In my Father's house there are many dwelling places is one of the most radical statements of welcome in all of scripture. There is room for every single one of us, through Jesus, in God's kingdom. It sounds too good to be true, and yet there it is, in Jesus's own words, this profound statement of jubilant welcome.
Before I lived in New Jersey, I spent years teaching art and design at a college in Brooklyn, and my first few years were rough. One class, Introduction to Drawing, comes to mind.
The school I taught at primarily served first-generation, low-income students from across New York City. Many had come from underfunded public schools. Most were immigrants. They faced a lot of obstacles, and they came in raw.
I was going through a difficult stretch in my life and I had something to prove. So I picked up the syllabus the school gave me and followed it with an iron grip. Students were expected to arrive with their materials in full the first class, no exceptions. If they did not, they were marked absent, given a zero, and sent home.
Three weeks in, one student came to class again without her supplies. She needed her paycheck to come in. I chose to reprimand her in front of everyone, told her she needed to leave. I turned my back and started writing on the board.
I heard rustling behind me.
When I turned around, every student in that room had given her something from their kit so she could stay. The feeling of that humbling, humbling lesson was immediate. They already understood what they needed to do. I was shocked into my first lesson of welcome.
I still didn't learn enough. By the end of the semester, about 40% of the students had withdrawn. The martinet approach did not work. The following semester I went the other way. I let students turn in work late. We dissolved into long talking sessions. It was a shambles. Again, many students left. Why would they stay?
That summer, I finally sat with a question I'd been avoiding. Why did I fail? I grew up drawing. My grandmother taught my sister, my sister taught me, and it came to me in a shock. I had no idea what it was like to face a blank page and feel like a trespasser.
As it happened, I was also at that time trying to learn yoga — badly — and was getting ready to quit. I understood, bodily, that feeling of being a beginner in a room of people who seemed to know what they were doing. My teacher did lead us through some meditations I found really useful, and I couldn't stop thinking about one in particular. I quit yoga and kept the meditation.
The night before class my second year, it came to me. On the first day, instead of drilling through the syllabus, I asked my students how they were doing. We talked about what they thought of art class, about memories of teachers who told them they couldn't draw, or friends who drew better than them and thoughtlessly said so, or being talented and not having the chance to sharpen it. We dove into what their experience was.
I also noticed something else a little more sharply that semester. When I went over the supply list, my students who had little started whispering amongst themselves: you buy this, I'll buy that, we'll share. They started talking about why do we need five pencils — I'll just get the one. Using up supplies felt like a transgression, but thinking of not sharing didn't occur to them.
These wonderful people had not learned that they were allowed to take up room.
My job was not to teach them to draw. It was to help them find what was already there.
Improvising, I dimmed the lights and led them through that borrowed meditation. I told them: close your eyes and imagine a ball of light wrapped around your hearts, pulsing with your own heartbeat. Then we sent that light through their bodies, through the floor, all the way to the center of the earth. Then back up through their hearts, through the tops of their heads, through the ceiling, through the atmosphere, to the edge of the known universe, to the edge of all creation.
While they sat with that line of light, I asked them to look around in their mind's eyes and to see those same lines of light coming out of every other person in the room. Then outward, city by city, country by country, all those lines of light, every person connected from the center of the earth to the edge of everything.
And then I brought them back into themselves. That line, I told them, comes out of you in every direction. The way you speak. The people whose lives you've changed. The memories you make. And now we're going to spend time with its most humble expression. We're going to pick up a pencil and we're going to take our lines for a walk.
I placed paper and pencils on each desk, no one getting left out this time. I opened the shades and I told those students to open their eyes.
Whatever line you make today is as valid and connected as any other line in this room, on this planet, in all creation. Learn to love your line, because if you trust this process, you will learn to use it to articulate the world around you in ways that help you understand it more fully.
And then we began to draw. No longer a group of strangers assigned to the same room, we were a community of people who had gone through something together.
It was the most frightening thing I'd ever done in a classroom, and it was the only thing that worked. I had to make room in myself before I could help make room for them.
Jesus tells us that the Father's house has many dwelling places. I used to hear this as a promise of my dream room — all my posters, the bed just right — but I think it means something far more active than that. When we genuinely welcome each other, when we enter the work of loving someone as they actually are, we discover more of the house. Welcome is not management of existing space. It's how the house grows.
Jesus says this plainly: the one who believes will do the works that he has done, and greater ones than these. The house does not stay the same size. It grows through us.
That means the people beyond our doors are not waiting to be let in. They are already part of what God has made. Walking through an unfamiliar door takes courage. The question is whether we meet that courage with equal openness.
And this is where I want to ask something honest of us.
If welcome always feels comfortable, that is worth examining. Discomfort in this context can be a sign that we are extending ourselves only toward people whose presence costs us nothing, people who confirm what we already know and ask nothing of us we aren't already prepared to give. That is a warm feeling, but it is not entering anywhere new in the house of many dwellings. Real welcome has give to it. It asks us to be moved ourselves, to be changed by the encounter ourselves, to make room in ourselves before we make room in our sanctuary.
A few weeks ago I led a workshop about how we talk about St. John's to people who have never come here. I asked the group that came: what would you put on the T-shirt? And what they gave back to me — what your fellow parishioners gave back to me — was not a tagline or a campaign. What you gave was testimony.
A beacon of welcome.
A dose of sanity every Sunday.
Lapsed atheist.
A place called home.
Come for the community, stay for the faith.
Experience acceptance.
One person's story stayed with me. While going through a serious illness, they found real solace in faith, learned to ask for help and to actually let community hold them. But when they spoke of this faith with friends facing something similar, they were met with resistance. People carry a great deal of baggage sometimes when it comes to houses of faith, and those friends were carrying theirs. What moved me was how this person held both truths at once, their own solace and their friends' resistance, without needing to resolve the tension or to win the argument. That poise in the face of discomfort is not a small thing.Philip asks Jesus to show him the Father, and Jesus says: you have already seen him. You've been looking at him this whole time. That is what I want to say about that story, and about those phrases, and about a room full of students with very little who gave everything anyway. When someone stays poised in the face of discomfort, when someone holds another person's pain without needing to fix it or to win, when a community keeps discovering how much more room there is — that is not simply a nice thing that happened. That is the Father, made visible, in the works we do for one another.
Those are the greater works Jesus is talking about. That is the house with many dwelling places, not a building that controls who enters, but a community that keeps finding, together, how much more room there is.
The promise Jesus makes is already true. Meeting it with our whole selves, as a living, feeling body of Christ, is how we make it real for everyone who walks through that door.
Amen.