As you know, before I preach I pray. I created the prayer to bring the experience
of preaching and listening into a relationship.
You, I and God make up the relationship. “ Gracious God, be in our hearts; be our
minds; be in our lives—and help is to live in your Holy Word.”
God’s Holy Word as scripture should by my preaching and by
your listening be broken open in such a way that God can be better known. We can never understand God fully. But as my grandson would say, “You can
try.” “Trying” in this context means
approaching the Liturgy of the Word—the reading of scripture and the preaching—with
an open heart and with an attentive and open mind. God’s revelation of God’s
self can happen in the relationship we have created today—a relationship may
seem quite momentary, ephemeral—but the feelings and perceptions that arise in
this momentary relationship can be carried forward in our lives beyond these walls.
You may not remember my words—I don’t even remember them for very long—but
the experience of feelings and perceptions engendered can last through the
hours and days and weeks to come.
The final phrase of my prayer becomes important now. To “live in God’s Holy Word” doesn’t means to
keep all the commandments. That would be
to live by God’s Word.” To “live in
God Word” is to dwell in relationship with God—perhaps we might say “abide.”
“Abide” that word comes up again and again from both the
first letter of John and and from the passage from John’s gospel:
“By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of
his Spirit. And we have seen and do testify that the Father has sent his Son as
the Savior of the world. God abides in those who confess that Jesus is the Son
of God, and they abide in God. So we have known and believe the love that God
has for us.
God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in
them.”
“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.”
The literal translation from the Greek in 1 John that talks
about God abiding in us and we in God sounds a bit strange but helps to clarify
the epistle writer’s meaning: “the God in us stays” and “in him we stay.” The same verb is used by Jesus in describing
the relationship between the vine and the branches: “the one staying in me and
I in him . . .”
So “abide”—yes, an old fashioned word—could refer to the
modern concept of “hanging out with” or just “hanging with.” And, in a more theological sense, since these
texts are speaking about God and humans, “being in relationship with.” Not, of course, just you and God—but you,
God, and other folk.
When we abide in in Jesus, the vine, there lots of branches.
More than than the fact that many branches are all connected to Jesus, there is
the issue of these branches bearing fruit or not. The fruit referred to in Jesus’ illustration takes
its life and achieves its purpose of nourishing humankind only in relationship
with the central vine. So God stays in
us and we in God.
Because God’s Holy Word is more than scripture, it is
Jesus and God’s creative power. The
writer of Genesis uses this phrase with each act of creation, “And God said . .
.” The writer of John’s gospel tells us,
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God
. . . “And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory,
the glory of the Father’s only son, full of grace and truth.” So when we “live in God’s Holy Word,” we
become part of a relationship that will make our lives fruitful signs do the
coming of God’s reign.
As I was thinking about “abiding” this week and through
“abiding” bearing fruit, my mind kept coming back to the two tragedies in the
news this week: the devastating earthquake in Nepal and the street violence in
Baltimore.
In Nepal the local rescuers worked and worked, even after
they thought all the survivors had been rescued. They continued their tasks, I believe,
because of their relationship to the people in the destroyed communities. They
were abiding, staying at their tasks, because of the relationships they lived in with others of that
community.
In Baltimore, I heard a report that clergy who served in
the area of the unrest did their best to connect with young people and their
parents on Tuesday after Monday’s looting and burning. They sought to remind them that this
community where they lived, you could say “abided,” would not be made better
through acts of destruction. Their relationships in the community were
important, and working together in those relationships they could advocate for
the change they desired. Did this make a
difference? It’s hard to say, since other factors changed on Tuesday as
well. Did the people of the neighborhood
who came out to help clean up the streets on Tuesday make a difference? Again
hard to say, but this showed people recognizing that they live in relationship—abiding
in a place with others—and need to bear fruit in that relationship.
So there is God’s abiding in us and we in God, our living
in God’s Holy Word, and our living in communities with relationships connecting
us to each other—and to God, even if the people with whom we are abiding don’t
understand God as we do. What can this look like for each of us? What can this
look like for our parish? Can our commitment—with
God’s help—to staying in relationship and bearing fruit be a sign of God’s
coming reign?
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