Acts 10:44-48
Psalm 98
1 John 5:1-6
John 15:9-17
We began this Eastertide remembering the empty tomb, expectations reversed, the women's surprise and fear at the bewildering new reality of resurrection.
As
those who have joined the disciples in following Jesus, we have
inherited this resurrection reality.
We
come here into this building every Sunday to worship God and hear
again, be reminded of the good news that has come to us in the person
of Jesus.
We
come here into this room every Sunday because the kingdom of God is
near, it is breaking in to our world and we have heard the call to
join in the intrusion.
We
come here because we've heard the words of our teacher and friend,
passed on to us through the stories of our Bible that we should
change our minds, change our hearts, to give it all over to God and
hear the sweet good news of salvation, of forgiveness, of love
unconditional.
When
I was baptised in Lake Sunapee I was dunked into the water and
brought back up. This symbol reminds us that faith means that we die
to our selves and rise anew to a life in relationship with God. By
faith we have become able to pray to God and enjoy the blessing of
God's presence with us. We have become a people of the new hope
which is available to all of humankind through the powerful love of
God poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit.
And
all of this resurrection excitement is fun and good. But there are
days when we just don't feel it. There are days when resurrection is
not our reality. We feel only the cross. There are plenty of days
when we don't feel the presence of God by faith, we feel empty.
There are plenty of days and plenty of times when we expect
expectations reversed, only to find out that we're stuck with what we
got. There are plenty of days when nothing seems new, when nothing
seems changed or changeable. There are days of frustration. There
are days of fear. There are days when we want to just give up on
trying.
It's
important that we not deceive ourselves. We are a people who live by
ideals and can often find ourselves in a laughable state, like Tom
Ryle who was standing neck-deep in water claiming that he took a
couple steps on the water before he went down. We are not called to
undying optimism. Christianity is not the power of positive thinking
even if there are some parallels.
To
proclaim the resurrection, to proclaim the new life, is not to
proclaim that death no longer is with us. To proclaim light is not
to say that darkness is no longer a reality.
The
Kingdom of God is near, not here.
The
resurrection is a declaration that life has triumphed over death,
good over evil. But even though we are assured of the final outcome,
we must endure the battle all the same. The resurrection is the
first fruits of a harvest that is still being had.
As
the saying goes, we are not saved from the presence of sin and death,
we are saved from the power of sin and death.
Jesus
calls us into community together for precisely this reason. God has
called us into the story of God's redemption of humanity. The
kingdom of God is a mustard seed, Jesus says, “when
sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet
when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs,
and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make
nests in its shade.’”
The
kingdom of God becomes manifest on earth as in heaven by the new
community that Jesus has called into existence. This is our purpose.
This is why we are here on the earth at this time, this is why we
enter these doors and sing these songs. The gospel is God's changing
of the world, God's rescuing it from the tyranny of sin and death and
bringing it back to health and wholeness and life. And we are here
because God desires for us to be the means by which this good news is
embodied and proclaimed in human history.
So
we're stuck with sin and death and we need not look further than the
newspaper to realize this fact. Murder, greed, hate, and selfishness
seem to make headlines every day of every week. And it's to that
world that Jesus calls the disciples to proclaim the gospel.
So
how do we proclaim the gospel? Do we write it on pieces of paper and
hand it out to people? Do we stand at the Village Store entrance and
make sure that every person who comes through hears us say “Come to
church!” Surely that would turn good news into annoying or
obnoxious news.
What
we find in Jesus' words is not a call to do or to say primarily, but
a call to be.
Last
Sunday we saw how Jesus calls himself a Vine. Jesus sees himself as
beginning a new community of the people of God. God spoke through
the prophets to Israel, in Jesus God speaks to the whole world.
The
ones who hear Jesus' words, his disciples, are the branches. They
participate in this new community, the community of salvation, in
fellowship with their Savior.
So
often this picture has been used to lead us to some personal
spiritual devotion. We need to “abide in the vine” – and this
of course means to retreat to a solitary space and have some mystical
individual experience with God.
While
this may happen to you in your relationship with God, and it has
happened to many in the Christian community throughout history, it is
not primarily what Jesus means here.
Rather,
the Vine parable is a call to the disciples to participate in the new
community, and we find that participation in this new community is
not just about the vertical “me and God” but just as much about
the horizontal “me and you.”
We
are called together into the Vine because it is in community, in
fellowship with one another and with God that we learn what it means
to live life in light of the resurrection, in light of in-breaking
kingdom of God. And by learning this way of life in
community, we can become a community whose generosity and love is so
attractive that others seek shelter and comfort in our fold, among
the sheep, under the good Shepherd. In Gandhi's words, Jesus calls
us to be
the change you want to see in the world. And this is the reason that
there is a church – because if a new economics and politics of love
is to break into this world and offer us a valid alternative, it is
going to have to be embodied in people's lives, in practices, in
interactions in community.
Let's
go to our text with this question, how might we be a community that
not only proclaims, but embodies the love of God and draws people to
God for new life in grace.
Here's
the answer that I see:
Jesus
calls his disciples to see that it is in abiding in the love of God
that they will become a congregation that learns true joy in the
bearing of the fruit of love for one another.
Three
things, then.
The
Easter community abides in God's love.
The
Easter community bears the fruit of love.
The
Easter community experiences a joy that fulfills.
So,
first. The Easter community abides in God's love.
We
are to make our dwelling place, our home in God's love. And this is
not something we can just put on our to-do list and go out and get
done. The reason is this. A vine may give life to the branches, but
the branches cannot give life to the vine. A branch does not abide
by some act of its own, it abides by allowing the grace, the
life-source to nourish and grow it.
When
we are called to abide in the love of Christ, we are called to
receive that love and let it nourish us, let it heal us, let it
change us.
To
abide is not to do, to abide is to be. We are called to find our
rest in God. St. Augustine famously writes: “Our hearts are
restless until they rest in thee.”
We
must recognize the true source of our life, of our very existence,
and by faith dwell there and let thankfulness pour out of our hearts
as we realize the goodness of God's gifts in our lives, the gift of
life itself. We are restless because we are constantly trying to
justify ourselves in this world. We are constantly feeling as if we
are in control and are the only one looking out for us and ours.
Faith is to recognize that ultimately we are not in control, that we
are unable to justify ourselves, no matter which set of standards we
try to live up to, we will fail – we will fall short. Faith is to
realize that all such striving to justify ourselves, striving to
control is founded on the idea that I am God – I am the one who
gives life to myself, I am the one who takes care of myself, I am the
one who has made myself and I am the one who will sustain myself.
Faith is the humble realization that God is the source
of all life and all existence and God is the one who created each one
of us for lives of good. Faith is the resting in God's goodness,
forsaking our striving, and living the release, the freedom of life
as a gift, not earned.
To
abide in the vine, to abide in God's love is to live a life of faith,
not works. To be not to do. In the words of Rudolf Bultmann, it is
an allowing of “oneself
to be held” like the way that the branch is held by the vine.
We
rest in the love of God, and trust in God's forgiveness, and God's
continual care in our lives as we pray prayers of thanksgiving and
faith.
The
Easter community abides in God's love.
Second,
The Easter community bears the fruit of love.
To
be connected the source, to abide in God's love is to allow God's
love to nourish and strengthen the branch and to produce the fruit
for which the vine was designed.
There
is no possible way to abide in the vine and not bear fruit. If one
abides in the vine, the fruit will come. In the same way there is no
way to grow fruit if the branch does not abide in the vine. Any
branch cut off from the vine will find itself unable to bear the
fruit for which it was created.
We
cannot just commit ourselves to bearing fruit and try to go about our
task of bearing fruit without receiving the nourishment of the
mother-vine.
Fruit
organically comes from the branch that abides in the vine.
To
receive the love of God by faith creates within us the right
conditions for freely giving that love to others. It's analogous to
the idea characterized in the words of Lily Hardy Hammond who wrote,
"You don't pay love back; you pay it forward.”
We
receive from God out of God's abundance, and our resting in that, our
faith in God's care, God's love produces within us the conditions for
being able to love freely our neighbor.
Just
like the vine, so is the love of God. We receive in order to give.
What
kind of love do we receive from Christ?
Earlier
in the night, before Christ says the words of our gospel reading, we
read that he “got
up from the table,
took
off his outer robe, and tied a towel around himself. Then he poured
water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and to
wipe them with the towel that was tied around him. After
he had washed their feet, had put on his robe, and had returned to
the table, he said to them, ‘Do you know what I have done to you?
You call me Teacher and Lord—and you are right, for that is what I
am. So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also
ought to wash one another’s feet.”
Jesus
then says in our reading, “No one
has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s
friends.”
Commenter
Karen Matthews Huey helps us see what kind of love we are called to.
She writes:
“Love,
of course, doesn't mean the romantic, ephemeral feeling that fuels
our popular music, our films, and all too often, our personal quest.
Being other-centered rather than self-centered, even to the point of
giving up our lives (suddenly or over a lifetime) fulfills the law of
Christ. Purity codes and legalisms fall away. How well we know the
challenge of being other-centered: in our culture, with mobility,
career pressure, distractions, and overloaded calendars, it's
difficult even to make room for friendship. We don't stay long enough
to get to know one another, let alone to care about one another. And
yet this Gospel keeps talking about staying, about abiding, about
making our home in God, in the Body of Christ.”
In
Karen's words, the love is “other-centered.” In a world with so
much focus on the individual and personal satisfaction, we need to be
reminded of Jesus' words, “No
one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s
friends.”
This
radical way of life, this radical love is not something we can just
put on like a coat. We must learn this by spiritual education in the
house of God. We must abide in the vine by faith among other
learners, other abiders in order to truly be nourished and grown to
produce fruit like this.
This
love is “other-centered” and that's what makes it so radical. It
calls us outside of ourselves, it calls us to welcome and help and
serve those who are radically different than us, those of different
ages, races, cultures, classes, languages, genders, and sexualities.
To
abide in the vine means by faith to receive the radical love of God
in Christ who gave his life for the whole world, not just part of it.
And as we receive this love like the branch to the vine, we will
become fruitful, givers of the love that we see in the basin and the
towel, the love that seeks to serve and not be served. The
difficulty is that we want to jump write to doing these things and
all of a sudden we find ourselves powerless to do them or frustrated
in our attempts at radical other-centered love. We must always
remember that there
is no possible way to abide in the vine and not bear fruit. If one
abides in the vine, the fruit will come. In the same way there is no
way to grow fruit if the branch does not abide in the vine. Any
branch cut off from the vine will find itself unable to bear the
fruit for which it was created.
The
Easter community bears the fruit of love.
And
finally, the Easter community experiences a joy that fulfills.
“[Jesus]
said these things to [us] that [his] joy may be in [us], and that
[our] joy may be complete.”
We
seek joy in all the wrong places. We seek joy in personal
fulfillment, we seek joy in entertainment, in food, in sex, in buying
and selling. And all of these things are wonderful and good – but
none of them will satisfy us in and of themselves. If you imagine a
fountain, they are the drops from the fountain which evaporate from
the rock, they are not the fountain.
A
joy that fulfills cannot be found in anything bound to time and
space. A joy that fulfills must be founded in the eternal life of
the God who loves. By faith we abide in God's love, and by the
abiding we are nourished and given the fruit of other-centered love.
It is in this existence in relationship to the God who created and
sustains this universe and who loves us in the life-giving sacrifice
of Jesus Christ. It is in this relationship, this participation in
God's love, that we can find the source for fulfilling joy. Now joy
does not mean smiles. Joy is a deeper happiness, a satisfaction with
life.
Jesus
invites us to find our joy and satisfaction in relationship with God
and in relationship with one another. Joy comes from being all that
we were made to be. And we were made to be lovers. Lovers of God
and lovers of one another. We were made for God and for each other,
to live in community and to show the care, the hospitality, the
giving of our lives that God shows us in God's love.
We
were not made for war. We were not made for greed. We were not made
to be islands of self-interest. We were not made to build ourselves
up at the expense of others.
We
were made for peacemaking. We were made for generosity. We were
made to be bridges of compassion. We were made to build others up in
love.
“[Jesus]
said these things to [us] that [his] joy may be in [us], and that
[our] joy may be complete.”
The
Easter community experiences a joy that fulfills and completes.
So
what have we found in Jesus' words? Nothing short of a manifesto for
the living out of the good news in community. We are members all of
us of one body – one vine and many branches. We have been invited
to abide in that vine, to be held by the love of God, the forgiveness
and compassion, and daily mercies of God, to see anew our lives as
gifts of God and to rest in the reality that God loves us as we are.
As we abide we find ourselves nourished and healed by the love of God
and God's generosity and we reach out filled with the other-centered
love of God and bear fruit of love for one another. And in all of
this we find joy, the joy of fulfilled living, knowing God's love and
being that love. We were made not to be reservoirs of grace but
channels of that generosity to a world that needs to hear the good
news of the love that has been revealed to humanity in Christ and
which will go forward bearing fruit through all who dwell in the vine
that God has planted.
No comments:
Post a Comment