Sermon (Fr. Peay) April 29, 2018

St. John Chrysostom Episcopal Church – Delafield, Wisconsin

Fifth Sunday of Easter – April 29, 2018

V. Rev. Steven A. Peay, Ph.D.

[texts: 1 John 4:7-21/John 15:1-8]

“I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing. . . . If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples.””

            At the turn of the last century the South African clergyman and spiritual writer Andrew Murray observed, “During the life of Jesus on earth, the word He chiefly used when speaking of the relations of the disciples to Himself was: ‘Follow me.’ When about to leave for heaven, He gave them a new word, in which their more intimate and spiritual union with Himself in glory should be expressed. That chosen word was ‘Abide in me.’ It is to be feared that there are many earnest followers of Jesus from whom the meaning of this word, with the blessed experience it promises, is very much hidden. While trusting in their Savior for pardon and for help, and seeking to some extent to obey Him, they have hardly realised to what closeness of union, to what intimacy of fellowship, to what wondrous oneness of life and interest, He invited them when He said, ‘Abide in me.’ This is not only an unspeakable loss to themselves, but the Church and the world suffers in what they lose.” [Daily Thoughts on Holiness] Ever since I came across Murray’s words I have thought about what he said, especially about the possibilities Christ-followers, the Church, and the world lose because we have not actualized the gift Christ offers to us. As I see the state of the churches I think that, like so many other things, we’ve not learned the lesson God wants us to learn and so our lives are so much less than what they could be or were meant to be.

            The text of John chapter fifteen is a lesson in what it means to abide in God and God’s love through Christ. The reading today uses an organic metaphor to introduce us to abiding in Jesus. So in verses one to the beginning of verse five Jesus sets the stage with the vine (Jesus), the vine-dresser (God the Father) and the branches (us). In the second part of verse five through verse eight we learn the results of abiding – bearing fruit and giving glory to the Father – or not abiding in love. Now we’re brought to what this abiding really means. We move from need, to fruit, and in these eight verses, we come to understand love and the ultimate show of abiding – loving one another, living out the commandment to love as Jesus has, so Jesus’ joy may be in us and our joy may be complete.

            What John does in this text is to reflect on the oneness, the unity, between the Father and Jesus. At the core is the use of the verb menein, to remain or abide. To abide means to dwell, to remain in a place. In the Hebrew scripture this word is used of God’s promise and counsel – it abides, that is, it isn’t transitory or changing. The New Testament builds on this concept of God’s immutability and John particularly stresses the new level of immanence – the word, by the way, is formed from the Latin equivalent of menein and its root is the word for dwelling or house (manse, mansion) – so there is also a new level of intimacy brought by Christ to the believer.

            Jesus is saying, “live in me,” “dwell in me,” “be at home in me.” This is a powerful invitation to relationship, one that Julian of Norwich mirrors in the following passage from her Showings of Divine Love. “Also in this he showed me a little thing the quantity of a hazelnut in the palm of my hand, and it was as round as a ball. I looked thereupon with the eye of my understanding and thought, ‘What may this be?’ And it was generally answered thus, ‘It is all that is made.’ I marveled how it might last for I thought it might suddenly have fallen to nought for littleness. And I was answered in my understanding, “It lasts and ever shall, for God loves it.” And so all things have their being by the love of God.” [Showing of Love Julian Bolton Holloway, translator, p. 8-9] Here we see the ‘oneing’ that Julian celebrates throughout her touching, wonderfully profound and fruitful book.

            As she contemplates this wonder of all creation she comes to understand something else, there are three proprieties to it. “In this little thing I saw three properties: The first is that God made it; The second that God loves it; The third that God keeps it. But what is this to me, truly, the Maker, the Keeper, and the Lover, I cannot tell. For, till I am substantially oned to him I may never have full rest, nor true bliss; that is to say until I be so fastened to him, that there be right nought that is made between my God and me.” [p. 9]  The remarkable thing is that these are the properties of creation – not external to it – so all that is is because of God. We are to abide in God because it is that abiding which gives us life and, as Julian says, we will never know full rest nor true bliss until there is NOTHING between our God and ourselves. Note, too, that the Maker, Lover, and Keeper corresponds to the economic concept of the Trinity, so all of creation reflects the life of the One God in Three persons who makes, loves, and sustains the world and all that is in it.

            Jesus says, “Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me.” The follower of Jesus is thus to become an “abider,” a resident, if you will, who sets-up housekeeping in God’s love shown forth in Jesus’ life and teaching. So, a disciple abiding in love does something as Jesus does something to show his abiding in the Father. Jesus lives his life in conformity to the will of the Father in unselfish, loving service and this love is what witnesses to the Father. He bears fruit – the fruit of LOVE. Love, then, is the action; love that is self-giving, other-focused and which builds-up and reconciles. Jesus lives this love and the Father is glorified in that living. The harvest is rich.

            As Murray pointed out, many Christians get stuck at the point of “belief,” They give an assent to what they see as Jesus’ teaching, but don’t move to that next level, which someone called “beloving.” This is the point being made in the Epistle lesson, “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them...We love because he first loved us. 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.” Believing leads to beloving and beloving leads to behaving. If we have taken up residence in God’s love it’s simply going to show in our actions and in our attitudes. We can’t love God and act in a hateful manner at the same time – they are simply mutual inconsistent.

            I know it’s easy to say we should do this and that the hard part is the “how.” To my mind we come to abide in Christ and keep his commandment of love by doing three things: by study, by prayer, and by service.  We learn to abide by dwelling, remaining, in the teaching Jesus and his followers have left us – study. The “oneing” Julian talks about is the abiding of the gospel text and the goal of prayer. In prayer, she says, “our will should be turned, rejoicing, into the will of our Lord.” As she says, “the fruit and the end of our prayer is to be one and love our Lord in all things.”

            Third, we come to abide in Christ’s love through service. It is only natural that once we’ve studied and prayed that we do something – study and prayer give rise to action. Service can take on many forms, including our attendance in worship (“divine service”), seeing to the needs of the poor and less fortunate, and ministering to others’ spiritual needs. If we want to keep the fabric of our lives together growing and flourishing then all of us have to help – and not look for “ways out” when someone is calling us to ask us to do something. The list of potential means of service is endless, what’s important is for us to remember that all of our life is to reflect God’s glory. Our chief service is to live as a child of God, as part of the people of God. Whenever we act as a child of God we’re showing forth service.

            Our coming to abide reflects what Julian saw as the making, loving and keeping of the world by God. We come to abide by study – making, by prayer – loving, and by service – keeping. If we do these things we will, over time, come to experience the wonder of what it means to dwell in God and to be “oned” with God. To know, as Julian said, “to be so fastened to him that there is nought/nothing between my God and me.” Being oned with God is coming to the fullness of awareness that God indeed dwells within us and we in God.

            Today we conclude with a little prayer of Julian’s. Pray with me, please: “God, of Thy goodness, give me Thyself, for only in Thee have I all. Amen.”

Sermon (Fr. Cunningham) April 29, 2018

If you have ever heard a sermon from someone who was in seminary you may have noticed something in his or her sermon.  And the something was that they were not content with telling you one bit of information that they had learned in seminary, but rather wanted to tell you everything that they had learned in seminary.  I can honestly say that I never gave one of these sermons, not because of any great virtue of my own, but rather because my wife always reads my sermons and makes me remove any item that is not directly related to whatever was my theme that week.  Anyway, that floated around in my head a bit today as I read the text from our Gospel; largely because I had so many things I wanted to say about it, that I finally had to realize that if I did, this sermon would be a sprawling mess.  So let’s try and narrow it down a bit.  In the interest of transparency and so that you can grade me on whether or not I wander too far afield, let me tell you my theme which is this: The necessity of both us as individuals and the church in general to abandon those things which are not producing good fruit and focus our energy on that which is.

            So let’s start with a little background.  In the poetical devices that Jesus uses, there are lots of agricultural ones.  I am probably missing something, but broadly speaking I would put these agricultural devices into two categories.  The first ones have to do with growth and are things like the parables of mustard seeds, the spreading of seeds on various soils, the planting of vineyards and so on.  The others are those like what we have today which are stories of pruning.  Jesus says today, “[God] removes every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit.”  So agriculturally speaking we have stories of growing and stories of shrinking or pruning.  Now, if I was ranking popularity of these stories, at least in our day and age, I would say that stories of growth are far more popular than stories of pruning.  If you don’t believe me do this experiment, type the phrase “church growth” into Amazon and then type in the phrase “church pruning.”  Actually I will save you some time.  Amazon happily reported to me that “church growth” netted over 20,000 results whereas “church pruning” gave me 16 (that’s 16 as in 8+8).  Church Growth is pretty popular – I mean for some more perspective I typed in the Kardashians and only got 7,000 results.  And yet there it is – pruning is part of who we are as Christians.  And by extension what the Church is called to do.  But what does it mean to prune and why is it not really very popular?

            Let’s start with the popularity question.  Broadly speaking I think the answer to why pruning is less popular is that growth is fun and exciting.  We like our net worth to grow, our friendships to grow, our opportunities to grow and so on.  Outside of our waistline and growth that is modified by the word malignant, growing is generally something that we like.  And on a more existentialist plane, growing generally requires less introspection.  Which leads directly to the reason why pruning is not all that popular:  it is often not fun or at least not all that exciting.  Pruning, in practicality, means getting rid of parts of our personality and of our habits.  It requires us to part with things that while not healthy, are still part of who we are.  The things that require pruning about which Jesus speaks today can be issues like a temper, a tendency to judge others, a propensity to gossip or a drug problem.  These may not be good for us, but we often like them and hold onto them because they are ours – they are part of who we are.  Pruning makes us look deep inside ourselves and ask what in me is not glorifying to God and then seek to rid ourselves of those things.    

            When I was growing up, I would often go out to my Grandfather’s vineyards. January was generally the time of year when you had to prune.  It was a fairly exacting procedure, cutting off sucker vines, tying the healthy ones in place and so on.  I remember my grandfather explaining to me how it worked and what you needed to look for to determine what had a healthy future and what needed to be chopped off.  He of course never let me actually do it because it was not really something that you would or should trust a 10 year old to do.  But for all of those who have pruned any type of tree, the main idea is to get rid of the unhealthy or non-fruit producing parts to allow in this case the vine to channel its energy to the place that will bear good fruit.  And, often in this, you may prune some vines that will produce fruit, it is just that they will not produce the best fruit.  For without pruning, the vine will produce mediocre fruit at best and after enough years of neglect the mediocre and non-fruit producing parts will overwhelm the vine and nothing of value will be produced.  Now, of course, such a procedure is ripe (get it) with imagery.  Vines will grow if left un-pruned, in fact they will grow a whole lot, but they grow in ways that makes them of not much use for anything and ultimately they end up as a big worthless vine.

            So let’s bring this back to the two agricultural metaphors that are present in Jesus’ ministry.  Growth is big these days. In fact, it is something that the church has been fairly obsessed with in the past fifty or so years as Amazon attests to.  But the question must be asked of whether or not we are growing anything worthwhile.  Both a pruned and an un-pruned vine grow, but only one bears good fruit.  And honestly I am not sure how often the church in general or individuals within the church ask if the things that we are growing are worthwhile or if we simply think that it is enough that we are growing vines, because growing is fun and requires little introspection. 

There is a theory about the church, which posits that in the future we will see a smaller church.  And this is not the theory of some crackpot; it was actually put forth by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger writing before he was Pope Benedict and Pope Emeritus Benedict.  He had this to say about the future church, “[It] will no longer be able to inhabit many of the edifices she built in prosperity. As the number of her adherents diminishes . . . she will lose many of her social privileges. . . As a small society, [the Church] will make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members.... It will be hard-going for the Church, for the process of crystallization and clarification will cost her much valuable energy.  And so it seems certain to me that the Church is facing very hard times. The real crisis has scarcely begun. We will have to count on terrific upheavals. But I am equally certain about what will remain at the end: not the Church of the political cult, which is dead already, but the Church of faith. She may well no longer be the dominant social power to the extent that she was until recently; but she will enjoy a fresh blossoming and be seen as man's home, where he will find life and hope beyond death.”

            I don’t know if what he says is true.  Certainly, in the West the Christian Church is shrinking.  What I do know is that the Church in general and we as individuals should always think about pruning.  The conclusion that Cardinal Ratzinger reaches is that this smaller church will enjoy a fresh blossoming.  From the pruning much good fruit will be born – because the focus of pruning is on the fruit rather than on the growth.

Part of being a Christian is looking for ways to stop expending energy on things that are not glorifying to God.  The energy that we spend being envious we should use to focus on kindness; the energy we devote to pride should instead be focused on humility; the energy spent on anger should be spent on patience and so on.  Just as a vine only has so much energy, we also only have a finite amount of energy and so we should eliminate the places where our energy is devoted to things that are not glorifying to God and instead focus that energy on the things that bring Glory to God. 

            It might be time for the Church to get back to basics, to stop looking at itself as a corporation bent on growth at all costs and instead see itself as a place where we grow in our love and service of God.  Sometimes this will be painful, it will ask us to rid ourselves of habits that are very much a part of who we are, so that we can devote ourselves more fully to God. But ultimately the Church is there to call us to serve Christ in all things, glorifying him with every ounce of our being so that we may be his both now and forevermore.  

Sermon (Fr. Cunningham) April 22, 2018

As someone who can have fits of procrastination, I understand the impulse of wanting to wait to do something until we feel like doing that certain thing.  Sometimes this feeling actually does come, but most times I end up having to plug my nose and go do whatever it is that I have been putting off.  I bring this up to point out that there are really two ways in which we can perform an action.  The first way to do it is, rather obviously, because we actually feel like doing it.  The things that fall into this category are often the fun and enjoyable things in life.  People rarely say that they don’t feel like having a cookie or getting a massage or taking a cruise in the Mediterranean.  The other way of doing things is doing an action not out of any great desire or pleasure derived from those actions but is rather out of a sense of obligation.  These are often things like scrubbing the toilet, picking up after the dog or unclogging a drain.  We may not despise these actions, but we do them mainly because we know that they need to be done.  In these actions we rely not on an internal feeling, but rather on something outside of ourselves, which convinces us of the necessity of a given action. 

            Now part of being a Christian is doing actions that may not be actions that we feel like doing.  This does not mean these actions are wrong, quite the contrary, but rather that our feelings are often not good barometers to measure the things that we should do.  For example God asks us to forgive one another just as he has forgiven us.  He asks us to avoid gossip and slander.  But things like gossip and slander may be things which might come quite naturally to us.  But part of being a Christian and growing in Christ is changing our hearts so that the thing, which we do out of obligation eventually becomes something that we do out of desire.  In other words the goal is that we do things like forgive others, not because God tells us to, but because we want to. 

            I was thinking about this distinction today when Jesus talks about himself as the Good Shepherd.  He says, “The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. The hired hand, who is not the shepherd and does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away—and the wolf snatches them and scatters them. The hired hand runs away because a hired hand does not care for the sheep.”  Why does the hired hand run away?  The simplest answer is that he feels like running away.  The hired hand acts on the desire to not get embroiled with a wolf and the actions that will be required to defend the sheep against such an animal.  Jesus on the other hand says that he is the one who of his own will and desire will sacrifice everything, including his life to keep the sheep safe.  Or as he puts it, “I lay it down of my own accord.”  And so here is the question for us, how do we move from having the mind of the hired hand to having the mind of Jesus.  That is how do we move our desires from the selfish ones that are exemplified in the hired hand to the perfect and loving desires as displayed in Jesus?

            The short answer is it will not happen overnight, it will take a lot of trying.  And getting there will probably mean that we will live for a while in the in-between space.  That is the area between being the hired hand and being the Good Shepherd.  Now before I go on I want to say that I am slightly broadening this discussion.  The way the text reads we see the Good Shepherd acting in one specific way and that way is in laying down his life for the sheep.  This reading was most likely chosen for this season of Easter because of that fact – laying down his life is something of a foreshadowing of the crucifixion.  But I don’t think we have to always see laying down one’s life as leading to physical death.  I think it is enough to say that laying down one’s life can also be seen metaphorically and that it will encompass all of those times where we put the will of God above our own.  Or in the words of Jesus laying down our life is when we say, “not my will but yours be done.”  And so with that out of the way let’s get back to thinking about the idea of laying down our life.  The two ideas that we saw in today’s reading where that of willingly laying down our life or willingly running away from that responsibility.  In both cases the actions were done in accordance with what the person wanted to do.  Jesus wanted to lay down his life, the hired hand wanted to run away.  However as I said I think there is a place in between these two and we alluded to that in the opening discussion when we talked about scrubbing the toilet and picking up after the dog.  This is when we do something that was not necessarily what we wanted to do, but realize the necessity of doing it.  So in this case it is when we lay down our life, that is we submit our will to God’s will, but we really don’t feel like doing it.  This may not be the most popular thing in a day and age where authenticity to self is highly prized, but I would contend that there will be times in our life where the right thing to do and our wills will be in conflict.  And in such times we should say, “not my will but yours be done.”

            The great thirteenth century theologian Thomas Aquinas talked about virtues as being habits.  What he meant by that was virtues were good things and therefore we should do them, but because we might not always want to do them we should look at them like habits.  To understand a little better let’s think of something sort of mundane like turning off a light when we leave a room.  Most of us probably grew up with parents who told us to do this and if we are parents we have probably told our children to do this as well.  Based on my experience of raising children it appears that turning off a light when you leave a room is not a natural thing.   In other words children do not come pre-programmed with an overwhelming desire to turn off lights.  Eventually, though, with enough reminding it becomes a habit.  And it is a habit that helps save electricity.  So similarly submitting our will to the will of God may also not be something which comes naturally, but if we do it enough times it becomes part of who we are and something that we do naturally.

            And so now lets go back to our two examples of the Good Shepherd and the hired hand.  Ultimately we should become like the Good Shepherd, but most likely none of us are there yet.  Furthermore many of us are probably fighting against many of the characteristics that would make us like the Good Shepherd.  As a result we need an in-between place which is the place where we may act like the Good Shepherd but do so only out of obedience, hoping that one day it will become part of us.  A habit that we do naturally.    

            I want to conclude today with a brief discussion about hypocrisy.   And I realize at first this might seem to come a little out of left field, but please bear with me.  The chief secular sin in our day and age seems to be hypocrisy, that is believing one thing and doing another.  We love to find the pro-family politician caught in an affair or the environmental activist who flies around on a private jet.  But I don’t believe hypocrisy is inherently bad.  After all I would prefer it if all people with a mental predisposition towards being serial killers were hypocrites.  The thing is if we believe in higher ideals, the kinds that are exemplified in the Good Shepherd then we are most likely going to be hypocrites at some time in our lives.  We will believe in doing the will of God but may end up acting in quite another way.  Falling short of the Glory of God is not an invitation to give up and say that God’s calling on our lives is of no importance.  Rather it is a call for repentance and a call to continue to strive to do the will of God.  We will not always succeed.  We will all be hypocrites at certain points in time, but the hope is that success will lead to more success and we will grow daily in our love and desire for God so that we may be his both now and forevermore.