In My Father's House are many Mansions

Reading: John 14: 1-6

'Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. 2 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? 3 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. 4 And you know the way to the place where I am going.' 5 Thomas said to him, 'Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?' 6 Jesus said to him, 'I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

"In my Father's house there are many dwelling-places" - it is not as confusing to our ears as the King James wording - "In My Father's House are many Mansions"; the word "mansion" had an older meaning of any place of abode, which could be what we now call a mansion, or it could be room within a larger house.

What a powerful and attention-getting image that is! In God's house, there is room for all of us.

Let me tell you about a house: my family home in Laurel, Mississippi. It was built around 1900, by my great-great-grandfather, as a wedding gift to my great- grandparents. I actually knew my great-grandmother when I was young; she taught me to draw pictures and to play cards.

When I was a child in Mississippi, my grandparents (on my mother's side) were the masters of the house. It was called the "Green Barn"; and always painted green on the outside. I would never hear the end of it if I changed that color! The Green Barn is built of first-growth, tight-grain yellow pine, in the Midwestern stick and shingle style. During Hurricane Katrina, it lost its roof shingles, but stood strong through 120 mph winds. We had to have it repainted - green, of course - because the force of the wind had blasted off so much of the previous coat of paint.

The Green Barn did have a special room for everyone. My great-grandmother had her own little suite, with a kitchenette so she didn't have to come downstairs for tea if she didn't feel up to it. Every bathroom has a different color theme - blue, red, yellow, green. We still refer to the bedrooms by those colors.

When I was a child, there were relatives living in just about every house on the street, for two blocks. At Thanksgiving and Christmas, there would be big parties. Everyone would go to one house for drinks and appetizers, then walk to another house for the main meal, then sometimes another for dessert. The kids would run around the block between each course.

There would be 50 or more people, all bound together by relationship, chatting together in a dull roar. My grandfather and two cousins sang in beautiful barbershop harmony. My grandmother and my Aunt Peggy played piano. I know now that there bitter differences between some of those relatives, but there was a place at the table for each of them. I can still feel my childlike fascination with that scene.

Just before bedtime, we always gathered in the music room and sang hymns. After we had sung "Shadows of the evening steal across the sky", my younger brother got up and asked, isn't stealing wrong?

My parents got divorced, and my mother moved my brother and me to Washington DC when I was 6. I discovered to my surprise that the South had lost the Civil War, and my new classmates made fun of my accent. My grandparents were deeply involved in the Church. My grandfather was Senior Warden at St Johns Episcopal Church, where I was baptized, and where I still go when I'm in Laurel.

One day in 1962 a young black man came to him and asked if he could worship at St Johns. Students from Tougaloo College, an all-black college in Jackson, were going around Mississippi seeing if they would be allowed into white churches.

My grandfather and the other vestrymen agreed (of course, no female vestry in those days!). They escorted the young man into St Johns. About half the congregation got up and walked out.

The Ku Klux Klan burned a cross in the front yard of the Green Barn. My grandfather received many death threats. This was not idle stuff. The head of the Klan in Mississippi, Sam Bowers, lived in Laurel; Bowers is believed to have directed a number of murders, including the 1964 killings of the three civil-rights workers in Philadelphia MS, which is an hour and a half drive north of Laurel. He was eventually convicted of conspiracy and sent to jail.

The Klan had another issue with my grandparents: they had offered help to Leontyne Price, the great African-American opera singer from Laurel, when she was young. When my mother was a little girl, she called Leontyne her "chocolate sister". That kind of thing enraged people like Sam Bowers.

After we moved to Washington DC, we still spent the summers in Mississippi (not something I generally recommend, weather-wise!). I recall lying in bed in the Green Barn in the summer of 1963 or 1964, with the cicadas making that overwhelming nighttime roar that you hear in the Deep South in the heart of the summer. I was a young teenager, and I was reading and hearing about the violence all around. I was really, really scared.

A couple of years ago I was sitting in the Green Barn in the early evening. There was a knock on the door and I answered it to find a pleasant middle-aged man standing there, holding a clipboard with a petition. He said to me, I believe Sam Bowers is a fine man, and he has paid his debt to society. I wonder if you would sign this petition asking for his release from prison. No, thanks. Bowers died in prison just last year.

My grandfather's actions remain an example to me. In the calculation of the World, he had everything to lose, including quite possibly his life, and little to gain. And he wasn't really a liberal - in fact, he was among the founders of the modern Mississippi Republican party. I think the Gospel had something to do with his welcoming that young man from Tougaloo.

My grandfather died in 1974, and my mother took over the Green Barn. She did a lot of renovation, especially of the grounds. There was a little house on a half- lot next door. My grandparents had let a woman named Baby Alice live there for free; she was homebound with some kind of progressive illness. Whenever I arrived in Laurel, I was always required to go next door and say hello to Baby Alice. That was good training. After Baby Alice died, her little house was torn down and the lot became part of the Green Barn's landscape.

My mother took care of my grandmother in the Green Barn for many years, as my grandmother, who had graduated from Smith College in 1924, and once been a wonderful musician (piano teacher), and community volunteer with the Church and with the Red Cross, declined into dementia. It took almost another 20 years before she passed on, in 1991.

I will never forget the times the priest from St Johns came to the house to give Communion to my grandmother. By that time, she was unable to talk, barely able to walk. Yet I marveled that someone who could not even feed herself with earthly food, was able to receive the Host with no difficulty. It was a miracle.

When I was a young man, I had the same kind of feeling about Mississippi that Dolphus Weary expressed - I ain't coming back! However, Mississippi was changing. There were and still are problems, but the terrible violence and fear of the 1960s have subsided. Today, Laurel has a black Mayor.

So I came back to Laurel more often for get-togethers with my mother and brother and his family.

My mother always loved that line from Psalm 90, which Steve Faust reflected on a few weeks ago - "So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom." She had it illuminated and framed and hung on the wall of her bedroom in the Green Barn.

In line wth Psalm 90, one of her basic tenets was that every day might be your last, and she really lived with that in mind, to try to achieve what she could, and express her love for those around her. Sometimes, when she carefully explained her philosophy to make sure I would recall it after she was gone, I would just say, Oh Mom! and roll my eyes,..

But the day came when that advice was needed, and I certainly did not foresee the hour and the day. In June 1999, she suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, and died suddenly and quite unexpectedly. She was only 71, and had been in apparent good health.

St Johns Church was packed. She had carefully written out which readings she wanted at her service, and which hymns. She made it very clear that she wanted the recessional hymn to be "Fight the good fight, with all your might" - Hymn 552. The church rocked on that one.

Afterwards, the Green Barn was full of family and friends, with many reminiscences. My mother had the ability to concentrate totally on someone else while they were speaking to her - as some said to me, it made them feel as if, to her, they were the only people in the world. I was amazed at how many people dropped whatever they were doing, and traveled to be at her service.

The next day, after everyone had gone home, Lynn and I were the only ones left in the house. I stood alone in the downstairs hall of the Green Barn, and heard the echoes of all the unique voices that had been in that place. As William Faulkner wrote, in the the South, not only is "the past ... never dead, it is not even past". I recalled the four generations that had lived under that roof when I was a young child, and marveled that I could be standing there at all. How could this have all come down to me?

That house, the Green Barn, is a glimpse of Heaven for me. A place of great welcome. A place of wonderful enjoyment. A place of childlike wonder. A place of safety. A place with many unique rooms, one for each member of the family.

But it has also been the place from which my forebears went out to try to live the Gospel. I only realized in retrospect how much their Faith truly shaped their lives.

And my picture of Heaven includes all those ancestors I have told you about. I feel their presence every time I am in that house. I hear them singing the Lord's praises every time that I am there, or in Church anywhere. And I thank them most of all for having passed that gift of Faith on to me.

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