a sermon on houses and homes, and a few updates!

yes, i still have a newsletter!

Hi everyone! Some eagle-eyed subscribers may have noticed a little change. i moved my newsletter from Mailchimp to Substack. I like the social functionality of Substack better, and Mailchimp changed their rules and wanted to start charging me! You know I love you all, but not enough to pay to email you.

With this new format, I’m intending to actually send something once a month. Most newsletters will contain a new piece of writing alongside updates about my writing speaking, but some will just be updates and announcements if there’s something especially exciting.

I’ve just wrapped a MAJOR season of traveling and speaking. In the last six months, I spoke in more than 12 cities across 8 different states! I did book readings, led workshops, spoke at conferences, and preached a bunch of sermons! Thanks to all who hosted me or came to see me. More to come, but nothing official to announce just yet.

Today’s writing is one of those aforementioned sermons. This was originally preached in Portland on May 7, 2023, following the lectionary text (which really lined up nicely!) I hope you enjoy!

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John 14:1-2 —

Jesus said, “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. 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? 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. And you know the way to the place where I am going.”

In my Father’s house, there are many dwelling places. 

Growing up, for me, this passage was a description of the excess of heaven. As someone who never worried about whether or not I would have a home, it was easy to think about this passage as though Jesus were saying, “You know how good you have it here??? In heaven, it’s going to be even better!” A bigger house, even more rooms! And even now I can’t get a song out of my head that was hugely popular on Christian radio when I was growing up: “It’s a big, big house, with lots and lots of rooms. A big, big table with lots and lots of food. A big, big yard, where we can play….. football?” I guess in heaven there are no concussions. 

And it isn’t just here, but all over scripture and in our hymns, we talk about home; and it wasn’t until I spent lots of time with people whose experience is primarily defined by their lack of home, that these words began to open up to me in new ways. Because of the way they lived, Jesus and the people he surrounded himself with and who tended to follow him, had much more in common with the people I met in encampments, drop-in centers, and shelters than they do with me.

What might it mean to someone who lacks stable housing, who has faced eviction, homelessness, couch-surfing, a shelter stay–to hear “in my father’s house there are many rooms, and I’m going there to prepare a place for you”? It’s good news, certainly. It’s that big, big house, table, and yard, but it’s so much more than that, isn’t it? 

The translation of this verse is a little tricky. Two different words that mean close to the same thing are used. Oikos and Mone are the two nouns operating here–when it says “in my father’s house” that’s oikos “there are many rooms or dwelling places” that’s mone. Both of them can be translated as dwelling place or living place or even room, but they are different. Oikos is incredibly common, but mone is only used twice, both in John. It occurs here and then later in John 14:23, which reads: “Jesus answered him, “Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home (mone) with them.” While this isn’t a perfect comparison, oikos is closer to what we might say when we say house–the building, the four walls, the roof and the door–and mone is closer to what we might mean when we say “home.” All of the things we mean by “home'' that have nothing to do with the building: safety, rest, family, stability, consistency, warmth. A looser but still true translation might be “In my father’s house, there is enough room for everyone to find home.” 

And wow is that good news, because it means that something is true about heaven that isn’t true here. And I don’t just mean Portland… thought I certainly do mean Portland. It isn’t true of Los Angeles, where I did the majority of my work, and it isn’t true of Minneapolis. Overall in this nation, the numbers say that for every 100 extremely  low-income renters, only 37 affordable and available units exist. There is not enough room for everyone to find a home. And it’s becoming such an issue that segments of our population that weren’t considered vulnerable ten years ago suddenly are now. 

I’ll never forget the day Javier showed up to our gate. He had worked his whole life, retired late, never married and had no family to speak of. He had lived in the same apartment for 30 years, but the rent kept going up each year. Then the building was sold, and the new owner came and raised it even more. On his fixed retirement income, Javier kept stretching his budget further and further, until he knew he couldn’t do it anymore. When he showed up at our gate asking for help, he was on the verge of experiencing homelessness for the first time in his life. He was 91 years old. 

Even now, though, it seems like we’re talking dollars and cents, walls and roofs, which is obviously crucial. But we’re only talking about the house, the oikos.

Because when we talk about someone who experiences homelessness, I think we’re talking about oikos and mone. We’re talking about not just the absence of a house, but a place to call home. A place that provides safety, consistency, rest, stability. The experience of homelessness is not just one defined by a lack of physical resources, but one of isolation. Of unsafety, of instability. 

In my line of work we talk about “housing first”, which is the simple but paradigm-shifting idea that if you provide people with housing–with that sense of safety, well-being, and stability first–things become possible that weren’t before. For so long we’ve told people they had to get their lives together first, and then they earn their housing. And it didn’t work, because housing is the oikos and it’s the mone. The house provides the stability, the safety, the physical address, the security to know that I have something to build on.

But there’s also some mone, some home, to be found outside of traditional housing. Because let’s remember that, when Jesus is talking about a house with a lot of room or rooms, he was in the first century CE. He wasn’t talking about the celebrity mansions on Sunset Boulevard or skyrise Penthouses in NYC. That’s not how people lived. And the historic people of God were quite accustomed to unconventional living situations–as slaves in Egypt, as wanderers in the Exodus, as Exiles in Babylon. In the father’s house there is ample room to make a home, but the Bible consistently honors all of the different ways that people make homes; even temporary ones. 

Understanding this should cause us to shift our lens when it comes to tents and encampments; to embrace and honor the ways that people who experience homelessness try to make homes, communities, mones in unlikely places. That’s not to say that encampments don’t have issues, that they are perfect utopias. But hey, the same could be said about churches. But for as long as there is not enough room in our cities for everyone to make a home inside, we must look with compassion and grace upon the ways that those who have been left out make their own dwelling places.

This morning, my prayer is that we begin to imagine cities and neighborhoods that we can describe the way Jesus talks of his Father’s house, that there is room for everyone to make not just a house but a home. May it be so on earth as it is in heaven.

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See you next month! Blessings!

kevin