The church board met for a retreat last weekend. We set aside a morning to pause and focus on relationships- with each other, with the church, with God. We started with some snacks and some silly yet illuminating icebreaker questions… like, what’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever done? I think “pee on a barbed wire fence” was the best answer to that one! I will not tell who said that! We spent time with scripture and our new mission statement. We considered where we are with our goals for this year. And we began planning for a capital fundraising campaign that will be part of celebrating our 175th anniversary. Amid all that, an important conversation bubbled up about the work of “cultivating a community for all to belong.” “Do we know what we mean by belonging?” someone wondered. Have we tried to define it? Would that even be helpful? Someone else added, “I’m pretty sure that cultivating belonging requires that we are willing to be changed.”

The last time Jesus gathered with his community before his arrest and execution, the lamps burned late into the night. They ate; Jesus washed their feet; Judas slipped away intending to betray Jesus. Today’s reading is a part of the farewell discourse—five whole chapters of Jesus saying goodbye. “Do not let your hearts be troubled.” In Greek, the pronoun “you” is plural while “heart” is singular. So where our cultural ear hears Jesus’ words as if they are addressed to individuals, the text actually says something more like: “You all, do not let your (plural) heart (that’s singular) be troubled.” Jesus is speaking to them as a community that has one shared heart.

Jesus knew trouble was coming for him with the very next dawn. And yet, Jesus said, his followers have a unity and strength of heart that not even the world’s worst troubles can break. “Believe” (or more true to the Greek) “trust in God, trust also in me.” Trust is built on relationship; trust comes from sharing a heart. In John’s gospel, relationship is everything—relationship between the branches, the vine and the fruit; between shepherd and flock; and in today’s passage, relationship among those who share a heart and a home in God.

“In God’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.” We’ve been trained to hear these words as a promise that we will each get our own room in a heavenly mansion after we die. However, the “you” here continues to be plural—so Jesus was still speaking to the whole community of disciples and to their collective heart. And he was referring to his own death (not to theirs), promising that even this apparent separation would not keep them apart. No matter what happened, the disciples would continue to dwell with Jesus, to find their belonging together in God.

“Where I am, you will 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.” In the early days of the church, there was no such thing as Christianity. Those who followed Jesus were simply known as “the way”. “The way” was not a doctrine or a destination. It was a way of being Jesus embodied—being community together, with one heart, praying, singing, eating, telling stories, healing, protesting, engaging in mutual support and and embracing mutual transformation. So “knowing the way” was not about finding a place. It was a matter of continuing to be in relationship with Jesus, and continuing to embody the way he had shown them.

“No one comes to the Father / Mother God except through me. If you know me, you will know God. From now on you do know God and have seen God.” Here’s a verse that’s on my top ten “I wish that wasn’t in the Bible” list—because of the way it has been used to support an exclusive theology. Certainly, John’s Gospel was written amid contention within the Jewish community, between those who followed Jesus’ way and those who didn’t. So it is likely a comment on that specific situation. I don’t read it as a blanket condemnation of all people in all times and places who are not Christians. And, more importantly, it’s not a doctrinal claim; it’s a practical one. If we are looking to know God, then we will see God through the relational ministry of Jesus. God is visible in works of love and justice, like those Jesus performs. If those are works present, then God is also present. Jesus says as much in the next paragraph. “Believe me that I am in God and God is in me, but if you do not, then believe because of the works themselves.”

Melissa Florer-Bixler is a doctoral student at Duke Divinity School where she studies preaching traditions in working class communities. Her recent article in The Christian Century magazine, titled, “Has Worship Become a Luxury Good?” discusses the research findings of religious demographer Ryan Burge, who found that “The people most likely to attend Christian worship [in both predominantly white and African American churches] have a master’s degree and earn a salary between $60k and $100k.” She recalls the stories of working class folk she knew in her previous church. She writes, “It wasn’t easy for Cecilia and Manuel to get to church on Sunday morning. They took whatever shifts were available at Walmart, working as long and as often as the manager allowed. The city bus appeared, if at all, once an hour outside the hulking box store, making a timely arrival anywhere nearly impossible. Ryan and Tom were in the same boat. Money was tight, and even though they worked 40 hours a week, both adult men lived with their parents to make ends meet. A vet tech and a butcher, when shifts came open, they would take them.”

Florer-Bixler laments the deep disconnect between the church and the many people in our society whose lives are oriented around survival in an increasingly unjust economy. She explains: “As livable wages, adequate housing, and affordable health care options evaporated in the 1970s, churches that upheld values of education, delayed gratification, and self-control—bourgeois virtues— increasingly became detached from workers’ lives. Churches have not simply lost working-class people; they have been formed as institutions built on a brand of moral superiority that requires middle-class stability to participate.” For me, this analysis is painful to read— because it rings very true. I suspect this disconnect is shaping not just the church, but our society as a whole, and it is one factor underneath increased political polarization.

Even so, the truth-telling in this article also inspires me. It feels like Gospel good news, like a promise of resurrection. It reinforces the insight from last weekend’s board retreat—cultivating a community of belonging will, above all, require a willingness to be changed. We will not overcome deeply rooted dynamics of exclusion and alienation if people with college educations and middle class stability simply provide more charity to the less fortunate or work harder to enact a just society. What is really needed is trusting relationship—the sharing of one heart and home among diverse people. My friends, let us open our heart anew to the one who shows us the way to dwell together in God’s own mutuality.

Amen.