The following is my draft of this Sunday’s sermon, the sixth Sunday of Easter, at Zion “Goshert’s” United Church of Christ, where I am Pastor. There is no mention of Memorial Day but the subject of grieving is one of the threads at work here. (We have a Memorial service in our cemetery early Sunday morning, which keeps the civic celebration separate from the Sabbath celebration.) The scripture I am drawing from primarily is John 14:15-21, Jesus’ last speech before the ascension, and Psalm 66 and 1 Peter 3:13-22 will also be read. Among the hymns will be “Abide with Me,” which is one of the great hymns.

The main theological shift here is that Jesus’ promise to abide with his disciples, which shifts tribulation and rapture eschatologies, takes on new meaning, at least for me, if one considers John’s audience when this Gospel discourse was written. The promise is one made to outcasts.

One of the most important things I learned about pastoral care was learned while I was serving as an intern as a prison chaplain at Indiana State Prison, and I was thinking about this while I was driving by the town where the prison is, just north of Route 80, on my drive to Chicago two weeks ago. The nun who supervised my internship wrote a book on grieving, and she taught those of us whom she supervised to ask to ourselves the people whom we encounter what they are grieving. We are all grieving something, we’re always in a state of mourning for something or another. Sometimes we’re not aware of what we’re mourning, as in the case of times when we’re in the dumps, or at times when what we’re grieving is so present around us that we have become blind to it. And at other times it is clear what we’re mourning, as in the time after we experience the death of someone close to us.

And as we all have had the experience of losing someone to death, we also know that it is our faith that often guides us through the loss, and not only gives us hope that we will one day be reunited with the one who has left us but that our shared faith makes our lives better and makes our lives more meaningful. Our shared faith is a place where, as Jesus says in our scripture reading this morning, we “abide.” Living our faith together makes us touch more lives as a community, and it makes the loss of one of us even greater. But the loss of life underscores the intimacy, the empathy, and the brotherly love that can be experienced across generations within the church, especially in a world where generations are separated more and more from each other.

We should pay attention to the context in which Jesus’ speech from the Gospel of John, our reading this morning, was given. Jesus promises that he will remain with his disciples forever, that he will not leave them, that he will not leave us orphaned, and because he lives he will abide, or live, in us and that we will abide in him. And he promises that the Holy Spirit will come upon his faithful. There is a lot of theology behind these words, but the context is also important. The Gospel of John was written during a time when the Jews were being persecuted, millions of them had been killed at the hands of Roman soldiers, and the small Christian group was separated from the more dominant Jewish religion from which it came. At the time these words were written down by John it’s also quite likely that more non-Jews were becoming Christians than Jewish-born individuals.

In other words, they were a small cult, a small group of people that was likely fairly diverse, but they were all individuals who had not just joined a new denomination of their local religion, they were joining something new and something that would have been considered offensive or abhorrent by their families and dominant culture. They were heretics and blasphemers. They were covenant breakers and were considered apostate from their communities and their families. They may be mourning the coming departure of Jesus, but they were also mourning and grieving the family and community ties that they had given up to follow Jesus. They were likely no longer welcome in the temple, might not have been able to participate or witness weddings and funerals, and may have not been allowed to receive a proper burial by their family. But while their relationship with Jesus was stronger and beyond all of these things, they probably still mourned for these losses.

So when Jesus says “abide in me and I will abide in you,” Jesus was speaking to individuals who were at least spiritually homeless and were probably physically homeless. And after what had happened, with Jesus raising from the dead, they couldn’t go home even if they wanted to. And we should remember that most of the disciples were killed for preaching the Gospel.

The more I am the pastor of this congregation, and the more and more I talk to adults about their faith, the more I understand that even though people are not killed for their beliefs in our culture, many of us have experienced a similar kind of spiritual homelessness or have been hurt or abused by the church in some way. For some of us, that hurtfulness has come by way of an abuse of power of a pastor or someone else in leadership in the church. For others of us, we got too involved and too wrapped up in a church and it overwhelmed us and burned us out. I know that a few of us in this congregation have experienced cult-like behavior in former faith communities, where our money, our medical decisions, and even sexual relationships were dictated by the church or its pastor.

Many of you know that while I was in seminary my ordination committee back “home” sent me a letter declaring me to be “not Christian” by any definition, and I was grilled about my beliefs on everything from the atonement to homosexuality. In fact, I suspect that two of the pastors I encountered in this process belived that I was hiding my homosexuality from them, to the point that I once said to them “I’m too fat to be gay!” Of course, one of those pastors was removed from the ministry for having an affair with a woman on that same committee who determined me not to be a Christian, and another pastor is now sitting in jail for molesting children. My removal from leadership and voice from the church was not fun, and it was painful, but there are more people out there who were hurt by the church’s complicity to allow these absive pastors to continue their “call” and “ministry” to destroy the world and to bring about their own destructive vision of the world where the church served their secrets and their own perversions. So, to make a long story short, as you all know, I ended up here with you in the United Church of Christ, which is often seen as a denomination of misfits and exiles from other churches. And I know that many of you, especially those of you in this church are in fact in exile from somewhere else.

But still, those hurtful experiences and banishments remain with us and sometimes still shape how we act or behave. I actually ran into someone at a restaurant who was involved with my departure from the other church and I decided to say hello, as she didn’t recognize me. I was a little surprised at how she talked to me about how much she was also hurt by one of the pastors I mentioned before, and how the wounds left by that pastor got to the point that it was all she could think about for months. And then she found healing and hope, but as we talked about it I realized that I was not her victim, but that we were both victims, though minor victims compared to the children whose lives were destroyed and spouses and children of the pastors themselves, of a church and a system that prioritizes power over people, and a church culture in the United States that worships itself and the Lord of This Age more than it could possibly recognize the grace and mercy offered to us all through the person of Jesus, who saves us.

The fact is that to be a Christian is to be living in exile, that if we are too comfortable in our institutions and in our faith situations, if we have never really been challenged, if we have never been offended by the Gospel—we are serving the church and ourselves, and not the Christ who redeems us.

That sometimes we need to stand up for Jesus and walk with the Lord out of an institution or community is a moment where we may look back upon that moment and yearn for the togetherness and unity which we once felt, and feel tenuously confident that the time to move on is a way of protecting the integrity of our walk in Christ. Here I am not talking about churches leaving a denomination, as our Lutheran neighbors down the street have done, but I am talking about situations where the church itself acts to protect its own borders, or leaders act to preserve their own sovereignty, and thus disclose a very narrow understanding of the Christ who sustains us in this pluralistic and diverse world.

I believe in Christianity not because of the borders which the religion lays down, offering lines across which I am not to color, but because Christianity is a religion of crossing borders and going into new frontiers—both geographic and spiritual. I believe in Christ as my Lord because he promises to abide with us, and we in him, and not in the worship of static and fixed sky-God who wants us to live in the Stone Age. I believe in Christianity precisely because it is a religion of exile, it is a religion of blasphemers and heretics who speak out against injustice, even and especially when it is unpopular and when it is perpetuated by the dominant culture and the predominant religion.

Our confidence, and our Good News, is that if Christianity is a border-crossing faith, it is one where if we bear our own cross and walk with Christ, and invite Christ to abide in us, we enter into exile as a community that can truly change the world, for it is a world of hurt in which we live. And the more we look at the hurt the more we can begin to understand, as atheists love to remind us, how much the church often perpetuates and causes the hurt in the world. Bearing the cross, crossing borders, and crossing-out bad religion leads us into a faith of the Holy Spirit, where new languages, identities, and states of living may be achieved.

Jesus’ first followers in the Bible were not the rich, they were not those who had authority in the Temple, they were not the varsity athletes, and they weren’t the highly educated. They were the sick, those who worked with their hands, the disabled, and others who were marginalized by some aspect of their culture. The same is often true today, as a church of misfits, exiled people, and hurting and grieving disciples. The first disciples were willing to speak truth to power, to reverse the course of history, and to make significant sacrifices, including their lives, for the God of History to enact anew into the resurrection and ministry of Christ. They bore their crosses and crossed their borders.

The challenge to us today is to ask ourselves, “why are we grieving?”, just as Jesus asked the women in the garden on the first Easter, and to walk into the warmth of the sun shining on a new day, as a church in exile, a church ready to bear the cross for others, and a Holy Spirit people prepared to speak the new language of those scores of people around us desperately searching, yearning, and grieving for the New Hope which Christ alone may offer.