5th Sunday of Easter

Easter 5A: Acts 7:55-60; Psalm 31:1-5, 15-16

1 Peter 2:2-10; John 14:1-14

The Rev'd Cameron Partridge

May 3, 2026

https://vimeo.com/1189524317

Good Morning, St. Aidan’s and St. Cyprian’s.

I invite you to picture this scene. It’s the middle of the day on a Wednesday—the first Wednesday of the month, in fact – and you’ve come to St. Aidan’s for lunch. A hot lunch that you know will have been homemade with love by one of the St. Aidan’s cooks who rotate month by month. There will be some sort of hot dish – a soup, a pasta, a casserole of some sort; a wonderful salad; some bread; and a delightful, often whimsical dessert. As you make your way down the driveway, the red doors are open. Just to the right of those doors, you see the little green 1950s era card table set up with a coffee urn and tea water. And then you notice the brownies. These are not the aforementioned whimsical dessert. These are extra, just sitting there waiting for you to take one as you come in the door or come back for your hot drink. They were made by Albert Tam. The same Albert who, more often than not, would have set up music to play as you make your way into the sanctuary where tables are set. Albert himself may have greeted you as you entered the space, with his warm, welcoming smile. Some of you knew Albert well, because you volunteer for Diamond Diners – which I’ve been describing – or the Food Pantry, for which Albert was one of the coordinators for several years until his death during Holy Week after a long difficult illness. Albert was a true an ambassador of welcome, an agent of divine hospitality. He embodied the sentiment expressed so strongly in our gospel passage this morning that in God’s house there are an abundance of dwelling places, spaces of rest and remaining, of relationship-building, of connection and delight.

This passage from the fourteenth chapter of John’s gospel, is often heard at funerals. I’ve preached on it in such contexts many times. The line that always stands out to me is the one I’ve just referenced, where Jesus declares, “Do not let your hearts be troubled… 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?” (John 14:1-2) The placement of this passage in the gospel account is significant: it was at the Last Supper. In the chapter just before our passage, Jesus had told the disciples that one of them would betray him. Judas had left the scene, mystifying the remaining group. “And it was night,” the text had declared (13:30). Then Jesus had said, “Little children, I am with you only a little longer. You will look for me,” but, he continued, “where I am going, you cannot come” (13:33). Yet more disturbingly, when Peter had asked him where he was going, proclaiming he would lay down his life to prevent a terrible outcome, Jesus had told him that no, to the contrary, Peter would deny him three times before the cock crowed (13:37-38). By the start of chapter, it is safe to say the disciples’ hearts were in fact troubled. But even as Jesus had rebuffed their impulse to try to prevent what was coming, what Jesus was ultimately doing, where he was ultimately going, was in fact meant for them. It was meant for all of us. Jesus’ response to the disciples pained hearts, shared in the passage we heard, was “a profound exploration,” as Johannine scholar Sandra Schneiders writes, of “how… we enter into Jesus’ life, we in him and he in us, when we no longer see (or have never seen) him in the flesh, witnessed his works, and heard his words.” Jesus then “weaves together a theology of the resurrection, a theology of the Holy Spirit, a theology of Christian community into a seamless whole” in a way that is “mystical and immediate”.^[1]

This resurrection vision is woven with language of dwelling. John’s Jesus loves this language, and I love to share it. The verbal form of the Greek word for dwelling – which can also be rendered as abiding, staying or remaining – is μένειν. Back in January, perhaps you may recall, when we heard the story of Jesus’ baptism through the eyes of John’s gospel, this word showed up in the testimony of John the Baptist: “I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and it remained [ἔμεινεν] on him,”  (John 1:33). And then not long after this baptism, when John saw Jesus walking along and had pointed him out to two of his disciples, they had followed him, asking Jesus, “where are you staying [ποῦ μένεις]?” “Come and see,” Jesus had replied (1:38-39). They would see. And along the way they their hearts would be troubled: they would navigate the terrible trauma of Jesus’ arrest and death, their loss of him. Mary Magdalene would remain at the tomb in her grief until the risen Christ, the divine gardener, would cause her to turn and embrace his risen reality.^[2] Then on the Second Sunday of Easter, to Thomas who carefully guarded his heart, the risen Christ would issue an invitation not simply to believe, but also to risk reaching out for the dwelling place in Jesus’ open side.^[3] In the fifteenth chapter of John’s gospel Jesus discourses extensively on the theme of the vine and the branches, image of the indwelling of the Father and Son, and our own belonging in a living, growing collective body. “Dwell [abide, remain— again, μένειν] in me as I dwell in you” (15:4). Bear much fruit. Dwell in love.

On this fifth Sunday of Eastertide, in our passage, Jesus speaks to all of us whose hearts are troubled: come and see where not only I am staying but where you are invited, the μοναὶ πολλαί of my Father’s house [μονή being the noun form of μένειν]. Come into God’s many abodes, dwelling places, spaces of abundant abiding, welcome and rest in excess. You who are weary and heavy laden, as Jesus says in Matthew’s Gospel, find rest. Dwell in love. Know that spaces of abundant welcome and invitation await you in God’s eternity together with all the holy ones of God, but that even now this you are invited to share in the divine household. Gather in love, share in nourishment and renewal, be strengthened and consoled amid a world shattered by war and the erosion of human dignity on so many fronts. Know that I am with you, encouraging and energizing you help manifest God’s in-breaking dream.

Do not let your hearts remain troubled.

I recently read an essay by the openly trans science fiction writer Rachel Pollack, who died in 2023. She had transitioned in 1971 and lived in the UK and the Netherlands for a number of years before returning to her native New York. In her essay, originally published in 2019, Pollack expressed how her vocation as a writer and a human being who was trans were interwoven. Pushing back against the narrative of being “trapped in the wrong body,” she says, “I was trapped in the wrong universe. In order to become who I was, I had to break the world open. I had to embrace a kind of science fiction life. Or maybe a magical life, by which I mean the ability to experience the world, and connections, and myself in ways that did not fit the standard model of reality.”^[4] To render her words in the language of our passage, I might say she needed to share in forging a world of many dwelling places.  A world of life abundant, of communal connection, of room for the flourishing of all. Pollack’s work not only reckoned with but also engaged, as science fiction and fantasy writing so actively does, in the shaping of our moral imaginations. Such shaping is afoot in our passage today – the house of many dwelling places, inviting us in, urging us into hope, abundant rest, nourishment, breaking open the world, embracing a life of possibility, of justice, of true and lasting peace, of love.

We seek to practice this life here at St. Aidan’s, dear friends. Week by week as we gather around this table, as we share food on Fridays. Month by month as we offer delicious nourishment at tables set for conversation, music, delicious hot meals, salad, brownies. Last week we blessed a container beautifully made by Janet Lohr and we laid prayers and blessings into it, gathered from January through last Sunday. After our service and energizing conversation with Aaron Scott, I placed that contained into a dwelling place in the wall of our emerging kitchen. This week sheet rock was hung, but X marks the spot. Our prayers remain there, dwelling with this house of prayer, as we dwell with God and one another. They will continue to urge us and all who offer nourishment here: let your hearts remain not in trouble but in me, in us abiding in one another, in the love that created us, redeemed us, sustains and energizes us to share in God’s dream for this world. Let those prayers embolden us to break open this world for God’s dream. Amen.

^[1] Sandra Schneiders, Written That You May Believe: Encountering Jesus in the Fourth Gospel (New York: Herder & Herder, 1999, 2003), p. 56

^[2] My reading of the scene of Mary Magdalene at the tomb in John’s Gospel is influenced by Shelley Rambo, Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010), especially chapters 3-5.

^[3] The side-wound as an opening to the divine heart has a long history and archive in the Christian mystical tradition, and has garnered much contemporary, critical reflection on its gendered dimensions. E.g. Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption (New York: Zone Books, 1992); Amy Hollywood, “’That Glorious Slit:’ Irigaray and the Medieval Devotion to Christ’s Side Wound” in eds. Theresa Krier and Elizabeth D. Harvey, Luce Irigaray and Premodern Culture: Thresholds of History (London & New York: Routledge, 2004), 105-125.

^[4] Rachel Pollack, Trans Central Station (UK: Spiral House, 2026), 4-5.