Abide

“Abide”

John 15:1-17

First Presbyterian Church of Jamestown , New York

The Reverend Thomas A. Sweet

May 17, 2009

Easter 6

Eugene Peterson, a pastor friend of mine in my Baltimore days, grew up in Montana and I remember him one day telling the story of how, when he was a little boy, he often would walk across the meadow between his backyard and the fenced-in fields of Leonard Storm. Leonard Storm was a huge, forbidding Norwegian man of whom Eugene was in awe and fear. His wife’s name was Olga and, Eugene said, she looked like it. Eugene would stand at the barbed wire fence and watch Leonard Storm plow his fields on an enormous John Deere tractor. The thing Eugene said he wished for more than anything in those days was to get a ride on Leonard Storm’s tractor. One summer day when Eugene was five years old, he was standing at the fence watching Leonard Storm. Leonard Storm was probably a hundred yards away when he spotted Eugene . Eugene reported that Leonard Storm stopped his tractor, stood up on the seat, and made strong windmill waving motions to him with his arm. Eugene said that he had never seen anyone use gestures like that. Leonard Storm looked mean and angry to Eugene . He was large and ominous in his bib overalls and straw hat. Leonard Storm was yelling at Eugene , but the wind was blowing against him, and Eugene could not make out what he was saying. Eugene knew he was where he probably should not be and so, scared and sad, he turned away and went back home.

The Sunday after Eugene ’s disappointment at the edge of the field, Leonard Storm, who went to the same church as Eugene ’s family, called him over after worship and said, “Little Pete, why didn’t you come out in the field Thursday and ride the tractor with me?” Eugene told Leonard Storm that he didn’t know he could have, that he thought he was being chased away. Leonard Storm said, “I called you to come. I waved for you to come. Why did you leave?” Eugene told Leonard Storm he didn’t know that was what he was doing with his windmill arms. Leonard Storm asked Eugene , “What do you do when you want somebody to come to you?” Eugene said, “I go like this” and showed him, extending his index finger and curling it back toward him three or four times.

Leonard Storm harrumphed. “That’s piddling, Little Pete. On the farm, we do things big!” Eugene was crushed. He felt small. He already was small on the outside. Now he felt small on the inside. Disappointed and crushed. But also a little angry. This gigantic Norwegian farmer had called him and his world piddling (Eugene H. Peterson also tells this story in his book, Under the Unpredictable Plant, pages 158-160).

I don’t want us to live piddling, paltry, puny lives when we have the chance to live big resurrection lives in which we know God to be the center out of which all life emerges, the center out of which we live. God is not an add-on to our lives, not an appendage to us. We belong to God. We don’t ask God to tag along with us, propping us up, keeping us safe, and giving us what we need to satisfy our plans. We follow after God and that might sometimes mean that we find ourselves being led into places or situations we never imagined we’d have the ability or courage or trust to go. We do not ask God to be an audience to what we are doing. It is the other way around. We try to discern what God is doing in our lives and in the world and then join God in doing it.

God is more than an idea or a higher power or an unseen force. God is real. God is knowable. God is present. God is social. And God is personal.

God is real. It wasn’t coincidence or accident or fate or chance that made the heavens and earth, but the living God who created the universe in a blaze of light and an explosion of glory that continues to send forth life even today in all its many forms and creatures.

God is not remote or hidden, but knowable. God’s signature is on every flower, lake, tree, bird, and person. God’s passion for justice and mercy is writ large in the ancient prophets of Israel , in the likes of Amos and Isaiah and Jeremiah, in the likes of more contemporary prophets like King and Gandhi and Berrigan and Teresa of Calcutta and Tutu of South Africa. But for the greatest clarity in knowing God, Jesus of Nazareth is beyond compare.

God is not long ago and far away. God’s Spirit, the same Spirit who was in Christ, still is being poured out on God’s people today: God present, Christ present, with us here, now.

God is social, the very idea behind the theological concept of the trinity. The way we understand God, God’s very essence, God’s own being is social and communal and neighborly. As God is one- Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the traditional language of the creeds –so are we, all of us, one with God and thus, also, one with each other.

And God is personal as Jesus tells us in his stories about the shepherd of a large flock of sheep going out to search for one lamb who was lost, Jesus siding with the woman charged with adultery as she faced her accusers, the prodigal son welcomed home by a father awash in love and forgiveness. What are these stories meant to tell us other than that, just as God cares for all, God also cares for each!

There is more to Eugene Peterson’s story of his experience with Leonard Storm. A few days after his disappointment at the edge of Leonard Storm’s field and his reprimand in church, Eugene told us that he was back at the fence, watching, hoping that he might get a second chance. The giant Norwegian saw him, stopped the tractor, and, Eugene said, he did it again...Leonard Storm made that giant sweeping motion that Eugene now understood was invitation. This time, Eugene said, he was through the fence in a flash, running across the furrowed field and then bounding up on the big green John Deere tractor with the yellow seat. Leonard Storm let me stand in front of him, Eugene said, holding the steering wheel, pulling the plow down that long stretch of field, my smallness now absorbed into his largeness. (Eugene H. Peterson, Under the Unpredictable Plant, p. 197).

I want something like that for your lives, too, as I want it for mine. I want our smallness to be absorbed in the largeness of wonder, love, and praise...so that we can find and experience the life that fills our souls and makes us truly alive! Our gospel reading today tells us how we can do that. In a word, we are told to abide. Eleven times in our short reading Jesus uses the word abide.

“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.”

“Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit…”

“Whoever does not abide in me is (like a torn away branch) and withers…”

“If you abide in me, and my words abide in you,

ask for whatever you will and it will,

and it will be done for you.”

“As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you;

abide in my love.”

“If you will keep my commandments, you will abide in my love,

just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love.”

What does it mean to abide in Christ? It doesn’t have anything to do with place but has everything to do with presence. If we want to abide in an abode in Chicago , for instance, we have to go to Chicago . But we can abide in Christ anywhere. Abiding in Christ means being present to the presence of God in our midst wherever and everywhere we are. Abiding in Christ means being connected to Christ. Abiding in Christ means that we are to Christ as a branch is to a vine. Abiding means participating in an ongoing rhythm of being nourished and bearing fruit.

St. Paul reminds us that “the church is the body of Christ.” So, abiding in Christ also means being connected to the church which is his body on earth. Theodore Parker Ferris once wrote that “a person can live a good life outside the church but a person cannot live a Christian life outside the church, for there is no Christianity without Christian community.”

I wonder if Jesus used the word abide as frequently as he did to warn against a spasmodic or irregular religious life. Perhaps he was countering the idea that we can drop in on worship when we think we need it or when the kids are singing or when Aunt Clara who is very religious comes to visit but otherwise it is all right to stay home to read the New York Times over coffee and krumpets. Maybe Jesus is telling his followers that a Christian life involves a long obedience in the same direction, that it is a weekly and daily affair, and that in order to experience God in a way that stills the storms of our lives and strengthens our faith to endure all things, we need to stay connected to Christ through Christian community. There is nothing I can find anywhere in any of the gospels or in any of Paul’s writings that suggests that being a stand-alone Christian is possible.

To say it succinctly and summarily: to abide in Christ is to let Christ happen through you. There is something wrong with the picture that has us straining and striving to live a Christian life. A Christian life is one that flows from Christ in and through us in the same way that life flows from a vine into its branches. I frequently am asked what I think it means to be a Christian. What is a Christian, I often am asked. Well, not someone who believes certain “Christian” things. A Christian is someone in and through whom Christ lives who then necessarily, willingly, and joyfully lives in Christian community for the sake of the world.

Abide is a relationship word. It implies mutuality. If we abide in Christ, Christ abides in us. It is not by divine principles or dogma that we live and move and have our being, but the very presence and power of God. I cannot think of better news than that on a Sunday morning. For if that is so, of whom or what do we have to be afraid?

Amen.

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