Sermon transcript:1
There are certain verses in the Bible that come with…baggage. John 14:6 is one of them: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to God except through me.” For many, those words have not sounded like good news. They’ve sounded like a locked door. A narrowed path. A line dividing who’s in and who’s out. And if that’s what this verse means, then it raises a hard question: what kind of God needs to be accessed like that?
But what if Jesus isn’t drawing a boundary here? What if he’s dissolving one? Because Jesus didn’t begin with separation. He never assumes that God is far away and we are trying to get there. Again and again, in what he says and how he lives, Jesus begins with closeness. With intimacy. With union. “The kingdom of God is within you.” “I am in God, and you are in me, and I am in you.”
This is not the language of distance. This is not aspirational—believe the right things, do the right things, and maybe you’ll gain access. This is the language of a reality we are already a part of. So, when Jesus says, “I am the way,” he’s not handing out directions. He’s saying: Look at this life. This way of being. This way of seeing. The way is not a path to get somewhere else. The way is about waking up to what is already true.
And when he says, “I am the truth,” he’s not talking about correct answers on a theological test. Truth, for Jesus, isn’t something you pass or fail. It’s something you live. It’s what happens when your life lines up with reality—when you stop living as though you are separate from God, from others, from yourself.
Somewhere along the way, things shifted. It is easier to turn a way of being into a set of beliefs. Easier to manage boundaries than to live with radical openness. So what may have been spoken as an invitation became a requirement. A declaration of unity, full of grace and possibility—became a test of belonging. You can’t deny verse six exists: “No one comes to God except through me.” What if the “me” is not Jesus as an object of worship and teacher of right belief, but instead the “me” is Jesus as the revealed truth of what’s possible for all of us when we awaken to God’s presence in our lives and embrace it? What if you don’t come to God by striving, improving, or being right? What if you don’t come to God at all? What if you merely wake up to the fact that you were never apart from God and God isn’t withholding anything from anyone? Then Jesus doesn’t come to close God off from unbelievers. He comes to open our lives to the grace that is already here.
And that’s why he says things that sound almost reckless to religious ears: “You are in me, and I am in you.” Not you might be someday. You are. Present tense. And if that is true, it does not stay in the realm of private spirituality. It reshapes everything—how we live, how we relate, how we organize our common life. Listen to the words of Ilia Delio, a theologian who specializes in the intersection of science and theology:
I think, you know, if we could focus our attention on several things. One, the deep immersion of God in our midst, you know, in our lives, in our own being, in the lives of others, I don’t think we would do what we do to one another to any significant degree, if we can recognize that the God in me is also the God in you. And so, we really are united on a deep level of divine love.
And second, you know, the fact that God is in love with everything with the trees and the flowers and the stars, and you know, even the little earthworms and even the snowflakes falling outside, you know, everything bears that love of God within it. Would we do what we do, you know to one another and to the things of the Earth? I don’t think so, I don’t think if we had an awakening, an attention or a consciousness that what God is about is to be God for us and to be with us…2
To hear Jesus’ words as a call to awaken to God’s presence doesn’t permit Christians to use today’s scripture for exclusion. Marcus Borg, the late theologian, tells the story about a sermon preached, on today’s scripture, by a Hindu professor in a Christian seminary several decades ago. He said, yes, this is true—Jesus is the only way. But then he added that this way—of dying to an old way of being and being born into a new one—is known across the world’s religions.
“The way of Jesus is not a set of beliefs. It is a pattern of transformation. Death and resurrection. Letting go and becoming new. And that pattern is not owned by Christianity. It is woven into the human experience. To testify to Jesus, then, is not to draw lines around who is in and who is out. It is to point to a way of life—a way of awakening—to the reality of the Holy in our lives.”3
When we reduce Christianity to belief, we separate ourselves from others and God. We rob the world of the very energy that could heal us. In the words of that spiritual and ecological giant, the late Father Thomas Berry, we don’t live in a universe made up of lifeless things—it’s a community of living beings, each with its own value and presence. When we begin to see the world this way, we stop treating nature as something to use, as a storehouse of objects, and start relating to it with care and respect. To walk in a meadow, then, is not to pass through a resource, but to stand within a living community. A good economy is one that lets that meadow flourish. Good politics is what stands guard over its life.4 When we allow the words of Jesus to open our eyes to our God-infused reality, the logic of exclusion and the exploitation that follows, gives way to the logic of connection.
And at a more personal level, something else shifts. So many of the voices we inherit and carry in our minds—from religion and culture—tell us to strive, to prove, to earn our belonging. The message, often unspoken but deeply felt, is that we are not enough. Not worthy. Not there yet. Into that noise, Jesus speaks a quieter, deeper truth: You don’t come to God. You discover you were never apart. And if that’s even a little bit true—it changes everything. It changes how we see ourselves—not as problems to be fixed, but as lives already held in something sacred. It changes how we see others—not as outsiders or threats, but as people who live and move and have their being in the same love. It changes how we see creation—not first as a commodity but as an expression of God.
And it changes what faith becomes. Not a test you pass. But a life you practice. A way of seeing. A way of being. A way of walking through the world awake to the presence that has never left us. So maybe this week, the question for us to take with us is: “Where am I still living as though I’m outside of something I’ve never actually been separated from?” Because the love we’ve been trying to reach has been holding us the whole time. This is the good news of Jesus the Christ. It’s amazing what you’ll find when you open the baggage. Thanks be.
Rev. Joe Gaspar
1 This reflection is based on a Substack article by Jim Palmer, There Are No Roads to God: Rethinking Jesus, rejecting exclusivity, and seeing why the search for a single path misses the point entirely, https://substack.com/home/post/p-194599615, April 18, 2026.
2 Ilia Delio, in the video The Fullness of Union, https://youtu.be/m7nck4gppMk
3 Marcus Borg, Reading the Bible Again for the First Time: Taking the Bible Seriously but Not Literally (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001), pp. 216-217.
4 https://thomasberry.org/the-meadow-across-the-creek/