This morning I'd like to juggle two images, ``home'' and ``the way,'' or ``the journey.'' Both are found in John 14. In a passage we sometimes use at funeral services we recall Jesus saying I go to prepare a place for you and in that place there are many mansions. And then in this same chapter, a few verses down, in response to a question, he says I am the way, the truth and the life. Going home I've referenced before how back in 1994 I traveled with a about eight or nine African-American Mennonite leaders to eastern Africa. This was one of the more challenging, stretching, emotional experiences of my life. This three week trip was sponsored by AAMA (African-American Mennonite Association) and MCC. The group was composed entirely of African-American Mennonites plus me, playing the role of MCC facilitator. During our journey through Ethiopia, Uganda, and Kenya one of the persistent themes was the idea of ``home.''
At our first meeting as a group in a hotel room on the East Coast, and then across many different meetings and encounters in Africa, this theme was repeated.
``Why have you come? What are you doing here?'' the curious asked those questions.
And the answer was some variation of ``we're coming back home! We're coming back to the mother land!''
The three weeks gave us plenty of time to grow to miss the people we loved back in the United States, the warmth of your own bed, the familiar food, just the rhythms of life we had left behind. And so I will never forget what happened on the morning of our departure from Nairobi. We got up that morning, having slept at the Mennonite guesthouse, and it was time to bring our bags to the van for the ride to the airport. I can still remember Steven Francisco, an AAMA leader from Virginia (and who died at too early an age several years ago) walking towards the van, his suitcase in hand, a big smile on his face, saying ``It's going home day, it's going home day!''
For me those days always crystallized the questions around ``home.'' Can we ever go, truly, ``home?'' Is it okay to feel completely at ``home?'' For me it was painful watching these particular brothers and sisters struggle with the idea of place and home. Even as they had come back ``home'' to Africa it was clear this was no longer really and truly their home. The cultural and language differences were all too obvious. And given the legacy of our own country it's not hard to imagine how African-American people might harbor lurking feelings of mistrust and suspicion in the land that is officially their ``home.''
The old gospel song makes the emphatic point that none of us should ever feel completely at home during this life. After all, we are just passing through, so this world is most certainly not our home. And this is what Jesus says, don't be worried, I'm going to prepare a place for you, a place of fellowship and rest, a place with many rooms (using the image we humans can understand). In some ultimate way none of us should ever feel completely at home here. We understand, of course, that because this earth can't be our ultimate home we can then live benignly indifferent, just living out our days in as pleasurable a fashion as we can while we await our eternal home.
The way This passage pivots around several questions. If we back up into the concluding verses of chapter 13 we hear Peter ask, Lord, where are you going? Then Thomas asks, ifwe don't know where you are going, how can we possibly know the way? And then Philip basically asks, Lord, can you just show us the Father? All these questions are intertwined around Jesus' words about traveling on, about going somewhere, and about actually being the path, the way, himself. And he also says that he would like his listeners to travel along with him.
How are we to understand Jesus as ``the way?'' John understood that in Jesus the word had become flesh and bones. The very wisdom of God, the very love of God, all of God was expressed in Jesus. What we see in Jesus is ``the way.'' And what is this way? What is this ``way'' we are invited to embrace, to become part of ourselves? Let's back up into chapter 13, just before this section.
In the preceding chapter is the poignant scene where Jesus takes up the towel and basin and ministers to his disciples by washing their feet. He teaches them that they ought to do the same, to become servants to others, just as he has for them. And buried between the lines of this scene is the reality that this service extends to even those who may turn against us, for Judas himself was in that room. Later in the chapter it is more explicit. I'm giving you a new commandment. Love one another as I have loved you. And Peter gives voice to another Jesus-like instruction that we be willing to lay down our lives for him.
We can say that the fullness of God takes visible form in Jesus. We are invited to join in, to participate with, this fullness of God's revelation. We are invited to join hands with, to find our deepest camaraderie in and with and through this ``way,'' this Jesus. It's not just a matter of raising our hand in response to the question, do you believe in this Jesus, and thus signifying, ``yes, I believe.'' But it is swinging our lives onto the onramp, and joining in, following in, the way, which is Jesus.
The universal and the particular We can't read these verses without pausing to reflect on the universal and yet particular aspects of our faith. Just who are all these rooms, or mansions, that are being prepared, just who are they all for? And when Jesus says ``I am the way, the truth, and the life,'' just how inclusively, or how exclusively, do we experience these words?
I think that the universality of our faith, and yet the particularity of our faith, is increasingly an issue at the congregational level of churches within our broader Mennonite Church USA fellowship. Our communities change, a Sikh temple is built nearby on the 99, some folks from faraway move into our neighborhood, and we read a bit more, and so the conversation slowly shifts at the congregational level.
Most congregations are behind what has been going on for years, even decades in our academic institutions and in our agencies. Interfaith dialogue has been an important theme in MCC for years. This is clearly a current within our mission agencies. There are conferences around interfaith dialogue. Mennonites write books around themes like ``Anabaptists meeting Muslims.'' And, even broader, we ought to be informed by the experiences of the global Mennonite community. Being a follower of Christ is far different in our context than it is in Indonesia, for example. As in most things, we need each other.
Perhaps the challenges we face today are not new but we just feel them in the particular expressions of our modern times. The crisis of our times, as Harvard Divinity's Harvey Cox puts it, is this, `the crisis in the current sate of interfaith dialogue (and we might add inter-Christian conversation as well) is that the universal and particular poles have come unhinged.'' (Cox, ``Many Mansions or One Way? The Crisis in Interfaith Dialogue'')
Over on the universal side everyone is for dialogue, mutuality, and the ongoing search for what unites. We just sing ``love, love, love, all we need is love'' and we repeat the Rodney King mantra, ``Can't we all just get along?'' And over on the particular side dialogue is shunned in favor of a passionate and repeated retelling of the Truth with a capital T.
But Cox would argue (and I agree) that both poles need each other. Both sides, in repeating their favorite lines, can realize in their quieter moments that they are just preaching to the choir. Over in the far reaches of the universal side the conversation becomes so general that it becomes vapid, just a repetition of niceties that are not anchored in concrete, real, heart-felt experience. The universalists need the dynamic passion of the particularists anchored in a story.
Meanwhile over in the spooky hinterlands of the particular, people so enamored by their own particular faith arrogantly proselytize or kill in their faith's name. Particularism in the extreme becomes fanaticism. As Cox puts it, we are left with a paradox, ``Without the universal pole, no dialogue would ensue. But without the particular, the dialogue dissipates its source of primal energy.'' Cox is talking about interfaith dialogue but I dare say that this can be applied to conversation between Christians as well.
Obviously I'm for finding a path somewhere between the extremes. I believe our calling is to offer winsome, engaging, passionate testimony to the way as we have seen it, experienced it, felt it, and learned it in Jesus Christ. This is the particular story that we are rooted in, the story of the great God of all Creation, God of the universe, reaching out to women and men, seeking reconciliation, and this yearning taking full expression in Jesus.
Our experience as Mennonite people is that as we give humble (of course!) testimony to what we have seen and heard we have a more authentic voice. Surely a more authentic voice than if we shuffle our feet and sort of mutter under our breath, almost as an afterthought, well, there is this Jesus…our voices trailing away. We better point to the universality of God by sharing the more particular ways in which our lives have been transformed.
Living on the way home Allow me to return to my trip to eastern Africa in 1994. Towards the end of our time in Africa I was in the town of Garissa. That night, in the wee hours of the morning, I had the most striking dream of my adult life.
I dreamt that I saw Glena, beckoning me to come. She was waving her hand. So I went. I found myself on a wide African road. Over to the side was a little stand where I could get some tea and something to eat. I sat down and had some tea and I was given a black, charred dog to eat. I bit into the dog, it moved, to my great surprise, and then I woke up. I remember feeling great emotion as I awoke from that dream, and I still feel it today.
When I got back to Nairobi I went for some help in interpreting the dream. Interestingly I think I only talked to a small circle of white people. One of them was Mark Nickel, an Anglican priest who grew up in the Mennonite Brethren church down the street from us.
We surmised that Glena had given her blessing for me to go on this trip. On this trip I was given this unique, personal, and particular insight into the African-American experience, and more particularly into the African-American Mennonite story. I was allowed to sidle up close to their pain, and I was given another opportunity to glimpse again a particular African story. In both stories though there was great pain there was still life.
Surely all of us can remember times in our lives when the storm clouds loomed ominous and large, and our hearts filled with uncertainty and fear. For some of us, we are right now in a season where we feel the pain of loss, or we are worried about what the future holds, or the burdens of this life seem so incredibly heavy to bear.
The assurance, the comfort we are offered, is that as we give ourselves over to Jesus who is the way we find our deepest, truest selves. In taking as our own Jesus the way we are inspired to serve and to love, to do and to say. We find ourselves drawn to places of brokenness and despair.
As we live and minister in these intersections where God's great love meets the world's great pain, we find that this way leads us to a place called home, a place where there is rest and peace both now, and eternally, a place near to the heart of God.
