It’s a Big, Big House
© copyright 2011 Robert J. Elder
Fifth Sunday of Easter: May 22, 2011
I Peter 2:2-10
John 14:1-14
Home. It is a recurring theme in I Peter. The idea that the household of faith is the new believer’s home, runs throughout the letter. An old friend of mine once gave me a unique definition of home. He said, “It is the place where you can make it from the bedroom to the refrigerator in the dark.”
Thinking on the meanings of house and home, I am reminded of Robert Frost’s poetic line: “Home is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”[1] It comes from a poem in which a man comes home to die, even though his real family has moved away. Nevertheless, the family living in the house takes him in, proving the New Testament’s frequent observation that home is sometimes more a matter of a chosen family than a biological one.
I think Yogi Berra once said, in his characteristic way of stating the unmistakably obvious, that “Things are more like they are now than they have ever been before.” That’s a little like one of my favorite definitions of home. To me, home is where you feel more like yourself than anywhere else. Some people prove this in a backward way by going to any lengths to keep away from their houses at night, so little do they feel themselves to be at home there. The cast of characters in the old TV 1980s series, Cheers, dramatized that sad fact. Of course, the corner bar isn’t the only substitute people find for home. There are many folks who feel more at home at work than in their houses. Others may be more at home at the ball park where they are free to say loud and obscene things to players and umpires, behavior frowned upon in many homes but not at a lot of sporting events I have attended.
If our ideas of home are varied, so are the limitations on those who are able to be at home around us. Remember the family or families in the neighborhood where you grew up who always seemed to have 3 or 4 extra children with their feet under the dinner table at night? In my childhood neighborhood, they were the people who could never feel at home unless everyone else in their neighborhood felt that way too. In contrast, I also remember a cool white house across the street and a few doors down from my family’s home. In my childhood memory, it was inhabited by pasty-skinned people who always wore starchy-looking clothes. My parents said it was an immaculate home, though I couldn’t verify that from any personal experience. Children, as far as I know, were never allowed inside.
Some folks think of home as a place where ancestors are celebrated. I remember a high school history class in which we were each asked in turn to say something about one of the ancestors in our families who were celebrated by some well-worn family story. I told a few details about the only moderately famous ancestor I know of, my great, great, great grandfather Tompkins, former governor of New York who served as vice president of the United States when James Monroe was president. The boy seated next to me followed my story with a strange sort of one-upmanship. His great grandfather had been hung in Texarkana for stealing horses. You’ll never guess which story made a bigger impression on the class.
Even though Matthew and Luke go to some trouble to list extensive genealogies for Jesus, I think they knew in the backs of their minds that Jesus was the Son of God whose real family, as he himself said, were not related to him by blood, but rather were those who heard the will of God and went about doing it. [2]
In John 14 it appears that in Jesus’ view it isn’t human fathers or mothers that matter when it comes to salvation. My friend with his horse-thieving great grandfather and I with my blue-blooded ancestor each have equal access to the only parent that matters, our Father in heaven. It is no wonder that people have found John 14 to be such a source of comfort for centuries. When folks gather following the death of a loved one, as often as not, John 14 is read to comfort them. Why do you suppose that is?
These were the first words spoken by Jesus to his disciples after he had told them that it was necessary that he die soon. Harsh words of reality were then followed by words of comfort about the household of God. “Don’t be worried and upset,” says one translation of these famous words, “believe in God, and believe also in me.” If they believed in God, Jesus said, then believing in him should be as simple as falling off a log. The God who had taken the slaves of Egypt and brought them through the Exodus to the renewal of the promised land, the God who had seen his people carried off to Babylon in exile yet returned to the land he had given them, for this God, redemption seemed to be his hallmark. If we believe God is capable of bringing life where there had been death, redeeming what we had feared was hopelessly lost, time after time making new that which we were certain was finished and done, if we believe in the God of the Exodus, then we can believe in Jesus. If we believe God brings dead nations, people, ideas to life again, then we can believe that there is more to the life of Jesus than that short 33 years of it which he knew in first-century Palestine.
“In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places.” Jesus told us that we are his true brothers and sisters. There is ample space, then, for the whole family in the great household of God. If we want to see how big the family is, then we need only to look around. These are our brothers, these are our sisters. If we are in Christ, we are at home with one another, whether our grandaddy was a horse thief or a politician – or both.
In John 14 Jesus said, “there are many dwelling places.” There is no housing shortage for this home. Our home is the wide heart of God – room for plenty more than the ones who have made themselves at home already. All those bad and sometimes tasteless jokes about Saint Peter at the gates of heaven administering a final exam, or asking folks to wait, or placing some high and some low in heavenly condominiums, all these are just that: jokes. They bear no resemblance to the picture Jesus painted of God’s kingdom as a place of endless spaciousness.
We may be like Thomas. We want to know the way to this place Jesus describes. We lack a road map, a compass. How do we get there, Jesus? Like Thomas, we fail to see the forest for the trees. Jesus said, “I am the way.” No need for a map. If you are with Jesus, you are there. So we want to know how to be with Jesus that we may be there already. For this we need only remember the household of faith. If we are in the company of brothers and sisters in faith, we are in the very presence of Jesus. That is his promise.
Many years ago now I helped build houses on a mission trip to Mexico with the youth from the church where I was the pastor, and they introduced me to a song, popular at the time, by a Christian rock group called “Audio Adrenaline.” The impact of their music, I can testify, more than lived up to the name, especially at the volume the kids liked to play it. But while their music might not have been for everyone, the lyrics to the song they taught me struck me as clearly true for the Christian community of faith. The chorus goes:
It’s a big, big house – with lots and lots of room
It’s a big big table – with lots and lots of food;
It’s a big, big yard – where we can play football.
It’s a big, big house – it’s my Father’s house. [3]
Do you feel the spaciousness of it? Big house, big table, big yard. Big house for worship; big table for the Lord’s Supper; a big yard: a big world in which to live and serve. Plenty of room for everyone, plenty of family for everyone, plenty of work to give everyone’s life meaning. That’s our Father’s house. Welcome home.
© copyright 2011, Robert J. Elder, all rights reserved
1. North of Boston, Robert Frost, First edition, 1914. Second edition, 1915. Reprinted June … October, 1915–T.p. verso. Originally published: 1st ed. London: David Nutt, 1914.
2. Mark 3:33-35.
3. Don’t Censor Me, “It’s a Big, Big, House,” Audio Adrenaline, © 1993, Up in the Mix Music, BMI.
