The House That God Builds

1 Peter 2:2-10; John 14:1-14

I remember spending some time as a child trying to imagine what God’s house could look like – a house that contained within it a whole bunch of other houses; “many mansions” in the good old “King James” text of this gospel.

Would the mansions fit one inside the other, like Russian nesting dolls?

Would you walk along a hall and open a door into what seemed to be one room, and find a whole other house inside it?  Are the houses alike, or all different in size and style and shape?

I enjoyed the speculation, but I never did manage to construct a satisfactory picture of the houses within God’s house, and eventually I stopped wondering.

Then later, I went to seminary, and found out that if you dig around in the Greek text, “my Father’s house” was as much “household” – a community of God’s leadership – as it was a building. And these mansions or dwelling places were really just awkward English for an “abiding” that is sort of verb and noun together.

You could say that Jesus’ Father’s household includes many options for “staying”, and Jesus has been setting those up for us.

Which is good to know, but I’ve come to think that the poetry of the “many mansions” or even “many dwelling places” actually matters more to our understanding of what Jesus is telling us.

It’s important to let Jesus tease our imaginations like this; important to stretch ourselves around something unimaginable. It’s essential, actually, to wonder about what God can build.

Because this is not a question of how fancy our residence in heaven will look someday; it’s a question about exactly what Jesus and God are up to, in relationship with us, here and now.

“Come to [Jesus], a living stone,” Peter says, “and like living stones, let yourselves be built into a spiritual house.”

Let yourselves be built into the house of God.  Into a structure and a community that is shaped for God’s good news. A house of profound and powerful belonging.

This too, is a house that’s hard to imagine structurally. “Living stones” are building materials that can move and change and grow (not life become artificially rigid). So any structure built of living stones is going to continually change shape and size, and will not stay according to plan.

(You may have had some metaphorical experience with this yourselves recently, as our homes seem to be shrinking or changing around us depending on the number of people or animals trying to eat, cook, work, school, play, pray, and rest in them – or when we notice who’s missing from our dwelling places these days.)

A house like that is not one that’s especially easy to live in – but God, apparently, is a very flexible architect and householder. God can – and does – build with us continually as we ourselves change shape; grow stronger or more stressed, or shift around.

Over the last several weeks, I’ve seen a cartoon making the rounds on social media. One figure, dressed in red with a pointy beard, announces “With COVID 19, I closed all your churches.”

“On the contrary,” says the other figure (white robed and white bearded), “I just opened one in every home.”

That cartoon reflects the same truth Peter is trying to convey today: that God is a flexible architect; that God builds us into God’s ongoing plan, no matter what changes we experience. It’s true, too, that the church is in more places than ever, making sandwiches in every kitchen to feed the hungry at Cathedral Kitchen; praying together in hundreds of scattered computers. The church is in every phone these days that calls a friend.

But there’s one equally important truth that that cartoon misses – or, actually, mis-represents. God didn’t just open a church in every home when we closed Trinity’s buildings in mid-March.

God opened that church in your home the day you were baptized, or even before.

Peter’s trying to remind us of that.

When he tells us to “Long for the life-giving “milk of the Word” with the all-consuming hunger of a newborn infant,” he’s inviting us to renew that longing for the living, life-shaping presence of God that was birthed when God first opened within us.

Because our longing for life-sustaining relationship with God is one important way God builds with us. That’s how God shapes us into that house of profound belonging, a living structure that’s laid out and built up by relationship.

That’s what Peter is telling us when he calls Jesus the cornerstone. The first block set into the building, at a corner, determines the alignment and relationship of every other stone, every other element of the structure. Even as living stones change and grow, we are held together and secured by our relationship with that cornerstone.

Jesus is saying the same thing to his disciples: “I am the Way,” he tells them. The Way you already know, even if you don’t know where we are going. The map to God’s presence isn’t a pre-set route we follow turn-by-turn. The map to God’s home and heart is a person we have a living relationship with.

Now, that relationship doesn’t always come naturally to all of us.

Conversations with Jesus can feel rather one-sided, often, now that Jesus is dead and risen and ascended, and not physically across the table from you or me as he was two thousand years ago when he said all this to his friends.

You can’t grab coffee with Jesus; go with him to see a movie or a baseball game, or join a book club or a gym with Jesus these days, even if you could do that with anyone at the moment.

It takes more intentionality, more planning and attention than we are used to just to enjoy and deepen a relationship these days, when the casual interactions of the office or church coffee hour or school drop off just aren’t happening.  Standing six feet apart when you drop off groceries on a doorstep, or struggling with electronics to catch a glimpse of an isolated relative you long to hug can make us self-conscious or awkward. But those connections seem to matter even more these days than they did when it was casual, accidental, and easy.

Hanging out with Jesus is like that, too. It’s not accidental; we have to plan some. We have to choose deliberately to read the Bible – not to achieve knowledge or accomplish a task, but just to hear Jesus’ stories, to spend a little time together.  Or make a time to pray, like scheduling a call. And some of the calls or prayers feel awkward, empty, or flat, yes. But they accumulate, and the relationship deepens, grows closer; living stones changing shape through time and trust and persistence.

Jesus makes that effort, too. God always has, before we ever start. We heard Jesus telling his friends that he has deliberately prepared a place – an abiding – for us. Deliberately prepared a wide variety of lasting, rooted relationship in the home of God for us. And that he’s going to make a special trip to bring us into that place, that relationship prepared, and won’t leave anyone out.

And God has been building that home out of you and me and people we don’t even know from before we began to imagine it. God has been building you and me into a house of belonging, a house that moves and lives and changes and grows, but never loses us however far we’re scattered. Because we are connected through the cornerstone.

You and I – and people we don’t really even know – are connected into God’s living house, The church was opened in our own homes and hearts before we ever asked. We are living stones, chosen and precious, built together by God to show God’s glory to the world, and make a home for all in the heart of God.