Earlier
this month, Kathy and I were away celebrating our 40th anniversary
for a couple of weeks, and we returned to an avalanche of troublesome American
news. This may sound like the understatement of the year, but there seems to be
an epidemic of incredibly bad behavior going around. I am not sure how to
process the news I see and hear about all kinds of people—presidents, cabinet
members, entertainers--these days. Just this week, a former policeman has been
charged with a decades-old series of murders. A nominee for a cabinet-level
position withdrew after allegations of workplace harassment and on the job
drinking. A cabinet secretary blamed all his very serious ethical lapses on his
subordinates. People we thought we looked up to are being shown to have behaved
abusively and, now, criminally. The conviction of Bill Cosby on three felony
counts of sexual assault last week is only one more in the series of what we
might charitably call “disappointments” we have witnessed in the past several
months. The good news is that these people are finally being called to account.
The bad news is that it seems that almost everybody in public life an has an
incredibly dark side.
The
temptation we all face is to look at these public malefactors and to draw a
hard line between them and us. If I see one more tweet or Facebook post about
how my innocence has been shattered I will scream. “I loved Bill Cosby as
Scotty on I Spy and as Dr. Huxtable
on The Cosby Show. I feel cheated.”
But who ever gave us permission to think ourselves innocent in the first place?
It is a great mistake to look at abusers and not see ourselves somehow
implicated in the culture that enables their behavior.
Now
that’s a kind of post-Easter downer way to begin a sermon, but remember that
the theologian Karl Barth once said that Christian preachers should hold the
Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. Today, on the fifth Sunday of
Easter, we are asked to understand how Jesus can be for us the way, the truth, and
the life. How might we put the Bible and the newspaper together today?
This
morning’s Gospel (John 15: 1-8) is relevant here. It gives us Jesus’s
well-known allegory of the vine and the branches [John 15: 1-8], a familiar yet
challenging text. Here is the part we always remember: “I am the true vine, and
my Father is the vinegrower,” says Jesus. “Abide in me as I abide in you.
“ Gosh that sounds nice. But then comes the part we always forget: “He removes
every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes
to make it bear more fruit.” Not very sentimental at all.
“I am the vine, you are the branches” is a saying that has brought comfort to
Christians over the centuries, an extended metaphor suggesting our unity, our
oneness in Christ. The figure of the vine was also a traditional Old
Testament metaphor for the people of Israel [Psalm 80]. In John’s
understanding, Jesus himself is the new Israel and all of us who believe in him
are what Paul would call “members one of another.” [Romans 12: 5] But the more
we press on it, the more we see that Jesus’s use of this figure of the vine and
the branches is not just about the connection of Jesus with the church. To say
that Jesus is the vine and we are the branches is to suggest something not just
about Jesus and the church but something even bigger about the nature of God
and the world. Remember the words of Dr. King:
We must all learn to live together as
brothers or we will all perish together as fools. We are tied together in the single garment of
destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly
affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I
ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the way God’s
universe is made; this is the way it is structured. [“Letter from
Birmingham Jail”]
All
of us—not only Jesus and the church, but God, humanity, and the world--are
woven together in one fabric of life. We are all in this together.
So one thing we hear in today’s Bible-newspaper dialogue is a word of human
solidarity even in hard moments like the present. The bad news is that because
of this solidarity I find myself judged in the dark work of human sin and
aggression. The good news is that I find myself vindicated whenever justice is
done. A full, mature Christian spirituality understands that we see ourselves
in both sides of this equation. It is tempting to identify only with the
victims, but we must also see ourselves in the aggressors. We cannot look at
these events—sin on the one hand, righteousness on the other--and not see
ourselves implicated. Human solidarity is universal and absolute. “We are
tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable
network of mutuality.” Jesus is the vine. We are the branches. We are all
in this together.
But what are we to make when Jesus speaks of God’s role as the vinegrower? “God
removes every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit
God prunes to make it bear more fruit.” The Greek verb here (airo) suggests both cutting and
cleansing. Yes, we are all connected to each other through our oneness in
Christ. And yes, God is at work in events that try and test and shape us
into the people God intends us to be. As Dr. King says, “For some strange
reason, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be.”
Vines need pruning and we need cleansing. Just as you would not let a rose bush
grow wild but would cut it back to enhance its fullness, so God uses hard
events in our personal and social lives to shape us for God’s own
purposes. The life of faith is the process of becoming ourselves, of
growing and being shaped into the people God intends us to be. This process has
moments of joy and wonder. It also has times of self-examination, suffering,
and pain. To describe the way life
shapes us through testing and trial, the Hebrew prophets often compared it to
the smelting of precious metals. Jesus uses the figure of the gardener and the
vine.
Whichever
figure you use, the point is inescapable: the events of our lives—the joyous
ones and the painful ones, even and especially when we see ourselves and others
revealed in all our uncomfortable complexity—these events weave us into a
single garment of destiny with God, each other, and the world. Even when Jesus
says something hard that makes us squirm in our pews a bit—as in today’s, “Whoever does not abide in me is thrown away like a
branch and withers; such branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and
burned.”—even that cleansing, pruning announcement is shot through with good
news. Whether I like it or not, God is making me into the person I am called
and destined to be. God is doing that through the agency of every person with
whom I come in contact. Those parts of me that resist God’s love and justice
will, like those branches that wither, be thrown into the fire and burned. Rose
bushes probably do not love being cut back. But they only realize their
potential at the end of some rigorous pruning.
The
season of Easter is all about the deep and abiding solidarity you and I share
with each other in Jesus. It is only because we all live and grow together in
Christ that the resurrection is not only about Jesus but is now also about us.
In coming to terms with the complex fullness of our cultural icons you and I
are being asked not to excuse their behavior but to see how even the dark side
of someone else can illuminate our understanding of ourselves. If we look at
the events of the week and come away only concluding that there are some bad
apples out there but thank God I’m not one of them we will have missed the
point entirely. God loves and transforms and blesses us in all our complex and
ambiguous fullness. Easter is about God’s ability to take the sum total of who
we are and prune and shape it into new and beautiful life.
Jesus
is risen. We shall be, too. Getting there is a lifelong journey of sometimes
painful self-discovery. God knows and loves and blesses even the parts of you
that you cannot acknowledge and accept. Pruning and cleansing are painful, but
as in vines and roses, so in you and me: they always lead to new life. Dr. King
knew what he was talking about when he described life as a “single garment of
destiny”. For that life, for the way we are inescapably tied to each other, and
for God’s ongoing remaking us into the image of the one we see in the risen
Jesus, we proceed in this Eucharist to give thanks. Amen.
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