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Friday, 30 April 2021

Remain

 

SERMON PREACHED at St MARY’S, OAMARU NORTH

FIFTH SUNDAY IN EASTER (2nd April) 2021

 


Readings

Acts 8:26-40                                

Psalm 22: 25-31

1 John 4:7-21            

John 15: 1-8

 

It was a delight this week to engage in the on-line Gospel Conversations[1] that we are now running – an aid we hope to sermon preparation – and to find my fellow conversationalists there zoning in on two key themes from the seventh and final “I am” saying of Jesus. Perhaps we can mention in passing that seven was a number that often symbolised perfection in Hebrew discourse. Was John carefully suggesting, in his rendition of these sayings, that in them led the path to perfection in Christ? Or to put it a different way, was John saying that by adhering to the immersion, the saturation, the absorption in Christ that Jesus demands, lies the way to completion of our sanctification, our being made Christlike, our being made holy and acceptable to God? I suspect so, but let’s set that aside for a few moments.

Let us set aside, too. for a few moments the letter of John, written perhaps a few but not many years after his Jesus story, the Fourth Gospel. Though as we set it aside we may want to confirm what I suspect we all gleaned, that “love” is an over-arching theme on John’s mind. “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.”

Though funnily enough – and by I suspect John’s careful design – that very verse from John’s later letter takes us to the heart of the Gospel-story John has written. There at the heart of the epistle reading is that other great verb that is at the heart of the “I am the Vine” teaching of Jesus. That verb, which we translate generally either as “abide” or “remain,” is a strong, an emphatic verb. “Remain” is a useful translation insofar as it picks up and echoes the Greek verb “mene,” and the related noun “menō.” The noun refers to a continuous, unfailing presence rather than a fleeting encounter. The verb contains far more of a sense of deliberate intentionality than the English “remain” does. So perhaps “the archaic “abide” is a better English word. To abide is no accident. Jesus is not suggesting we hang around him loosely, like an annoying sandfly, but that we utterly and intentionally attach ourselves to him, like a limpet. Or perhaps like a branch.

But as one of my co-conversationalists reminded us last week, (and if you are reading this online you will find the link below), there is an awful lot about pruning, too, in this Jesus saying. Sadly, as with so many scriptural passages, the Christian community has often turned this Jesus saying into an antagonistic weapon to be fired at perceived enemies of faith. Really it is a word to turn on ourselves, a word by which we, not anyone else, is scrutinized. So many gay friends for example of mine have heard in this verse nothing but accusation, the bitter distortion that says someone would, because of their sexuality, be dismissed to an eternal hell.  Those who peddle that distortion have missed the heart of the teaching themselves. They need to turn the pruning saw of God’s Spirit on the decaying branches of their own faith.

Though let us admit in context that Jesus is describing the pruning of branches from the vine, and the burning of those branches. It sounds an awful lot like the suggestion that there are those beyond the pale of faith, those whose celestial fate is somewhat fiery. There are occasional biblical verses – fewer than some imply – in which this is a core ingredient, that for there to be “the saved” there must be the “unsaved” (neither is a term I use). Yet my homework tells me that the scriptures that focus on this beyond-time fate are written in the face of persecution of the faithful. There they belong. Belief that white oppressors would receive their come-uppance in the future was a source of hope and strength to oppressed slaves in the Deep South of the United States. African-American Spirituals remind us that God hears the cries of the George Floyds, not of the Derek Chauvins. “Nobody knows the trouble I've seen / Nobody knows but Jesus,”[2]  indeed. We are reminded of that even if, the day after the Chauvin’s conviction, 16 year old Ma’Khia Bryant died in an altercation with police. More than 60 people, predominately black or Latino, have died at the hands of US police since Chauvin’s trial began.[3]

There is much to be pruned from us collectively, and much to be pruned from us individually. I’ll leave it to those who live and work with me to speak of all that stands as impediment to my integrity and lovability as a bearer of Christ. But I use the word “lovability” advisedly. For in the passage from John’s epistle we find words based on love appear no fewer than 29 times – getting on for 9% of the words used passage in English alone.[4] Johns’ writings of Jesus are overwhelmingly centred on love. Love is the fruit, though that word is Paul’s, not John’s, that stems from abiding on the Vine. Love is the fruit that is the hall mark of the community that abides in Christ. Love, said the early watchers of Christianity, was the hallmark of the Christian community, “See how Christians love each other” was the response that Tertullian imagined that pagans would have to the Christian community. Whether or not it was true is another matter. Today, sadly, I more often her the phrase used with bitter sarcasm.

Nevertheless love is the sap that flows through the vine to which Jesus commands us to intentionally attach ourselves. To attach ourselves and by discipline – by intentionality – remain attached. When John Lennon infamously wrote “Christ you know it ain’t easy” he probably wasn’t intending it as a prayer. Yet it can be our prayer. We are called to love, and when, we as humans and our neighbours as humans are not totally loveable, that is not an easy calling to uphold. Yet John’s gospel-telling provides the formula. I am the vine, says Jesus. Abide in me. If we work hard at allowing the Spirit, who is called the Comforter or paraclete in John’s gospel-account, to prune, to nip away the unproductive and fruitless aspects of our life and of our communal life, then we become bearers of fruit.

May it be our prayer that as we move into God’s future that we surrender ourselves to the vinedresser so that we can become closer to the sanctified, perfected Christ-bearers, become the fruit that points to, attracts to a living, loving Christ of hope. Can we, by disciplined faith-lives, become bearers of the Christ who transcends all the hopelessness that we see around us? Can we as we abide in him radiate a living, loving Christ of light who transcends all the darkness that we see around us and around our world? May that be our prayer.

 

The Lord be with you.


[4] Marginally lower in the Greek, if you’re interested, albeit by a margin not statistically significant: 8.9% in English (NRSEC Version), 8.8% in Greek!

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