Sermon preached at the Sung Eucharist on the Fifth Sunday of Easter 2026

‘Where are you from? Where is home for you?’

Some people can answer this easily. For others like me, the answer is ‘it’s complicated.’ I moved many times as a child and have a few more times between countries as an adult. In fact, my husband and I just moved to London from Cambridge a few weeks ago and have therefore become regular visitors to IKEA!

Sometimes when I was little, my mother would go ahead to prepare things, and I would stay with my grandparents until she called for me. I remember on one time when I was 10 and we moved to New York. I came into the new flat or apartment and it felt like home right away — our books were in the bookshelves, my favourite posters were on the wall, my plushies and dolls were lined up on the bed to greet me. But what made it feel most like home was not just these comforting details. It was the presence of my mother, who was the constant wherever I lived.

Home. A word that resonates with longing and hope. A longing for a place where we feel safe, content, where we belong. We can chase that feeling all our lives without quite finding it. But somehow nothing quite satisfies, because deep down we know we are made for something else. As Saint Augustine wrote: ‘God has made us for himself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in him.’

Right now, our hearts are acutely restless. We wrestle with political and economic uncertainty, we feel unmoored, exhausted, longing for rest. So we arrive at this Easter season more than usually hungry for the reassurance Jesus offers his friends in our lesson from the Gospel of St John:

‘In my Fathers 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?’

At the Last Supper, on the night before he dies, Jesus speaks these words to his troubled friends. They are worried and wobbling — where is he going? He reassures them: he is not leaving them for good but going on ahead to prepare the way. And one day they will be where he is:

‘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.’

After his death, resurrection, and ascension, he will not be present in the usual way — but through the Spirit he can be with them always, even to the end of the age. So he calls them to confidence in God and in God’s future. For that is where they will find him again in this world and the next.

The theologian Jürgen Moltmann grasped this best. As a young soldier in World War II, he was captured and held in a prison camp in Scotland, having come to understand the horrors the Nazis had unleashed. Some of his comrades fell into despair after learning of many of the atrocities. But Moltmann, who have been given a Bible by a chaplain, began to read it and experience hope. He saw that in Jesus, as he wrote ‘there is someone who understands you completely, who is with you in your cry to God, who has felt the same forsakenness.’ But he also saw that this suffering was not the end of the story for Jesus or for us. With the resurrection comes forgiveness, healing, and hope based on God’s promises for the future. The Christian faith, Moltmann came to believe, is lived with trust in the promises of a God who can and will make all things right, not just after death, but starting now in our world.

For the resurrection is not only something that happened in the past. It is also a reality that is still arriving and unfolding in our lives. This means Jesus is not only behind us in history or beside us now in the present, but that God is also already ahead of us in the future, beckoning us to follow.

‘But Lord,’ we might say with Saint Thomas, ‘we don’t know where you’re going. So how can we know the way?’

Jesus’s response to Thomas and to us is both simple and enigmatic: ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life.’

The earliest followers of Christ were known as ‘The Way’, according to the Book of Acts. They saw faith as a way of life in community, following their risen and ascended Lord Jesus, empowered by the Spirit. But it was also about following a path, looking forward in the same direction.

Christians in the Middle Ages continued to see faith in Jesus Christ as about a journey: The doctor of the church Thomas Aquinas called Christians viatores: wayfarers, pilgrims, those who are on the road. To be a Christian meant that we are not completely at home yet, that we are wandering, but that we have a destination and we believe we will get there, travelling together.

Every year, thousands of people come to Westminster Abbey as pilgrims from across the world, carrying their questions, griefs, and hopes. We come because something in us knows we are on a journey and are looking for the Way. We come to press pause within our busy lives for spiritual refreshment, encouragement, and a glimpse of a transcendent God whom it can be easy to forget in the rush of the everyday.

What lies ahead is two-fold: first, God’s promise about eternal life in God – that we will find rest and a deep sense of home and comfort in God beyond our earthly lives. But also - and just as importantly - a promise that God cares about our real, concrete messy and beautiful lives now, our future as individuals and as communities now, and promises to be there up ahead of us even in turbulent times.

So we press on — in the words of Saint Paul to the Philippians — ‘forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead’, toward the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.

The way will not always be easy. We need persistence, patience and trust even when we cannot see the next steps, when the path is overgrown or hard to see, when the road branches off and we are unsure which way to go and wish we had a better sat-nav (GPS) or at least a clear road map to tell us exactly what to do. But Jesus reminds us not to lose heart:

‘Do not let your hearts be troubled. I am the way, the truth, and the life.’

At the end of his long life, Moltmann found words to explain the hope that was within him: ‘Whenever we base our hope on trust in the divine mystery,’ he wrote, ‘we feel deep down in our hearts: there is someone who is waiting for you, who is hoping for you, who believes in you. We are waited for as the prodigal son is waited for by his father. We are accepted and received, as a mother takes her children into her arms and comforts them. God is our last hope because we are God’s first love.’

So even if we can’t give a quick answer to the question of where we are from, at least we know where we are going — and who will be waiting there for us to welcome us home.