5EasterB
1 John 4:7-21
John 15:1-8
ABIDING
Is the theme of the day
We heard it in the First letter of John
As well as in the Gospel
ABIDE…ABIDING
What does this mean?
Chapter 15
We are nearing the end of John’s Gospel
This is the farewell discourse
Jesus is saying goodbye
He is preparing the disciples
offering comfort
AND we hear abide
The vine and the branches abide
And in the 1st Letter of John
We are hearing
A distillation
A kind of mission statement for Christian living
Abide
YOU, ME, ABIDE, ABIDING, LOVE, NEIGHBOR
About 10-15 years ago
hype about Mission Statements
Everyone was writing or rewriting mission statements
My old parish spent a whole month crafting a Mission Statement!
Somehow I was on that committee!
What I remember
a study of mission statements.
Turned out that the most successful corporate mission statements
were all under 8 words
And one of the most successful
Was from Disney:
Can you guess?
3 words
MAKE. PEOPLE. HAPPY.
Sounds simple
But in fact
Its tons of work
Takes years
Takes the whole darn organization to live into those words:
Make People Happy
Its simple…but HARD
That’s what is behind this language in the first letter of John
It a kind of mission statement
In verse 1
We love because God loved us first
God loved us into being
So any time we actually do love our brother/sister
Its God’s doing!
The whole abiding thing is working
Its not an automatic
If A then B follows
Not a cause and effect… kind of thing
Its dynamic…organic…not a straight line
More circular
It’s a happening
God’s love
Finds its PERFECTION
Or its COMPELTION
In how we love one another
And this has something to do with ABIDING
I don’t know much about Vineyards
And vinedressers
And pruning for fruitfulness
But I do know that what Jesus is talking about
In the Gospel
Is a promise
He is promising his LIFE to his disciples
And from them to us
I think if there had been such a thing as heart surgery
In the first century
Jesus might have used that image
instead of the whole vine and branches business
How many of you…
Stents, heart valves, Cath Lab, Heart attack???
I thought so;)
… over the past couple of weeks 3 people in my sphere of relationships
Have experienced cardiac events
I bet we are all more familiar with Stents and heart surgery
than we are with vines, vineyards and pruning;).
Being attached to the vine speaks to sharing nutrients…sharing life
But think about those clogged up arteries
Blood is being constricted, cut off
Blood = Life…life blood…
And the surgeon borrows another artery
from a place in the body where it can be spared
And hooks it up to bypass the clog
Like a perimeter highway around a big city
And the heart and the rest of the body
Re-establish their abiding rhythm
What is the beating heart all by itself?
It is perfected
When it reaches our eyes…so we can see
And feet…so we can walk
And hands so we can touch
And muscles so we can embrace
God’s love (the heart of the matter…the vine)
is perfected when it gives life to the body (the branches)
when that body…
when our bodies…
see, walk, touch, embrace
the world lovingly
lovingly…because it is God’s life blood we are talking about
We have a lot of memories stuffed up here
And I have been noticing
That there has been a kind or natural cataloguing going on
The weightier ones seem to get more accessible
And the lighter ones recede until I just can’t recall them at all.
So that when I say
“I just can’t remember anything anymore”
That’s not quite true
Some things…maybe only a few… are becoming very vivid
Mid 70’s Dad story
Looking back now
I can say with some certainty
that this was my parents’ Mission Statement
8 words:
“HERE, home, is a safe/loving/forgiving place”
IT’s simple…but hard.
Maybe part of why this memory is so vivid
Is because I later connected it to my parents faith
and then to mine
After hearing all this Love/God/Abiding business
Over and over again
I began to trust that at the heart of it all
These were mission statements
I wanted to attach myself to
Coming here
Praying these particular prayers
Proclaiming these particular lessons
Singing these particular hymns
Standing together
Forming a body
as we do these things
IT quite literally FEELS
like a mission statement
One that is both simple and hard
God is Love
Abide in that love
Perfecting it…in loving others
Simple and hard
The YOU
in our Gospel reading is plural
We don’t fly solo
We are supported be each other
…and that mysterious body we call the People of God
5 days ago
I got home from Dad’s
That the tables have turned
Its my mission now
…to be a safe, loving, undemanding presence to him as he slips away
Little by little.
It actually felt like he was ABIDING in me.
One way to bring this
Beyond lofty abstraction
Is to ask a few simple questions
Ask ourselves individually and also ask ourselves as a community:
Who will I/We invite into that abiding place…
Who will I/We invite into that best part of myself…that best part of us
That part
That flows with the life of God
The part that rests in the communion of the Holy Spirit
The part nourished by love of neighbor (…by you)
Who will I/we offer safety, and forgiveness, and compassion to
in actions that are the fruit of all that love?
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