"He Gets Us" - Easter 5A

 Acts 7:55-60

Saint John 14:1-14

I first saw the signs behind the batter’s box where they could be easily captured by the centerfield camera.  They weren’t the cheap, cardboard signs held up by fans that greet their moms, express opinions on the opposing team, or even feature a verse from Scripture. These were strategically placed on-field, commercial, advertising signs which directed the viewer to a website called: "He Gets Us."

I didn’t think anything of them until an unchurched friend of mine said he had seen commercials for the same website during the college football playoffs and asked me about them.  

Selective attention being what it is I began to see them too on sporting events that I was watching – hockey, baseball, basketball, and college football.  The “He Gets Us” group even managed to raise enough revenue to purchase airtime on the Super Bowl.

Both my unchurched friend and his very churched pastor buddy loved the ads and their themes:

“Jesus was wrongly judged. He gets us!”

“Jesus had strained relationships.  He gets us!”

“Jesus had a complex family life. He gets us!”  

“Jesus loved outcasts. He gets us!”

And their more controversial:

“Jesus was a rebel.  He gets us!”

“Jesus was a refugee. He gets us!”

On their website, the group outlined their goals and purposes and quite rightly diagnosed the problems that occur among followers of different faiths and people in different places in their political lives.

Many perceive those who differ with them on issues of justice, dignity, and humanity as not just wrong or misguided but also as evil. As enemies. We often see these “others” as close-minded, selfish, hypocritical - and if we’re honest, many of us respond in kind. 

So, the founders of “He Gets Us” clearly laid out their agenda saying that they wanted “to move beyond the mess of our current cultural moment to a place where all of us are invited to rediscover the love story of Jesus. Christians, non-Christians, and everybody in between. All of us.”1

As you might imagine, just like with everything else in our day, there was blowback. Criticism came from both the left and the right; from church folk and those who would never step foot in a church building.  

No matter what the naysayers may say the ads are right about one thing: Jesus does get us.  Jesus understands that there are times when we have troubled hearts.

For a moment there, while I was reading the Gospel, I bet you thought you were at a funeral. Those words about troubled hearts in troubled times and Jesus going to prepare a place for us where the relationships we have formed now with continue on forever shows that Jesus “gets us” in our grief.

He also shows he “get us” in the image he uses. What better image is there than a house with many rooms?

Jesus was a carpenter’s son who may have even followed in his earthly father’s footsteps, and so he knows how important houses are.  They offer warmth and shelter to be sure, but a house is also a place where relationships are formed, nourished, sustained.  

Think of the house you grew up in.  It may have been a pleasant, “Leave it to Beaver” or “Father Knows Best” kind of place.  Or, it may have been an unpleasant, dysfunctional place like “All In the Family” where disagreements and fighting was the order of the day, every day.  Or, it may have been thought of by neighbours and friends as the house where the Marx Brothers lived, full of zany antics and pure craziness. No matter what kind of a house or family you lived in it formed your world view. How you learned how to relate to others can be traced back to the people in your house.  Jesus gets that.

Jesus wants to make a home with you in your house.  He wants to dwell with you and he wants you to dwell with him.  

Remember, while we may be deep into the Easter Season liturgically, our reading comes from a scene in the Upper Room just hours before Jesus’ crucifixion.

Elisabeth Johnson reminds us what was going on for the disciples and Jesus at that very moment when she wrote:

The setting is Jesus’ farewell address at his last supper with his disciples. Jesus has washed his disciples’ feet and has explained to them what this means. He has foretold his betrayal by Judas, and Judas has slipped out into the night. He has told his disciples that he will be with them only a little while longer, and that where he is going, they cannot come. He has also foretold Peter’s imminent denial.

No wonder the disciples are troubled. Their beloved teacher is leaving them, one of their own has turned against them, and the stalwart leader among the disciples is said to be on the cusp of a great failure of loyalty. It is as though the ground is shifting beneath their feet.

Jesus responds to the anxiety of his disciples by saying, “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me”. Jesus calls them back to this fundamental relationship of trust and assures them that he is not abandoning them.2

Jesus not only gets them, but he is claiming to be the way through their troubles.

When Thomas asks how they can know the way?  “Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.’”3

How odd that this beautiful verse, meant to comfort, has been turned into a instrument of division and discord.  While Jesus may get us, sometimes we don’t get him. 

We have turned something that was intended to be an invitation into the mystery, awe and wonder of following Jesus into an instrument of judgement and exclusion. 

When we begin to think that our way is the only way we no longer are ambassadors of the Good News but bouncers at the door of club heaven.  

To paraphrase Vicar Tim’s wonderful sermon last week: Jesus may be the gatekeeper, but he has this overwhelming tendency to leave the gate wide open. 

In one of their ads the folks at “He Gets Us” invited viewers to appreciate the way Jesus “gets us” by considering just exactly who it was that Jesus associated with by looking again at his dinner companions.  

As we looked closer, we noticed that his company around the table was a remarkably diverse cast. He shared meals with outcasts. He spent time with the self-righteous religious elite. He cared for people who had broken every rule and were seen as unclean. He dined at the tables of the wealthy men whose riches were won with lies and corruption. Some of those men gave up comfortable lifestyles to follow him. He crossed racial boundaries to the shock of many around him. He invited everyone to the table. 

Strangers eating together and becoming friends. What a simple concept, and yet, we’re pretty sure it would turn our own modern world upside down the same way Jesus turned his around 2,000 years ago.

The name of Jesus has been used to harm and divide, but if you look at how he lived, you see how backward that really is. Jesus was not exclusive. He was radically inclusive.4

 That, I think, is the pure power of the words “let not your hearts be troubled” and the promise attached.  It tells us that Jesus “get us” and that there is a place for us, all of us.

That, I think, is why these words get read at funerals – almost every funeral.  They were read at the funeral of the Queen, they were read at funerals of presidents, they are read over all kinds and conditions of God’s children from the riches to the poorest.  Countless times I have stood over the grave of someone I loved, and some people I didn’t even know, and said those words that promised the relatives and friends that their hearts need not be troubled because Jesus gets them.  He understands their grief, the sorrow, their pain, their loss.

For me, perhaps these words are at their most powerful during a ceremony that few people even know about.

A couple of times every year funeral directors and clergy participate in a burial service for some 100 or so individuals whose bodies have gone unclaimed or unidentified and are therefore abandoned at the medical examiner's office.

The Archdiocese of Chicago provides an earthly resting place for them at Mount Olivet cemetery.  They are picked up and, in a dignified manner, transported with a police escort down Western Avenue to the cemetery. Onlookers stop and seem stunned by such a long parade of hearses.  

Once at the cemetery prayers are said and today’s Gospel is read over those whose lives and hearts became so troubled that they became estranged from family and friends to the point that, even in death, no one claimed them.

Yet it is there, on days dry or damp, sunny or cloudy, in winter’s cold or summer’s blistering heat, we proclaim something. We proclaim that even though we do not know their backgrounds.  We proclaim that even though we may not know who they are or where they came from.  We proclaim that even though we have no idea if they had faith or no faith, in the end, Jesus still “gets them” with a welcome that is more warm and more gracious than they could have ever imagined.  

He gets us too!  That is his promise.  That is our hope.  Jesus “gets us!” 

________________

1. https://hegetsus.com/en

2. Elisabeth Johnson, “Commentary on John 14:1-14,” Working Preacher from Luther Seminary (Luther Seminary, November 11, 2020), https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/fifth-sunday-of-easter/commentary-on-john-141-14-4.

3. St. John 14:6. (NKJB) [NKJB=The New King James Version] 

4. https://hegetsus.com/en/jesus-invited-everyone-to-sit-at-his-table

Sermon preached at the Evangelical Lutheran Church of St. Luke

7 May 2023

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MStgdy8S8zU