6 Easter

May 10, 2026

John 14.15-21

 + I was having a conversation this week with someone and it came up that today is Mother’s Day.

 I responded by saying, “Wow! That slipped my mind.”

 This friend then said, “it’s strange being a fifty-something-year-=old orphan isn’t it?”

 That hit me hard.

 Orphan? I thought.

 That’s a word we don’t use much anymore.

 It has become somewhat archaic.

 I don’t know why.

 Because orphans are still very much a thing.

 Any of us who have lost parents—no matter at what age—are orphans.

 I remember my mother saying that when her mother died.

 And I definitely thought about that a lot in my own grief process following my own mother’s death.

 There is something very sobering about that fact that we can be orphans as adults.

 And I think being orphan has a major tie-in to the general pandemic of loneliness our culture is experiencing right now.

 Watch any film brought out by the A24 Studio.  

 There is an epidemic of loneliness in our world right now.

 For those of us who work with people on a regular basis, who actually help people in their emotional and spiritual pains, loneliness is a big thing.

 And sometimes it’s a thing people don’t often identify.

 Like being an orphan.

 Or a widow or widower.

 In our Gospel reading for today some of these issues, I think, are addressed.

 But first, we hear Jesus say something that we have heard a thousand times,

 Jesus says, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”

 Now, most of us might be reassured by that statement.

 But I think some of us hear that the way we hear most religious language: as pressure.

 As obligation.

 As some impossible thing.

 We hear “keep my commandments” and immediately our minds start hearing rules and regulations.  

 We start imagining Christianity as a kind of spiritual performance review conducted by a disappointed supervisor in the sky.

 I want to stress that God is not a disapproving supervisor in the sky.

 But it’s important for us to remind our selves that,  in John’s Gospel, Jesus is not standing over the disciples with a clipboard.

 He is speaking to frightened people.

 Lonely people.

 People who are about to be orphaned in a very real way.

 And that matters.

 This whole section of John happens on the edge of loss.

 Judas has gone out into the night.

 Peter is about to fall apart.

 Jesus keeps talking about leaving them, and they do not know how to imagine a world in which the center of gravity of their lives is suddenly gone.

 And into that fear Jesus says: “I will not leave you orphaned.”

 I will not abandon you.

 I will not discard you.

 You will not be spiritually homeless.

 “I will not leave you orphaned.”

 Which means Christianity begins not with commandment, but with what?

 It begins in relationship.

 The commandments are not the price of admission to God’s love.

 They are what love starts to look like once it enters the bloodstream.

 Now, that’s different.

 Because there are forms of religion that are fundamentally transactional.

 Behave correctly, believe correctly, suffer correctly, and perhaps, if you did it all perfectly, correctly, maybe God will tolerate your existence.

 But Jesus never says, “If you perform adequately, THEN I will love you.”

 Rather what does he say?

 He says,  “I am with you. I will always be in you. I will never leave you alone.”

 And only then does he begin speaking about love that manifests itself in the world.

 Christianity is not merely saying the Creed correctly while ignoring the human being collapsing beside you.

 Jesus never says:

“They will know you are my disciples by your ability to win arguments online.”

 He speaks instead about love embodied.

 Love enacted.

 Love that takes on flesh.

 And consequence.

 And that kind of love is difficult because it keeps refusing abstraction.

 It is much easier to love humanity as a whole than to love actual humans.

 Humanity is theoretical.

 Actual people interrupt us.

 They irritate us.

 Or hurt us.

 Actual people are needy and contradictory and wounded and exhausting and occasionally very strange.

 Which means the commandments of Jesus are not really about moral bookkeeping.

 They are about participating in the life of God itself.

 To love the lonely.

 To forgive when every instinct screams otherwise.

 To tell the truth.

 To stand up and speak out.

 To protect the vulnerable.

 To refuse cruelty in a culture increasingly organized around it.

 To insist that no human being is disposable.

 That is not being sentimental.

 It is resistance.

 And Jesus promises that we do not do this alone.

 “I will ask the Father, and [God] will give you another Advocate.”

 The Greek word there is Paraclete.

 Comforter.

 Advocate.

 The One who stands beside you.

 The One who stands up for you.

 Not a distant force.

 Not vague positivity.

 Not some kind of religious mood lighting.

 God beside you.

 God accompanying you through grief and doubt and failure and all the bewildering terrain of being alive.

 And honestly, I think many of us live as functional orphans spiritually.

 Even in the Church.

 We carry the deep suspicion that we have somehow exhausted God’s patience.

 That eventually God will discover who we really are and quietly back away in disappointment.

 But the Gospel says the exact opposite.

 The Gospel says God moves toward us.

 Again and again.

 God moves toward frightened disciples.

 Toward betrayers.

 Toward deniers.

 Toward the grieving.

 Toward people whose prayers barely hold together.

 Toward people who are trying very hard to believe and people who are too tired to try at all.

 Toward the lonely.

 Toward the orphans and the widows.

 “I will not leave you orphaned.”

 And maybe that is the word some of us need today.

 Not advice.

 Not correction.

 Not another impossible burden.

 Just you are not abandoned.

 Not by God.

 Not in your grief.

 Not in your confusion.

 Not in your loneliness.

 Not even in your failures.

 Christ remains.

 Quietly.

 Persistently.

 Sometimes almost hidden beneath the noise of the world, but still…. there.

 Alive in acts of mercy.

 Alive in bread broken and shared.

 Alive in the cup given and received.

 Alive in communities that refuse despair.

 Alive in the stubborn insistence that love is stronger than death, even when death appears to be winning.

 “In a little while the world will no longer see me,” Jesus says, “but you will see me.”

 And perhaps that is the task of the Church—for us who are followers of Jesus—right now.

 To become people who learn how to see Christ still moving through the world.

 In tenderness.

 In justice.

 In compassion.

 In endurance.

 In the holy refusal to give up on one another.

 Because resurrection is not merely something that happened to Jesus once, way back then.

 It is something God keeps trying to do everywhere.

 Even here.

 Even now.

 Even in us.

 

5 Easter

 

May 3, 2026

John 14:1–14

 +Oh, if I had a dollar for every single time I heard this Gospel reading at a funeral!

 I would be a rare commodity---a rich pries and poet!

 In fact, just this past week, I heard this Gospel twice at funerals.

 One of which I did.

 It’s a great funeral scripture.

 It’s the standard.

 And why shouldn’t it be?

 These are exactly the words we want to hear during a time of loss and pain.

 “Do not let your hearts be troubled.”

 It sounds nice, I know.

 But let’s face it:

 This is one of the most unreasonable commands in all of scripture.

 Do not let your hearts be troubled?

 Seriously?

 Because, I hate to tell you—my heart IS troubled at times.

 A lot of times.

 But Jesus is insistent,

 “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me.”

 Now, to be honest, this is the exact point most sermons get a little sentimental.

 There is all this talk of “mansions in heaven.”

 And this is what most people at a funeral really hear.

 It almost sounds like a kind of celestial real estate brochure:

 “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places…”

 Which is fine, really.  

 There is comfort here.

 Real comfort.

 We are comforted maybe by this promise that we are headed toward a place already prepared for us, a place where we are known.

 When we travel, we like knowing we have a destination—a nice hotel with a reservation in our names.

 It’s one less thing to have to concern ourselves with as we actually travel.

 But, the problem here is that the mansions part of this scripture is not the main point.

 Jesus isn’t giving them (or us) some kind of  roadmap to the afterlife.

 I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the film Beetlejuice, but it isn’t A Manuel For the Recently Deceased.

 So, what is he doing?

 

He’s trying to keep them (and us) from falling apart.

 We get caught up on the mansions part.

 And doing so we forget the real point Jesus is making,

 “Do not let your hearts be troubled.”

 It’s important to remember, trouble is not something that just randomly happens to us.

 It’s what happens when the world no longer makes sense.

 And we’ve all be there, right?

 And in this moment of the Gospel story, the disciples are troubled.

 Deeply.

 We too know what it’s like to live in that space where the story we thought we were in begins to unravel.

 When everything we thought we knew, gets broken apart and thrown to the wind.

 And suddenly we’re not just sad. We’re disoriented.

 We are. . . troubled.

 So when Jesus says, “Do not let your hearts be troubled,” he is not dismissing that reality.

 He is redirecting it, shall we say?

 “Believe in God. Believe also in me.”

 Now, belief here is not just some kind of  intellectual checklist.

 It’s not checking a box that says yup, Ok. God exists.

 So long, trouble!

 Now, finally! Everything’s right with he world!

 It’s more like having something to lean on.

 It’s what you do when it feels like you’re walking on quicksand.

 You shift your weight to something that feels firm and solid.

 Then Jesus says something even stranger:

 After he says, “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places…” he then says, “I go to prepare a place for you.”

 He’s not creating this mystical place from nothing.

 He is telling us about something that has always been there—this place from which he came and to which he is returning.

 A place of belonging.

 A place in which we are truly home.

 Thomas then asks, in that way that Thomas always does,

 “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?”

 Now, Jesus does not, at this ppint,  give him directions.

 Instead he gives him what?

 He gives him himself.

 “I am the way.”

 “I am the truth.”

 “I am the life.”

 Not,  I will show you the way.

 Not,  here is the path, now go walk it.

 He says, “I am the way.”

 Who I am, what I am, everything I represent, my teaching, my Gospel---that is the way.

 Which means that whatever “home,” whatever these “dwellings” are, it is not just a place.

 It is a relationship.

 Philip then says, “Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.”

 Which feels like a reasonable request.

 Just show us God.

 Give us something clear, something undeniable, something we can hold onto.

 And Jesus responds with what sounds almost like exasperation:

 “Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me?”

 If you have seen me, you have seen the Father.

 Now, that could be a claim about Jesus’ divinity.

 But, there is something so much more amazing in what he says.

 He is essentially saying to Philip,

 You’ve already seen God.

 And God is not what you thought God was before.

 God isn’t only what’s up there somewhere, in some cloudy city in the sky.

 God is right here.

 In the things we do.

 In the words we say.

 God is in what Jesus did when he washed feet, when he ate with sinners, when he forgave way too easily, when he refused violence, when stood up against despots and overturned tables, when he accused self-righteous religious leader and called them, when he went to the cross instead of around it.

 If you’ve seen that, Jesus says, guess what? you’ve seen God.

 “Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do,”  all these things they God doing in Jesus’ actions, “and, in fact, will do greater works than these…”

 We can’t put Jesus up on that God pedestal and think to ourselves, “well, he did the work, so now all we have to do is kneel here like good Christians, humbling worshipping and admiring what he did.”

 No.

 Sorry to break that news to you today.

 Now, we are told, go out and do what Jesus did.

 We are told to go out and BE the Presence of God in this world to those who need God’s presence.

 “Do what you have seen me do,” he saying to us.  

 And when you do, you will bring God’s presence into this world.

 You will bring forth the Kingdom of God.

 Now, that too is very frightening.

 That too causes us to feel anxious…and maybe troubled.

 We now are expected to what Jesus did?

 How am I going to that?

 I’ve got a job.

 I’ve got work.

 I’ve got family.

 Well, Jesus says, don’t worry about it.

 Just do it.

 “Do not let your hearts be troubled.”

 Don’t be troubled.

 Because bad stuff will still happen.

 But you’re not alone in this.

 Remember this, The way we are seeking isn’t a set of directions.

 Rather, it’s a persistent presence that refuses to leave.

 The place prepared for us isn’t just waiting for us at the end of the story.

 It’s right here. 

 Right now. 

 Right smack dab in the middle of the story.

 So, don’t let your heart be troubled.

 Don’t let your anxiety and fear have the final word.

 But rather, let’s keep going.

 Let’s keep following the One who says, “I am the way.”

 Because if we do, it is then, that we will also truth find truth and life.