[VIDEO INCLUDED AT BOTTOM OF FULL POST] On a warm September night nearly a decade ago, I drove north to baptize my 29-year-old cousin on his deathbed; collateral complications from opioid use. We had been messaging about the possibility of baptism in the weeks before he died. Five years later, his brother was felled by fentanyl. We had long been out of touch. And so, as for many Americans, the opioid crisis feels to me both near and far. The battle with this particular addiction has not entered my immediate household, but it is all around. We search for doors to understanding what is happening: through policy documentaries like The Crime of the Century, novels like Demon Copperhead, and music like Jelly Roll’s Grammy-winning contemporary country album, Beautifully Broken.
Some of us in this room know exactly the feeling and false promise of excessive drugs, alcohol, and other highly addictive temporary escapes, like pornography, gambling, or compulsive eating or shopping.
For those who have been spared this particular kind of suffering, but want to understand the pain and yearning that any mis-used drug or drink is (at least temporarily) meeting, Jelly Roll opens up from his own experience. What’s at the heart of addiction, spiritually and physically? An over-simplified answer might be: addressing pain. Seeking peace. Searching for our true home, the solace only abiding with God can give. He sings about getting “Higher than heaven ... when I’m hurtin’ like hell ... No lost in my soul / No tears down my face / Yeah, up here alone / It all fades away.” The pull of heavenly promises is obvious. On another track, he names the paradox of our deepest longings: “...you want someone, but you want to be alone / And the drugs don’t work no more / Who’s gonna drive you home?” In this same song, someone answers “I will, I will, I will.” Who is this?
As Christians, we might smugly or lazily read John 14, our gospel today, with our post-Easter glasses on. We hear the disciples asking Jesus questions today that we might say are beneath us: On the other side of the resurrection, we think – UNLIKE THOMAS - we know where Jesus is going (to heaven! Fully at home with God!), and - UNLIKE THOMAS - we know the way (trust and follow Jesus!). Then Thomas in this story is just a foil, a dense sop, and it has nothing to say to us. Is this true?
I don’t know, friends. Because when I look around at some of the deepest pains of this world, I see the power and importance of Thomas’ truth-telling: We have heard Jesus say, just as Thomas did, that he is going to live with God. Yet it seems we don’t really know where this heavenly home is, or how to get there. Or at the very least, we need frequent reminders. Everyone’s searching for the peace and beauty of this sacred communion, and we’re driving down a lot of wrong roads, trying to find that heavenly home, trying to find that heavenly peace.
So let’s look again at this Gospel, trusting that we do have something to learn. How do we take refuge in God in this harsh world, as our psalm for today says? How can we find ourselves living in the house of God, and not just holding on tight until we reach the promise of heaven?
The promise of a heavenly home NOW (not just in eternity)
Where do we most often hear this passage, in what setting? “In my father’s house are many mansions” [funeral service!]. Now, this observation is not to dismiss the beauty and goodness of this passage in such a context. But outside of memorial gatherings, there are riches to consider in Jesus’ imagery and invitation to a divine habitation -- for our everyday earthly lives. After nearly ten years sitting at the feet of St. Teresa of Avila’s unearthly wisdom, when I hear “dwelling places” my mind now leaps to a different idea: not to the mysteries of heavenly glory that we only know when we die, but the various spaces, places, or ways we might encounter Christ and God’s peace, love, and joy in this life, in prayer. And in fact, Jesus’ words of comfort for his disciples seems to allow for this multivalent reading, one where we might access “the father’s house” or belonging in the household of God, through Jesus’ "preparatory work” even now.
And this is not just a Teresan teaching! This way of looking at an invitation to live now with God right in the biblical text, based on family and household structures in Jesus’ time. Jesus says: “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places.” When we think of this, we typically think of a place in heaven, maybe even a mansion. But there’s another way of looking at it, and it’s just as exciting – I think even better. To see it we have to think of “the father’s house” as a more typical house, or household, of Jesus’ time. A strong and financially able father in that time would have more than just one house, or dwelling place, on his property. The custom was often to add on as the family grew. It was a family compound! A household had more than just a mom, dad, and 2.5 kids. If you were part of the family, a dwelling place would be prepared for you “in the father’s house” even after you were grown, and sometimes even married. Or, if you were widowed, you and your dependent children would appeal to the household of a relative who might welcome you, who might prepare a dwelling place for you, too, to be included in the extended family household. And so when Jesus says, “I go to prepare a place for you” in my Father’s house, and promises to “come again and take us to himself,” we might hear an invitation into God’s family, God’s expansive household, that Jesus makes possible through his death and resurrection. In this light, the way has already been made. Jesus has already prepared the place for us to be in the extensive and expansive household of God, living in communion with Jesus’ heavenly father, and ours, too. We belong to the family of God, the household of God now, not just in heaven.
St. Teresa’s Invitation to Communion & Holy Dwellings in Prayer
This is the beautiful promise for every soul that St. Teresa of Avila is trying to get us to see. Teresa’s seminal work exploring this metaphor for life in relationship to God is The Interior Castle, but in Spanish the title is simply Las Moradas: the dwelling places. The image of a castle appears in the text as one of many metaphors Teresa uses for our souls’ capacities for encounter with God, and she uses it primarily because it points to a valuable, spacious, diverse, and varied concept: a large and elaborate structure. She quotes John 14 directly in developing this idea of “many dwelling places.”. The point of calling it a “castle” is the surprising size and dignity of this reality: each of us has already been entrusted with a soul, which is the place of encounter with the God who made us and loves us. And the soul is not a tiny gem or needle in a haystack, hidden away or easily crushed. It is more like a majestic castle, more enduring than our quickly-fading flesh.
But Teresa doesn’t just employ Jesus’ words today, or image about the structure: she keeps his promise from John’s gospel about his very function at the center of her teaching. “I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.” Through Teresa, we learn to accept with humility that it is Christ the Good Shepherd who draws us to himself, who draws us to the heart of God who is our very center, too. We can indeed spend our lives “outside the castle,” wandering the grounds, never exploring our capacity for divine-human companionship. But most people eventually “turn inward.” And those who begin to pray with any regularity, she says, who are intent on following Jesus’ way, will hear the beckoning call of Christ: “this Lord of ours deeply wants us to love Him and seek His companionship. And so He calls us again and again, ceaselessly, to come closer.”
We experience this alluring love in diverse ways: “through words heard from good people, or through sermons, or as we read good books, or through sicknesses and trials, or through truths God teaches us when we are praying.” It might be worth asking, alongside this text: when you look back on your life, what are the pivotal moments when you perceived the grace of an invitation to a different way of being, a way closer to God? How does it change your understanding of such moments if you think of them as the Lord at work, trying to “take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also” -- in other words, into deeper fullness of life and truth and communion with the Creator, more fully and securely into the house of God?
How do we respond to Christ’s leadership and Lordship, and invite others “home”?
Hearing anew this promise of Jesus as a “way-maker” to abundant life, not just once and for all through his death and resurrection, but even and especially through the intimate details of our life, can be electrifying. It led me to re-evaluate my entire lived experience through this “dwelling places” lens, write a book about it, and become something of a zealot for Teresa’s gifts to the faithful. This view helps us remember that Jesus is no intellectual proposition or one-time confession, but rather “the way, the truth, and the life,” alive and present to us through the gift of the Holy Spirit --.not just 2,000 years ago or after we take our last breath.
For some, this is a welcome Word. For others? Well, as my spiritual director once put it: “not everyone wants that kind of intimacy or direction.” The idea of building our own lives our own way remains attractive, and the humble submission of “let[ing] yourselves be built into a spiritual house” (1 Peter) is still repulsive to many. But if St. Augustine is right, and our restless hearts will not rest until they rest in God’s very presence, then all weary travelers of this chaotic world would do well to hear Jesus’ assurance: we are invited to follow him, and to dwell with God, as a message of unexpected peace and strengthening comfort for today, and not just funeral days.
In the end, it is only Christ the Good Shepherd who will and CAN “drive us home,” to the home we are truly longing for, and so the path to the ultimate place we are all searching for (both in this life and beyond) at least begins with Jesus’ simple encouragement: “Trust in God. Trust also in me.” Jelly Roll’s used his Grammy acceptance speech for a moment of evangelism, offering a heartfelt testimony to the power and possibility of this saving relationship, available to anyone.
Yet those of us who already think of ourselves as part of the church, who already know we are a part of the household of God, might consider reading the passages from 1 Peter and Psalm 31 this week as a corporate challenge and goal: if we as a congregation allow ourselves to be continually built into a spiritual house, and keep striving to be the kind of community where hurting bodies and souls can truly find refuge, safety, strength, guidance, and loving-kindness, then we live into our name and call as the body of Christ and household of God. Then we are the Father’s house, and the Father’s household, a royal priesthood, God’s own people. It’s a tall order, but sometimes we all need someone “with skin on” to drive us home. Remember, in the word of 1 Peter:
“Once you were not a people,
but now you are God’s people;
once you had not received mercy,
but now you have received mercy.”
St. Luke’s, when we extend the mercy we have received, when we share God’s love and mercy, we particate in calling others out of darkness and into God’s marvelous light. We who have found a home with God must leave the light on for others, and not just that, but invite others in, and offer to drive people home when they can’t do it themselves.
We might practice answering that question of the brokenhearted person who feels so alone: Who's going to drive me home? As the body of Christ, we might say together – we will. We will. We will.
