St. Charles Episcopal Church - St. Charles, IL
The Fifth Sunday of Easter - May 22, 2011
Acts 7:55-60; Psalm 31:1-5, 15-16; 1 Peter 2:2-10; John 14:1-14
Guest Preacher: Vicki Garvey, Canon for Life-Long Christian Formation in the Diocese of Chicago

To listen to an audio recording of the sermon given by guest preacher Canon Vicki Garvey, click here.

My mother recently moved here from Maryland. As you might imagine, there was a lot of down-sizing involved. She moved from the home she had designed, the home where she and my dad raised us and where she lived for more than half her life to a small apartment in a retirement community. As sometimes happens, after we actually got her here, we found that we had down-sized a bit too much. So it was back to places like Target and dollar stores for small things and to IKEA for odds and ends of furniture. It fell to me to put together the IKEA stuff.

Of course the first issue with IKEA is that everything has Swedish names so you have to make sure when you're downstairs that you're picking up the box that contains the thing you actually saw upstairs. From there on though, the IKEA way is to ensure that assembly is simple and easy and, in that spirit, the instructions always seem to picture these cheerful stick figures who promise in big print: This project will take 30 minutes and everything you need is included in this package. Three hours later I am generally sitting on the floor with ‘side a' confused with ‘side g' and sometimes missing one of the I don't know what they call it in Swedish and I don't much care little bolt-y things, but I can't complete this project without it. More than once I've been almost finished building some piece of what looked to be a simple item of furniture only to notice that I've constructed one whole side backwards.

It's on such occasions that I begin to understand the frustrations of a Philip and a Thomas. Just before the gospel story that we heard Fr. Bill proclaim this morning, Jesus had informed the assembled disciples that: One of them would betray him [13.21], one would deny him [13.38], and oh, by the way, he was going away and they couldn't come with him [13.33ff]. And then without pausing for breath, he tells them not to let their hearts be troubled.And all of this on the night on which he is shortly to be arrested.

So I can understand the frustration, the fear, the confusion and the sense of creeping bereftness that prompt the questions that first Thomas and then Philip ask. They don't know what to do, how to get where they're supposed to go or how to make sense of life without him and they need some assurance, some direction, some … something particularly in the face of what he's just told them. This is not, I think, what they might have had in mind or thought he had in mind for them back when they decided to follow him. When he was new and exciting and the things he had to say were stirring and the changes he was initiating were bracing and everything seemed possible. Now, the end is drawing near and what he's saying, nice though some of it is, is confusing and disturbing and perhaps even panic-making.

His response both to Tom's "Way? What way? We don't have a clue to the way" and to Phil's exasperated: "Just show us God and that'll do the trick" comes down to the same thing, though articulated differently to each of them from the infamous "I am the way the truth and the life" to the less widely known "If you know me, you know God; when you see me, you're seeing God".

These are the people who've been with him for a while. In John's gospel, they've been with him for years. They've listened to him preach and teach; they've watched him heal people of disease and of anxiety and of isolation; they've seen him feed people hungry for food or a kind word or a welcoming gesture; they've been amazed with others as he raised people from death to life, from outcast status to welcome home. They've known him and watched him and listened to him; they are the ones for whom he's modeled the ministry. But the way and the truth and the life? Seeing God when they see him? This is a bit much.

I imagine that some time in their pasts, probably in their childhoods, they each learned the compelling stories of that God. It will dawn on them finally that this Jesus whom they've known, is in fact incarnating the very way that they learned as kiddos, the way of justice, the way of taking care of the widow, the orphan and the stranger at the gate, the way of wisdom, the way that the prophets preached and walked and taught others to walk. From the days of Abraham and Sarah, there was handed down in their sacred traditions,the stories of the way of God, the stories of the best of their ancestors who had walked that way and paved the way for others to follow. This is not new stuff or 1st century rocket science. This is the stuff of their catechism classes of old.

And in this Jesus do they begin to see – now that he's reminded them of the similarity – the contours of the God of Israel who once called nobodies to be the people of God? Do they begin to detect a likeness to the God who was in the business of bringing down the powerful and lifting the lowly, who was fond of filling the hungry with good things and sending the rich away empty?

On this night in that room with him they will not remember those things, the things they know, the things he taught them, the things that mark him as the embodiment of the way and a chip off the old divine block. They were as hapless as I am with my jumbled box of IKEA parts. For them, this is too soon; they will need time, time after the resurrection, after they've come to know him again, after he sends them one last time into the world to do his ministry in his name.

They'll remember. They'll get it and act like they get it. And when they remember all of that they'll recall something else. Back, way back before they ever met him, back when they were kiddos, learning about the ways of their God, there was an educational system in place of which they were a part. Children, including our Tom and Phil and Pete and the Marys and the rest would have started in the local synagogue school where they would have learned the Torah, the opening stories of the way of God and of their ancestors. At about 10, some of them would left school to begin learning the trades of their families; some to the fishing industry and some to construction, or farming. The better students would go on for another 5 years or so, learning from a more renowned teacher about the prophets and beginning to learn what others had said about the meaning of the stories and about how those stories were also their stories. And they'd begin to learn to ask their own questions; like their ancestor Jakob, they'd learn to wrestle with the word of God and the way of God.

At about 15 or 16, many of those students would also leave school to begin other trades or to start families of their own. But this time, the best of the best of the students would seek a gifted teacher and ask the teacher if they could become disciples. The rabbi would question each candidate closely. The rabbi wanted to know: did this kid know the stories, the Torah and the prophets and the psalms? Did the kid know how those ancient stories were still at work in their own lives? Did the kid know how to wrestle with the texts, know how to ask it questions. And most of all, did this kid have what it took, not only to say teach what the rabbi would teach, but also to do what the rabbi did? If the rabbi thought the kid was capable of all of that, then and only then, the rabbi would say to the kid: "Follow me."

Years later, when Jesus finally met up with Tom and Phil and Pete and the Marys and the rest, not one of them was following a rabbi which means that back when they were kiddos learning the ways of God, they weren't the cream of the crop, the smartest kids, the best and the brightest. Not one of them had made the grade. They were the not-good-enoughs who'd gone off at 10 or 12 or 15 to learn another trade. And Jesus, this talented rabbi comes to them – not they to him – and he says: "Come follow me" which means he thinks they have what it takes, these nobodies, these lowly. He thinks they have what it takes not only to know the ways of God, to know the prophets and the writings and how to wrestle with the text; they have what it takes to speak as he would speak and do what he would do.

So later, after the resurrection, they'll remember. They know the way. In him they've seen God. In themselves they have what it takes, as he promises, to do even more than he's done. Barbara Brown Taylor describes the moment this way: "That familiar beloved voice was once again heard on the earth, only briefly this time. Go, he said. Make disciples. Teach. Proclaim. Go. Ready or not, it was the disciples' turn to speak. The Word had come back to entrust them with his word and then he disappeared for good. His words did not disappear. They lingered in the air, still pulsing with power. All they needed to do their work was someone to speak them. There was no way around it. The Word had willed them his words. And so the disciples entered the cloud of sacred speech. Quoting him they began to sound like him, and remarkable things happened around them when they did. People were healed, freed, fed, transformed."¹

I may be all thumbs when it comes to my IKEA projects, but I'm an heir to those words. So are you. I might not have been around in 1st century Israel to listen to Jesus teach and preach or to watch him heal and feed and nurture. But I'm called to be a disciple. So are you. Every Sunday we disciples-in-training come to a place like this to hear the old stories which are our stories, the stories of the way of God on which we are to pattern our lives. Every week we pray ourselves out of here with some variation of the prayer found on p 365 of the BCP, not because it's a pretty prayer, but because it reminds us of who we are and what we are called to be and do in the world which Jesus cared enough to live in and die for. "Send us now into the world" we pray, "and grant us strength and courage to love and serve you with gladness and singleness of heart."

This is not 21st century rocket science; it's not even as difficult – to me at least – as fitting ‘side a' into ‘side g' and attaching with those weird little bolt-y things. It's the normal stuff of everyday life that Jesus trusts me – trusts me – to do in his name and on his behalf.

¹BBT, When God is Silent (Cowley, 1998), 47-48.