May 22, 2011
Your Room is Ready
- John 14:1-14
- Dr. Teri Thomas
So, you know we are not supposed to be here this morning. Yesterday, May 21, 2011 was predicted to be the day of the Rapture. According to Harold Camping, a radio personality in California, Jesus was scheduled to return yesterday. 200 million people, about 3% of the world population, were to have been saved and taken into heaven with Jesus. Those not saved would be left behind in the Apocalypse until the end of the world on October 21st of this year.
So either the prediction was wrong, or we have been left behind.
I used to believe that people who read the Bible this way and made these predictions were just crazy. The older I get the more I wonder if they are not so much crazy as they are hopeful.
There are days in this world when the idea of Jesus showing up and ushering us through the pearly gates to our reserved room in the clouds sounds pretty good. It would be a relief.
A few weeks ago, the morning after Easter to be precise, I left for a quick trip to Kenya. While it was a great experience, it was not what I would call relaxing.
Fly to Chicago, then to London, then to Nairobi,
take a shuttle to the guest house in Nairobi,
next morning visit some employment projects,
fly to Kisumu,
shuttle to the next guest house,
crawl under the mosquito netting
onto the cot for a hot, noisy night,
up early and into the van
to visit schools, clinics, churches, farms and homes,
back each night late, exhausted and very dirty,
do that for ten days;
then reverse the travel 24 hours to get back to New York,
wait in lines at customs
and get interrogated trying to return to your own country,
a cab from JFK into the city
Finally, I walked into the hotel lobby and gave them my name.
"Let me see," the woman said as she typed away at her computer.
Then, she looked up, handed me a key
and said- "Your room is ready."
There are no words more appreciated,
nothing is more soothing,
more evocative of being cared for, than the words,
"Your room is ready and waiting for you.
Why don't you go on up?"
Jesus knew the power of those words. He used them in this morning's reading. In my Father's house are many rooms and I am going to prepare a room for you. Our journey through life is not always an easy one. Jesus says, "I am the way, the truth and the life," and we know that way leads to the cross. We don't skip merrily through our days without some serious commitment and reflection. We don't even attempt it without a lot of encouragement and support from our fellow travelers.
But this passage gives us hope and promise. There is something so very calming about knowing no matter what happens, we have a place, at the end of the long and exhausting journey there is a room, somewhere, that is waiting for us; a place that is ours.
That maybe why this is one of the all time favorite verses for funeral services.
Polls show that 9 out of 10 Americans believe in heaven and 85% are pretty confident they will be going there. While the number of people believing in God is declining then number who believe in heaven keeps going up. In moments of reflection, we may find talk of heaven implausible, but in moments of need, we find the hope of heaven irresistible. The problem is that our popular understanding of heaven the promise of a place where we go when we die is not actually biblical, and has been rejected by most theologians and scholars.
Rob Bell, an evangelical mega-church pastor in Michigan recently authored a book- Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived. He dismisses the traditional notions of heaven and hell - the idea that heaven is a place where you go when you die if you believe in Jesus and are good and Hell is a place where you go when you die if you do not believe in Jesus or you are bad. Bell calls that understanding misguided and toxic. His book landed him on the cover of Time Magazine and in hot water with other evangelicals.
But Jesus doesn't say to the disciples- this is what will happen when you die...He says, "Do not let your hearts be troubled...there is a room for you."
What troubles your heart?
Grief
Sadness, sorrow
loneliness
anger
loss, separation,
addiction, illness
fear
Whatever it is that troubles your heart- now - let not your hearts be troubled.
God has a place for you.
There is room for you in the heart of God.
God is comforting and roomy.
A less sensational look at heaven is a book by theologian Christopher Morse The Difference Heaven Makes: Rehearing the Gospel as News. Morse combs meticulously through the biblical evidence, observing that in the Gospels heaven is mainly "not about blue skies or life only after death." Rather, heaven is the life that is now coming toward us from God, the life "of the world to come," a life that overcomes our present age. The life that calms our troubled hearts today.
Heaven is God's unbounded love breaking in to every situation, stronger than any loss, even death. We don't go to heaven; heaven comes to us. "In sum," Morse writes, "we are called to be on hand for that which is at hand but not in hand, an unprecedented glory of not being left orphaned but of being loved in a community of new creation beyond all that we can ask or imagine."
In my Father's house there are many rooms,
also translated mansions,
habitations,
or dwelling places.
The word is monai. Monai actually means a temporary resting place for a traveler. It was associated with caravans. In those days, there would be a contingent of folks who would go ahead of the caravan to "prepare a place" so that when the caravan arrived there, the camp ground had been prepared, the water supply located, and food prepared.
The travelers in the caravan would have a place of comfort to spend the night. Monai is less about getting some fancy digs in the hereafter, in a house separate from the people you can't stand, and more about welcome, hospitality, and community for people traveling on a journey.
Jesus said,
I will take you to myself,
so that where I am, you may be also.
Here, now.
Then, there.
Always. Forever.
Do not let your hearts be troubled.
Amen.