Creekside Church Sermon of April 28, 2002 "Homeward Bound " John 14:1-14	Rev. David Bibbee
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While preparing sermons, names will jump into my mind for no apparent reason. Their presence usually serves no sermonic purpose so I simply set them aside. But sometimes a name resists being sent on its way. These names I allow to linger a little longer. Perhaps God is bringing them to the front of my thoughts for a reason. As I thought about what to say, Larry dropped in.

Larry and I have been friends since high school. He was a smart, good-looking, popular guy who played drums in our band. But something set Larry apart from the rest of us. His job. Many of us had after school jobs at fast food joints, service stations, grocery stores and retail businesses. Not Larry. He worked at a mortuary. While we did homework, he was on ambulance runs to accident scenes, or to homes and hospitals to pick up the bodies of the deceased. He got a kick out of saying, "Well, I've got to get back to the body shop." While we ate lunch in the high school cafeteria, he took great pleasure ruining our appetites by telling us what he had seen the night before.

For years, Larry has owned and operated a funeral home. He has a successful, highly respected firm, and as we remind him, no matter how the economy performs, he will always have job security. But last Thanksgiving he confided to me that he was growing weary of his work and considering a career change. "Why?" I asked. He replied, "I've had my fill of death. I've made a living out of dying. I provide a service to families. My work is meaningful, but it gets more difficult as time goes by. I have done funerals for our classmate's parents, and now I am doing funerals for our classmates. I want to spend time with a different side of life than death."

Larry knows a lot about death. He sees the grip it has upon people's lives. He knows that the greatest need families of the deceased have is one which he cannot provide…hope.

Life is change. Life is a succession of leave-takings and goodbyes. Because we live, we shall die. Because we love we shall grieve. Nothing we can do can change it, but Christians, nonchristians, when there's a death, we all grieve. As St. Paul said, "We do not grieve as those who have no hope." On resurrection Sunday I said Easter isn't a story. The gospels tell us four stories. Easter isn't "a" Sunday, or 52 Sundays, for that matter. It's 24/7 from here to eternity.

So how has it been with you since March 31st? Is Easter hope still with you? Before you fall to sleep at night, do you think to yourself, "Because he lives, I can face tomorrow?" Has a "yes" you expected turned to a "no"? Do you still believe that at Easter God turned the world's "no" to a "yes"? Since Easter, has hope been your companion, or was it tossed out with the withered Easter flowers? Will it be business as usual until it's time next year for a fresh infusion of hope on Easter Sunday?

Christ is risen! But death remains to be dealt with. Christ is risen! But do we believe we can do all things and overcome all obstacles through Christ who strengthens us?

In the gospel of John, Jesus spends a lot of time saying, "Goodbye." The disciples wouldn't have Jesus with them much longer. He wanted them to have something to hold fast to, so he promised them a house. "Don't let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God. Believe in me. In my Father's house there are many rooms." The house of God isn't a bungalow. It wasn't built for people just like us who think as we do, believe as we believe and live as we live. It's a very big house, with more than enough room for all who desire it, and don't deserve it. Occupancy is unlimited. "This is where I'm going," Jesus said. "This is where I'll be waiting."

Jesus' picture of heaven did not include golden streets and pearly gates. "There is a house where my Father and I will be waiting," he said. And it is no coincidence that in Jesus' best known parable, the prodigal son, there is also a house and a waiting father. The parable is not really about a son who behaves badly, but a father who behaved extravagantly and loved unconditionally. The parable doesn't say how long it took the prodigal son to run out of cash, come to his senses, and come home. What is clear is that the son was more on his father's mind than was the father on the son's mind.

Every day the father gazed down the lane for a sign of his son. He did it for weeks, months, perhaps years. Parents, do you recall what it was like when your child became separated from you in the department store? Instant panic. Someone observed that we do not know what pain is all about until we have children. Their pain, becomes our pain. There is no look so mournful as the face of a parent who has lost a child. I can still see my mother and father at the head of my sister's bed during her final moments of life; their contorted faces streaked with tears, my father crying, "She's yours now, Lord."

There are losses that cannot be consoled by powers we possess. Time heals some wounds, but can't heal them all. Supportive friends who surround us in our grief mean much. Counselors can help us through the raw emotions and help us reestablish some semblance of order in our lives. What we need most we cannot give ourselves. Witnessing the impact of death for 25 years, my friend Larry has heard every cliché and seen about every human way possible by which people try to pull themselves together. He has seen lots of grief. Hope is another matter, and our great need is hope.

In the past I commended a book to you called, A Grace Disguised. It is written by a religion professor named Gerald Sittser who chronicles his grieving process following an auto accident which took the lives of his wife, his mother, and four-year-old daughter. One of the family's routines was reading from the Bible each evening before bed. Six weeks after the accident, Jerry and his three surviving children sat on the sofa one night reading from the book of Acts about Peter raising Dorcas from the dead. No sooner had he finished than his daughter questioned him. "Why didn't God do that for us?" This question brought tougher questions from the others. "Why did God allow Mommy, Diana Jane, and Grandma to die? Why doesn't God care about all of us?" They were all crying and voicing their rage at God for destroying their family. After putting them to bed, Jerry walked to the house of his friend next door and cried like the children.

What he saw with awful clarity that night was our ultimate enemy… death. It mocks our dreams and designs. It claims everyone and everything dear to us. He says it is especially difficult for people of faith who think they are immune from its power. But in the end we must all see our losses for what they are…the reminder that death has done it again. As far as our plans are concerned, in the end, the score turns out the same. Death wins…save for one notable exception.

Jesus' death crushed the disciples. They had neither the energy nor the imagination nor the will to invent a resurrection story. They possess nothing by which they could generate their own hope. But hope was provided.

The other night I got in on the tail end of a sci-fi movie called The Abyss. I don't know much about the plot…just that there was an attempt to destroy a secret deep-sea lab, and, there was an activated nuclear warhead at the bottom of an unexplored deep-sea trench. In a suit designed to withstand immense pressures and freezing temperatures, the hero descended thousands of feet to the ocean floor. Down, down he descended through the black abyss. But beneath was a faint blue glow which grew more intense the deeper he went. As you would expect, man finds bomb. Man disarms bomb. Man is in peril. Then from the glowing depths there appeared an alien life form that rescued our hero and took him to an immense underwater world where there lived an advanced civilization of water based beings.

Afterward, I remembered words from Barbara Taylor who spoke of the dark unknown unto which we all will go, not knowing what it is about. "The fact that we can get there has everything to do with that 'notable exception' to death." Barbara Taylor says, "Jesus on the cross dares us to believe that God is at the bottom of everything, waiting to cradle us with loving arms when all our dying is done."

"If I ascend to heaven, you are there. If I descend the realm of the dead, you are there," Psalm 139 reads. We can add to it. If the goal for which you have worked all your life doesn't work out, God is there. If life forces an unwelcome change upon you, God is there. If the application is denied, if the broken relationship can't be repaired, if the diagnosis is cancer, if your faith falters, when your time and my time comes and the last word is spoken, and the last thought occurs, and our last breath is taken, God will be there.

When we hit bottom, God is beneath it. The cross and the empty tomb tell us that God is at the bottom of everything…and a home awaits us.

I used to depress myself when I went back home to Ohio. I drove through the old neighborhood and gazed in disgust at the Dollar General store that sits upon the place where home once stood. Why did I keep driving by when I knew I would regret it? I was looking for home…not a house at 516 North Main, but a home…not a home I used to have, but the one I long for and haven't seen; the home which has been prepared for us and all who seek the way, the truth, and the life in Jesus Christ.

There is plenty of sorrow in the world-enough for believers and non-believers alike. Jesus told us so. "In this world you will have much tribulation, but fear not." Like everyone, for us there will be losses to grieve. But Christians grieve differently, not as those without hope, but as those who know there is a home with a father waiting and a party going on and a big sign with our names upon it.

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