Where Does God Abide? Reflections on 1 Kings 8 and John 6

Where Does God Abide?

Reflections on 1 Kings 8 and John 6

 

RCL Proper 21B

25 August 2024

 

Church of the Epiphany

Surrey BC

 

            Twice in my life I have emigrated from one country to another.  The first time I was an infant accompanying my mother as we crossed the Atlantic from England where we both had been born to the United States where my father had been re-assigned.  Even he was about to experience a major change from the familiar rolling hills of the Adirondak Mountains of upstate New York to the sharp and soaring Front Range of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado.

 

            The second time was in 1987 when Paula, our first-born child and I left the United States for Vancouver where I was to take up a teaching post at Vancouver School of Theology.  Paula had never left the boundaries of the forty-eight states south of the Canadian border.  Neither of us expected to remain in Canada for more than three years, maybe six.

 

            I know that many of you here today have had similar experiences of leaving familiar places that had been where you were born and grown up to move somewhere else.  Perhaps you, like I, have felt a longing for home.  Even after almost forty years of living in Canada, there are moments when I feel a stranger.  Someone here in the Lower Mainland will say to me, ‘Oh!  I forgot you’re an American.  You won’t understand.’  Or I’ll be in Toronto for a meeting or some other gathering and someone will say something that reminds me that I’m a person who’s from the western part of North American not the central heartland.  Or, as happened this summer, I’ll be visiting friends and family in Colorado and I’ll suddenly realize that I’m a foreigner with a different perspective on the world.

 

            We immigrants are always seeking a place to call ‘home’.  We continue to seek such places even after we’ve been in one place for many years.  I think that it’s something built into every human being – the desire to feel comfortable, to feel secure, to feel at peace in our surroundings.

 

            Perhaps this is why I find Simon Peter’s words in today’s reading from the Gospel according to John touch my heart so deeply:  “So Jesus asked the twelve, ‘Do you also wish to go away?’  Simon Peter answered him. ‘Lord, to whom can we go?  You have the words of eternal life.  We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.’” (John 6.67-69 NSRVue)

 

            Remember, my friends, that Peter and the rest of the twelve have already left friends, family and their former lives behind.  They have stretched thin if not cut entirely the ties that bind them to ‘life before Jesus’.  They are sleeping rough.  They are sometimes hungry.  They are often the object of scorn by other people.  Where can they go?  Or, to use one of the evangelist John’s favourite words, where can they abide?

 

            Even Solomon standing the midst of the great Temple he has built in Jerusalem to house the Ark of the Covenant, God’s resting-place on earth, knows full well that God has a habit of going on ‘walk-about’.  God has travelled everywhere the people of Israel have travelled.  God refused to give David permission to build a temple.  Even though God is pleased with what Solomon has accomplished, God is making no promises that this building will be God’s fixed address, a box in which to confine the Holy One.

 

            Just as immigrants seek a home in a strange land, just as Peter and his companions seek a home in the presence of Jesus, so does God seek a home, a place where God may abide.  There are many holy places where God has been known to stop and to abide for a while – there are thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of them throughout the world.  Some are ancient places that continue to be pilgrimage destinations.  Others are more recent and not as famous.  And then there are the unexpected places where God chooses to rest for a moment to bring transformation, hope and peace before moving on to wherever the Holy One chooses to go next.

 

            As we keep seeking to find where God abides, we may lose sight of two things.  First, God cannot be contained by any single space no matter how magnificent.  God reveals Godself wherever God chooses to do so.  We can only come with open and expectant hearts, minds, souls and hands in the hope that we will meet God in these familiar places.

 

            But more importantly is this.  Just as we are seeking to find where God abides, so is God seeking to abide in us, wherever we are.  God does not remain stationary but is constantly on the move and at work in the world to draw us into a deeper relationship with Jesus, the one in whom we see what means to abide with God and to be fully alive as a human being.

 

            Our holy places are holy because they are where we encounter God and become aware of God in us and around us.  Such encounters are not limited to familiar or traditional sacred spaces.  God follows us in our daily migrations to work or to school or to our kitchen tables or wherever our feet and hearts take us.

 

            Simon Peter asks Jesus, ‘Where can we go?’  And God answers, ‘Anywhere because I am not tied to any fixed address.  I am with you in every moment, every place, every experience, every relationship.  All of these are holy ground. Seek me there.  Abide with me there.’

 

            In our blue hymnal, Common Praise, there is a hymn by Thomas Troeger, an American hymn writer, that I particularly like.  I found myself humming it as I was preparing this sermon.  I’ll close with the first two verses.

 

Seek not in distant, ancient hills

the promised holy land,

but where you live do what God wills

and find it close at hand.

 

A single heaven wraps around

this whirling, watered stone,

and every place is sacred ground

where God is loved and known.

 

Common Praise #470 vv. 1,2