This Strong Rock

The first seven words of the section of John’s gospel we just heard have some applicability, I expect, to pretty much every place and time since Jesus first spoke them. “Do not let your hearts be troubled,” Jesus says. Reassuring words when there’s always so much to be troubled about. I could give you the whole litany of today’s troubling things, but I’d just be filling time. I trust you all know whatever cares weigh on your heart today.

So hear our Lord’s words again: “Do not let your hearts be troubled.” Take a moment. Breathe. Be still and know that God is God.

“Do not let your hearts be troubled.”

Did that work? Are your hearts untroubled now? Have your anxieties abated, your sorrows ceased? I mean, mine are nowhere to be found. Who knew it was that easy?

Now, don’t get me wrong. The last thing I’m doing is mocking the words of The Word made flesh. But these two things can both be true: that the words of Christ are filled with wisdom and power, and so long as they are spoken into the same world that saw fit to crucify the son of God, they are more a prophecy of God’s plans, purposes, and longing, than they are a prescription for our pain.

For each one of you, I’m guessing, Jesus’s injunction not to let your hearts be troubled lands differently. As well it should: each of you arrived this morning carrying all the joys, confusions, and burdens of your unique life on this rainy, thundery day. Just so, Jesus also first spoke these words into a unique context. And with all due respect to the Revised Common Lectionary, that context was not, in fact, the fifth Sunday of Easter. It was Maundy Thursday, that darkest and most dramatic of nights, filled with the last supper, the washing of the disciples’ feet, the new commandment - that you love one another as I have loved you, the betrayal by Judas.

And the betrayal of Peter. Indeed the verse that immediately precedes this morning’s text is John 13:37, when Jesus says to Peter, “Will you lay down your life for me? Very truly I tell you, before the cock crows, you will deny me three times.” And then the very next words are “Do not let your hearts be troubled?” We know for sure that Peter’s heart was not relieved by Jesus’s reassurance, for Luke’s gospel records him “weeping bitterly” when the prophecy comes true. What then, does this mean?

Isolated from its context, this passage can read like a vision of the hereafter. Jesus’s promise that “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places” calls to mind a castle in the clouds, or perhaps a heavenly subdivision, if suburbia is more your speed. I won’t deny that that’s a possible reading, but I don’t think it’s the only one.

We actually hear directly from Peter this morning. Our second reading was from his first letter. And it may not be a coincidence that, some years, maybe even decades, after hearing his Lord’s reassurance that “In my father’s house there are many dwelling places,” and, therefore, “Do not let your hearts be troubled,” Peter reflects on these words in his own message of reassurance to the people he addresses as “the exiles of the dispersion,” presumably early Christians crushed under the Roman fist.

Peter uses the imagery of God’s house, just as Jesus did, but there is no ambiguity here about whether he is talking about a house above or amid God’s beloved on earth. Those who follow Jesus are “built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.” And not in some far off heaven, but here, now.

In Christ, Peter writes, God calls us to be the living stones that form the unshakeable foundations, sturdy walls, and shielding roof of the spiritual home of God, with and among God’s creation, with all sorts and conditions of people. And pay attention to this - living stones, so that the structure we form doesn’t crumble like Hadrian’s Wall. Living stones like us do what living things do: move, grow, learn, change, love. Adapting and evolving to make room for each new person who passes through the waters of baptism to take their place in the ever-growing edifice of the everlasting home.

The fact that, “Do not let your hearts be troubled,” is Jesus’s immediate follow-up to his prophecy of Peter’s betrayal is tremendous hope for us all. For if Jesus so offers his grace to Peter in advance of the betrayal he knows is coming, how much more must he offer it to us, in all the ways we think we have failed, fall short, worry that we are abnormal or unworthy of love.

But we’re here, today, doing our best to follow Jesus despite all of that. And he is the way, he is the truth, he is the life, and he has gone before us, to prepare a place for us, this place: this strong rock, this castle to keep us safe, where God’s face shines upon God’s servants, where God’s loving-kindness keeps and saves us all.

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Fifth Sunday of Easter

May 7, 2023

Episcopal Church of All Saints, Indianapolis, IN

Readings: Acts 7:56-60; Ps. 31:1-5, 15-16; 1 Pet 2:2-10; Jn 14:1-14

Image: "Hiking Along Hadrian's Wall" by eight cent, distributed under a CC BY-NC license.