This sermon was delivered at the St. Matthew’s Evening Service on 4/29. The readings we used were the lectionary appointed epistle (1 John 4:7-21) and gospel (the Gospel of John 15:1-8). You can read them here.
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In the name of the One God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—Mother of us all, Amen.
The Spiritual Practice that we are using this Easter is called lectio divinia—where we pray on scripture, reading a passage until something ‘shimmers’, or stands out to us, or sits with us in a wondering type of way. Then we use that word or phrase as a prayer to open ourselves up to God.
In the context of John, and his verbose writing style, I wonder if there might be another reason to choose a word or phrase—and that is, if a word is used so many times in a passage that it is almost nauseating—then maybe we should focus on that.
Love is certainly one of those words here, but the word that caught me the most was Abide.
The greek word here is the verb menó. And it has been translated as everything from to remain, to live, to await, to continue, to endure, to last, to live, to dwell—and lastly, to abide. (See Strong’s Concordance)
There is a sense of connection, of longevity, of consequence and purpose. I might try to describe the word ‘as making a home within’.
When John says that God abides in us, or that we abide in love, he is describing a promise that God has made to make a home within us, and an invitation that we have to make a home within God.
The Gospel of John, from which we read the parable of the vine and the vine grower, and the First Letter of John, from which we heard a whole lot about love abiding, come out of the same community of early Christians, who followed the tradition passed down to them by John the son of Zebedee.
First John was composed to address an early split in the community. In describing how some were failing to follow Jesus, it left a beautiful discourse on what it really meant to follow Jesus, and who God is in relation to us.
In it, we hear:
“No one has ever seen God; if we love one another—God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.”
“God is love, and those who abide in love, abide in God, and God abides in them.”
“The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.”
The author of this letter wants us to understand that in our communal life, God is made manifest—that even if we don’t see God running around, working miracles, flattening mountains, or protecting us at all times—that God is alive in us, and that the love that we show each other is from God, our link to God, even God himself. That God has made a home within us.
Richard Rohr calls this spark of God within us the “true self.”
He says: You (and every other created thing) begin with your own divine DNA, an inner destiny as it were, an absolute core that knows the truth about you, a true believer tucked away in the cellar of your being, the image of God that begs to be allowed, to be fulfilled, and to show itself. [Read the Full Quote]
He says that sin isn’t an action against God, but rather the “symptoms of the illusion that we are separated from God”—anything that tells us that we aren’t of God, not based in love, that is illusion. It is the false self—it isn’t real.
When Jesus tells us that he is the vine, and we are the branches, a key part of this parable is that the branches originate in the vine.
We aren’t birds making a house in the vine, we are growing out of the vine—it is already within us.
And–then there’s that business about clipping off branches and throwing them into the fire.
What are we to make of two passages, right next to each other, that say “God is Love” and “God’s going to chop you off and burn you if you can’t bear fruit?” Certainly, these seem to be contradicting premises.
Again, I come back to Richard Rohr, and the true self.
And I wonder if, at some point in your life, you have known what it was like when the false self was in charge.
I wonder if you, at some point in your life, or even now, have heard the voice of the inner critic, that tells you that who you really are is unacceptable, unlovable, even by God.
Perhaps that voice tells you that if God was going around chopping people off the vine, you would be the first to go.
And I want you to imagine that vine grower, with his pruning sheers, taking that false self of yours, and cutting you free from it.
I want you to imagine God clipping away the voice that says that you’re not of God, that you’re not in possession of the divine spark, or that you aren’t worthy of living through the vine. That isn’t real.
The vine grew us—we all belong in it, and the vine grower is tending us, cutting away the pieces of ourselves that are not expressive of our true selves.
Perhaps—that vinegrower is not going around destroying whole people who can’t produce miracles of faith, but rather going around and clipping away the pieces of our severed selves that cannot believe we are loved, who cannot live out of our true selves in community. That vine grower is setting us free from what makes us believe that we are broken.
It’s hard to control the inner critic, hard to silence the voice that says that we are never enough—perhaps this is a story of God helping us with that task.
It isn’t that God is chopping off everything that isn’t exactly the right kind of Christian, but rather, that in our lives what we want is to love and be loved, to care for one another, to be set free from fear, and trouble, and brokenness.
And the vine grower is our partner in this, because to love and to be loved is to be of God.
The vine grower helps us to sever the false self from the true self, because the true self dwells, lives, remains, persists–abides in God.
