John 14:1-6; Summer rerun series--first preached July 13, 1997.
Where are you from? 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 my father talk and it clicks for you that I’m from New York. Oh, well, that explains a lot, you say. Same as it explains a lot when Bruce McIver used to drop his –g’s as in singin’ or preachin’ and you knew he was from a small town in North Carolina. Regionalism is real. Where you are from doesn’t mean everything, but suggests certain things. We are not complete products of where we grew up, but place does shape us.
God put the first people in a place. Eden. Center of the world. When God cast them from their place, the world was off-center. They were displaced. Not just homeless, but eccentric, literally. Sent off to search forever for what they lost – home, Eden, their Place.
And that is our lot, too. Some of you remember Foy Valentine. Foy was a Baptist statesman. He died just a couple of years ago in Dallas, but he grew up in Van Zandt County. He once wrote: As Greenwich in London is the bearing point from which all modern latitudinal and longitudinal measurements and orientations are reckoned the wide world over, so our Place was the only Greenwich I knew anything about from my Exodus from Edgewood. . . . Place is very special in helping you know who you are! [i]
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. 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.
When she was 13, I took my now married daughter Cameron to New York, where I grew up. It was just a dad and daughter trip. (I did the same with son Rhett and daughter Jillian, too, when they got to that age. I recommend the experience.) We took the ferry to Staten Island and drove up Todt Hill to where I grew up. Strange feeling. It has been a few years for me. Twenty-some years since I had lived there. It was all grown up; like me, I guess. Which may account for why it seemed smaller. It was really big when I was a kid--the street, the neighborhood, the house. The house was strangest of all. Two owners, maybe three, removed from when it was our place. Now it’s hardly recognizable. They cut the roof off and raised it one story. Pushed the sides out. Pulled down the post and rail fence with the rose bushes. They changed everything. I recognized a spruce tree. That was it, pretty much. That was my place. My father and grandfathers had built it together when I was three. I mowed the grass there. I played all over that place. Somebody gets the mail now at 76 Copperleaf Terrace, but it’s not my Place anymore.
Almost 18 years into our relationship together here, I realize my world has shifted again. After 17 of those years in one house, we are now in a new one. I used to turn right out of the parking lot; now I turn left. I am still in transition.
Of course transition is just what being displaced is all about. And 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.
I was talking to Allen Walworth on the day he resigned as pastor of ParkCitiesBaptistChurch ten years ago. I told him I never thought he would only be a transitional pastor. To which he replied, Is there any other kind? No matter how long you are someplace, that place will go on without you at some point. And he’s right. Bruce was a 30-year transitional pastor and I have been the same for nearly eighteen. Neither of us can claim pride of place. It will all change.
Some of you know this transitional feeling, this constant out-of-place-ness. 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. And it doesn’t stop there. Singleness to marriage, parenting children to parenting your parents, maybe marriage to singleness again, work to retirement, from your house to assisted living, 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.
I remember being with Norma Lee, visiting her father in a health care facility. His physical distress was spiritual, too. He knew how out-of-place he was in that bed. As we said the 23rd Psalm together, he said how he longed for that to be true for him. To be with God, in the house of the Lord forever. He knew he couldn’t go back, he could only go forward. He was looking for his place with God. It reminded me of Frederick Buechner’s words in his book Longing for Home: “We carry inside us a vision of wholeness that we sense is our true home that beckons us.”
And 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, or 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 family places and slept under the stars with him who said, Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of man has no place to lay his head. They are feeling disoriented, dislocated, unsure. So Jesus assures them.
He tells them to trust him. 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. And not even the groom, let alone the bride, knows when that will be. The bride 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 in the waiting, but necessary. She has to trust his love. There is no other way.
In the magical movie Contact, based upon the novel by the late astronomer Carl Sagan, the hardboiled scientist played by Jody Foster is contacted by a world beyond the senses. She 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 from the dangerous ways we get attached to 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 (I paraphrase), unless you are able to put your hand to the plowshare and not look back, you cannot be my disciple. And what he means by that is, that you cannot find your place in the future with him, 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.
Life is a great journey from beginning to end. That is the very nature of life. We can try to deny it, we can fight it, we can try to sink concrete piers deep into the ground to keep us moored to one place or one time of life, but sooner or later, the earth will move under our feet. The tidal wave of change is the nature of the day, and only if we get on the surfboard and ride it out will we know the true thrill of it all.
My friend and Croatian native Miroslav Volf is one of the brightest lights in theology today. He took the pledge of allegiance to become a citizen of these United States on Good Friday ten 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, O, 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. And some people can live so much for later that they 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.
The most unusual thing happened as our family was driving to Louisville for the CBF meeting some years ago. Along the road from Little Rock to Memphis to Nashville, I realized someone was following us. Every time I changed lanes, this car would stay with me. The more I thought of it, the more I figured, well, this guy just likes following me because I like to go so slow, don’t you know?! He figures he’ll be safe trailing me. Well, after a few hours of this, we had to get gas and make a potty stop. So I put on my blinker and waved at him good-bye, but sure enough, he followed us off the exit and right into the gas station. We got out of our cars and I said “hello, sure good to have a traveling mate.” He smiled and asked where we were going. Turns out he was going to D.C. where he worked at Walter Reed hospital. I asked him if he wanted to join us for dinner in Nashville. He did. So there we were, the grubby-looking, travel weary Masons, and a thirtysomething African-American stranger piling into a booth at Outback Steakhouse. We had a good visit, found out he was an orphan, adopted by a couple in Arkadelphia. His adoptive parents were now dead and he only had two sisters. No other family. No sense of place. He latched on to us and we to him. We looked together for a place to stay that night, and when we parted, we exchanged addresses and all that. We stayed in touch for awhile, but have lost touch now.
Go figure. All the way to heaven. We are all looking for experiences of home on our way to Home. 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 as I was showing my daughter the place I grew up. 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 final resting place.
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. When we say the 23rd Psalm, we are not so much longing to be in the house of the Lord forever so much as to be at home with the Lord forever. 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? And, 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.
[i] “A Paean for Place,” in Christian Ethics Today, Jul 97:3-4.
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