Sermons
What's My Plumb Line?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 07/14/2019 - 14:54My sermon as prepared for delivery on July 14, 2019, Pentecost 10 C, at Grace and St. Peter's Episcopal Church, Hamden, CT.
You can listen to the recording on Soundcloud
O Lord, mercifully receive our prayers and grant that we may know and understand what things we ought to do and have grace and power faithfully to accomplish them; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
When I preached here last March, I started off with a request for forgiveness that I’ve borrowed from the Orthodox church. If I have sinned against any of you or hurt any of you in any way, known or not known, I am deeply sorry, and I ask your forgiveness. Thank you.
Let me start off today with a question. How many of you have heard the story of the Good Samaritan before? [Raise hand…Pause… look for hands] I kind of figured that would be the case. The story of the Good Samaritan has become part of the fabric of our society. As an illustration, let me tell you a story of when I was in college.
One of my classmates did a research project on whether or not reading the Bible had any effect on how likely someone is to help a person in distress. She had two groups of high school students that participated in the research. They were told they were being tested on how much they would remember of a text they were assigned to read. Half of them were given a text about some scientific information and the other half were given the story of the Good Samaritan.
After they had read the text the were told to go to a different location to take the test. On the way, they passed an actor dressed as a homeless man who would start coughing and collapse. I was that actor.
After the experience, the researcher asked me if I did the same thing each time. Some people claimed that they saw me but that I didn’t cough or collapse. Others said they didn’t see me at all. In the Gospel, we read that the priest and the Levite actually saw the person who had been attacked by robbers and quickly passed by. I suspect that many of us are more like some of those students. We don’t even see the suffering around us. We don’t see how we contribute to that suffering.
I don’t remember the details of the results of that experiment, but I seem to recall that it was something like, listening to someone speak about the story of the Good Samaritan for ten minutes didn’t really have much on an impact on people’s lives.
This leaves me with the question, what am I doing up here? Maybe we should just sing another hymn, or something. Or, maybe the reading from Amos can help us. How many of you know what a plumb line is? For those who don’t know, a plumb line is a line with a weight on the bottom to help in building straight walls.
On our first lesson, the Lord says to Amos, “See, I am setting a plumb line in the midst of my people”. Taken by itself, that sounds like good news. God will set things straight. When we hear from Isaiah, “make straight in the desert a highway for our God”, it is in the context of God comforting God’s people.
But Amos is a different story. The Lord says to Amos, “the sanctuaries of Israel shall be laid waste”. As we look at changes in the climate driving storms like Hurricane Barry onto our coast and at children of God being held in horrible conditions at our border, the doom Amos talks about may feel a little too close to home.
As I was reading the description of Amos’ audience in one of my commentaries, I was struck how similar things sound today to how they were in Amos’ time. In her commentary on Amos, Amy Erickson writes, “The audience of Amos’s message is one familiar with luxury and wealth. Amos directs his words to a society he characterizes as dominated by structural injustice.” We are a nation today, burdened by structural injustice. Erickson goes on to speak about the “deep divide between the living standards of the rich and the poor”. You see this, oh so clearly, around San Francisco where the average rent for a 800 square foot apartment is $3,612 a month and where many are homeless.
There do not seem to be easy clear answers to the problems we face. We need to think about how we can best be neighbors to the homeless, to those facing flood waters, to those fleeing violence in their native lands; to those who have fallen among thieves. We need to have serious, respectful discussions about how we live out our baptismal vows to ‘strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being”. It isn’t easy.
Maybe we try to address these problems be arguing with people we don’t really know on Facebook. I suspect that in most cases that is at best as effective as yet another sermon the Good Samaritan.
Amos provides a different starting point. God showed Amos “a wall built with a plumb line”. What is the plumb line in our lives? It seems as if for too many in our country right now, the plumb line is money, power, or influence. For too many, it does not seem to be about loving our neighbor, especially if that neighbor is somehow different from us, is facing tough times, or has fallen among thieves.
Isaiah tells us about God’s plumb line. “I will make justice the measuring line and righteousness the plumb line”. Elsewhere, righteousness is spoken about in terms of concern for the poor, the widowed, and children. How are we doing at making righteousness and justice our plumb lines?
Last week, Bob encouraged us to think about what’ve done, what we’re doing, and what we should be doing going forward. We’ve done a lot of great things: Abraham’s Tent, Dinner for a Dollar, Girls Friendly Society, Vacation Bible School, Arden House, Faith Study Group, and the Older and Wiser group Are just a few examples.
These have all furthered righteousness and justice, but have we been intentional about righteousness and justice? Are there ways in which we are unintentionally thwarting righteousness or justice? Are their people who have fallen among thieves around us that we are not noticing?
As a final thought: Recently, I saw a post online in which a family is leaving church after the service and the husband is saying, “That was a great sermon on sin, I felt like the pastor was speaking directly to the man two pews in front of us.”
I hope there aren’t similar reactions to this sermon. I would like each one of us to think about our plumb lines. What is it that centers us, that drives our every action? How can we align this more closely with God’s plumb line of justice and righteousness? How can this inform our discussions going forward on what we ought to be doing as a worshipping and serving community? As we think about how we should love our neighbors, remember the words of Jesus, “Go and do likewise.”
O Lord, mercifully receive our prayers and grant that we may know and understand what things we ought to do and have grace and power faithfully to accomplish them; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Lent 3C 2019
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 03/24/2019 - 10:00On March 24, I preached at Grace and St. Peter's in Hamden. I've been very busy with school, life, and work, and it is only on June 16, that I'm getting a moment to post it.
You can listen to the audio on SoundCloud (Lent 3 C).
Below is the text as I prepared it.
May the words of my mouth and the mediations of our hearts be always acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.
As some of you may know, I sometimes worship at an Eastern Orthodox church and one of the things they do there is, at the beginning of the service, that is really like, is the priest asks forgiveness of the congregation. So, in that spirit, let me start off by saying, if I have sinned against any of you or hurt any of you in any way, known or not known, I am deeply sorry, and I ask your forgiveness. Thank you.
When Bob asked if I would be willing to preach this week, he suggested that maybe I could talk about the Lenten Study Group and what we’ve been talking about after church. I replied that I’d have to see how the scriptures appointed for today fit with what is going on in our group.
Well, it turns out that they fit together pretty nicely. A starting point for our discussions has been where we see God at work in our daily lives. Some of this comes from a discussion that took place at the faith study group sometime ago when we were reading Acts. Do miracles, like those which took place in Acts, or like Moses experienced when he saw the burning bush, take place today?
I suggested then, and I maintain today, that miracles are still happening, or to use a motto from the United Church of Christ, “God is still speaking”. One way to approach this is from one of my favorite quotes from Jewish wisdom, “The miracle was not that the bush was not consumed. The miracle was that Moses noticed”. Let me explain by looking at the text a little more closely.
The lesson starts off, “Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro.” Moses wasn’t out looking for some great spiritual experience. Moses was simply doing his daily, and I imagine, somewhat tedious job. When Moses stopped to look more closely, he wasn’t looking for God. He was trying to figure out why the bush wasn’t being burned up. It is only then, when Moses stopped to look at something that seemed a little out of the ordinary in his daily life that God spoke to him.
To bring this into the present day, I work in Middletown. It is a long and tedious commute. One day, I was passing the reservoir on Route 66 and it struck me that it looked a lot like a section of Route 6 heading into Provincetown out on Cape Cod. Two similar views: one part of a tedious commute, the other part of a vacation. What if we could see the miracle of God around us all the time, and not just when we are on vacation, but also when we are commuting to work or facing tedious chores? This is a challenge I offer to each of us for the coming week. Look for the beauty of God’s creation around us in our daily lives.
Now I know some of us difficult challenges right now. If this applies to you, the sermon up until now may be enough, and you’re welcome to tune out until the final part. However, I’m not satisfied to end the sermon here as a sort of Pollyanna feel-good sermon. Sorry. Because that’s not where this week’s lesson goes. We must now look at what God said to Moses when Moses stopped to look and listen. God said, “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry”. Where is the misery of God’s people today? What is their cry?
The city of Beira, Mozambique was 90% destroyed by Cyclone Idai a week or so ago. The death toll now exceeds 700 and now cholera is starting to rear its ugly head. It illustrates what climate scientists have been telling us all along: As the earth’s temperature rises, the poor are going to be hit much worse than the wealthy, and it is the wealthy that contribute most to climate change. In a sense, we, through our lifestyles are contributing to the suffering of others. And we only have to look at the flooding in Nebraska and Iowa to see that it strikes close to home as well.
This is where Jesus’ words in the Gospel might apply to us today. Adapted to the current day, “Do you think that because these Mozambicans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than the rest of us? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, we will all perish as they did.”
In New Zealand, they are still grieving the mass shooting of people of God who were shot at their weekly services. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, in her first address to parliament after the shootings spoke of the dead saying, “They were New Zealanders. They are us. And because they are us, we, as a nation, we mourn them.” We are gathered here to pray, just like our Muslim brothers and sisters in New Zealand were. They are us. We all suffer because of white supremacy and deep seated racism.
So, once we stop to notice the suffering in God’s creation as well as the beauty, what do we do? God sent Moses to set his people free. I believe God is sending us to set people free today. It is much more complicated today than it was back in time of Moses, and we all know how complicated it was for Moses.
We are caught up in human systems that contribute to goal warming. We are caught up in systems that contribute to the hatred by white supremacists toward people of color. When we confess our sins after the sermon, we will start off by saying “We have sinned”. Sin is not just individual poor choices. It is also corporation actions we are part of, at times even unconsciously. We will confess that we have sinned by what we have left undone. We will confess that we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. Think about these words as you say them today.
I know that some of you already get this. Yesterday, I saw people from Grace and St. Peter’s share a post on Facebook that says, “You cannot love your neighbor while supporting or accepting systems that crush, exploit, and dehumanize them.”
Of course, ending here might leave us paralyzed with guilt, shame, or lack of hope. Yet that is not what happens to Moses. It is not what the Lent is leading up to. The collect acknowledges “that we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves”. The Epistle reminds us that “God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond our strength, but with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it.”. I know this is not something you say to people in grief, but I do want to emphasize one part of it. One of the ways out that God provides is the love of our brothers and sisters. Sometimes, we rely on those around us to get us through tough times. Other times, those around us rely on us. I hope we can all be the sort of people that can rely on others and that others can rely on. And, the Gospel ends with the fig tree that hasn’t yet born fruit being cared for, nurtured, and given yet another year to produce fruit. Let’s be cared for, nurture ourselves, that we may bear more fruit this coming year.
So finally, join us for the Lenten Study Group after church to talk more about how we can produce more fruit. And this week, as we keep our eyes open for the burning bushes in our own lives, let us keep our eyes open for chances to help one another and to disrupt systems that crush and exploit our neighbors.
Amen
Humbly Confessing our Participation in Abusive Systems of Power
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 08/25/2018 - 09:57I am not preaching this Sunday, but if I were, here is a draft of what I would say.
May the words of my mouth and the mediations of our hearts be always acceptable in your sight, o Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen.
If I have sinned against any of you knowingly or unknowingly, by things I’ve done or things I’ve failed to do, please forgive me.
As many of you know, I am currently a seminarian seeking to become an ordained priest in the holy catholic and apostolic church. So, the recent news about the sexual abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic church in Pennsylvania has weighed greatly on my mind. How do we respond to a church that allows this to happen? I’ve seen a lot of posts on Facebook dealing with this.
One post that particularly jumped out at me was a link to an Op-Ed in the New York Times, I Stood Up in Mass and Confronted My Priest. You Should, Too.. The man spoke about going to church and hearing his priest say the church has to change. The priest began to move on and the man jumped up and asked, “How?”
The priest responded with what felt like a bureaucratic answer. At the end of the service, the priest spoke with him.
the father looked at me and said the most honest thing I’ve ever heard in a church: “You and I have no influence.”
He was right. And if congregants like me have no influence, and if parents like me no longer feel safe and comfortable bringing our sons and daughters to make Communion, then the Catholic Church is beyond redemption.
Fr. Jonathan Slavinskas, a Roman Catholic priest serving in the Diocese of Worchester, MA wrote a powerful Facebook post about how the scandal affects him from the viewpoint of putting on the priest’s collar.
He talks about the great responsibility that the collar represents, the suspicion it generates, the grave sin it now represents for so many people. He talks about questioning why he should stick around. He talks about not wanting to wear the collar because of the shame of what it represents to so many people and the weariness of dealing with it.
He then went on to talk about a woman asking if he were a Catholic priest. She wanted him to anoint her dying brother and the comfort he was able to bring to her and her family. He reminds us all that the collar is not about us, it is about Jesus. He speaks with great humility.
It reminded me of a priest I know who starts off the Divine Liturgy asking for forgiveness. It was based on his words that I asked your forgiveness at the beginning of this sermon. I was copied on an email he recently sent to a friend. He ended it with, “I remain your unworthy pastor”. We would all do well to show some of his humility.
How do we respond to the scandal in the church? Do we have any influence? Is the church beyond redemption?
Today’s Gospel offers us some insight:
Jesus said, “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live forever.”
When many of his disciples heard it, they said, “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?”
Jesus doesn’t back down and responds, “For this reason I have told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted by the Father.”
Many of the discipled turned away and then Jesus asked the twelve if they would turn away also. Peter responded, “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life.”
You and I do have little influence on the church structures, but that isn’t what matters. We are called to abide in Jesus and trust in God’s influence. We will not change the church. God will.
This is not just a passive thing, the “thoughts and prayers” that are so often derided in political commentary today. This is putting on the whole armor of God with the belt of truth and the breastplate of righteousness. This is praying in the spirit without ceasing.
This is adopting a spirit of humility and recognizing that we, ourselves, participate in structures of power that harm others. Like well intentioned priests in a broken ecclesiastical power structure, we participate in systems that perpetuate racism, sexism, and a raft of other “-isms”.
The first steps in dismantling these systems is recognizing our own culpability and the powerful narratives that support these systems. We can then begin to change these narratives by turning away from the gratifications they offer and turning towards the gratifications of humbly abiding in Christ.
Let us pray in the spirit without ceasing. Amen.
The Bread of What Sort of Life?
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 08/17/2018 - 08:38Here is the audio of the sermon I preached at Grace and St. Peter's Episcopal Church in Hamden, CT on August 12, 2018:
The Bread of What Sort of Life (rough cut)
Below you will also find the text as prepared for delivery.
I would like to thank my good friends who provided feedback, both as I was writing it and afterwards. I hope to discuss some of their ideas in a follow up post, if I can make the time.
“I am the bread of life”. How many of you have heard verse before? If you were in church last Sunday, you probably heard it. How many of you have heard it so many times before that it has lost much of it’s meaning?
Last Sunday, I was at a folk music festival and went to a small church in upstate New York. “I am the bread of life” was written over the arch leading up to the altar. It was part of the appointed readings for last week. It is for this week also.
Since I was in New York, I didn’t hear what was preached here, but I suspect it was similar to the sermon I heard there, talking about freshly baked bread, about being hungry, maybe even about feeding the hungry. I’ve also read other people’s sermons which were about freshly baked bread.
If I wanted to play it safe, and not worry about repeating what was said last week, I could preach on other parts of the Gospel lesson or one of the other readings. Yet the folks who put together the lectionary thought this was important enough to repeat two weeks in a row, so I’ll expand a little bit on the verse.
As I think about this verse, I split it into three parts. “I am” … “the Bread” … and “Life”.
The phrase “I am” is very important in scripture. It is how God responds to Moses when Moses asks God’s name. In the Gospel of John, Jesus describes himself seven times with phrases that start off with “I am…” The final phrase is “I am the true vine”, which was the Gospel the last time I preached here. “I am the bread of life” is the first of these phrases. In these phrases, Jesus is linking himself back to God and Moses on Mount Horeb.
So, if you were to start a sentence with the words, “I am”, what would you say? Who are you - really? I was thinking about this as I was listening to folk music last weekend. One of the songs that jumped out at me was “I am the one that will remember everything”. It is about orphan refugees being trained to become child warriors. How much are we like orphan refugees, living out painful lives and being trained to deal with that our pain by bringing pain to others? To borrow from a different song, how much are we “living like a refugee”? How much are we remembering painful parts of our lives and perhaps causing pain to others? How much are we like “the least of these” that Jesus talks about, like “the others”, whomever the others might be?
In another song, Dar Williams has a response, “I am the others”. How is God calling us to treat others?
When we talk about “the bread”, we are reminded about manna. Manna is referenced in both last week’s Gospel and this week’s. Remember, God gave manna to the Israelites as they wandered and complained in the wilderness. This continues the discussion from last week, where Jesus said, “Very truly, I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves”.
Are we coming to God and to church primarily to have our needs met? Are we seeking some sort of wealth that prosperity gospel preachers talk about? God does want our needs to be met, but God has a much greater understanding of what our needs really are. God wants so much more for us. This leads me to the final phrase part of the quote. “Life”.
What sort of life are we looking for? For ourselves? For our church? What makes you feel really alive? This takes us back to the stories of David we’ve been hearing about over the past few weeks. God took David, that ruddy son of Jesse who’s been out tending the sheep and makes him king of Israel. God defends David from his adversaries. David shows his gratitude dancing before the ark of the covenant even though his wife derides him for this. God has provided for David greatly, but David wants more than is appropriate and seeks out physical intimacy with Bathsheba.
I want to be clear here. What David did wrong was not seeking physical intimacy. Unlike some conservative preachers, I believe that physical intimacy is another wonderful gift that God gives us. What David did wrong was to seek physical intimacy at the expense of others. We don’t know what Bathsheba really thought. The bible is woefully lacking in exploring the thoughts and desires of most of its female characters. This reflects a larger issue of men generally failing to respect what women want. It reflects the overarching issue of power imbalances.
This isn’t just an issue of Biblical times. We still hear it today. As one political media personality put it, “when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.” Power continues to be misused today, and it’s not just politicians. In April, the founding pastor of Willows Creek mega-church resigned amidst sexual abuse allegations. At General Convention this year, the Episcopal Church had a powerful Liturgy of Listening in response to issues of abuse and harassment in the Episcopal Church.
Last week, we heard about Nathan confronting David of his great sin, and I’ve longed to hear people confront some of our leaders today in the same manner. Perhaps the closest we are to such prophets are ones who use the #MeToo hashtag.
I suspect if we really look closely at our lives, there have been times that we have been taken advantage of by people misusing their power … AND … I suspect that we have all taken advantage of other people by misusing our own power. Sometimes, we’ve probably done this without even knowing it. I believe it is something we should always be keeping in mind when we confess our sins.
This week, we hear more about David. He gets the news that his son has died in battle and laments, “O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son!” I won’t go into Absalom’s history. It is, like so many of the stories in the Old Testament, complicated. Yet I will say that I cannot imagine the pain and grief of losing a beloved child. It is hard enough to lose even a pet.
How do we respond to such pain and grief? For David, and I suspect most of us, there are things that are more important to us than our own suffering, even than our own lives. - “Would I had died instead of you”.
One year ago today, Susan Bro’s daughter Heather Heyer was killed at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. I cannot imagine her pain and grief. Yet she is calling on people today not to respond with violence. On top of that, I can’t imagine the pain that drives people to hate other people because of their skin color.
Yet I did just read a story that helps me understand a little bit. Ken Parker, an ex-neo nazi put it this way, “I had gotten out of the navy, it was hard getting a job and it was really easy to blame it somebody else, you know people with darker skin.”
This is, I believe, can help us understand today’s gospel lesson. The crowds were asking for physical bread. They were looking for food, just as people are looking for jobs and better lives today. Jesus was talking about something much deeper.
You know, there are these quizzes on Facebook: Would you be willing to live in a haunted house with no modern communications for a month for a million dollars? Todays lesson asks a similar question: Would you rather have a life time supply of bread or have someone love you enough to be willing to suffer and die for you?
Ken Parker’s story continued on to encounter Jesus, the bread of life, when he befriended a black pastor and turned his life around, being baptized and received into a predominantly black church.
Today’s epistle takes it the one step further. It says, “Thieves must give up stealing; rather let them labor and work honestly with their own hands”. Why is this? It isn’t simply because stealing is wrong or that maybe we need to be doing our fair share of the work that needs to be done. The epistle tells us it is “so as to have something to share with the needy”. That is where we experience the joy of Christ. The epistle ends with “Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.”
This is where we experience true joy, where our lives are most full, when we are living in love, imitating God, and sharing with those in need around us.
In a theology group on Facebook the other day we were asked what sort of church events other than the worship services did people ‘feel the spirit’. I mentioned Dinner for a Dollar. I believe it is in helping with things like Dinner for a Dollar that we are especially close to being imitators of God, living in love, that and deeply experiencing God’s love for all of us.
Jesus said, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”
“Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.” Amen.
Sermon: Locating The Vine
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sun, 05/06/2018 - 15:14Below is the text of the sermon I delivered Sunday, May 6, 2018 at Grace and St. Peter's in Hamden, CT. As described in the sermon we had switched the Gospel lessons between last week and this week, so the text was John 15:1-8. I did vary a bit from this draft as I presented it, but the ideas and framework remained the same.
[From the center Aisle]
Good Morning. Bob is out of town today and Dexter has graciously given me the opportunity to preach. In today's lesson were going to talk about about location and I’m going to do something a little bit differently. Bob has been preaching from the aisle, Amanda used to preach from the pulpit. I’m going to do a little bit of both and maybe bring in a little bit from my studies in seminary. I also invite you to think pay attention in a different way. I want you to pay attention to all that is going on here. Look around the sanctuary. Look at the altar. Look at the light coming in through the stained glass windows. Listen to my words. Listen to the sounds of people shifting around in their seats, rustling papers, and the sounds of the world outside the church, the traffic, the birds, and so on.
[pause… Walk to the altar and then to the pulpit]
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be always acceptable in your sight, oh Lord, our strength and our redeemer.
Today, we hear the lesson about Jesus being the vine and us being the branches. We’re doing things a little bit out of order. Our lesson last week about God’s love should have been the lesson for this week and vice versa, but Bob wanted to change the order so that youth Sunday would have such a great passage to preach from and that fit in with their song. We need to keep in mind that today’s lesson comes before the lesson we heard about love last week.
These two lessons, together come as part of the Jesus’ great Farewell Discourse in chapters 14 through 17 of John. They are preceded and followed by Jesus telling the disciples about God sending the Holy Spirit.
In Biblical Studies, a lot of attention is paid to the location of various texts. When and where were the texts written? Who wrote the texts and how did they fit into the society of the time? What about the location might shape what got included and what didn’t get included in the text? Finally, how does our location today shape how we think about the texts?
An important question that the early Christians at the Gospel of John was written were struggling with was the relationship between Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians. Would Gentiles have to adopt Jewish customs? If so, which thread of Jewish customs, the customs of the Greek Jews spread out across the Middle East, or the customs of Hebrew Jews in Jerusalem? This was about more than things like keeping a kosher kitchen or being circumcised. It was about the very understanding of who they were.
What role did Jerusalem play to these Jews and early Christians? Jesus’ comments about being the vine need to be thought about in terms of Old Testament scriptures about Vineyards.
In Isaiah 5:7, we read:
The vineyard of the LORD Almighty
is the nation of Israel,
and the people of Judah
are the vines he delighted in.
Deuteronomy 28:30 echoes this theme but with an ominous warning, “You will plant a vineyard, but you will not even begin to enjoy its fruit.”
Various commentators have suggested that what Jesus is saying here is that what matters is our relationship with God instead of any specific physical location. In this light, John 15 fits very nicely between the discussions of the Holy Spirit coming in Chapters 14 and 16. The physical body of Jesus cannot possibly be with all people in all locations at all times, but the Holy Spirit can be.
As we continue to think about who we are as a community, I think this is an important perspective. We have a beautiful church building at a great location. Its purpose should be to draw each of us closer to God and to one another as we bring God’s love to the greater community. We, as a community, can bring God’s love, as we experience it here to people in our daily lives, wherever our paths take us.
In the Gospel, Jesus calls us to remain in him, as he remains in us. An older translation of this is ‘abide’. What does it mean to remain or abide in Jesus? The same word is used in Matthew when Jesus sends out the disciples. “Whatever town or village you enter, search there for some worthy person and stay [or remain or abide] at their house until you leave”.
This location here in Hamden is where we are sent out from. It is where we abide as we show God’s love to those around us, through programs like Dinner for a Dollar and Abraham’s tent.
Another place where the word ‘abide’ is used in the New Testament is by Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. In Matthew, Jesus says to his disciples in the garden, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here [abide or remain] and keep watch with me.”
Our location here in Hamden is also where we abide in times of grief or sadness as we say good bye to loved ones and comfort one another. We abide with those we love when they are grieving or troubled, whether they are with us here at Grace and St. Peter’s or far away from us. It is part of what makes us the community we are.
And what is the result of our abiding in Jesus? Jesus tells us, “If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. This is to my Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples.”
What is this fruit? We find the word used many different places. Many of my evangelical friends think of these fruits in terms of the number of new people we bring to church. That is part of it, but that is much more. In Galatians are told that the fruits of the spirit are “love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control”.
In the story of Jesus birth, we get another view of what these fruits. In the beginning of Luke when Mary visits Elizabeth, Elizabeth shouts out, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb”.
This is the fruit we are called to bear, to bring God’s love into the world. It is what the children of our Sunday school spoke with us about last week. It is what we show through ministries like Dinner for a Dollar, Abraham’s Tent, Arden House, Older and Wiser, and simply showing God’s love to those around us.
Finally, we come to the type of fruit that grows on vines. The grapes used to make wine; the wine which will become for us the mystical blood of Christ in the Eucharist in a little while. We are the body of Christ. We are the branches of vine, bearing the fruit that will bring hope, love, and joy to those around us. Let us keep all of these things in mind as we consider our location, here in Hamden, and as branches connected to the vine of Christ. Amen
