Becoming God’s Home

What makes you feel at home? 

Most of you know by now that I’m from Canada. And it never fails to bring warmth to my heart everytime I can talk about it, how proud I am of its people, its culture and its over-the-top and without fail politeness. It’s a country that welcomed my dad from Hong Kong over 50 years ago where he became the first asian RCMP officer in Western Canada, that’s the Royal Canadian Mounted Police for those playing at home, with the red suit, big boots and a horse for a sidekick. And it’s a country that gave home to my mom and her ancestors for 7 generations. And yet, despite the beauty and nourishment it’s given to my family and family-past, there’s always been a force beyond myself, a restless spirit of sorts, beckoning me elsewhere, a yearning and a searching for home where I could truly grow into who God was calling me to be, where I could truly feel my heart enriched, my lungs expand, and where my soul could feel at peace. These are the characteristics of home. And even though Canada had all the hallmarks and the workings for this to be true for me, home turned out to be falling in love with an Australian and moving to Melbourne. 

The things we do for love, or rather, the things we do to feel at home. 

But my experience is hardly unique. People have always immigrated—uprooted their lives—for similar reasons. On the surface, it might be for safety, opportunity or, like me, love. But beneath it is the deep desire to become the person they were born to be or, in other words, to embody peace within their own flesh and blood. 

In this way, home is less about geography and more about identity, belonging and, whether we realize it or not, transformation.

In other words, less about where we live, and more about who we’re becoming.

What makes you feel at home? 

And our scripture today is the embodiment of this truth. It follows last week’s passage where we explored the law of love and its radical implications. Today, in the continuation of what scholars call John’s “farewell discourse,” Jesus prepares his disciples for what’s coming—the cross, yes, but also the radical ramifications of the resurrection. 

Throughout this discourse, Jesus doesn’t offer an abstract theology to puzzle over. He offers embodiment. He doesn’t call us to memorize a creed—he calls us to become it. This farewell isn’t really about Christ’s leaving. It isn’t about God’s incarnation in him either. It’s about Christ’s incarnation in us. It’s about Christ making home in us.

The word ‘dwelling place’ or ‘home’ is referenced twice in John 14. Once in verse 1 and again in our reading today. These are the only places in the New Testament the Greek word, monai, is used and it gives us a particular way in which we’re meant to imagine home. Although verse 1 has notoriously been mis-translated into, “In my father’s house are many ‘mansions’, the image that comes to our modern minds couldn’t be further from the truth. The actual meaning of the Greek word is the opposite, meaning ‘small’ or rather ‘tranquil and safe’ rooms and is pointing to the ways in which first-century Gailileans actually made home. 

Picture a simple structure—one level, walls of mud and stone, a flat roof of beams and thatch, and a large open courtyard at the center. Around that courtyard, rooms were added over time, one by one, as families grew. Each small room might have held a whole nuclear family, while the courtyard was shared space—for cooking, conversation, and community.

This was the architecture of everyday life in Jesus’ world. Some homes even grew so large they could shelter a hundred or more people. These homes weren’t strong by today’s standards, the walls were thin, and the roofs were flimsy but they were strong in something deeper and stickier: identity, belonging and peace.

Again, like our Revelation reading a couple weeks ago, the kingdom of God continues to be less about gold thrones and fluffy clouds after our bodies have died and decayed and more about an ever-expanding home for the richness of diversity in all people that doesn’t create division or dissonance – but rather the opposite – peace, in our living bodies. 

And so when we get to our scripture today, about God making monai in us, we get a far more interesting picture. Christ, in his farewell discourse, isn’t just going away to make an ever-expanding, community-rich and peaceful home for us after we die, this Christ event and the coming of the Holy Spirit is actually meant to do something to our finite, failing yet beautifully woven-together bodies: it’s meant to expand us so that we might become who we all long to be at our deepest core: bodies of peace. This is less about belief systems and more about an embodiment that sets us apart to be God’s monai, God’s home, where Christ’s life, death and resurrection live and breathe and have its being in us, right here right now. 

So here’s the question I’ve been holding—not just for this church or this denomination, but for the wider Church, especially in this time of grief and fear as pews empty and properties are sold: what might it mean to take this seriously? What if the Spirit is not evaporating but expanding? What if this is not loss, but invitation—to reflect anew on what monai looks like in us, not in buildings but in bodies?

What would it mean to truly believe that the only temple God has ever longed to dwell in is the human heart… is our human heart?

When I lived in China nearly 15 years ago, I got to witness this kind of embodiment in an underground christian community. At the time, religious institutions and particularly Christianity was not allowed to be practiced. And yet, this group of 50 or so people found a way to gather week after week, in a school basement, in a neighbour’s living room or discreetly eating together in a restaurant to embody and to make home the Spirit of peace within community and within themselves. And this community was vibrant, unaffected by the ills of what could happen to them because they knew the truth of Easter. They understood that resurrection isn’t a one-time event. It’s not linear—it spirals. It expands. It’s making monai not in buildings or temples or societal structures, it’s making monai in our momentary matter, in real time, in real bodies. 

And the Christ event is still unfolding—in us, through us, around us.

And we need to remember this, that’s re-member, that’s re-embody this more than ever.

For we live in a world where power still crucifies the peacemakers. Where leaders cling to their own palaces, their own kingdoms, their own mansions, while the poor and displaced search for a home to breathe. We live in a world built on unease, unrest, anxiety, and the myth of scarcity.

And what’s needed—desperately—is people who are becoming monai. People who have made room for God’s peace to dwell. People whose lives have become courtyards of grace.

Because what prompts our scripture today is Judas asking how it is that Christ will reveal himself to his disciples and not to the world. And Jesus’ answer? By making home in his disciples will Christ be known to the world. 

So what makes you feel at home? 

Because in answering this questions will we discover what we are truly searching for has already been given to us. The home we are looking for has already been expanded within us. Here, the only place where true peace is possible. 

So breathe deeply. Take down the dividing walls. Open the door. Let peace become the supporting beams of your body.

For resurrection is imminent, it’s making home in you, breathing through you for the life of the world.