviors without teaching the “why” behind them. And we taught obedience to avoid hell, instead of the bliss of being one with God and the love and delight of following God’s ways.  Following Jesus leads us to a new way, a way that sees the interdependence of God’s creation, and sees the real although mystical oneness of believers with God. 

For example, consider the name we use for Jesus at Christmas - Immanuel.  Hear the word “immanent” in that - the immanent God = immanu-el.  Translated as ‘God with us’, the God who is here.  We use it about the infant Jesus, God born in flesh.  But you know, Jesus is showing us the truth about God, that God has been here all the time, and is even now here all the time.  God is the one who is present.  God dwells in and among us and creation; and as believers in God, we know God as the One who is present.  Not that every thought we have is God speaking - we have a very human voice inside us that is swayed by all kinds of human desires for power, lust, hurts, angers, cravings, glittery false desires that pull us away, and so on.  Our spiritual life is a battle of sorts, a battle to listen for God’s Spirit and heed it, follow it; a work of sorting God’s voice from our lesser voices, and following. 

I talked to my son over the weekend, and as we shared about our weeks, I mentioned how, at the Vital Congregations conference, we had communion 2 night in a row, and then when I attended 1st Myrtle Beach’s early Sabbath service (on Thursday night), I got to have communion yet again.  I said, “I like having communion often like that!”  He asked, “Why, mom? What difference does it make?”  So I had to feel around for some words to explain, and I said that communion was more than just juice and pieces of bread, it carried a sacred meaning about how we need God, how God feeds us - and not just in our souls, but also in the world, with real bread and juice.  And how we are part of a larger picture that includes Christians of other stripes, but who are bound together in God’s world.  And as a ritual, it reminds me of these things on a regular basis.  Ah, he said, awareness, living in the awareness of life.  Yes, I said. It brings me back to the awareness of the whole that my faith teaches me is reality.  I can forget that so easily in doing all the stuff I have to do every day.  It’s good to be brought back to that awareness of how God is present.   My son who loves philosophy says, “So any eating could actually do that.”  Well, yeah….but its the ritual, the sacred eating, as a part of worship of God, that first teaches me that awareness of God making a home with me. 

See, he gets it, although he just doesn’t like churches too much.  Church, in his mind, and his generation’s mind, is too preoccupied with details, and who’s right and who’s wrong, what Jesus called ‘straining out the gnats and swallowing the camels.’  The worldview Christ teaches is more than gnats!  Its meaningful, and speaks to people’s great need for belonging, of having a purpose, and is hopeful of abundant life.  If we can get around to saying it in a way that can be heard, and not get lost in the morass of petty fluff, God could open more hearts that long for this forgiveness and restoration. The mess in our own living of Christianity at a lower level can cloud the larger message of God, and distort the worldview of God that supports life and its thriving that was intended. 

Okay, I like to talk big Picture things, like how the truth is that God has made a home with us.  But, see, its important that the big picture be right, the worldview be right, so that the small and daily actions be also right.  If we start with a view of our human aloneness, our independence and individualism as our foundation, we are set up to fighting for our own good and seeing others as threats.  We have to win, so they have to lose. Since the purpose is for ME to survive and thrive, to ‘win,’ so to speak, then I can ride roughshod over other peoples, those losers who are poor and powerless.  Its okay that to get all I can for ME, so I can rip other people off, trick people, use my power to defeat people, and even despoil the world I live in.  As long as I throw God a bone now and then, quote a Bible verse or so go to church to stay on God’s good side, I can do what I want to win.  That’s tricking God, too.  Or thinking that I can manipulate God….  It sets us up to have fights and wars and excuse ourselves for our meanness. 

When we start with the foundation of God’s big picture and learn to walk in that awareness, we will have a different value system - we will seek the good of all persons like we seek our own.  Our awareness of the truth of God with us, God making a home with us, the way we are joined in faith with God and with others, can lead us to better communities, better actions and behaviors with others, not needing to rule over them or use our power to get our way.  We appreciate and understand the ways all creation is connected, and seek to live in ways that will help all prosper, and guard this planet where God has placed us.  We can think beyond our own good only, when we see that God loves the world.  God’s worldview will have us treating people right even if they are cashiers at Food Lion, even if they are a different color, even if they are  different gender, even if they belong to a different political party, even if they worship differently - we don’t have to beat them, and we don’t have to rule over them, even if our function in our job is to lead or direct or be the boss.  We value our customers and our employees and care for their good as we care for our own.  We are aware that we are all one in Christ, and with Christ in God.  It makes all the difference.

There was a book I read some years ago called, All Children are Our Children.  It didn’t come at it from a religious point of view per se - It pointed out that our living will be impacted at some point by the way any children of the world are treated.  If they are uneducated, or starved, or their families broken up by us - it will all eventually affect the way the world goes.  Humanity will reap what we sow, in effect. The book urged people to work for the good and well-being of all children, as a way to also work for the good of our own children in the future.  So it was based more on a long-term view for our good than on religious beliefs per se,….  although faith could have taught us the same lesson of valuing all life as the way God has designed things to function for thriving.  God made us all and seeks us all again, willing to forgive and transform as God makes a home with us.

We are seeking a renewed view of what church is and can be, and a revived sense of call here at Indiantown, and in our presbytery, and in our own spiritual lives.  So we go back to the basics, go behind the assumptions, peer into the things we’ve always done just because the last generation did them that way and it feels so familiar and comfortable.  We let these foundational faith concepts color our seeing as we look at our community, as we look at our lives, and as we look at our church.  We let God open our eyes yet again, and yet more, and ask to be led into what God says is good.  Its not necessarily easy, yet it is right and good.

My prayer for us is that we can cultivate this awareness of God making a home with us so that it becomes a daily and a constant awareness.  That we can grow in carrying this awareness of God into the moments of each day, wherever we are - home or school or work or even at church!.  A different generation called it practicing the presence of God, a good spiritual practice that will transform us from within.  This is how faith grows and comes out in our living.  May God work in us as we seek this awareness.  AMEN.