“Believe
in God”
John
14:1-14
First
Presbyterian
The
Reverend Thomas A. Sweet
May
22, 2011
Easter
5
The part of the gospel according to
John we read today contains one of the most incredible sentences in all of
scripture. And I am not talking
about John 14:6 wherein John pictures Jesus saying, “I
am the way, the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but by me.”
That one may be controversial and often misunderstood but is not in
my mind incredible, but let me say a little about it here since my sermon is
going in another direction. It is
too often used as a “clobber text” by Christians to claim Christian
superiority and exclusivity and so it merits some clarification.
(If you would open your Bible to John
10:14-16, I want to read those verses with you.
One of the most important principles for understanding the Bible is that
“scripture interprets scripture.” That
means that any single verse or passage must be interpreted in the light of all
the scripture. Here, in this little
section of John 10, we read, “I am the
good shepherd. I know my own and my
own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father.
And I lay down my life for the sheep.
I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold.
I must bring them also…”
That wonderful sentence in combination
with the line in John 14 that tells us that in God’s house there are many
different rooms, as well as other similar scriptural affirmations, makes an
exclusivist reading of John 14:6 dubious. Remember
that Jesus is in an intimate setting with his disciples shortly before his
crucifixion and he is trying to prepare them, telling them that they always will
be together in God and that he will be “preparing a place” for them.
When Thomas says that they do not know where he is going and thus they do
not know the way to where he will be, the text says, “Jesus
said to him (Thomas), ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life, no one
comes to the Father but by me.” Jesus
was talking to Thomas and the other “followers of the way,” disciples, there
in the room. The text does not say, “Jesus said to the world…” or “Jesus said to the Hindus and the
Muslims…” but, rather, “Jesus
said to him…” It was
a compassionate, pastoral response in a particular circumstance meant to
reassure Thomas and the others that they will continue to be in the love of God,
that they are on a path that will lead them “home,” that for them no other
path or legitimization is necessary, no other “credentials.”
It does not exclude others from “home.”)
Okay, so on now with the sermon.
The verse I think is so amazing is right at the beginning of our John 14
passage when Jesus says to his disciples, “Do
not let your hearts be troubled.” Do
not let your hearts be troubled?! That
would be a good trick to know, wouldn’t it?
We all know about a troubled heart, do we not?
In our gospel story, the disciples’ hearts are troubled by the news of
Jesus’ impending departure. They
had left their lives to follow Jesus and now he will be leaving them as he is
delivered into the hands of the crucifiers.
“What will become of us,”
the disciples wondered? “Shall we
be judged guilty by association? Will
the crucifiers be coming after us next? Was
it all a sham, a waste of our time, foolishness that we left our homes and jobs
and families to join Jesus in his ministry?
This does not seem to be ending well, but ignominiously (well, they might
not have used that word).
It all seems out of whack and out of kilter.”
Ah, that proverbial cry of the centuries: “What in the Sam Hill is
going on here?”
Sensing their trepidation and
restlessness, Jesus says to them, “Do
not let your hearts be troubled.” And
then he offers his antidote to a troubled heart: “Believe
in God. Believe also in me.”
What are things that trouble our
hearts? Do I even have to name them?
Financial troubles. Health
issues. Concerns about children.
Concerns about parents. The
state of the world. Gas prices.
Food prices. Taxes.
Broken relationships. Job
insecurity. Technology beyond our
understanding. Guilt about something
we have done. Guilt about something
we have not done. Fear of the
future. Regret from the past.
Aimlessness in the present.
And yet, to the disciples, to us, Jesus
says, “Do not let your hearts be
troubled.” We know there are
many ways that people try to calm their anxious hearts.
Some seek escape into drink or addictions.
Others exert power and control over others so that they can build a
protective wall around what scares them, or so they think.
Some dabble in denial but that only works for a while.
Some are certain they can think their way out of any fretful heart.
But in my personal experience and judging from hundreds of pastoral
conversations over the years, none of those methods finally work because we have
to lay our heads down on our pillows at night and, if anything, our troubles
find us again and they seem to intensify in the dark.
But Jesus says, “Do not let your hearts be troubled.
Believe in God.” Believe
in God. Not in the glib way in which
polls on religion report that 92% of Americans “believe in God.”
Not the cursory affirmative answer that many give when asked if they
believe in God. When Jesus says to
believe in God, he means to trust God sincerely, deeply, completely even when it
seems existentially or experientially as though such trust might be misplaced.
Though to those times when it seems as if God is absent, away, or AWOL, I
find it helpful to remember how John Calvin said that if you cannot see the hand
of God within a situation you have not looked hard enough.
Believing in God means to account God
trustworthy, that God is faithful to God’s promises.
I love the beginning of Psalm 143 in which David says, “Hear
my prayer, O Lord; give ear to my supplications in your faithfulness;
answer me in your righteousness.” And
at the end of the prayer psalm, David reiterates, “For
your name’s sake, O Lord, preserve my life.
In your righteousness, bring me out of trouble.”
Believing in God means trusting that God deals with us not according
to who we are, but according to who God is.
It is God’s nature and promise to love us, and so love us God does.
Always. Without fail.
Sometimes it is tender love and sometimes it is tough love (as in “God
chastens those God loves”) but always God deals with us in love.
It is God’s nature and promise to be
merciful to us, and so we receive mercy. Sometimes
it is a mirthful mercy and sometimes, in the title words of a wonderful book by
Sheldon Vanauken, it is “a severe mercy.”
But mercy is not withheld.
It is God’s nature and promise to be
gracious to us, and so we receive grace upon grace.
Since grace means caring absolutely for our well-being, God’s grace may
at times be no picnic for sometimes we respond only to lessons learned the hard
way. And grace that seems hard or
harsh in the short run is found to be nothing less than salvation in the long
run. But God’s grace also means no
giving up on us.
So Jesus says, “Do not let your hearts be troubled.
Believe in God.” Then, “believe
also in me.” This sermon is
not the occasion to hash out the details and theological vagaries as to how
Jesus is God. In John’s passage,
we simply are told it is so. Jesus,
John says, is the human face of God: “If
you know me, you will know my Father also. From
now on you do know him and have seen him.”
And later: “Do
you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?
I do not speak on my own; but the Father who dwells in me does his
works.”
So, when Jesus says, for instance, “Come
unto me, you who labor and whose hearts are heavily burdened, and I shall give
you rest,” he is talking of the solace of God.
When he tells us to look at the birds of the air and how they are fed and
the flowers of the field and how they are so beautifully clothed and then says
to those who are, in his words, “of little faith” – “Do
not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or
‘What will we wear?...for indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all
these things…but seek first the kingdom of God…” he is talking of the
provision of God. Our part in it, he
implies, is to believe utterly in the
trustworthiness of God. For God
works through our believing, through our faith.
And God even has given us that. The
book of Hebrews says that “God is the
author…the giver…the pioneer of our faith.”
It is our part to trust the gift, to use it.
Only unbelief stymies God because God
has made faith the vehicle for working in our lives. In the eleventh chapter of
Mark – this is humorous in a way - Jesus is hungry and sees a fig tree and
goes over to it but there are no figs on it.
So Jesus curses the fig tree, saying, “May
no one ever eat fruit from you again.” That
does not seem like a very “Jesus thing” for him to do, but wait.
The next day Jesus and the disciples “happen” to pass by that same
fig tree and they see it already has withered down to its roots.
Peter marvels at it, saying, “Rabbi,
look at this,” as if it would be a wonderment to Jesus also.
It is a teaching moment for Jesus as he
says to his disciples, “Have faith in
God. Truly I tell you, if you say to
this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and if you do not let
your heart be troubled, but believe that what you say will come to pass, it will
be done for you. So, I tell you,
whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will
be yours.” Which mountain is
Jesus talking about? The mountain of
unbelief. Our unbelief stands as a
great impediment in our lives, a mountain that can be moved only by believing in
the power and desire of God to do good things in us, not as a divine Santa Claus
or a cosmic bellhop, but as one who wants us to live into our high calling, as
one who desires for us to grow into our full and true humanity, as one who
delights in the image of God coming out more and more in us.
Sometimes “coming to ourselves” means that God allows us, perhaps
even sends us, into the prodigal’s far country of desolation and humiliation.
Sometimes it means that he wraps his protective arms around us when it
seems as though everybody else wants to stone us.
But always we are to believe,
as St. Paul writes in his letter to the Philippians, “that
God is at work in us, enabling us both to will and to work for God’s good
pleasure,” a life pleasing to God and thus also to us.
Another example of the necessity of
believing: Again in Mark, though the
story also is told in Matthew and Luke, when Jesus returned a second time to his
hometown of
I really have only one purpose in mind
this morning and that is to encourage you to believe in God.
Not in an offhanded way, but in the way in which you bet your life on
God, in the way that trusts God completely, in the way that sees, or at least
accepts when such sight eludes us, that all things work together for good for
those who love God.
I read in the paper this week an
article that quoted the eminent physicist Stephen Hawking as saying that the
idea of heaven “is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”
I guess that Hawking, for all of his immense intellectual prowess, never
has figured out that fairy stories are the truest stories of all.
In his wonderful book called The
Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale, Presbyterian minister
Frederick Buechner writes of fairy stories,
A
far country, a deep forest, a palace, (a kingdom), which
is to say if you care to enter these places for yourself,
you
must be willing to enter them in some measure
as a
child because it takes a child to believe in the
possibility
at least that such places exist instead of
dismissing
them out-of-hand as impossible (p.74).
No doubt that is why Jesus said we need
to be like as a child to enter into
the kingdom of heaven, the
But we forget to our peril that God’s
ways are higher than our ways and God’s thoughts are higher than our thoughts
and that at best, in this life, we see as in a mirror darkly.
We know in part. God comes to
us through faith, in our believing. So
much of what we want to know about God and ourselves and life is revealed only
to us as we believe. We cannot know
ahead of time. There is no
“faith” in that. Faith is the
adventure we are called in God to live. It
is not easy. God knows it is not
easy to give up our control of our lives and to trust when the storms of life
are beating against our house. But
it is God’s way for us.
There are many troubling, concerning
things in the world today and in our lives.
It would be disingenuous to deny it.
Even so, friends, we do not have to live with troubled hearts.
Believe in God.
Amen.
Copyright
© 2011 by First Presbyterian Church