Growing up, I had regular chores.
Filling wood boxes, emptying the trash, cleaning and
vacuuming a certain section of the house.
And then there was the garden.
There were a few times when I was actually required to work
in the garden.
But I invited to a lot
and did find myself out there at times
pulling weeds, mostly.
And there was one summer when I was given a small plot for a
“salsa garden.”
I made my own salsa brand, “Mr. Spicy” when the harvest
came.
But for the most part I avoided the garden.
Because, I didn’t have to work in the garden.
And when I was invited to come out and do some weeding,
on those June evenings with the black fly swarms
I, well, found other things to do.
It’s one of those things of growing up, I suppose.
We try to navigate the path of least responsibility.
The path of least intention.
And I think as much as we learn responsibility,
There’s still a part of us that will choose the path of
least intention.
And few things require more intention than relationships.
Amen?
And yet few things get less intention.
We are very prone to autopilot in our ways of relating to
others.
And autopilot that was learned in our earliest experiences
of community,
In families of origin, or adopted families, the community in
which we were raised.
Often ways of relating (especially ways of navigating
differences)
that were as
unhelpful then as they are now.
And yet we’d prefer the path of least intention
To seeking a better way and changing our habits.
And my resistance to weeding on a June evening in the midst
of hungry black flies makes sense.
But the garden requires intention and attention if they are
going to be fruitful.
And relationships are like gardens. They do not become fruitful and healthy by
just being let alone.
But in Jesus’s metaphor of the vine, we are not in the place
of the gardener, doing the tedious work of weeding.
We are in the place of branch, pruned and tended by God.
We are branches in the vine with one another –
And so we’re off the hook, right?
We don’t have to go out and weed in the black fly evening
Because we’re not the gardener.
The branches just receive from the vine.
They just sit back and receive, like someone watching a
sportsgame
with that drinking hard hat on the couch,
with straws coming from cans on both sides,
easily accessible for your drinking pleasure.
That’s the tricky thing about metaphors and parables.
You can press them in all directions.
You have to see them in context in order to get the central
point that’s being made.
And this part of Jesus’s discourse to his disciples takes
place in the upper room
on the night that they were together before he was betrayed
and arrested.
And as we remember, that was the night when he gave them the
command to love one another as he has loved them and to pin down a word that
can be used in so many different ways he showed them what he means by the word
love
And pulled out a basin and a towel and washed their dusty
road weary feet.
“I am the vine,
and you are the branches.
Whoever remains in me,
and I in him,
will bear much fruit;
for you can do nothing without me.”
There are a couple of ways to hear these words.
And one important way is to understand how necessary it is
to be in relationship with Christ in your own personal lives.
Christ is the power of God in us to love, to forgive,
As we commune with God in Christ we are strengthened and
encouraged,
Given eyes of faith, and renewed in hope.
Paul says in Philippians 4,
“I have learned to be content with whatever I have.
I know what it is to have little,
and I know what it is to have plenty.
In any and all circumstances I have learned the secret of
being well-fed and of going hungry,
of having plenty and of being in need.
I can do all things through him who strengthens me.”
There is a crucial dimension where abiding in Christ, our
vine – the source of our nourishment – is a personal reality, an inward
reality,
where we commune with God in our hearts and we find peace
and contentment.
Where we can confess our sin, find forgiveness
and find the power to
live more faithfully.
We might see this as the branches “receiving” task – opening
themselves to the nourishment of the vine.
It’s receiving but it’s not passive.
This requires intention and taking responsibility for your
spirit.
And there is a second dimension to the fruitfulness of
abiding in the vine.
The branches participate in the life of the vine even as the
vine sustains the branches.
We think of photosynthesis as an example.
Where this breaks down because we’re humans is that we can
choose to photosynthesize or not.
We have an agency that the branches do not.
And that agency, that ability to choose
has to do with the
basin and the towel.
The fruitfulness of the vine is in the branches
participating in the life at the source – and there’s a personal part in
that. But there’s also a practical and
social/communal part in that.
We participate by remembering.
Just as today we will remember Christ’s death as we eat the
last supper together,
We remember Christ’s basin and towel existence.
The way of being human that was not primarily for himself,
but for God and for the healing of the world.
To abide in the vine, is to be intentional and do thinks
like wash each other’s feet.
It’s not a passive but an active abiding.
And this is brought out in our other reading from 1 John.
“No one has ever seen God,
but if we love one another,
God lives in union with us,
and his love is made perfect in us.”
And this is where it gets tricky and hard like weeding in
black fly season.
But spirituality has to be both personal and communal.
And wherever there is Christian community there are people
erring on one side or the other of this balance.
Either we are quietist who seek God in our personal prayer
lives and otherwise live a fairly normal American life.
Or we are activists who see our spirituality as primarily a
matter of social action, feeding the hungry, opposing unjust laws and social
structures. Perhaps too busy to spend
time in prayer and meditation.
But I’m so sick of this dichotomy.
It’s not about personal vs. communal spirituality,
prayer vs. empowerment,
it’s about basin and towel spirituality.
Receiving God’s love
And then saying, “if God so loved me…”
And then risking everything to complete that thought.
Some of us have found that it suited our temperament to be
the quietist Christian
And others that it better suited our temperament to be the
activist Christian.
I go through stages of both.
We need both temperaments, but also
Both temperaments need to learn from each other.
We need a prayerful, basin and towel, table-turning,
Spirituality.
“For he cannot love God,
whom he has not seen,
if he does not love his brother,
whom he has seen.
The command that Christ has given us is this:
whoever loves God must love his brother also.”
Love God – but love your sisters and brothers also.
Personal. And communal.
And this is hard work.
Because personal spirituality requires us to open our hearts
to God in prayer and that can feel like turning on the lights when our eyes are
not adjusted to it.
And because communal spirituality requires us to do our best
to understand and respect
and above all call sister and brother –
those that we have been trained in society or our families
of origin,
To call enemy or some other label.
It requires the hard work of seeking to understand and care
for those who I’d rather avoid.
But in both the personal and communal we abide in the vine.
We receive love, power, and grace as we pray to God, as we
sit in the stillness of God’s being in prayer.
And we are made more alive and more joyful as we find
sisters and brothers, friends we never knew we had
And as we confront injustices and silences that oppress.
As we seek to build a better home for all of God’s children.
Abide in Christ the vine,
And realize in your hearts and in your relationships
And the promise is
that the love that is made more perfect in you
Will give joy and displace fear.
“There is no fear in love;
perfect love drives out all fear.”
What does your soul need right now?
How are you abiding in the vine?
