Coming up this Sunday are the words of Jesus, “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places." (John 14:2 NRSV)
I know these words by heart because I say them so often at funerals. When I started preaching four decades ago, I used to always use the King James Version’s promise of “many mansions”, because the older members of the congregation always heard the old Revised Version’s “many rooms” as a downward revision of their expectations. “Many dwelling places” is a good translation and works for most people today.
So, how do we read this passage the week after the smartest man in the world has said that heaven is a “fairy tale”?
The way we have always read it - sociologically.
Even the wealthy will nod their heads and have a tear in their eyes when I read these words at a funeral. It is a comfort to believe that Grandpa, age 96, has been transferred to that Great Rest Home in the Sky and has his own - not just a room - a dwelling place. The Lord knows he doesn’t need a mansion anymore. Just a “dwelling place” - a comfortable suite of rooms with a nice view of the heavenly golf course.
These words were not spoken to comfort the comfortable.
They were spoken to the poor, the battered, and the oppressed. They were spoken to people who saw their lives as a journey to a better place - not just where they could eat pie in the sky and wear their shoes all over God's heaven, but a place where God's will is done on earth and everyone has his or her daily bread. They were spoken to people who saw their life as a journey toward a destination rather than just a cruise.
In his review of The Liner: Retrospect and Renaissance, Timothy Larson says that even if we put a “2” next to the storied name of the Queen Mary, we aren’t recreating the huge ocean-going ferries that got people from New York to London before airliners became the preferred mode of travel. There is a huge difference between a person who is traveling to a destination and a person who is cruising around for a week and then returning to the same port from which he embarked.
Unless you are 100% Native American (or one of the European or Singaporean readers of this blog), your ancestors came to this country on one of these vessels and I’ll bet most of them did not travel first-class. Passengers in steerage couldn’t wait for the journey to be over. They were looking for that first glimpse of the Statue of Liberty, for the Ellis Island gateway to that City whose streets, they had heard whispered, were paved with gold.
So, it wasn’t as good as that, but it was better for most of them than what they had left behind. Those that came in the holds of slave ships didn’t find a Promised Land, but they heard tales about that Land and about how God had called slaves to come to that Land where everyone has shoes and there are no more tears.
If our lives are as comfortable as a cruise ship; if we can get off and tour the markets and see the children begging in the streets and then return to the ship for the buffet and the after-dinner show and if we can stroll back to our comfortable cabin and say to one another, “What could be better than this?” We won’t be able to hear what Jesus is really saying when he says, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6).
Some Christians believe those words mean that people have to join their private club to get to heaven. They really mean that the Way to Life and the Truth about Life is that there isn’t any real life on board the cruise ship, because the cruise ship isn’t going anywhere. The Way to Life is to get on the liner that is heading toward that place where justice rolls down like water and righteousness like an ever flowing spring, and where, even for the poor, there is no more crying, no more pain and no more death.
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