ABIDING IN LOVE
A sermon preached by
Rev. Dr. Randle R. (Rick) Mixon
First Baptist Church, Palo Alto, CA
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Text: John 15:1-1; 1 John 4:7-21
“I am the vine, you are the branches.” How often have we heard this beloved metaphor for Christ and the church? How many sermons? How many songs? How many poems? How many carved or painted or woven images have treated this parable? We see it everywhere as a significant symbol in our faith tradition. It is one of several “I am” metaphors that the writer of John uses to tell his audience who Jesus is, what he is like. This text has parallels with last week’s gospel reading, also from John. The Good Shepherd and the True Vine are enduring images of our faith tradition, yet they lose some of their original zing both because they are familiar to us in their repetition and because they are unfamiliar in that we do not live in the same sort of agrarian society inhabited by those who first hearers.
Given the explosion of viniculture all around us, we probably know a little more about vines and vineyards than we do about sheep and shepherds. Many of us could share a word or two about our favorite varietal with hints of blackberry or lemongrass or musky oak. You may have seen more than one cellar in which you observed the wine-making process from beginning to end, from the growing to the harvesting to the crushing, fermenting, bottling, selling and drinking. You may have a standard wine-tasting tour on which you take your visiting friends and relations from Kansas or Mississippi or North Dakota. California wine, as we all know, is unparalleled, but I will tell you that I have driven by extensive vineyards in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, along the Washington side of the Columbia River Gorge and even among hills that slope down to the Snake River in southwestern Idaho. It is a booming business; in some places it is sad to see family farms and old orchards turned over to the more profitable grape-growing enterprise.
So we have seen enough vines twisting up posts and running along attached wires to recognize what the vine, the branches and the fruit look like. We know enough to consider this image Jesus offers as a lovely one, indeed. Driving through the Amador foothills, we have seen the beauty of a gnarled, old growth Zinfandel vine, glistening green in the summer sun or laden with burgundy fruit in an early autumn haze; we know enough to have some appreciation of the metaphor behind this parable.
As we discussed in Bible study last Tuesday, the image of vine is a rich one in Jewish tradition as well, and, in fact, Jesus is drawing on this tradition when he uses this metaphor. Barclay tells us that “Over and over again in the Old Testament, Israel is pictured as the vine or the vineyard of God” (William Barclay, The Daily Study Bible, The Gospel of John, Volume 2, p. 201.) There is undoubtedly a reference in Jesus’ words to this prophecy from the 5th chapter of Isaiah:
Let me sing for my beloved my love-song concerning his vineyard: My beloved had a vineyard on a very fertile hill. He dug it and cleared it of stones, and planted it with choice vines; he built a watchtower in the midst of it, and hewed out a wine vat in it; he expected it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes. And now, inhabitants of Jerusalem and people of Judah, judge between me and my vineyard. What more was there to do for my vineyard that I have not done in it? When I expected it to yield grapes, why did it yield wild grapes? And now I will tell you what I will do to my vineyard. I will remove its hedge, and it shall be devoured; I will break down its wall, and it shall be trampled down. I will make it a waste; it shall not be pruned or hoed, and it shall be overgrown with briers and thorns; I will also command the clouds that they rain no rain upon it. For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel, and the people of Judah are his pleasant planting; he expected justice, but saw bloodshed; righteousness, but heard a cry! (Isaiah 5:1-7)
“I am the true vine,” says Jesus. In other words, “I am the true Israel, the true manifestation of God’s desire and vision for God’s people.” This kind of talk, of course, is what got him in so much trouble with the religious authorities and, finally, executed. These authorities, themselves responsible for God’s vineyard, had failed to understand what God wanted of them. God desired justice and righteousness from her people; instead she received bloodshed and cries of anguish.
Some dimension of the ancient word of judgment still holds in Jesus’ view. In order, for the vine to flourish and bear sweet fruit, it must be pruned. Unhealthy branches, unproductive branches, branches growing inward, twisting around the vine instead of outward toward the light, all need to be cut back for the health of the system. The text says God will do the pruning, but James Alison argues that it really is humanity, it is we who do the pruning, at least in the sense that we self-select whether to be connected to the vine. We choose whether or not to tap into the source of our living. Now, I realize this messes with the metaphor in that actual branches do not have freedom of choice, but no metaphor can carry the entire weight of an argument.
Alison points out that in 1 John the writer says that “God is love, and we all parrot this somewhat easily, which leads to no end of banalities and flights of sentimentalism in our approach to matters religious, except” he says, “when we become all serious and moralistic, and remember that God is just, and punishes, and so on, so we expel and punish as if the Gospel had never been preached. Well, it's not like that” he goes on. “The phrase ‘God is love’ is not one more slogan which we can tack on to the end of other things we know about God, and which we can brandish when we feel like it…the goodness and justice of God have nothing to do with our fatal and expulsive notions of goodness and justice. The perception that God is love has a specific content which is absolutely incompatible with any perception of God as involved in violence, separation, anger or exclusion” (James Alison, Raising Abel: The Recovery of the Eschatological Imagination, p. 48.) That “God is love” leaves no room for “violence, separation, anger or exclusion” and if this is so, it means that these are qualities of our own human devising. They are the bitter fruit of our separation from the vine, of our disconnection from the source of life.
So we have two key concepts that Jesus is trying to enliven through this teaching – to love and to abide. Abide is a sort of old-fashioned word. We don’t use it very much anymore. Still it seems crucial, not only to our understanding of this morning’s gospel reading, but also to understanding what it means to be disciples of Jesus. Abide comes from the Old English and means “to wait for; to endure without yielding; to bear patiently; to accept without objection; to remain stable or fixed in a state; to continue in a place” (Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary.) When I hear it I think of the verb “to dwell.” In selecting songs for today, I thought immediately of the lovely old hymn, sung so often in the past at times of distress and loss: “Abide with me; fast falls the eventide; the darkness deepens, God with me abide; when other helpers fail and comforts flee, Help of the helpless, O abide with me.”
As beautiful and moving as those words are, I don’t think they capture what Jesus means when he speaks of this mutual abiding. Surely safety and comfort and God’s everlasting arms are involved with what Jesus is saying, but the challenge of abiding is much, much more. It really is a word about indwelling, about being rooted and grounded in the source of all being, not only to know comfort but also to know challenge, growth, fulfillment, the true possibilities of being fed and nurtured by the love of God. Hafiz, an ancient Muslim poet wrote, “God said, ‘I am made whole by your life. Each soul, each soul completes me’” (Quoted in Seasons of the Spirit, Congregational Life, Lent, Easter, 2009, p. 113.) And it is true that a vine is actually its roots, trunk and branches altogether so that there is no separate part called the vine. All the parts join to make one entity.
It seems to me that what Jesus is trying to teach those first disciples, and us, is the importance of relating to, being connected to the source of all life. We cannot thrive or even survive if we are cut off from the ground of our being. We need to be connected to God and we need to be connected to each other in the beloved community. But for those first disciples, and for us, this rooting and grounding is not passive. The challenge for us as branches of the true vine is to practice actively spiritual discipline, to pray and study, to search and listen for God’s Word, to focus intentionally on seeking God’s guidance and walking God’s way. “Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit,” Christ says. That is, they find the fulfillment for which they were made. Apart from Christ we can do nothing of real lasting worth; in Christ whatever we ask for will be done for us. Of course, the trick of this saying is that, if we are truly abiding in Christ, we will never ask for or want to ask for anything outside of God’s will and Christ’s way.
“If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love…” Thelma wanted to know if this meant that God’s love is somehow conditional, but I don’t think it is. This is really a statement about where we place ourselves in life. The love itself is constant, abundant, inexhaustible, as Alison and John and Jesus all say. It’s the very essence of God. Abiding in love…what does it look like? The writer of 1 John says it looks a lot like how we treat our sisters and brothers, how we treat one another. He says, “Those who say, ‘I love God,’ and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also” (1 John 4:20-21.)
Abiding in love…what challenges, what possibilities. Maybe we would treat one another more kindly. Maybe we would look for the good, the lovely, the Christ in one another. Maybe we would seek out righteousness and practice justice. Maybe we would care for one another and all creation with the same compassion that Christ brought into the world. Maybe we would grow in fearlessness as love filled every hidden corner of our lives, bringing them into the light of Christ. Maybe the world could yet be turned right side up and we could claim a role. Maybe…well, who knows? “Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them” (1 John 4:7,16b.) Amen.