A Sermon for "The Day After the World Didn't End"

A Sermon for the Fifth Sunday of Easter 2011 - based on John 14:1-14.

Friends, I have to preface these words by saying that I, like many of you, I’m sure, am frequently frustrated by the way “religious” people – particularly Christians in this country – appear in the news media. We look judgmental, single-minded, preoccupied mostly with sex and the afterlife, and generally irrational. I resent this…and sometimes I worry about its implications.

And this week has been no exception…Christians appear in the news, and I want nothing less than to be associated with them and their billboards and talk radio shows. 


And yet…there is a funny sort of synchronicity between recent events (or the lack thereof) and the story we hear proclaimed from John today.           

What a perfect gospel for The Day After the World Didn’t End.

After this week, it is quite clear that the misunderstanding and anxiety of Jesus’ disciples given voice by Thomas and Philip are still alive and at work among religious folk today. The certainty we still crave in the face of great doubt is hard to shake– the desire to know a date or a destination where our journey of faith will be complete.

So, to back up… just in case anyone was lucky enough to miss the “religion” news of the past week or so…A Christian radio broadcaster did some calculations, and predicted (after a failed first attempt to do so in 1994) that yesterday was the day that Christ would come and whisk true believers away from earth and leave everyone else to burn…at 6 p.m….time zone by time zone across the globe…

And as easy as it might be today to use him as the butt of a series of jokes… I don’t bring him up to distance our views from his… or to gloat… or to make us look like mature and reasonable believers when compared to him and his listeners.

Rather, I would like to talk about how we are similar… how we, like Harold Camping, so often miss the richness of the gospel because we think it would be preferable, or at least more comfortable, if we could just find a nice math solution to our existential angst.

Camping’s complete misunderstanding of Jesus’ message is actually uncannily like Thomas’s…and like our own.

Jesus says, “‘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.’ [And] Thomas said to him,  ‘Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?’”

It is like Thomas says…“But…but…wait a minute… I need an address. Google maps won’t give me directions unless I can type in a destination…”

We want to take the Numinous…the Great Mystery…the Ground of Being…and make it concrete, tangible...predictable. We want to take Christ’s expansively metaphorical words  and turn them into formulas for salvation.We want to take Christ’s invitation into a way of living and turn it into a roadmap to a heavenly destination. We want to set aside the promise that the end will come like a thief in the night and instead pretend that there is a hidden code, a secret knowledge that we can decipher, to pacify our fear of an unknown future.

But Jesus is not focusing on formula, date or destination. For, though we have heard the promise that Jesus has gone ‘to prepare a place’ for us used to paint a picture of a heavenly mansion far away, Jesus is far more concerned with a journey…now…and a relationship….here. In the end, his promise is – “Where I am, there you will be also.”

If you’ve ever asked a child boarding an airplane where they are going, I suspect it is less likely that you have been told: Miami…or Chicago…or Sioux Falls…and much more likely that you heard: Grandma and Grandpa’s…or Aunt Susie’s…or even, to see Mickey Mouse!

Journeys are to people, not so much to places, in the wisdom of childhood.

And, our journey is to God…and it is with God. And there lies a great mystery: we journey even as our destination is with us. For Christ is The Way…and he is also our home…our dwelling place. And we do not need to be whisked away from here to be with him…because he comes to be with us. We do not need a green line on the ground to follow to get to a safe future. We don’t need a divine GPS unit to find him…as if heaven were a geo-cache or an X on a treasure map. We do not need a mathematical equation for when God will save us.

We already have what we need for the journey because we are in Christ and he is in us… already and always in our midst… yet leading us forward in the transforming work of God.

But it is hard to trust something so abstract. The map, the directions…the equations…are security blankets we crave in lives full of betrayed trust and wrong turns. It is just as hard for us to embrace this mysterious way of journeying in God as it was for Thomas, Philip and the rest of the disciples… and as it is for Harold Camping.

Yet, today, Jesus says that he and the Father and we…We all dwell within one another already…right now…and that we can trust this without a maps or formulas or timelines.

Perhaps you already know a bit about the early Christian community, and the first name (as far as we know) that they gave themselves. We find it in the book of Acts.

And the name was just: The Way.

Imagine for a moment, if this life of faith is about journeying within the love of God… What does it look like to be a part of The Way? Does it look like a group of travelers talking, laughing together… breaking bread and sharing stories… helping one another up when we stumble… perhaps carrying those who are tired or sick? Even stopping together along the road, when some of us need to rest or to wait.

I know I have felt what it is to be on The Way this year at First English Lutheran Church: Certainly in worship each week, especially at those moments of passage in individual lives as we have gathered for baptisms, weddings, funerals…the milestones in our individuals journeys… and as we have come to the altar and font, where God meets us in the sacraments and pour grace into our lives and sends us out into mission. I’ve been on The Way with this community preparing meals for street youth on freezing nights… collecting donations of food for the food pantry and money for mosquito nets…in learning about the lives and work and relationships of this family of faith over beers at Octoberfest…and reflecting together in midweek worship services during Advent and Lent.

We are here encourage each other and welcome others into this journey, because we know that the journey is so rich… and we also know that there are days when things are hard and we are tired, and we will need each other…

And it is a sacred task we have: to be present for one another and to our community… to honor the joys and fears and needs and questions of one another… and to accept the love and care of others as the very love and care of God.

Knowing we are on The Way frees us from looking for boundaries… because you really can’t draw a line around a journey. Knowing we are on The Way frees us from the need for a destination, because we know that the journey is the most sacred part. Knowing we are on The Way frees us from the fear that we haven’t got it right, because – of course we haven’t! But that’s not the point. Knowing we are on The Way is knowing that God’s presence is not something we predict or wait for but something we live in. And, the journey will never take us beyond the bounds of love.

Timelines and destinations are out of our hands. But Christ promises us his presence…so, we are free to keep doing the kingdom’s work without fearing the future…

We can, like Martin Luther is thought to have said, plant an apple tree today, even if the world might end tomorrow…and we can leave the math to God.

We are safe, today, in the one who is the Way, Truth and Life...even as our journey moves forward from here…into an uncertain but promise-filled future.                                   

Amen.