Mutual Abiding & the Politics of Jesus
The Rev. Sara Fischer
This morning’s gospel is part of what is referred to as Jesus’ “farewell discourse” that begins while he is having his last meal with friends. A certain kind of goodbye party, where the guest of honor spends hours holding the floor, speaking either to the other guests en masse, or to God. This farewell discourse, which we’ll read over the next several weeks, is timely as we prepare to say farewell to one another. If you have a little farewell coffee hour for me on May 31, I promise not to go on and on like Jesus.
This gospel that we just heard is many people’s choice passage for their or a loved one’s burial service. There is a lot to say about this passage, and I am not going to say it all. I want to talk about the mansions. That’s the King James version that is so familiar: “In my father’s house are many mansions—I go to prepare a place for you.” What has come down to us through the centuries as we understand more fully where the King James people got the word “mansions” is that we are really talking about places to stay. God’s house is more like an overnight shelter or a youth hostel than a bunch of what we might think of as mansions. There is a place for everyone in God’s house. To abide in the house of God is to abide with God. And abiding with God is not always about us going to a place where God is, but also the journey of God, in Jesus, to abide within our humanity.
Stephen, who is considered the church’s first martyr as well as the first deacon, knows so much about this mutual abiding that he is possessed, possessed of grace and power. His speech ends with a crazy vision: “Look,” he said, “I see the heavens opened and the son of man standing at the right hand of God!” The heavens are open; God is everywhere. To religious and political leaders threatened by the Jesus movement, these are fighting words. They cover their ears, and stone Stephen to death. Yet even at the moment of death, Stephen reminds his hearers, and us, about the one for whom he is willing to die. “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit. Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” That has a familiar ring to it. The story of Jesus’ death defines Stephen’s understanding of his own death, just as the story of Jesus’ work on the ground defined Stephen’s understanding of his own work.
Stephen is possessed, not only by his love for God, but by his understanding of what it means to be a follower of Jesus.
The author of the First Letter of Peter writes about this kind of possession. You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people. Most translations read: God’s possession.
If you’re like me, there are parts of this that gives you the creeps. A chosen race? A holy nation? How much blood has been spilled, in the Crusades, in the conquest of the Americas, in two world wars, in the name of being a chosen race, in the name of holy nationalism? How much fear do we have, right at this moment, of groups inspired by the idea of a chosen race? But to be God’s chosen is not to be set above others, but to be set apart. Apart from the political and material norms that drive the world as we know it. To be God’s chosen is to belong to God, to be God’s own possession. To be possessed, like Stephen.
When the stone rolled away from the tomb, when the earth quaked in the early dawn of Easter Sunday, God announced a new order. God raised Jesus and therefore raised all that Jesus embodied: Justice, forgiveness, love of enemies, not just tolerance, but love, extravagant generosity, risk. Freedom that comes from truth, no matter how awful that truth might be. We know this. We talk and sing about it every week. These are the politics of Jesus, the politics that possessed Stephen, the politics that Thomas and the other disciples in the upper room knew as the Way, the truth, and the life.
Our history is filled with examples of the politics of Jesus. The martyrs of Uganda, surely spiritual descendants of Stephen, condemned for refusing to renounce their faith, walked to their deaths singing hymns and praying for their enemies. Those who stood by were so inspired that they sought out instruction from the handful of remaining Christians. Within a few years the original handful of converts had multiplied many times.
The politics of Jesus is not about being on the right or the left. The politics of Jesus is the politics of the Magnificat, the politics of the Beatitudes, the politics of life that stands in the way of death, the politics of forgiveness and love, the politics of self-sacrifice, the politics of generosity. Obviously, these are not the politics we see in any politicians these days. These are the politics of a holy nation, a royal priesthood, God’s own possession. More than ever, we need these politics, politics worth dying for. Otherwise, the way of Jesus becomes a way of apathy and indifference, a way of misunderstanding, a way of spiritual escape, a way of adaptation to the ways of the world that are antithetical to the ways of God. Without the politics of Jesus, the way of Jesus becomes simply the way of our own private practice.
We live in times that might demand us to go public with the politics of Jesus. We will each have our own definition of “public.” No one is going to stone us. I almost wish that what we have to say and do in the name of Jesus might be so shocking, so threatening, that someone would. Of course I don’t mean that literally. But imagine drawing attention to ourselves because of how we love. Imagine being condemned for acts of non-violence and prayer.
It is in the practice of the politics of Jesus—love, mercy, and generosity—that we dwell in God and God dwells in us. Dwelling in God’s house is not necessarily and certainly not exclusively a place in the hereafter. It is also in this mutual abiding, in the bond created between the human and the divine through the movement of Jesus into our midst, not once but after resurrection and then after Pentecost in the Spirit—it is through this human-divine bond that Jesus is with us and working in us to the end of the ages.
