John 14: 1-14. How we Abide the Goodbye
Rev. Kathryn J. Cameron
Mother’s Day brings memory's tears
Kitchen sink drips
Her fingers scrub my scalp clean.
Prell smell. A remembered ad where a pearl dropped
through thick green shampoo takes that road.
Along that way, the hidden product message: buy this softest hair
to make it to your wedding day.
My mother didn’t cry at my wedding.
She cried on days when her emergency room
Work got to her. That day the high school senior
Crashed into a mountain, doing 58 MPH around
a Curve. She shed tears when I called
from the hospital with News: we’ve named her
after you mom, our daughter’s middle name—
she'll be baptized “Kathryn Irene”. Peace be with you.
And also, with you. Mom’s last Mother’s Day
with us Passed twenty years ago. We knew, not conclusively
my siblings and I, how we must come to abide that day as
one goodbye among the many. “Farewell, until we meet again.”
Jesus said, “I go and prepare a place for you.” Thus, he spoke
saying “adios” to those he most loved. And if
I go prepare a place for you, he granted, again I am coming
to Receive you to Myself, that where I am You
may be Also. “Farewell, until we meet again.”
Jesus said goodbye, 1990 years ago, if we follow
our Gregorian calendars based on his birth and calculate
his farewell address based on what the beloved
disciple remembered through the years.
This Sunday, May 10, 2020 we hear again his goodbye, yes
And a promise: ‘where I am you may be Also.’
“I am you,” Jesus says. I am you will be also. That’s what
we hear when we take out the where. Why would you
take out the where? We believe place matters, don’t we?
We do believe place matters especially this year of our Lord
when we have been misplaced. Displaced, unplaced, among
the no-place-to-rest-our heads-believers of Jesus.
We grieve our loss of place, our social distance from our sanctuary. For
God’s sake we can’t even Sing! How can we sing the Lord’s song,
when we can’t Lift every voice and sing? ‘Where’ does matter and
where matters not.
“In my Father’s house there are many rooms,”
Jesus tells us. He might have added, ‘you have not begun to see
all the places you will find me and through me the Father who
is in me as I am in you. I am you. Wherever we find ourselves,
whether we think we know the Way or not, we may know this Truth.
We may also find the Life Jesus promises where God abides.
Such promise does not diminish our grief. We are beyond
sorrow in these days of loss. In the living room of sorrow sits anger, hurt cowers by the door. Yet Jesus gives us the Spirit to abide hurt and anger. God abides with us in our sorrow.
Jesus suffers with us the cross we bear, sheds with us the tears
we weep. The Spirit sighs with us the deepest breaths of despair
and exhales the air of hope when we cannot abide another
death; when we fear we have lost the Way. I am you Jesus says.
You be the ones believing in me and the works I do
for those who abide in my Father, and believe in me;
they will do what gives God glory. May we
be known not for what we buy or buy into; may we
be known for how we abide in God through Christ who
prepares the way. In truth and life, amen.