Following the Way

Transcripts are computer-generated and may not be 100% accurate.

All right, third to fifth graders, it's your turn. You may go with Marta now. We'll see you back here for communion.

Good morning, everyone. My name is Maggie. I'm part of the Table team. And I'm so excited to continue our series that we've been calling Rise Up. This series is all about sort of instructions to the church about how do we live in light of the resurrection of Jesus. How do we live lives post Easter? And a couple of weeks ago, Debbie talked about the resurrected Jesus meeting two friends on the road to Emmaus. She encouraged us to pay attention, to be astonished, and to go tell about it.

And last week, Justin encouraged us to emulate the early church in the book of Acts by embracing what's common or what we share together among ourselves. And there's encouragement for our community in today's text, too. So this week, the election area is actually taking us back in time a little bit. In the church calendar, we are post Easter, but this morning, we're going back to Maundy Thursday. So here's a little bit of a refresher. Jesus has just washed the disciples' feet, and he's sitting down to dinner with them. You know the kind of dinner this is. Have you ever shared a meal with someone and they go, "Okay, can I just be honest?" And you know that something outrageous is about to happen. And so you sort of lean forward and maybe you prop your elbows on the table, and you are prepared for what they are about to say. Jesus does this exact thing. He's at this meal, and he says, "Someone is going to betray me, and it's someone in this room." Can you imagine the drama? If Judas were Minnesotan, this would be his response: "Well, I better get going." And he would have left, and he did leave. He went to go find the chief priests and the elders to get Jesus arrested later that night. And the disciples, the rest of them anyway, are sitting at the table with Jesus going, "What just happened?"

And Jesus begins to give what scholars call the farewell discourse. Jesus is going to do a couple of things. He's going to announce his departure. He's leaving. He's going to offer some comfort to his disciples. He's going to give them some instructions, and then he's going to make a promise to return some day. So here we are. We're in John chapter 14:1-7, and Jesus says:

"Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God. Believe also in me. In my father's house there are many dwelling places. If it weren't so, I would have told you that I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go to prepare this place for you, I will come again and take you to myself so that where I am, there you may be also. And you know the way to the place where I am going."

And Thomas said to him, "Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?" And Jesus said to him, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you know me and you do know me, you will know my Father also. From now on, you do know Him and you have seen Him."

Every time I read this passage, I think of our friends, Jerome and Anna Bergquist. In 2021, they bought some land up north and they said, "We're building a cabin." And I thought to myself, "Oh, great, it'll be so nice to visit their cabin this summer." And we're chuckling because Jerome and Anna are building the cabin with their own hands. And you all have pitched in and helped. Ahlbergs, you've been there. Baakers, I know you've gone. Goods, you have lent your hands to build this thing together. But I cannot help but hear Jerome's voice: “If I go to prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you with me so that you can be where I am.”

But Jesus is not talking about cabins or mansions in the sky here. He's not actually talking about heaven at all according to Greek, Jewish tradition rather. The Greek word here for dwelling place, which is sometimes translated mansions, is the Greek word “monai” (μοναὶ) and it gets its root not from a noun, not a place at all. It's a verb. It's an action. The word is "meno," (μένω) and it means to remain, to abide, or to be united in relationship.

This matters. It matters because Jesus is not pointing us to a place, but to a person. Jesus is pointing us as always back to the Creator God. He's preparing a relationship for us of closeness and intimacy. Humanity is inseparably united with the Father through Jesus.

And then, Thomas' words, "We don't know where or we don't know the place you are going. How can we know the way?" And Jesus says, "I am the way." He doesn't give a destination. He gives directions.

When I first learned how to drive, there were no GPS. There was no smartphones. There was no Waze or Google Maps. We did have MapQuest, but that meant that I had to print out the directions at home and then take them with me in the car. And boy, if I took a wrong turn, I was sort of just hosed because there was no, like, refreshing the map. Here's where you are. And I remember the very first time that I went out all by myself. I'd just gotten my license, and I wanted to go to Plato's Closet near the Burnsville Mall because I have always been a thrift store girlie, okay? So I printed out the MapQuest directions, and I got to the thrift store just fine. And on my way home, I didn't know the difference between 35W and 35E. So instead of taking yes, you groan. Instead of taking 35W home to Bloomington, I got on 35E and wound up in Mendota Heights. And I began to sob, and I pulled off the highway into a gas station parking lot, and I called my mom using her cell phone calling our landline.

And I said, "Mom, I need help getting home." And she said, "Well, where are you?" And I said, "I don't know." She said, "I cannot give you directions. If you don't know where you are, you've got to go in that gas station and ask for directions." So I wiped off all the tears from my face, and I went inside, and I said, "I need help getting to Bloomington." And the guy behind the counter, he was very nice, and he rattled off the directions. But I didn't have a pen or a paper, so I kind of smiled and nodded, and went back out to my car and cried some more. And I got in the car, and I got back on the highway, and as soon as I made it back to 35W, I knew exactly where I was going. It was all familiar. And a couple of years later, when I bought myself my first car, my mom gifted me a Garmin, which is that GPS that connects to the windshield so that I'd never get lost again!

So when Thomas says, "We don't know where you're going, how can we know the way," Jesus does not tell Thomas where the destination is. He simply gives him the directions: “I am the way. You don't need to know where you're going, you just need to follow the way, and if you do that, you'll get to the Father.”

And this right here is the point of the whole passage. In fact, it's the central theological claim of the entire gospel of John. Remember, this gospel was written during a time when Jewish communities were locked in hot debate about whether or not Jesus was actually the Messiah. So this gospel is born into that conversation. It isn't a newspaper reporting the facts, it's a narrative written to demonstrate that yes, Jesus is the Messiah, yes, he is divine.

But if we're going to talk about John 14:6, I do want to acknowledge some painful history here. I was raised to believe, and maybe you were too, that John 14:6 is an exclusive claim. And commentaries do call into question the difference between a particular and an exclusive claim. But I want to assure you that if you see a street preacher on the corner shouting John 14:6 into a megaphone, that is a misapplication of this verse.

Let's read it again in context. Jesus has just told his disciples he's going away, and Thomas is the only one brave enough to speak up. His words are plaintive, they're earnest. Can you hear the worry when Thomas says, "Jesus, we don't know where you're going. How can we follow? How can we get there if we don't know the way?" In that context, verse six becomes this beautiful promise: “You do know the way, because you know me. You can be in relationship with God the Father through me.”

And that is the good news of the gospel, friends, that we can have a deep and personal and intimate relationship with the God of the universe through Jesus. These verses tell us, "This is who we are. We are the people who believe that Jesus is the tangible expression of God on the earth. This Jesus, the one who put on flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood to show us how to be human. That is who we believe in."

I tend to be a pretty binary thinker, right and wrong, left and right, up and down. Anybody with me? Teasing out nuance is what some people might call my growing edge. I used to thrive on a literal reading of Scripture, because I knew exactly what to do and what not to do. When Jesus says, "I am the way," I'm Thomas going, "Uh, which way? Where are you going? Give me the step-by-step directions on how to get there."

But Jesus doesn't give a destination. He gives directions. And there's mystery here. It can feel uncomfortable for some of us. All the binary thinkers are like, "Thanks, I hate it."

But it's the same call that Jesus has been making since he first met the disciples. Follow me. I'm the way. Follow me away from your families. Follow me across the Sea of Galilee into the storm. Follow me to feed these 5,000 people. Follow me into Jerusalem as all the people are cheering and waving their palm branches. Follow me all the way to the cross. I am the way.

The way is not easy, friends. It is not straightforward, and it might not always make sense, but Jesus says, "I am the way," and so we are the people following the way.

By the way, that phrase, it stuck around. Jesus had died and resurrected and went back to heaven. His followers started calling themselves followers of the way almost immediately. That term Christian, it wouldn't be around for about another 10 years or so, but they started adopting this phrase. We are followers of the way. I love it. I think it is beautiful. I think it's a little poetic. It helps me, the binary thinker, embrace some more mystery. You know, forget the denominations. We are all followers of the way, aren't we?

But I can hear the disciples' voice and my own. What does that mean? What does that even look like?

Here at The Table, our mission statement, the way that we describe ourselves, is that we are a community following the ways of Jesus. That identity guides our whole life together. Following the way means loving God and loving neighbors, and we are as serious about the first as we are about the second.

It means that this is a place where you can show up just as you are and be welcomed and accepted. Every week we're going to hear the good news of the gospel and our worship through music and through Scripture and through the sermon, and every week at communion, we remind ourselves that we belong to God and to each other. We pray for each other. We believe in a God who hears us.

Following the way also means loving our neighbor. This is a community that loves hard. We advocate at a policy level and we march in the streets. We bring meals and we show up at funerals. We donate to food shelves, as in the back, and when our neighbors weren't safe to leave their homes, this community spent two months donating, shopping, bagging, and delivering groceries. And friends, if that's not following the way, I don't know what is.

Sometimes following the way is messy. Sometimes it's confusing. Our family has a neighbor who has been struggling for almost a year now to get out of a domestic violence situation. It has been devastating and scary. We’ve fielded phone calls at 11 p.m. asking for a safe place to sleep. And more than once, I have turned to Jon in tears and said, "Is this loving our neighbor? Are we doing this right?" But I think the discomfort is where it's at. If we are stretched and we are unsettled and we are inconvenienced, I think that's how we know we're on the right way.

Do you know what my favorite part is about following the way? It's that we don't do it alone. We're doing it together. I was thinking about our Palm Sunday Day of Action when people of all faith backgrounds, Catholic and Protestant and Muslim, we all came together and we marched to the Capitol. And we said, "We are going to heal the sick and we are going to feed the hungry and we are going to welcome the stranger. Our faith commands us. This is the way.”

I get such comfort from knowing that I'm not following the way alone. And this brings us right back to the beginning of chapter 14. We're going to end today where we began. In the first line of the passage, Jesus says, "Do not let your hearts be troubled." The Greek does something kind of funny with the pronouns in the sentence. And so I'm going to use the word "y'all" to help us understand the difference. The sentence is more like, "Hey, y'all, don't let y'all's heart singular be troubled." Justin knows exactly what I'm talking about. He's from North Carolina. Amen.

Jesus is talking to the whole group, but they share one heart. This is exactly what Justin was talking about last week when he talked about sharing things in common. What does it look like to share a heart?

I think we got a glimpse of it this morning as we baptized your kids. You know, I think about the way that we have promised you that we're going to walk alongside you and we're going to support you. We're going to cheer you on. I've got four babysitters ready for you. The Kellers are locked in. But you know what's beautiful about that? Is that someone did it for me when my kids were babies. This is the beautiful part about following the way together. Sometimes you carry and support other people, and sometimes you have to let yourself be supported.

If the road that you are walking right now is difficult, if you are stumbling, if you are in need of some support, this community will care for you. In just a moment during the time of communion, we're going to have a member of our prayer team in the back. And if you need that reminder that none of us are walking this way alone, we would be happy to pray with you and for you. But we also want to care for you practically too.

If you're experiencing a difficult time, if you could use some tangible support or a listening ear, you can request care in a couple of ways. One, you can talk to any of us on staff or our community care team leads, Sam Manning or Andrea Johnson. And if you aren't quite ready to talk to someone, you can go online to thetablempls.com/care. You can learn about that care ministry and you can request care online.

The good news this morning, friends, is that life can be full of joy and grief and that following the way is messy and beautiful and that none of us do it alone. Let me close in prayer.

Jesus, you are the way and the truth and the life. We're following you and we are doing it together. Lord, make us a community that shares one heart, unite us together and bring us into deeper relationship with you. Amen.