May 2, 2021
Fifth Sunday of Easter
St. Paul’s, Monroe
Spring
It’s Spring all around us. There are signs of green happening everywhere all around us. Almost as we speak, the boundaries and limits that have been imposed to deal with the pandemic, are being relaxed. The Easter season, running for a week of weeks from Easter Day to Pentecost, is more than half through.
Theophany through surprise and unexpected
I made a decision a long time ago, when I was in my 20’s, that there were 2 things really important to me. One was the result of having experienced a variety of things that today I would call “theophanies” or “epiphanies.” I experienced – I didn’t read about or think about – I experienced – a breaking in of the sacred. The divine.
The particulars of my experiences don’t really matter here. They were peculiar to me – although probably similar to the kinds of things that you also have experienced. But it’s the 2nd thing that I decided that I want to focus on for a minute here.
At that point in my life I thought that it was likely that this holiness or sacred or divine stuff that I had experienced was accessible from many different religious perspectives. I had been exposed to enough different cultural and religious approaches that it seemed probable to me that any number of them might put one in touch with the sacred.
But I decided that what I would do is to pursue the tradition that I was raised with, that was most familiar to me – namely being a Christian.
I guess I’ve spent the next 50 years trying to do that.
Amazing: positive and negative
It didn’t take long in that journey for me to be surprised by the things I encountered among Christians. Really – people who are trying to know God, to experience God’s work, through Christ, do amazing things.
It’s amazing in lots of different ways. Mother Teresa dedicated her entire life to try to serve absolutely the least likely people in Calcutta. Her dedication, her devotion, her determination – in love – was amazing. I’ve known several people in my life who lived and worked with her for a time. And they were transformed. One of them started a free health clinic in Michigan City and she was a member of my congregation.
But sometimes Christians do other kinds of amazing things. When I taught religion at Iolani School in Honolulu, I would ask my students in an informal survey what kinds of things they thought of when they thought of Christianity. The majority of these students were not Christian, but came from a variety of different Asian traditions. The things they reported most prominently were things like: judgmental, intolerant, reluctant to share, and so on. {Link to an example} I suspect you know what I’m talking about.
One of the things I’ve wrestled with these 50 years is that this Christian path is filled with – as the jargon has it – “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” When I was first ordained, the priest I worked for explained why he had forbidden his congregation to sing the then quite popular “They will know we are Christians by our love.” He said he didn’t want his congregation to be known for hypocrisy and until Christians actually were known by their love he didn’t want to sing it. I didn’t agree with him, but I got his point.
“Beloved, let us love one another” (1 John)
Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.
We hear today from this short excerpt from the 1st Letter of John.
Long ago I heard those words to at least point to what I had originally responded to as a 20 something year ago. Love is what reveals the sacred. Love outstrips all our divisions. Love overcomes what separates us.
By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. And we have seen and do testify that the Father has sent his Son as the Savior of the world. God abides in those who confess that Jesus is the Son of God, and they abide in God. So we have known and believe the love that God has for us.
It seemed as if the writer of these words had experienced something like what had experienced years ago. He was trying to mine this “Christian thing” for all it was worth. And for him, mining this Christian thing meant everything. I recognized my decision to be something along the lines of deciding to abide in Jesus, Son of God.
Abide here meaning to “live with, to explore, to cultivate, to discover” the many avenues to the manifestation of the sacred.
John’s Gospel
The same tradition that gave us the letters of John gave us the gospel of John. There we encounter the same kind of language, similar comparisons, common focus. This week’s reading focuses on a vineyard, vines, gardening,
I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinegrower. … Abide in me as I abide in you.
(following last week’s I am the Good Shepherd)
There aren’t any complicated words here. We understand them – basically. Take the word, abide. I understand the word. It has to do with where I live. But in fact that’s not how we use the word. A dictionary gives 2 basic ways that we actually use the word.
- to accept or act in accordance with (a rule, decision, or recommendation). “I said I would abide by their decision”1
- informal to be unable to tolerate (someone or something). “if there is one thing I cannot abide it is a lack of discipline”
Now neither of those meanings for the word abide is the way it is used in our scripture readings today. For that reason a number of recent translations of the text use a different word. “Remain in me” or “Stay with me.”
What is of particular interest to me, is the way in which our normal approach to listening for God’s word to us, or looking for what God is doing in our lives, is to expect what we are used to. For most of us, the biblical passages are familiar to us. Many of us have heard sermons or read edifying studies about the text. We figure we know what this is about.
Yet as I have sought over these 50+ years to mine the Christian faith for the manifestation of God and the sacred, I have consistently found that it is the unexpected that characterizes God’s approach to us.
When it is familiar to us, we figure we know what that’s all about, we are much less likely to encounter God stepping into our life.
New eyes and ears
The way I often think about it is to use language that Jesus himself used, that we need to listen with new ears, we need to look with new eyes, we need to understand with new hearts. To let the sacred or the holy in we need to open ourselves in new ways.
I had a lesson in this week before last. We were in a small bible study with college students. The text was last week’s gospel about the “good shepherd.” Most of the observations that we made were familiar and what I would have expected. But towards the end one of the students described what God seemed to be telling her from the passage. She said that God needs everyone, especially the least of us. She said all of us fall short and are inadequate in some way or another, but the Good Shepherd needs everyone and especially the least likely.
And I was stunned. I smiled inside and I gave thanks, because while I believed with all my heart what that student said, I had never heard it through that text. And I thought, “There you are again, God. Speaking through what I wasn’t expecting.”
The lesson for me this week has been trying to open up to a new way of hearing that word “abide.” I have been so accustomed to hearing this passage about what I need to do, how I need to live my life, that the pruning I feel in my life is for my own good. These are all things that I have heard and read before.
But today I hear it in a new way. I look at the new life springing up around us. I see familiar faces around me that I haven’t seen in a year of covid restrictions. And what I hear in the word “abide” is that we together are the vineyard. That the new life of Resurrection is not aimed at me – it is aimed at all of us. Together we are the Resurrection and the Life.
My decision so many years ago to pursue Christianity, to cultivate it for the sacred and the holy, that Was a decision to “abide” in the vinekeeper. It was a decision to allow the vinekeeper, the gardener, to mold and shape me into the whole vineyard.
It’s been a long season at St. Paul’s and indeed many churches across the globe. It has been an extended season of winter. But winter has ended. The hard ground begins to break apart with the tender green new growth doing the work. Though our voices are yet still weak, we are nevertheless alive. And our message is: Alleluia! Christ is Risen! May we abide in that Alleluia as the Lord of Life abides in us.
Similar: comply with, obey, observe, follow, keep to, hold to, conform to, adhere to, stick to, stand by, act in accordance with, uphold, heed, pay attention to, agree to/with, consent to, accede to, accept, acquiesce in, go along with, acknowledge, respect, defer to Opposite: flout, reject↩︎
No comments:
Post a Comment