The "Problem" of Amat

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The "Problem" Of Amat

John 14:1-7
May 22 2011

“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 one of them, a woman I called 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 it’s 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
then 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
for 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 so, of course, I ended up a Christian, and, ironically enough, far more
religious than my parents ever were, and I ended up being a minister no,
less, and, because of that reality, 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, the Creator, except through him. Now, 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 when I read texts like this I am also almost always drawn back to my
childhood, and 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 are Christian, Muslim, Hindu, or Jewish.
In fact, as odd as it may seem in our global culture, it is still is pretty rare for
us not to basically follow the tenets our family’s religion—conversion across
faiths is still very, very rare, and when people do switch traditions, they
usually do so within the boundaries of their original religion—a person moves
from being Presbyterian to Methodist, or something like that. 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 practiced around me, and so if I grew up in a family that
generally had always been Christian, even if nominally, I too would probably
end up a Christian if I ended up practicing any faith at all.

So, what about Amat, and her faith? 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 I feel like I’m being offered
poison, and I feel that because of people like Amat, and people like my father
who had no faith, and people like some of my friends who authentically can
find no reason to believe in Christ, mostly because of the people who claim
Jesus, us Christians, and the way we behave so badly in Christ’s name. And
so, all of 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 so 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, one that she was writing while I was in seminary, and she
would often come into the class that she was teaching on John with sheaves
of paper and notes, her research for the commentary she was writing, and
share it with us seminarians as a sort of sounding board for her work on the
book.   Anyway, Dr. O’Day 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, Buddhism, 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 in the late first century, especially one that was clearly
beginning to separate itself 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
push Christians out who claimed Jesus as their Messiah from their midst,
which caused some real anger and pain in the Christian community, as
probably the very presence of these Christians had caused some strife to the
more traditional Jews in these early first century synagogues. And so these
words are less about defining other people and their religions as much as
that early Christian community defining itself against the Judaism out of
which it came. Sadly, that tone and tenor in John has some devastating
consequences for Jewish and Christian relations in centuries to come, but
that is a different, more painful sermon for another day.

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, thinking 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, it is never used as a 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—later in this Gospel, 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 the disciple’s great distress in
that upper room about their unknown future, he seems to be saying that he
will be with them, the relationship will continue, the journey will go on beyond
the grave, empty or otherwise, because there are many, many dwelling
places, many, many ways of being in relationship with him, when he comes
back to receive them as his own. 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 and experience God more clearly because of this Jesus of Nazareth.
And the way, the way home towards these spiritual dwelling places, is not a
path, its not a set of rules, its not the Apostles Creed, or the Bible, 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. Certainly the recent
backlash against Rob Bell, the evangelical pastor in Grand Rapids, Michigan,
who simply tried to re-imagine hell, shows us that to really say God loves all
of us, and meant it, really, will get you in a lot of trouble. 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, the moment we experience it in our bones, in the deepest
parts of ourselves, those are moments of conversion, of transformation, of
the 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 kind. 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 of Jesus’ 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, in whose home we were born
into.

Focusing on our own dwelling place, our own relationship with God, is
something we 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 relationship with God.
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 us that HE is the way, he is the truth and the life, and not me, and
Christ is the bread of life, and not me, and Christ is the good shepherd, and
not me, and Christ 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. And, so my heart is not troubled, as the text says here,
because God’s love and embrace of us is wide and deep and goes into so
many beautifully unexpected places, a truth embodied in a wonderful old
medieval legend about the disciples who were 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, if even
troubled, selfish, confused, dastardly Judas, is welcomed back home, then
surely, surely, Amat and others have a place at God’s eternal table of life and
love as well. Amen.