051406sermon

Abide

John Wilkinson                            Third Presbyterian Church
May 14, 2006                               John 15:1-8

We are mindful that today is Mother’s Day, and so a happy greeting to you who are mothers, grandmothers, maternal figures of many kinds. We are mindful also that Mother’s Day is difficult for some. The nature of our community of faith is solidarity, and so we stand with each other and all of us this day. We give special thanks for those who have nurtured us and cared for us, for the love they have given us along the way, and for the love that they, and you, continue to share. And we extend a special word of welcome to grandmothers and mothers who may be visiting with us this day.

Typically we would pray a prayer for illumination before the reading of the lesson and the sermon, to seek God’s presence and the Holy Spirit’s guidance as we encounter and explore the word. Today, I would invite us to sing a verse of the old familiar hymn, “Abide With Me,” which is printed in the bulletin.

***

One of the phenomenons I lived with when I worked in Chicago was the Willow Creek Community Church. Willow Creek started out as an experiment; a recent seminary graduate from a more evangelical tradition began a door-to-door suburban visitation process. The door would be answered and a question would be asked; do you go to church? If the answer was yes, then the conversation graciously ended. If the answer was no, then it continued, and included an invitation to a non-conventional worship service. A ministry to the un-churched, or non-churched.

Willow Creek grew and grew, into the thousands and thousands. I visited it one time. A huge campus that included a parking shuttle, a Starbucks-like enterprise in the lobby, Sunday morning worship, called a “seeker” service, that focused more on entertainment, while the other services during the week were more in-depth.

Joining the church involved becoming committed to a small group. People of my type, mainline Protestant, often were critical. I tried not to be, and wondered if some of that criticism was driven by jealousy.

I was always glad that the people who went to Willow Creek, and other places like it, sometimes now called mega-churches, had found a place, a community, when otherwise they would not have.

Mega-churches have become a scholarly phenomenon, both religious and secular. They are studied for who goes to them and who doesn’t, for what programs they offer or do not, for their worship and music styles, a category unto itself.

One of the most interesting things being studied is the churches’ leadership. Most are still first generation. That is to say: the wall that includes the pictures of all the former pastors would be empty; the founding pastor is still at the helm, as it were. And that leaves people worried, worried that such a flourishing, oftentimes emotional experience might diminish if the original, charismatic leader is gone.

It is not a dynamic unique only to the mega-church, though it may be more pronounced. Remember when people wondered who could possibly follow the charismatic Pope John Paul II? Or perhaps you have seen a telecast from the Crystal Cathedral, from Southern California. I understand that it is on on Sunday mornings! The founding pastor, Robert Schuller, is advancing toward 80 and his son has been deemed his successor, and people here are not quite sure what will happen.

It is an issue in politics; it certainly is an issue in sports. We have missed athletic references here for several weeks, but I remember in Chicago how people were worried what would happen to the Bulls after Michael Jordan left. And with good cause; they became lousy, almost as lousy as the Cubs.

Even before he left them, Jesus knew that this would be a problem with his followers. They did not fully understand the implications of who he was or the church he was building; how could they possibly survive and thrive after he was gone?

The charismatic nature of his leadership – his teaching, his preaching, his healing – drew increasingly larger crowds. His followers could not conceive of a community, an institution, without him at its center. Nor could we. Nor do we have to.

It is a word we don’t much use anymore, or if we do, we use it with a slightly different meaning. “I can abide that" means something like “ I can live with that.” “I can’t abide with that” means something like “I can’t quite tolerate that.”

Jesus meant something entirely different. In the long soliloquies of the gospel of John, sometimes called the farewell discourses, Jesus is laying everything out. In sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph, in words sometimes difficult to trace, Jesus is laying out the pattern of Christian life after he has gone and established a new relationship with each of us and the community he has called into being.

In his absence, he says time after time, we will not be separated from him, but our fellowship will be made deeper. “I will not leave you orphaned,” he says to those who were fretting just that. I will not leave you, and in fact, I will send the Holy Spirit to be with you to draw us ever closer together.

And the nature of our relationship, and the nature of the relationship you will share with one another in my spirit, will be love. Without love, my presence will mean nothing. With love, it will mean everything.

Then these words: “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not let them be afraid.” Even when he is gone, we will have that gift of peace. We may turn to other sources for it, and we will not find it there.

This is sometimes read as an invitation to withdraw from the world because the peace we seek and the love we need may not be found in the world. I believe that the opposite is true, that Jesus is calling us into the world, for our own sakes and for the sake of the world that so misses the deep peace that he brings and the true love that he offers.

Then this: “Abide in me as I abide in you.” Jesus uses the image of the vine and branches, appropriate somehow as the fragrance of lilacs fills the air. Without the foundational elements of the plant, blossoms cannot grow and fruit will have no yield.

“Apart from me you can do nothing,” he says. We are in spiritual, mystical territory here, and some of us are more intrigued and some of us are a little daunted. I am not a religious person, we may say, or I am not very spiritual.

The fact that we are all grafted onto the vine because of the events of Holy Week, because of the promise of new life, means that we are all spiritual people. It is not so much about a certain practice, or reading a certain book from the "spirituality" section at Barnes and Noble. It is about acknowledging the gift that because Jesus abides in us, we may abide in him, a deeply rooted dwelling. We need to tend to it, just like we tend to any living thing.

And like gardening, some of us may be more prone to green thumbs than others. I read an essay recently from a seminary president, of all people, who confessed a rather bad job of tending to his own spiritual life. He now makes what is, in his mind, a very modest daily commitment, less than five minutes, a psalm and a brief prayer. He testifies as to what a life-changing difference that five minutes makes.

This is not about technique, though, nor about a far-off quest. It is about claiming the presence of Christ in our every-day lives, in our work and in our play. It is about remembering that Jesus does not build a gulf between spirituality and social responsibility, but rather builds a bridge between the ways we engage his presence and the ways that we engage the world.

Why spirituality is so popular these days is because of some deeply felt dissatisfaction. Claiming the deep-seeded nature of this mutual abiding will not make all dissatisfactions go away. But it will enable us to understand, in this wildly individualized and personalized age, that life is not about acquisition or isolation or achievement or Brad and Angelina and Jennifer. Life is about the full and deep and true engagement of who God calls us to be and who Christ calls us to become and what the Spirit calls us to do.

Our lives will be changed and the life of the world will be changed. You will bear fruit, Jesus says, and become my disciples. Only because Jesus leaves can the Spirit come, Eugene Peterson says, so that we can do in the world what Jesus did in us. (Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places, page 236-237)
Jesus’ absence becomes the Spirit’s presence:
· Because we were loved, we may love.
· Because we were taught, we may teach.
· Because we were transformed, we may transform.

“In life, in death, O Lord, abide in me.” It is more than a wish. It is a promise and a prayer and a call to each of us and all of, a resurrection community of love and transformation. Amen.