6 May 2012 at Saint Mark the Evangelist in Norman, OK
Acts 9: 14, 26-31 + Psalm 22 + 1 John 3: 18-24 + John 15: 1-8
In 1863 Edward Everett Hale publishsed a short story in The Atlantic. The story is an allegory about the upheaval of the American Civil War and was meant to promote the cause of the Union against the priority of individual states. In the story, an army lieutenant named Philip Nolan is tried for treason as an accomplice of Aaron Burr. In the trial during his testimony, he bitterly renounces his nation, cursing the nation, and wishing he would never hear of his country again. Upon his convition, the judge grants him that wish, and he spends the rest of his life aboard Navy warkships, in exile with no right ever again to set foot on U.S. soil and explicit orders that no one should ever mention his country to him again. The sentence is carried out to the letter. He is moved from ship to ship, and no one in charge of him speaks to him about the U.S. Even his newspapers are censord. Unrepentant at first, he becomse sadder and wiser over the years and desperate for news. Deprived of a homeland, he slowly and painfully learns the true worth of his country. He misses it more than friends and family, more than music or love or nature. Without it, he knows he is nothing.
I think of that short-story when I hear Jesus saying: “Remain in me.” For as independent as we all like to think we are, as human beings we desperately need to belong. Broken families in disfunctional neighborhoods breed gangs. Desperate victims of injustice band together with others who are angry and helpless making terrorist cells. To this deep human need Jesus speaks. Over forty times in John’s Gospel this word appears. In English it appears in slightly different ways even though it is the same in the original language: “abide”, “stay”, “remain” are the mosts often used, but they all translate the same wish, the same desire, the same hope. “Stay” is perhaps for us today the most powerful. “Stay.” says Jesus to us.
When the apostles first meet Jesus, he asks them: “What are you looking for?” They respond: “Where do you stay?” They were not asking for his address. They wanted to know where his roots were, what anchored him so solidly, what gave him such vision and peace, and how he came to have such confidence and purpose. With another story in John’s Gospel, people brought to Jesus by the Samaritan woman “stay” with him for two days. Discipleshhip in John’s Gospel means staying with Jesus, abiding in him, or as we hear it spoken today: “remaining” in him walking the walk of his life all ending in the symbol of the vine.
There is a vine growing on a fence over at the rectory, and I took a close look at it as I was reflecting on this gospel. It is a curious thing. Unlike a tree with a trunk and obvious branches, there is not such a clear distinction between the vine and the branches. I could not distinguish one branch from the vine. The whole vine is the branhes at which point the symbol becomes obvious. The disciples become the master. The branches are the vine. The oneness he seeks with us is that complete.
Take note that Jesus says: “I am the vine.” He does not say: “I am like a vine.” There is something more essential being said here. There is something more to do with our very being, our identity, our purpose or calling. This is not about being “like” something, it is about actually “being” something. No imitation, no acting like, not even any “trying”. It is a call to a new kind of existence, a new identity, a new way of being, living, thinking, seeing, and believing!
“Remain”, “Stay”, says Jesus to us today. It is a plea, and an invitation to enter into a relationship, a friendship, a bond that is life-giving, and lasting. As the text continues next week, we are drawn deeper into an understanding of what Jesus offers and asks of us: a loving friendship in which one is willing to die for the sake of the other. This is not a fanatical kind of self-martyrdom motivated out of anger or hatred for an enemy; but pure love that generates more pure love.
Staying with, or remaining with Jesus is both a personal experience and a communal one. Thos who know Jesus, those who have explored, accepted, and lived in an ongoing and real friendship with this risen one are then drawn together through that relationship to become what we have called: “Church.” I am coming to believe that those who do not remain as church have not yet found their identity and their made their frindship with Christ. Being “Spiritual”, is not being “Church.” Being spiritual is a individual’s effort to find their identity outside the vine, and sooner or later, it fails or dies. The individualism of this day is but the latest way of trying to find life away from the vine, apart from Christ who is revealed, living within and the very reality of “Church” itself: the Body of Christ.
Hear him today speak to us all once more in this Easter Season: “Remain in me.” We cannot remain in this world and be of this world. We are the branches of this vine, and apart from this vine, we can do nothing, we will be nothing, and we will have nothing.