Grace & Loss

[00:00:01] Speaker A: Will you pray with me? Father of grace, love and mercy, no matter who we are and how we have come to worship today, send your holy Spirit so that our eyes and ears and hearts might be open to this God breathed passage of Scripture. Speak to us all, Father, and may your gospel be change us forever. Amen. Our scripture reading this morning is found in John's gospel, chapter one, verse 29 to 42. And if you'd like to follow in the pew Bible, it's on page 862. Hear God's word. The next day, John the Baptist saw Jesus coming toward him and declared, here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. This is he of whom I said, after me comes a man who ranks ahead of me because he was before me. I myself did not know him, but I came baptizing with water for this reason that he might be revealed to Israel. And John testified, I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him. I myself did not know him, but the one who sent me to baptize with water said to me, he on whom you see the Spirit descend and remain is the one who baptizes with the Holy Spirit. And I myself have seen and I have testified that this is the Son of God. The next day, John again was standing with two of his disciples. And as he watched Jesus walk by, he exclaimed, look, here is the Lamb of God. The two disciples heard him say this, and they followed Jesus. And when Jesus turned and saw them following, he said to them, what are you looking for? And they said to him, rabbi, which translated means, teacher, where are you staying? He said to them, come and see. And they came and saw where he was staying. And they remained with him that day. And it was about 4:00 in the afternoon. One of the two who heard John speak and followed him was Andrew, Simon, Peter's brother. He first found his brother Simon and said to him, we have found the Messiah, which is translated, anointed. He brought Simon to Jesus, who looked at him and said, you are Simon, son of John. You are to be called Cephas, which is translated, peter. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. [00:03:24] Speaker B: So these past two weeks, I've been thinking a lot about home. You might say I've been on a kind of journey of the heart and mind, exploring where that place called home might lie for me. And I suspect some of you have been on such a journey as well. For me, I could say this journey started some two weeks ago when I began studying the passage that Nancy just read, and I found it raised this important question for me and other disciples. When you follow Jesus, where is your home? When you follow Jesus, where is your home? Today's passage hones in on precisely that question. Just after we read of the witness of John the Baptist. You might say John the Baptist preaching prompts this very question. And his disciples, as they, hearing John's witness, turn from being his disciples to being Jesus disciples and then have to figure out once they're following Jesus, what is home for us. Now, John the Baptist, as he is portrayed in the fourth Gospel, leads people to that Jesus. He invites people not to follow himself, not John the Baptist, but one greater than him, one who was before him. In the fourth Gospel, we hear John proclaim, this of Jesus. Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. I came baptizing with water that he might be revealed to Israel. Now in the passage Nancy read, we hear so many familiar elements from the story of Jesus baptism by John as told in the Synoptic gospels. In Matthew, Mark and Luke, it all happens in real time. We hear of as Jesus is getting baptized by John, the heavens open, the spirit descends like a dove, rests on Jesus. And we hear how Jesus is declared God's beloved son. You might have noticed in the passage Nancy read, as we read of this account in John's Gospel, it's not happening in real time. Instead, we hear it from the eyes of John the Baptist. We hear it from a witness. We hear it from someone who saw and believed and is passing on what they saw. And in my reading, it's like John's gospel is saying there's power not just in what happened, but in someone seeing it and then passing on what happened that others too, like John, might see. All of whom this Christ is, what he represents, what he can mean for them. There's power in a witness. Well, apparently that power directs these disciples of Jesus, these two in particular, to follow Jesus after having been disciples of John. And when they are following Jesus, we read, he turns to them and asks them this question, what are you looking for? What are you looking for? How would you answer that question? If you met Jesus today, with all that's happened this week, and were asked, what are you looking for? What would you say? Here's what I might say. If I was asked that question, not just today, but weeks back, I might have well said, I'm looking for home. I might say, jesus, I'm looking for a place or a community or a form of work or A rhythm or people or way of life I can truly and honestly call my home. I'm looking for that place, that internal sense that here is where I belong and I can dwell here safely, securely, permanently. I'm looking for home. When we read of the answer these two disciples give to Jesus when he asks them what they're looking for, I hear an answer similar to the one I gave. They. They say to him, rabbi, which means teacher, where are you staying? The word for staying is that's translated from the Greek word meno. And the word menno is a rich word. It has right implications of home. The word can mean to lodge or to dwell. It can also imply a space where one sleeps or eats or calls, well, home. But meno can also mean to abide, to remain, to stay. It's a word that's used later in John to refer to those who cling fast to Christ and his teaching, even when times get tough. Mennono speaks to that place where you literally stand and sleep, but it also speaks to where you make your stand, where you say, this is where I belong, where I will belong. This for me, is home base. It's home. So I don't believe it's too far a stretch to translate the question of these two disciples like this, rabbi, where is your home? Where's your home for? That's what we're looking for, home. Don't you love Jesus? Reply, he says to them, come and see. And I don't know about you, but I want to go and see. I want to see that place Jesus calls home. Is it a house? Is it a room in a house? Is it a tent? What does it look like? What's the architecture? Paint me a picture, won't you, of what this looks like? Where is it located? Is it on a field or a hill? I want those visuals to try to conjure in my mind this place the disciples seek, a place Jesus was inviting them to seek that was his home. And that would be their home as they become his followers. But did you notice in that passage Nancy just read, there are no details like that at all? No structural, no architectural information. The fourth Gospel doesn't paint a portrait of a field or a plot of earth or a house or structure, any kind of which these disciples might lay their belongings and say, okay, here it is, were home. There is to my mind, this kind of blank canvas where I expect to have painted in detail what home with Jesus looks like. You know when it all gets started, when the first disciples, according to John's Gospel, get on their way. But no visuals are offered of that structure or space to which Jesus invited those new followers to call their new home. So I do what many who study the Bible would do. I look to other gospels. Maybe in there there's some glimpse of this place that Jesus called home. But all I find in the other gospels, in, say, Matthew and Luke, is this enigmatic response of Jesus when he is asked about home. There, somebody says to Jesus, I will follow wherever you go and remember what Jesus says. Foxes have holes and birds of the air have nests, but the son of man has nowhere to lay his head. It's this massive missing picture in my mind. Where's that structure, that house or tent, that plot of earth, that spot to sleep and eat and say, this is my home? I want to plug in the phrase Jesus home into the search engine in my Bible and have it shoot out a map that can point me right there, you know, maybe even hone in from, like, a satellite and say, ah, that's what it looks like. That's what I can expect to see as a follower of Jesus. Now I know what home looks like, but I find so little when it comes to descriptions of physical space. Jesus took us to disciples, too, that I'm left to wonder, when you follow Jesus, where then is home? Well, today's passage is not the only thing these past two weeks that has prompted that question of mine, where is home? Events of this past week have pushed that question to the forefront of so many of our minds and hearts. If you've asked me on Monday, Pastor Matt, where's your home? I might have answered, oh, it's at 2266 Norwich Place in Altadena, California. You want to see it? And if they did, I could show them that house and tell them all about it. I could say, Jill, Lucy, and I have all called this home since back in 2011. A church I serve, a great church, as a matter of fact, called Knox Presbyterian, Help Jill, Lucy and me find and then purchase this home. Jason Burns, Nord Erickson, Brad King, Kevin Schjeldahl, Brian Jones, Gary Swanner, Tom McGinnis. So many others I could name helped us find and purchase this place we would call home. It was a house you would definitely call a fixer upper. When we got it roughly 14 years ago, it had no operational heating or cooling. It had an upstairs, unpermitted master bathroom with an odd leak we learned later was honey from bees, and with pipes extending out and scaling down unceremoniously and quite terribly down the side of the house. It had a kitchen the size of a small closet, a really small closet, and an odd detached dwelling from the main house that had a bedroom and bathroom, but nothing else. It had an outdoor staircase in front of the house that led to the upper floor, but you didn't really need that, so it seemed kind of pointless. And it had all kinds of electrical, plumbing, flooring, masonry, and insulation issues to address. And there were other things, too. But doesn't it sound perfect? And the price was great. This was 2011 too, so housing prices had fallen. It's looked to us just perfect. It was full of character. You know, it was built in the 1920s in a style evoking French Normandy. The same architect who designed it had designed a host of other houses on this block, giving the whole place a kind of Northern European vibe. When you drive there, some people would say it felt like you were going to Disneyland or going to another country. The house had fruit trees in back, a grapefruit tree, an orange tree, and a kumquat tree. It had a line of rose bushes and a sizable yard. And at the time, we had a sizable dog that needed a large yard. We had a greyhound at that time. But what really sealed the deal for us and what made us certain this was to be our house is when our daughter first saw it after we were driving back from that house viewing, she called it the Castle House. How could we not go for the Castle house? For the next 13 years? We would invest a great deal in that house to make it a home. We would connect the separate dwelling with the main house by way of a new kitchen. We would install solar panels and put in a new heating and cooling system. We would take out the master bathroom upstairs and make that upstairs a true living room space. Friends of ours from this church, like John Gardner and the Howards and the Rispons, would help us build a chicken coop in back of the house where when chickens were all the craze, and they were the craze for a little while, not long, not now, but they were. We would have chickens, and it was lovely. And we would host events for the church in that space that we had come to call home. Then last Tuesday, I was out having dinner with a friend, and I got a call around 6:15pm from my daughter, Lucy. She and Jill had been at home in the dark, hoping the power would come back on soon. They'd begun to smell smoke, and stepping outside, they'd seen how close the Eaton fire was to our Altadena residence. And so they grabbed our dog fits and nothing else, and drove down to Knox. I raced off to meet them at Knox and Jill, Lucy and I talked, and we decided that Jill and I would make one last run and see if we could grab a few things from the house. We did that driving uphill. Everyone else was coming down, we were going up, but felt like we could get in the house for just a minute. And we raced in, grabbed computers, few photo albums, a few other items, and raced out, realizing already we had left so much behind, but thinking, hey, there have been evacuation orders before. We're probably going to be just fine. Well, that night and the next morning, we exchanged texts and phone calls and emails with our neighbors. Many of our neighbors were elderly, and the neighbors were checking to see how those particularly who were older, were doing and if they'd found a safe spot. And late Wednesday morning, we got the news from our neighbors that every house on Norwick Place had burned to the ground. So where's home? I wondered that this past Wednesday. Where's home? Suddenly losing your house, your apartment, your place to minnow or dwell, forces this kind of question to the forefront. Well, I might not get an answer to that question in today's passage in exactly the way I wanted it. Not an answer that arrives in the form of a structure or a physical dwelling like that one I knew so well. We might not get any details about that tangible place the two disciples, one of whom was Andrew, went once they became Jesus followers. But we do read this. We read that after Jesus had invited those two disciples to the place, he minnowed or lodged or stayed, the disciples minnowed or lodged or stayed with him. That's what we read, and that's it. But Lord, is there a lot packed in to that sentence. It's as if John's Gospel wants to direct our attention not to the physical dwelling, but to a new set of relationships. Relationships with Christ, abiding with Christ, abiding with others connected with him. The portrait we get of home in today's passage, the home Jesus leads people to. His brief but poignant home is relationship with Christ and relationship with others in Christ. It's relationship with Christ and relationship with others in Christ. The physical structure or plot of earth on which that takes place. It may be really special to us, as mine was to me, but it's not the central element. What's the central element? It's relationships. And then the structure becomes that place wherein those relationships are forged. I love how Frederick Buechner put it when he wrote this. I believe that the home we long for and belong to is finally where Christ is. I believe that home is Christ's kingdom, which exists both within us and among us as we wend our prodigal ways through the world in search of it. Since Wednesday, I have been without that house on 2266 Norwick Place. But have I been without a home? Not for a second. They say that there's nothing like a loss to remind us of our desperate need for God. And I have learned that hard lesson yet again this week. And yet again in a time of need. I have sensed, felt, tasted, seen the presence and accompaniment and love of Christ like never before. Who was there to celebrate with me that my family was safe, my family was okay. Who was there to mourn with me at the loss of all those houses on our neighborhood? Who was there to hold my heart and then empower and direct me alongside so many others, to mourn with others for their loss and to be part of that vital work of loving our neighbors inside and outside of the family of faith. Christ. Christ. By the power of the Holy Spirit, Christ, the very incarnation of the power behind all things, I had a home truly with that Savior this past week. And I needed. And one way that the love of Christ became especially tangible for me this last week is by so many, so many Christ followers reaching out to me and my family and to others who had suffered loss. Hours, if not minutes after the loss of our home, I received offer after offer after offer of gracious hospitality from families and individuals from this church and from families and individuals all over the state and all over the country. One family's house was still in danger. They were already trying to make a place for us. I've been staying with Carolyn Wilson and Patrick Connor and Caitlin and Braden these past few days. And thank you all so much for hosting me. It truly has been a home to be with you all in this past week. Terry McGonagall and some of the fine saints of this church from Monte Vista Grove Homes have arranged for me and Jill to have a unit there as their temporary dwelling starting Monday. You know, I thought it would be some decades before I moved into Monte Vista Grove home. Early bird option, I guess. And then so many outpourings of tangible support, too. So this shirt, this is Spencer Wilson's. Thank you, Spencer, who I have as a confirmation student and went to India with. And now he's giving me the clothes off his back. These pants, belt. Patrick Connor. Thank you for those. The socks, the undershirt, Marcus and Joy. And the stencil. Family thank you for making that target run for me. And Jill, Lucy and I have all been brought to tears by the outpouring of love extended by people near and far, and phone calls and texts and emails and gifts and gracious gestures and social media. You all have minnowed or remained with us, abided with us as you have abided with Christ. And it has all felt profoundly like home. It's been rich. Work with you, too. Work I might call home as well, to consider other Knox families who have suffered loss. Work already on caring for them, and be at work in caring for our neighbors all around the city who have suffered. Friends, this baptism of the Lord. Sunday, heed the witness of John the Baptist. Look to Christ the Lamb who takes away the sin of the world. Abide in him. Allow him and his body to abide with. With you. Abide with one another. Love one another as he commanded his disciples to do. Love your neighbor, especially that neighbor who has suffered great loss. And there, in that network of relationships in Christ, you will find that home you were looking for. And if you don't believe me, hear the words of Christ to his disciples in today's text. Come and see. In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Amen.