Abiding in the vine: A Sermon for the 5th Sunday of Easter, Year B

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May 5, 2012

Most of you know that my wife is an avid gardener. What you don’t know is that over the years, I have provided most of the sweat and muscle involved in our gardening projects. I’ve made raised beds, moved tons of rock around, planted trees in hard red clay. She’s got a whole list of things for me to do when I get time off again (hopefully, in a couple of weeks). Having done most of our gardening in the south, Corrie is having to learn new things about growing seasons, hardiness zones, what plants will work and what won’t. So azaleas, which are almost ubiquitous in the south, are very rare in Wisconsin, and we hadn’t seen or smelled a lilac in bloom for over fifteen years when we moved back north.

But vines, vines we know about. There’s our experiment with a trumpet vine that we planted in front of a fence near our house. It tripled in size in one year, and by the third year, we realized we had to get rid of it before it attacked the house, foundation and the entire neighborhood. We dug up what we could and surreptitiously put it out on a railroad bed. We continued to dig up roots and suckers from that vine for the next two years, when we moved north.

Still, when one thinks of vines in the south, one thinks of kudzu. We happened to live in the area where kudzu was first introduced after the Civil War to help with soil erosion. What a mistake that was! It grew on anything, and took over everything. We used to see along side the road small areas , test plots introduced by the kudzu eradication project, in which they tried various means of eradicating or limiting the growth of the noxious vine. Some years ago, the city of Chattanooga experimented by buying some goats to try to keep the kudzu suppressed on steep hillsides.

Now, Jesus is not talking about kudzu when he says, “I am the vine, you are the branches.” Like the images of sheep and shepherd we heard last week, the vineyard is a theme with deep resonances in the biblical tradition. In the Hebrew Bible, the vineyard often symbolizes the people of Israel but here it is taken in a new direction. Coupled with another Johannine emphasis, “abiding,” the figure of speech used here, Jesus as the vine, his followers as the branches, stresses the relational aspect of life in Christ.

The language can seem violent, even terrifying; as anyone who has had to root out a vine knows. To cut the branches and tendrils of a vine means killing those branches, and often one needs considerable effort to extract the vine from the trees or trellises or walls on which it is growing. On the other hand, as any gardener knows, pruning is often necessary, not just to make sure the plant grows in the shape and direction desired, but in order to ensure its robust growth, and to ensure that it will bear fruit. An unpruned fruit tree, an unpruned grape vine will provide little fruit.

So too with our life in Christ. When Jesus describes himself as the vine, and the Father as the vinegrower, and speaks about the vinegrowers actions’ to prune the branches in order to ensure an abundant harvest, he is reminding us that we cannot live abundantly without him. The branches that are pruned from the vine wither and die; the vine itself thrives.

Throughout the gospel of John, the gospel writer uses imagery of “abiding” to describe the life we share in Christ. It’s an odd word, and its use in this reading obscures how common it is in the gospel as well as in John’s letter. Every time we see the words “staying” or “remaining,” it is worth remembering that the same Greek word underlies those translations as well as “abiding.”

In fact, the theme of abiding appears first in the very first chapter of John. When Philip and Andrew follow Jesus, he asks them, “what are you looking for?” They reply, “where are you staying?” Jesus tells them, “Come and see.” The gospel writer then tells us, “they stayed with him all day.” It was by staying with him, by abiding with him, that they came to know him.

Of course, it’s not just about getting to know who Jesus Christ is. Abiding means much more than that. It means living, thriving in that relationship, gaining strength and life in it. We may think that when Jesus is talking here, that he is describing a personal relationship between himself and you or I, but it’s more than that, too. The “you” in this passage is always plural. The relationships that Jesus models for us, is not a relationship between two people. It’s Trinitarian, the relationship, the community of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Our relationship with Christ is a relationship lived in, experienced, shared, in community. We abide in Christ, and he abides in us, when we abide together in love.

Today’s reading from I John stresses this point. Love, the author says is from God. God is love. But again, this is not some hazy, Hallmark sentimentality. It’s much deeper and stronger than that. Whoever loves, knows God. But love is perfected and fully experienced only in community. We are urged not only to love God, but to love one another, because love comes from God. Loving and abiding are related to one another. Whoever abides in God loves and is loved by God. This may seem abstract, but it’s not, for we know and experience God’s love first and foremost through the Son whom he sent to us, to love us. We know and experience God’s love above all in Christ’s gift of himself to the world on the cross. It’s that love that we know and are called to share with others.

I’ve used the image of “hanging out” to describe what Philip and Andrew did with Jesus on the day they met him. They stayed with him, hung out with him. And it’s easy for us to imagine our life in community with Christ in just those terms, as a passive experience, in which time passes unnoticed, people simply enjoying time spent together. But the image of vine and branches reminds us that it is more than that—abundant life in Christ means bearing fruit, expressing that love by sharing it with others and offering them nourishment from the same vine through which we are nourished.

The language of John’s gospel often leads us to imagine that Christian community is intensely focused internally, on the love  within the community, and the community’s love for God. As Jesus says at the last Supper: “Love one another as I have loved you.” But he goes on to say something else—“by this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” There’s a sense in which the commandment to love one’s neighbor, and one’s enemy, becomes in John, the commandment to love within the community.

But that’s misleading at best, for the love shared in community becomes a means for outreach. Abiding in God’s love does offer a witness to the world. Many of you know that we are about to embark on a process to think about how we might renovate and adapt our space. Although the process has begun with the Aesthetics committee, this is not primarily about how things look. Rather, it’s about mission and ministry. The question we have to ask ourselves is how can we adapt our space to the mission needs of our congregation? How can we make our space sacred space, not just for ourselves, for the community that worships here, but for our neighborhood, even the city? How can we make it a place where all can experience the love of Christ, where all might find it a place to abide in God?

On Sundays, we open our doors, inviting people in, but our building, our community must also be a place where God’s abiding love breaks out of these walls and enters the world, a place where our abiding love in God is experienced on the sidewalks and street corners, as well as in our worship and fellowship. If we abide in God’s love, if we are branches of the vine, we will bear fruit that will nourish the world.

Murders in the parish–Mission, Ministry and security

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My hearts and prayers go out to the families of the victims of the shootings at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Ellicott City, Md. The shooter is dead from a self-inflicted wound; the administrative assistant, Brenda Brewington is dead; the co-rector, Mary-Marguerite Kohn, remains on life support “to support the family intentions to provide the gift of life through organ donation.” More here.

It turns out the shooter was known to the parish, that he had accessed the parish’s food bank regularly, and that he had become belligerent in recent weeks.

It’s a shocking story, and it hits very close to home, given our own food pantry, the presence of the men’s drop-in shelter at Grace, and our regular traffic of homeless people in and out of doors.

I hate the security measures we have to take. I hate that it seems like we are a medium-security prison, that to meet me in my office, a visitor has to pass through at least three locked doors. I’ve preached about the message that level of security sends to people; I’ve preached about the mentality it creates in our staff and volunteers. And then I read this story.

We live in a dangerous world, with easy access to firearms and severely mentally ill people walking the streets. At the same time, our Savior calls us to minister among the homeless, hungry, and yes, the mentally ill. We want to open our doors and invite everyone in, never imagining that a horror like that perpetrated at St. Peter’s, Endicott City might strike us.

On Monday night, we will again welcome shelter guests and community residents to our Guild Hall for dinner and music. I will wonder, as I welcome them in, whether any of them might be capable of such heinous acts of violence.

Torture’s back in the news, and in our culture

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A 60 Minutes interview with Jose Rodriguez in which he defends the use of torture has largely passed unnoticed by the mainstream media. But Andrew Sullivan continues to force us to pay attention to crimes perpetrated in the name of the US.

Here’s Sullivan on why Rodriguez destroyed tapes of torture interviews:

watching live-action tapes of waterboarding would have brought the reality of torture – and the rank incompetence and brutality of the torturers – into stark relief. It would have destroyed any remnants of Bush’s and Cheney’s reputation and America’s moral standing in the world. It would have forced the American people to realize that their leaders really were and are war criminals.

Sullivan on the 60 Minutes interview itself, quoting Lesley Stahl: “we used to think waterboarding was a war crime.” Yes we did, when the Nazis and Khmer Rouge did it. Moral people think its a war crime when Americans do it, too.

And the argument that torture helped to get evidence used in the assassination of Osama Bin Laden is also refuted by the CIA and by members of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

The investigation by Democratic members of the Senate Intelligence Committee (The Republicans wouldn’t participate) has concluded “there’s little evidence that our so-called enhanced interrogation techniques produced key intelligence.”

Robert de Neufville comments:

We should not continue to look the other way. We may no longer be torturing people. But now we have established a precedent that we can torture with impunity. Torture doesn’t work, but if we aren’t honest with ourselves about it, we will inevitably torture again.

Greg Sargent wonders whether a President Romney would reverse Obama’s executive order forbidding its use.

Torture In the Game of Thrones: http://prospect.org/article/blood-and-guts-and-fluff

I raise the issue of torture regularly because it is a religious issue.

William Cavanaugh, the author of the brilliant Torture and the Eucharist has this to say about torture:

Torture is a part of the Christian past. From a Catholic point of view, the Church does indeed have penance to do for the Inquisition. But how? I propose that the way to do penance for the Inquisition is to speak out and resist torture as it is practiced now.

The examination of conscience that would precede such penance would require rejection of the many ways that we try to distance ourselves from realization of our own sins. Chief among these in this case is the attempt to put distance between ourselves and torture by relegating it to the past or to the remote Other. Confession of our sin would require not simply the admission that torture has been done in our name, but the confession that only God is God, and not any nation-state that claims to save us from evil.

Christians worship a God who was tortured to death by the Empire. It is this God who saves by saying “no” to violence on the cross. Our penance, then, would take the form of resisting the idolatry of nation and state and its attendant violence.

 

You never know what you might find in an old book

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When I was a student at Harvard Divinity School, one of my work study jobs was cataloging ephemera, a vast array of sermons, pamphlets, and other printed material chronicling the religious history of New England in eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries. There were sermons preached on Fast Days, sermons preached to the Ancient and Honourable Artillery Company, sermons preached on the death of Washington, and on the deaths, of well, pretty much anyone. We noted titles, joked about them from time to time, and occasionally were interested enough in a document to leaf through it or even read it.

There’s a charming story in the New York Times about a lowly minion working in the library of Brown University, who discovered a print by Paul Revere. The story is fun, and here’s the print:

It had probably been in the book for two centuries, never noticed, because no one was interested in the book’s contents.

Speaking of libraries, and especially of rare book libraries, they’ve isolated the smell that collections of old books create. Perhaps they’ll come up with a cologne and market it to librarians, archivists, and historians.

LGBT inclusion in American Christianity

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While The Episcopal Church continues to struggle toward full inclusion of LGBT Christians, other denominations do as well. The United Methodist General Conference voted down by 61% to 39% a proposal to drop language from its Book of Discipline that reads:

“The United Methodist Church does not condone the practice of homosexuality and considers this practice incompatible with Christian teaching.”

One reason for the lopsided vote is that United Methodist General Conference includes delegates from other United Methodist conferences throughout the world. More here.

Meanwhile, Billy Graham has put his stamp of approval on the proposed North Carolina Amendment 1, that would enshrine discrimination against LGBT citizens in the state’s constitution.

 

Revisionist History: The Anglican world marks 350 years of the Book of Common Prayer

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Who wrote that headline? Sure, it’s the 350th anniversary of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, but there were several others before it: 1549, 1552, 1559; and The Episcopal Church’s BCP is more dependent on that of the Scottish Episcopal Church than the 1662; which is why those documents that claim the 1662 Book of Common Prayer is shared by all Anglicans is just wrong.

The “genius” of the Book of Common Prayer is not in the 1662 edition, but in the work of Thomas Cranmer who was largely responsible for the 1549 and 1552 versions and in the 1559 book that tried to balance the more Protestant and Catholic tendencies of the two earlier ones.

Roger Ebert on the “Ten Best Films of All Time”

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Every decade, Sight and Sound polls critics and directors for their list.

Here’s what Ebert had to say before selecting his 2012 list.

Here’s what he has to say about how he ended up voting in 2012.

Here’s how he voted:

Aguirre, Wrath of God (Herzog)
Apocalypse Now (Coppola)
Citizen Kane (Welles)
La Dolce Vita (Fellini)
The General (Keaton)
Raging Bull (Scorsese)
2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick)
Tokyo Story (Ozu)
The Tree of Life (Malick)
Vertigo (Hitchcock)

Pretty good list, I would say, but I’ve never understood people’s preference for Vertigo among Hitchcock’s films.

How can I [understand] unless someone guides me? Reflections on the Lectionary for the Fifth Sunday of Easter

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This week’s readings are here.

The Acts reading (Acts 8:26-40), the story of Philip and the Ethiopian Eunuch, is one of the great stories in scripture. Philip is one of the men who was selected as a deacon to serve the hellenistic community (his name is of Greek origin). He had gone to Samaria, where his preaching met with great success (Acts 8: 4-8), but now an angel of the Lord takes him away into the wilderness. Here he comes upon an Ethiopian official who has been in Jerusalem to worship. As a Gentile, he was an outsider, but as a eunuch he could not participate in temple worship. He is reading from Isaiah, but can’t understand it. Philip helps him, and suddenly, miraculously, they come upon some water in the wilderness, and the eunuch asks, “What prevents me from being baptized?”

This is one of a series of conversion stories in Acts (Paul, Cornelius the centurion follow this one) in which the Holy Spirit works to transform individuals and also to transform the community of those who follow Jesus Christ. The group of disciples, Galileean followers of Jesus, is expanding to include members from other religious and ethnic groups and in so doing, the commandment to spread the gospel to all the nations is already being fulfilled.

But there’s more. What prevented the eunuch from being baptized? Well, all of the Jewish laws of purity did. As a eunuch, he was by definition outside the holy community; he could not approach the altar or even enter the temple (Deuteronomy 23:1). But nothing prevented him from being baptized, and so Philip did.

There are at least two important issues raised by this text. The first, of course, is that of inclusion. We see hear the expansion of the Gospel, and of the Christian community far beyond its original Jewish and Jerusalem setting. Philip, a Greek or at least Hellenist, preaches first in Samaria, then converts an Ethiopian eunuch–it’s difficult to imagine a figure more exotic, more other, more non-Jewish than that.

But there’s another theme that I find equally compelling. The eunuch is reading scripture and can make no sense of it. He needs help, and Philip provides or explains it to him. We often assume that the sense of scripture is clear, indisputable, and available to anyone who can read, or can hear it being read. But it’s not. Reading and interpreting scripture requires the help of others, of a tradition, of a community in which that scripture is a living organism, and in which the community wrestles with its meaning in a particular historical and cultural context. Philip helped the eunuch understand, and by understanding, the eunuch came to request baptism.

Bad Religion: Bad Theology (on Ross Douthat)

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Ross Douthat’s book Bad Religion has received considerable attention. Having read a number of reviews, I don’t think I’ll bother reading it. From all accounts, his historical retelling of American religious history is full of errors, and his understanding of “orthodox” Christianity is equally mistake-ridden. First, from the camp of his supporters:

Alan Jacobs writes here:

If you’re a Christian, it’s tempting to say (drawing on the Perfidious-Mainstream-Media account) that we were forced into these subaltern modes by the relentless hostility of the cultural elites. That’s a very comforting narrative: we get to cast ourselves as the persecuted minority, and who can resist that temptation? Ross is offering a less consoling explanation: that Christians lost their cultural influence in large part because they lost their connection to historic orthodoxy, preferring comfortably flaccid theologies — of the Right and the Left — that were pretty much indistinguishable from what most religiously indifferent Americans believed anyway.

So for those readers especially hostile to Ross’s account, I have a queston: Are you sure it’s not because he’s telling you something you don’t want to hear? — That if you have a marginal place in American culture, the situation may be largely your own fault?

Now from those who find his perspective inadequate. The Catholic author, Michael Sean Winters writes in the The New Republic. He begins:

ROSS DOUTHAT’S ANALYSIS of religion in America is more sophisticated than the analysis of, say, Rick Santorum—but not by much. There are many ways to be simplistic and coarse. In contending against what he sees as an America afflicted with too many heresies, Douthat’s book, like Santorum’s speeches, is riddled with mistakes of fact and interpretation that would make any learned person blush.

And he concludes:

My problem with Douthat’s book is not that his opinions differ from my own. My problem is that he does not seem to have any idea what he is talking about. In the West, there has been no universally accepted authoritative voice on orthodoxy since the Reformation. “What am I to do when many persons allege different interpretations, each one of whom swears to have the Spirit?” asked Erasmus in 1524. But Douthat does not see the larger picture that he aims to explain, and his treatment of his subject is so pitifully mistaken in things large and small that what we are left with is a meandering, self-serving screed. The book has the same reliance on private judgment that anyone who was really concerned with heresy would recognize as part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Randall Balmer’s review is here. Ballmer is an Episcopal priest and a prominent scholar of American religious history. He points out weaknesses in Douthat’s argument, and the numerous factual errors (as well as several egregious errors of interpretation). Ballmer writes:

Although Douthat’s grasp of American religious history is sometimes tenuous — he misdates the Second Great Awakening, mistakes Puritans for Pilgrims and erroneously traces the disaffection of American Catholics to the Second Vatican Council rather than the papal encyclical “Humanae Vitae” — there is much to commend his argument. Yes, the indexes of religious adherence are down, and the quality of religious discourse in America has diminished since the 1950s, in part because of the preference for therapy over theology. Theological illiteracy is appalling; many theologians, like academics generally, prefer to speak to one another rather than engage the public.

But the glass-is-half-full approach, to borrow from the famous Peace Corps ad of this era, looks rather different. I’m not sure that the enervation of religion as institution since the 1950s is entirely a bad thing; institutions, in my experience, are remarkably poor vessels for piety. An alternative reading of the liberal “accommodationists” Douthat so reviles is that they have enough confidence in the relevance and integrity of the faith to confront, however imperfectly, such fraught issues as women’s ordination and homosexuality rather than allow them to fester as they have for centuries. I suspect, moreover, that Douthat has overestimated the influence of intellectual trends like the Jesus Seminar. The thinkers he quotes are important, but I would also recommend the lesser-known work of writers like Roger Olson, Jean Sulivan, Doug Frank, Miroslav Volf and David James Duncan as evidence of the vitality of Christian thinking; they may occasionally poke provocatively at the edges of orthodoxy, but most do so from well within its frame. Finally, the fact that we are having this conversation at all (much less in the pages of this newspaper) is testament to the enduring relevance of faith in what sociologists long ago predicted would be a secular society.

Like any good jeremiad, “Bad Religion” concludes with what evangelicals would recognize as an altar call. Douthat invites readers to entertain “the possibility that Christianity might be an inheritance rather than a burden,” and he elevates such eclectic phenomena as home schooling, third-world Christianity and the Latin Mass as sources for renewal.

Religion in the rearview mirror never looked better.

An hour-long video conversation between Douthat and Andrew Sullivan: