The Problem With Amat
John 14:1-14
April 20, 2008

“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 were not so, would I have told you that I go
to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again
and will 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.” Thomas said to him, “Lord, we
do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” 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, you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and have
seen him.”

I know many of you know that I grew up overseas, in Indonesia, on the island of
Sumatra, because my father was working in the oil business.  I was there from the age
of 2 until around 11 years old, so, of course, I remember a lot, unlike my sister who is
seven years younger than I am and really has only fuzzy recollections of that part of our
lives.  There are a lot of great things about living overseas—the experience of another
culture, meeting different kinds of people, and frankly, the cost of living, or at least it
was for us.  We lived well—we didn’t pay any rent, and the company my father worked
for paid for a lot of other stuff, like food that had to be imported from Singapore, etc.  
He didn’t make much more money over there than he would have over here, but the
cost of living was so low that we could afford to have luxuries like servants, including
two that lived in the servants quarters right next to the house.  But, of course, they were
more than servants—they almost became part of the family, and, in reality, you could
say that Amat raised me as much as my own parents did—in fact, Amat, means mother
in Indonesian.  She was the one who taught me how to tie my shoelaces, which is
something I still get kidded about, because I guess its not the way we Americans
typically tie up our shoes.  She was the one woke me up in the morning, fed me, and
sent me off to school.  In the evenings, I would often play with her grandkids, whose
mother also worked for us, and we would eat Indonesian food together, if Amat didn’t
have to cook for the family that night, because perhaps my parents had a dinner party
they had to go to.  I will never forget my last day in Indonesia, because we were staying
with another family that night, before our plane left, and for some reason, I hadn’t had a
chance to say good-bye to Amat and so I went back to the house, and we got to hug
and we started crying together, because, of course, she was like a mother to me, and
even I knew that I would probably never see her again.    

One of the more interesting things about that whole experience of living overseas in my
childhood, was, of course, seeing another religion was practiced.  Indonesia is about
90% Muslim and 10% Christian, and Amat was a practicing Muslim, something I knew
because at different times of the day, she would leave the house and go to her room in
the servant quarters, and put on a white prayer dress that covered everything except
her face, and she would pray towards Mecca, as the Koran commands faithful Muslims
to do.  In my mind’s eye, I can still see her at prayer, fully clothed in white, offering her
prayers to Allah, as she stood up, and then went to her knees, eventually prostrating
her whole body before the Divine, over and over again she would do this.  During the
holy month of Ramadan, my family would be invited over by Amat to her house in the
village to feast at night, after the required fasting during the day was over.  It was
fascinating to me, especially someone who didn’t grow up in a particularly religious
home, to see such religious faithfulness practiced by someone I loved and cared about,
and, of course, who cared for me as well.  And yet, her religion was not my own, or nor
my parent’s, really, and even I knew the difference between Christianity and Islam,
because I had gone to enough Baptist Vacation Bible Schools when we would visit my
aunt’s family in Alabama during the summers.  

And yet, of course, I ended up a Christian, and far more religious than my parents, and
a minister no less, and I have before me Jesus’ beautiful words about him being the
way, the truth, and the life, and that no one comes to the father except through him.  I
believe in the Christ, and I believe in his message, and I believe in his life and death,
and resurrection, and I know how powerfully that life and message has changed me,
but I am also almost always haunted by the question of Amat’s faith and faithfulness,
because for her, Jesus isn’t the way, the truth or the life, at least not in anyway that is
obvious.  Like me, she is a product of her culture—we follow the general beliefs of our
parents, whether they be Christian, Muslim, Hindu, or Jewish.  In fact, as odd as it may
seem in our global culture, it still is pretty rare for us not to basically follow the tenets
our family’s religion—conversion across faiths is still very, very rare.  Even for me, who
grew up in a non-religious home, the statistics say that if I did decide to practice a faith,
the likelihood would be that I would choose something similar to the religion around
me—I grew up in a family that generally had always been Christian, even if nominally,
and so I too would probably end up a Christian if I ended up practicing any faith at all.  
So, what about Amat?  She was going to probably end up a Muslim, like I was going to
probably end up being a Christian.  Jesus isn’t her way, her truth, her life, at least not in
any recognizable sense, and if so how connected…or disconnected, to God was she, is
she?  These words by Jesus that we heard earlier today challenge many of us, or at
least me, because the implication seems to be that Jesus is the ONLY way to God, that
no one connects with God without connecting through Jesus.  And yet, I have to admit
that’s a hard pill for me to swallow, and one that I’ve found harder and harder to try to
swallow over the years.  Nowadays, when someone tries to hand me the pill, I usually
politely decline because people like Amat, people like my father who had no faith,
people like some of my friends who authentically can find no reason to believe in Christ,
these people come before me and challenge me with the goodness of their lives, the
authenticity of their doubt, and, in Amat’s case, the real faithfulness with which she
practiced her religion, and how that faith was lived out in her care for me as a young
child.  In many ways, these people with no faith, or a different faith had often been more
Christ-like to me than many of the Christians I’ve known in this world.    

So, what are we to do with this beautiful text, with this text that seems to exclude people
like Amat?  One of my professors from seminary, Gail O’Day—she’s UCC by the way—
wrote one of the most used commentaries on the Gospel of John, and she argues that
we often lose our ways with words like these, because we try to universalize them, we
try to make Jesus’ words speak to us about other religions, Islam, Hinduism,
Confuciusm, whatever.  And what she says is that rather than trying to get them to say
something about the relative merits about those religions, we should see these words
as a confessional celebration of an early Christian community that was just coming into
its own, especially one that was clearly beginning to separate from its Jewish roots.  
Most scholars believe that the Gospel of John, in which these particular words of Jesus
are only spoken, was written during a time when the Jewish synagogues were
beginning to kick out Christians who claimed Jesus as their Messiah, which caused
some real anger and pain in the Christian community.  And so these words are less
about defining other people and their religions as much as that early Christian
community defining itself, maybe against the Judaism out of which it came.  Who knows,
of course?  

But what I also found really, really interesting is the first part of the passage, where
Jesus talks to the disciples in this farewell discourse, a discourse given to disciples right
before he was to be crucified, and Jesus tells them that there are many dwelling places
where he is going, and he is going to prepare a place for them.  Like you, I suspect, I
thought he was talking about heaven, about some place, because I too make the same
mistake as Thomas makes in this passage, that this dwelling place is a location, a place
of some sort.  I’ve used this text in funeral services all the time because it seems to be
talking about heaven.  But if you actually look at the way the Greek word for “dwelling
place” is used elsewhere in the Gospel of John, it’s never used that way, not as way of
describing a location, or a place.  Instead the word is used as a way of describing our
relationship with God, and so John in his Gospel talks about us dwelling in God, and
God dwelling in us, or God dwelling in Christ—the writer John has Jesus get very
elaborate in his description of these relationships between God, us, and Jesus.  
“Dwelling place” conveys a sense of relationship, and so Jesus seems to be saying that
in the midst of their great distress about the unknown future before the disciples in that
upper room, that he will be with them, the relationship will continue, the journey will go
on, because there are many, many dwelling places, many, many ways of being in
relationship with him, when he comes back to receive them.  Like Thomas, we often
think of this passage as being about heaven, or the hereafter, but, instead, Jesus
points his disciples not to the world to come, but to the world that is, the world where
relationship with him, and the divine, continues, because now we can see God more
clearly because of Jesus.  

And the way, the way home, is not a path, its not a set of rules, its not the Apostles
Creed, or the Bible, or the Congregational Church or the United Church of Christ—the
way home is a person, this Jesus of Nazareth, who is life itself, who is truth itself, who is
the embodiment of God in some powerfully mysterious form.  That is what I love about
these words—Jesus doesn’t offer Thomas directions on how to get to this dwelling
place, this relationship with God with its many possibilities—he just simply points to
himself, and tells Thomas that he himself is the map, the way home.  I think that what he
says is true, because I have found them to be true for me, in the deepest way possible,
and I even think that the words that follow it are even more true, the ones about all
roads leading to the Father going through him.  

And I believe these words are true because I believe that God gave Christ to the world
in order to save the world, all the world, every last one of us.  Now, let me be clear
about this—there are many that would vehemently disagree with me, maybe not so
much here, but in other places.  As I’ve said before at other times, I think we’re all in, we’
re all beloved and welcomed home by God, but the great challenge in life is to
recognize how in, how beloved, how welcomed we really are by God—and the moments
we recognize that truth for ourselves, we experience it in our bones, those are moments
of conversion, of transformation, of in breaking by God into our lives.  But I also believe
that these in-breakings by God don’t just happen with us Christians—they happen
elsewhere, in other places and spaces, in “dwelling places” other than our own.  I think
the Christ shows up all over the world, in places and dwelling spaces that are foreign to
many of us, but are not foreign to God.  And no, I don’t believe that all religions are
alike—they aren’t and any good student of religion will be able to recognize that and
honor those differences by not trying to mash them up together in order to force a
harmony that sometimes does not exist.  But like Dr. O’Day, my professor from
seminary wrote, I don’t think these words are as much about those religions as they are
about our relationship with Christ, in whose home we have chosen to dwell, or if we are
completely honest, the home we were born into.  

Focusing on our own dwelling place, our own relationship with God, is something we
probably need to center our selves on—we Christians have done more damage to our
witness by focusing on other people’s dwelling places, other people’s relationship with
God, rather than our own.  One of great things about what Jesus says here in this
passage, and in the other I AM saying found peppered through the Gospel of John is
that he reminds that HE is the way, he the truth and the life, and not me, and he is the
bread of life, and not me, and he is the good shepherd, and not me, and he is the light
of the world, and not me.  That means I can let go of my worry about my beloved Amat,
who was of another faith, or my friends who do not and cannot believe Christianity or
any other religion, or even my father, whose faith was blown apart by his experience in
Vietnam.  Their dwelling place, their relationship with God, is God’s business and not
mine, but because I trust and believe in the Good News, the Gospel of Jesus Christ, I
think God will lead all people home, into a dwelling place with the divine, with the Christ
spirit, or whatever way you want to name it, one way or another.  In our study on
forgiveness, one of the writers tells of an old medieval legend about the disciples
assembling “together in heaven in order to re-celebrate the Last Supper.  There was
one vacant place at the table until through the door Judas came in and Christ rose and
kissed him and said, “We have waited for thee.” (Wiesenthal, The Sunflower, 180).  
And even though it is only a legend, I suspect it is a true legend, and if so, then surely,
surely, Amat and others have a place at the table as well.  Amen.