God’s Family, God’s Home, God’s Love

If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.
by lay preacher, Will Harron
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One of the things that I most appreciate about the Bible - our scripture - is the riches that can be teased from the passages and stories we sit with when we engage the text with our lives. This isn’t a feature unique to the Bible - for many of us various key books, films, or pieces of music, affect us all the more deeply because of how they intersect with our lives. Our commitment to the Bible in our worship and devotion as a key part of our life in church means that we have the opportunity to come back to it across days, weeks, and years. This week’s gospel passage, like many, contains ambiguities and challenges that make it worthwhile to return to again and again; to read from various modes of analysis. 

When reading the Bible, whether our weekly lectionary text, or daily devotional reading, or other encounters with this library of stories and traditions, poems and songs, we can find ourselves closer to God through the gifts of our life experiences alongside the blessing of the context added by centuries of previous readers and interpreters. God’s Holy Spirit is with us as we read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest the Bible, just as she accompanies us through the most joyful and the toughest times in our life.

And so, our Gospel passage today takes us from our festive fifth Sunday of Easter, back in time to Jesus’s last evening with his disciples - the night before his crucifixion. Jesus has washed his disciples’ feet, and told told them of his upcoming betrayal, and Judas has left to carry out that betrayal. 
Jesus is aware that his time with his disciples is limited, and he gives them a message of strength and courage. Do not let your hearts be troubled. Courage, the word, means heart, and it strengthens my own heart to hear Jesus comfort his dear friends. It is a similar admonition to that given by angels throughout the bible - do not be afraid. 

Jesus then says that in his Father’s house there are many dwelling place, and that he is going to prepare a place for his disciples. The Common English Bible translates this in a way that touches my heart. In that translation, Jesus says “my Father’s house has room to spare”. The welcome, the care, and the love that Jesus invites his disciples - us - into is into the welcome, care, and love of a family. Just as a parent cares for a child; just as God the Father has provided for Jesus with welcome, care and love, we are also to be provided for through Jesus. 

Family can be complicated. Not all families are welcoming, not all families are caring, not all families are safe. Families can be “all of the above”  - and navigating those ambiguities can make the metaphor of families challenging at times. Similarly, the concept of home can be complicated. Whether or not our family is safe, the home we are in also may or may not be - and in a world shaped by capitalism, racism, sexism, and other forces of oppression, keeping a home that is safe and welcoming is not always possible. “In my father’s house there are many dwelling places, many rooms, room to spare, room to be at home.” The notion of home, just like family, can be challenging.

Home has certainly been a challenging notion at times in my own life. Soon after I turned 18, during the same summer I moved to Massachusetts to start college, my home life in Delaware disintegrated. My mother and brother ended up in California, my sister spent most of her senior year of high school living with friends in Delaware before joining my mom and brother in California, and my father ended up with my grandmother in Texas, and then in New Jersey. When asked by friends at college, “where is home,” my answer would be “I grew up in Delaware” - an answer to a different question, because the answer to the question I was asked was so much harder to articulate. 
Was my home the foreclosed house in Delaware? Was my home my college dorm room, changing every year and stored in bins in a dorm basement during the summer? Was my home in California, in the home mom was creating with my siblings while I was away? Was my home with dad? With my grandmother? There were many rooms I could point to… but none were truly home. Much easier to say, “I grew up in Delaware,” and hope that my redaction of the question wasn’t noticed or commented on. And when “home” or “family” was used in a metaphorical sense - as something that could only ever be simple, good, and easily to relate to, I would bristle. My sense of home and family were not simple, good, or easy.

And so, I empathize with the disciples who want a little more specificity from Jesus. “You say that you are leaving us tonight - and that you are going to the Father and preparing a home for us,” wonders Thomas, and so he asks “We don’t know where that is. How do we know the way?” Thomas does not want to be separated from Jesus, no matter what happens. Thomas has found a home with Jesus and does not want to lose that safety.

Jesus’s answer here is relayed in the enigmatic style that I think of as a hallmark of John’s gospel: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” These are huge claims Jesus is making, about his relationship with God the Father, and about our relationship to Jesus and God the Father. And they complicate the passage. God the Father is has a spacious home for those in the family…and the only way to join the family is through Jesus. Half of this passage could be read to support the broadest of universalisms, and the other half seems to imply the opposite: a single narrow path of truth. What does that mean?

Philip pushes against this ambiguity.“Can you just show us the Father? Then we will be satisfied.” 

Jesus respond “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me?” 

Jesus explains, if you have seen him, you have seen his father. And Jesus goes on: if you can’t believe that, believe the works. If you don’t believe that the power of Jesus and the power of God the Father are intertwined, believe in the good works of Jesus - healing, casting out of spirits, feeding, raising the dead. All of these works of love can only come from the Father. That is enough.
And this further complicates the message of the text. God has a spacious home prepared for the family - and one joins the family only through Jesus. And if one can’t believe in Jesus, if they can believe in the goodness of the works of Jesus that is sufficient to be included. 

Boy, family can be complicated! But the final line of our Gospel text helps me to navigate my way through the ambiguity. “If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.” 

Through college and the five years after, both my mom and I put together homes under various trying circumstances. I moved into and out of a series of temporary housing situations across Massachusetts, North Carolina, and upstate New York as I worked my way through a succession of temporary and seasonal jobs. I found ways to distill “home” into a few cherished possessions that travelled with me, a few cartons of books and clothes, and the web of relationships I carried into a new place and that I built while I was there. 

My mom built a sense of home for my siblings (and for me, when visiting during holidays) in a series of apartments while figuring out how to support our family on a single income while living with severe disabilities. 

California was never “home” to me… and yet, I also knew that no matter the circumstances, my mom’s love both followed me wherever I went, and would make a place for me with her when I needed it. A letter with money to help me through a lean season would arrive unasked for; a gift from my Amazon wish list would appear unexpectedly in the middle of the year. I knew that if I ever asked my mom for anything, no matter how hard it would be, no matter how bad I was at returning phone calls or staying in regular touch, she would find a way to make it so for me, even across three thousand miles of distance, even as she was doing the same for my brother and sister. And so, when I read Jesus tell his disciples that, “If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it,” I have a context from which to imagine and interpret that unconditional love. 

And that unconditional love, that resolution to find a way to make a home, to make a family, to invite wholeness, helps me to understand the fuller passage. When Jesus says, “If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it,” I think of the love my mom showed in those hard years. And if that sort of love is at all reflective of God’s love for us, then I think that God’s love in making a home, and inviting us into family and safety and wholeness in that home, is a love where God will stop at nothing to make us welcome; that the works of that love are more important than understanding what it means for Jesus and the Father to be one; that the movement of God’s love is towards bringing us together into wholeness.

This isn’t the only way I might approach the Gospel passage; in a different season I might find new meaning through different lenses; I could read it instead from the sense of home I built when my life found stability in Boston, or when Lindsay and I moved out to Western Massachusetts. If I had read it alongside our Acts passage or our Epistle from Peter I might find different answers to questions raised by the text. But that is the joy of our scriptures - that this library prepared for us by our forebears in faith can be returned to again and again; we can apply the tools of various fields of study to them, and we can find our lives reflected in these stories, and through it all we can find God’s love reflected back to us in our lives. Jesus tells his disciples, do not let your hearts be troubled. Have courage. When I can connect my experience of love to God’s love through our scriptures, I find that courage all the easier.

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