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Let Not Your Heart Be Troubled Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis June 28, 2009, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Revelation 21 John 14:1-14
We have been lingering in John’s gospel since the beginning of the year and come, on this Sunday in the middle of the gospel, to the end and to a text that addresses the sense of an ending that only those given the gift of moral life understand. Brian said as much last Sunday. We are the only creatures who know we will die. What we do with that knowledge will either make us or break us every day until then. Jesus’ words at the beginning of John’s fourteenth chapter address our sense of an ending directly. I have read them countless times to you as we gathered in this sanctuary to bear witness to our faith in the face of death. At the edge of his own grave, Jesus means to reassure his disciples that his death will make of all their endings a beginning, a “way” whose destination is the room he is making for them in God. The disciples are incredulous. So are most in the crowd who have come to say farewell to a friend. We begin, therefore, where Jesus begins. Let not your heart be troubled. He begins with the troubled heart that he assumed and so redeemed in his own at the news of Lazarus’ death. On any given Sunday, this congregation is filled with hearts troubled by the fact that the gift of mortal life does not last. Perhaps, this morning, that heart is your own. The litany that puts flesh on these troubles sometimes can seem endless: a cancer discovered on the liver or suddenly metastasized to the brain; a friend in his prime felled by a heart attack or a wife fallen victim to her husband’s mid-life crisis; a business gone belly-up or a life-savings buried beneath a pyramid scheme; a dear one who no longer knows day from night, kith from kin or a colleague unrecognizable when some unethical push comes to shove. Sunday in and Sunday out, we come with our private hearts heavy with troubles we often hide from one another. Other times and other days of the week, as was the case with the disciples, we gather to weep in common because we share one common grief. In either case, our troubles are never hid from God. Jesus’ words acknowledge our troubled hearts in the first place as we find ourselves up against life’s endings. But in the face of our finitude and in the second place, we cry out with a question that anticipates Jesus’ answer: what would free our hearts from being troubled? The world has a multitude of answers and would proffer an endless array of consolations for a price. We consume these consolations. Before the economy collapsed, many a troubled heart literally went shopping. We were advised us to do no less in the days that followed September 11. I complied. An admittedly shallow response to life’s intractability, there is something death-denying in the act of acquiring one more thing, we think. Others turn to entertainment to forget their troubles: the Phillies, the Flyers, the Eagles will do, countless hours spent on Facebook, a spur of the moment trip to Argentina or perhaps a day at the spa to ease the pain. Even certain spiritual practices designed to relieve you of the world and its troubles or of your body and its weariness in well-doing may appear to free our hearts from our troubles momentarily. But to the question of what finally has the power to free our troubled hearts, Jesus has one answer: Believe in God, believe also in me. As you may recall, John almost exclusively speaks of believing not as something to which one assents inwardly but as an outward and active commitment to a person, the person being Jesus. The words of Luther in the first question of The Large Catechism come immediately to mind. In response to the first commandment, Luther asks what it means to have a God and answers that God is what you hang your heart upon. Jesus is saying the same. The heart that is troubled is a heart hung not on God but on all the things the world peddles as panaceas. Jesus tells the disciples in their time of deep uncertainty, Hang your hearts on God; hang your hearts on me. The immediate difficulty with doing this for the disciples is that Jesus was about to be murdered. How do we hang our hearts on someone who is dead? We have memories, but they fade; we have the person we have already become because a parent or a spouse or a friend’s life has shaped our own; we cling to a remembered word or a saying in the midst of the darkness. Experience tells us that to hang our hearts on a man whose own heart is about to stop beating, to live off of this brief relationship the rest of our days is not enough to free our hearts from trouble. Only if it should happen that in his death, death will be defeated will there be a reason for our hearts not to be troubled, will there be a living God on whom to hang our hearts. Jesus says as much before his death does as much. He speaks of the gift of another kind of life his death will give us: the gift of eternal life. Note that he does not speak in the images of the Book of Revelation. There is no talk of a tree of life, jeweled streets, ever-flowing rivers, light without moon or sun. Rather he tells the disciples that the God on whom they may hang their hearts “has room for them.” Theologian and friend Robert Jenson writes about God’s roominess in relation not to the space but to the time God has for us. “‘What is time?’ My answer is created time is room in God’s own life. If creation is God’s making room in himself, then God must be roomy,” says Jenson. “[T]his roominess of God should be thought of as his ‘time’, that God’s eternity is not immunity to time but his having all the time he needs.” What has troubled the disciples’ hearts is the very real sense that their time with Jesus has come to an end. You and I have the same relationship to time: its brevity robs us of those we love. What alone can free our hearts of this trouble is the assurance given one who hangs her heart on the God who has all the time God needs for her and for those she loves. If, in our lifetime, we hang our hearts on the God who has all the time God needs for us and for those we love, on the God whose love does not end with death, then Paul’s admonition that nothing can separate us from God’s love—neither life nor death nor angels nor principalities nor power nor things present nor things to come—becomes an almost palpable promise to which our hearts may cleave. Specifically and according to John, we have glimpsed in the signs of Jesus what eternal life, what God’s roominess, what God’s time will be. Think of the first sign—the wedding in Cana—a wedding that went on for so long that the wine ran out. Think of our own sense of scarcity and how we live thinking there is never enough. The room God makes for us, the time God has for us is like the abundance of the best wine poured out for all at the end. In the same way (and with a little different take from Brian’s honest reading of last week’s text), note the anxiety of Martha and Mary over time in that story. Their hearts were troubled because they believed they were running out of time in relation to their dead brother. Jesus’ sense of time was that of one who had all the time in the world. The raising of Lazarus, for John, gave us a glimpse of the God who is not driven by the dictates of death but by the love that does not end with death…the love that triumphs over death. Believing that this truth (the truth that sets troubled hearts free) was the ultimate threat to every death-dealing human institution (religion included), John connected the sign of Lazarus raised from the dead to the arrest of Jesus whose “time” had come. Though our grief overtakes us not only because our time is always almost up with those we love, but also because our space is emptied of the one in whose hold we thought we were home. Therefore Jesus says he is preparing a place and the place he is preparing in God’s own life is eternal life which is simply another name for God. As in the beginning of John’s gospel God has come to dwell with us in Jesus Christ, the content of our hope is contained in the promise that we will dwell together again through him in God. At this point, you may find yourselves resonating with Thomas who is, quite literally, lost. Philip is not far behind. Both of their questions reveal how little we (like the darkness) comprehend the God who has come to us in Jesus Christ. Frankly, we prefer the darkness. Jesus’ response to Thomas has been heard and used by religion as a gauntlet thrown down before those who do not believe God was in Christ and so, according to religion, dwell in darkness. Apparently the disciples, who had spent three years with him, did not believe this either…or as Jesus says to Philip (emphasizing the Johannine understanding of belief as active commitment to a person), “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me?” Who among us does know him? This question, in the third place, could fill a Sunday morning all by itself. Does knowing him coincide with inward assent to the church’s dogma or doctrine? Do we only get to dwell with him eternally if we get it right theologically this side of the grave? Or is every human apprehension of God’s glory that coincides with the signs or the works Jesus performed (from the wedding at Cana to the raising of Lazarus) what he meant when he said to the disciples, “…but if you do not [believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me], believe me because of the works themselves.” In what sense do we glimpse and even inhabit for a moment the roominess of God even if we have yet to understand who Jesus is? Are there others on the Way whose lives bear witness to his works but whose lips have yet to confess his name…others for whom Jesus is preparing a place even if religion will not? It occurs to me that though the God on whom Iranians hang their hearts day and night, shouting in unison against the darkness, “God is great,” is called by a different name, their hearts are not troubled because God has all the time needed for the unfolding of human freedom. “No one has ever seen God,” wrote John in his prologue. “It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.” If Christ alone has hung his heart on God, then the proclamation that he has taken us into his own heart (though we should only haltingly return the favor) is our hope. For in the end, according to Robert Jenson, “God…is not known by us because he is amenable to the exercise of our cognitive powers. He is known to us in that he grants us what we could never reach or even know we could or should reach: he takes us into his own knowledge of himself.” He makes room for us in the room named love that never ends. Thanks be to God. |