In 1925, a farmer and an experienced spelunker named Floyd Collins got stuck in a cave in Kentucky[1]. His foot was pinned under a heavy rock, and over the next two weeks family members, friends, rescuers, journalists and even women proposing marriage gathered around the cave entrance, which was not much more than a hole in ground. His predicament became a spectacle, the biggest news around those parts, as newspapers and radio stations sent reporters, the community brought food and rescuers tried to find a way to extricate him. Tragically, they could not help him, and Floyd eventually died underground. One reporter who was small enough to fit into the tunnel that Floyd had fallen into was able to talk with him and help him eat, and eventually received a Pulitzer for the story that he wrote about Floyd’s last days[2].
Eventually a book was published[3], not until 1979. And in 1994, Floyd Collins’ story became, of all things, a musical, premiering in Philadelphia[4]. And just about this time last year, it had its Broadway debut, finally, at Lincoln Center Theater.
Reading today’s Gospel reminded me of this story and that play – in particular, the final song in the play, titled “How Glory Goes”[5] – which is all at once beautiful and heartbreaking and hopeful. The song is a prayer. Floyd’s had faith all his life, he says, and he’s ready to leave this world, but first, he says to God,
“I wanna ask you somethin’.”
And then Floyd wonders and imagines and asks God – what is heaven is like? He asks:
Is it warm?
Is it soft against your face?
Do you feel a kind of grace
Inside the breeze?
Will there be trees?
Is there light?
Does it hover on the ground?
Does it shine from all around
Or just from you?
The first time I heard this song, I was rehearsing it with a soprano in the living room, and after we reached the end, I went into the kitchen and found my husband Phil, crying and trying to cook. The song asks the questions we all ask when we are facing our own mortality, when a loved one is dying, when our children lose a pet or a grandparent or a friend – we ask, what comes next? What is it like, God’s dwelling place? Where do we go from here? How does glory go?
Do we live?
Is it like a little town?
Floyd asks.
Do we get to look back down
At who we love?
Are we above?
Are we everywhere?
Are we anywheres at all?
Do we hear a trumpet call us
And we’re by your side?
Floyd’s questions are something like what the disciples are asking Jesus in this morning’s Gospel, though they don’t know that’s what they’re asking. This morning’s story reaches back before Easter, weeks and weeks ago, to that last supper Jesus shares with them before he is arrested in the garden. Just a few verses before this morning’s passage, we hear
Simon Peter say to him, “Lord, where are you going?”
Jesus answers, knowing, “Where I am going, you cannot follow me now, but you will follow afterward.” And Peter says, Lord, why can I not follow you now? I would lay down my life for you.
And what follows is what theologians call the Farewell Discourse, which we heard from this morning, when Jesus is trying to tell his friends and followers what they need to know, what they need to hear, to prepare them for what’s coming – not just his death, and not just his Resurrection, but his Ascension and everything that comes after – for their own deaths and resurrections, of the glory that he is welcoming them into, of the eternal hope and life in God’s kingdom. He is telling them they will be with Christ in his Father’s house, in a dwelling place prepared for them, one day.
This Gospel reading is familiar to many of us because we hear it often in funerals. Even though the story takes place during the days we mark as Holy Week, it is an Easter story. It is a resurrection reading.
“‘In my Father’s house,” Jesus tells the disciples, gathered around the table – he has just washed their feet, and Judas has left the room – “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.”
And because they don’t know really, or can’t bring themselves to believe, what is coming next – though Jesus has been trying to tell them over and over – the disciples try to interpret Jesus’ words literally. What place? Where? We have no map, no directions.
Thomas voices the confusion that all of them probably feel – “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” And Jesus replies: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”
So readers have had trouble with those words over the years. It sounds as if Jesus is telling his friends, God has made a mansion with many rooms, and everyone has a beautiful, joyful place there – but only if you have a ticket. You have to go through me. Otherwise, you’re out of luck.
But theologians including Lutheran Karoline Lewis[6] say that’s not what Jesus meant at all. She writes: “These are words of comfort, not condition, for the disciples. There is nothing uncertain for their present or their future because of their relationship with Jesus.”
Another Lutheran, pastor Natalia Terfa, writes, “Those words are not exclusive, but inclusive.” Jesus, she says, is telling them, “‘I am making a way. I will point you to the truth. I will give you new life. You already know everything you need to know because [7]you know me.”
In other words, perhaps this isn’t about who’s in and who’s not. It’s about the community that we’re building and loving along the way. And to reach our destination – God’s dwelling place – all we need to do is follow.
United Methodist pastor Gayle Landis says[8] that the destination Jesus is telling his disciples about isn’t, in so many words, so much a geographic place as it is about a spiritual space – God’s dwelling place is about relationship, redirection, love. We know the way to the Father because we are already following it.
Will I want,
Floyd asks,
Will I wish for all the things I should have done?
Longin’ to finish what I only just begun
Or has a shining truth been waiting there
For all the questions everywhere
In a world of wonderin’, suddenly you know
And you will always know
On this side of things, we can’t know how glory goes – we don’t know exactly what God’s kingdom, God’s new heaven and new earth will look like – but Jesus might be saying that we see a glimpse of it here – that we inhabit a piece of it here, in our relationship with Christ and with one another, that as we walk with Jesus and follow his teachings, we are one foot in heaven all along the way. Because we see God in each other, and in creation, then we see glimpses of heaven in that very creation, which includes the heights of the hills and the caverns of the earth – and also includes the people around us, our families, our friends, the people next to us in the pews, the strangers out on the street.
Jesus’s words to his friends are words of comfort and of love and of welcome. This is how glory goes, Jesus says – there is room for everyone in my Father’s house, and we will get there together.
So in the way that I love and welcome you, washing your feet, breaking the bread and pouring the wine, so are you to love and welcome and serve each other, Jesus says. Just as I have healed and befriended and forgiven and taught, that is the way you are to heal and befriend and forgive and teach. That is the way, and the truth, and the life, here on earth and in the kingdom to come.
Does rising bread fill up the air
From open kitchens everywhere?
Familiar faces far as you can see
Like a family?
Only heaven knows how glory goes
What each of us was meant to be
In the starlight, that is what we are
Amen.
[1] https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/tragedy-at-sand-cave.htm
[2] https://www.americanheritage.com/it-was-my-first-trip-cave
[3] https://www.kentuckypress.com/9781985903326/trapped/
[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/25/theater/floyd-collins-musical-history.html
[5] https://youtu.be/NYFCERQr7Uc?si=0qkYoP-fgvDlVzpx
[6] https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/fifth-sunday-of-easter/commentary-on-john-141-14-5
[7] https://churchanew.org/blog/posts/natalia-terfa-trusting-in-the-way?blm_aid=61874
[8] https://www.patheos.com/progressive-christian/place-prepared-gayle-landis-05-12-2014
