Vining And Branching
Sermon
The Culture Of Disbelief
Gospel Sermons For Lent/Easter
Parents know exactly what Jesus means about vining and branching. We know the connection of fruiting to pruning, the connection of fruiting to watering, the deep relationship we have with our children. There are consequences to our abilities to love them. If we can love them, they can mature and bear fruit. If we cannot love them, they cannot mature and bear fruit.
Jesus speaks of God as his Father, the vinegrower. He attributes his ability to fruit to his parent. How does he fruit? He abides in God. We have the same choice, the same good news, the same capacity for maturity and fruiting.
I am always amazed by the myth of individualism! We really do imagine that we make ourselves when in fact we make each other. Our parents make us and then we make our children. God made Jesus who makes, and remakes, us. We have tremendous personal, if not individual, responsibility for ourselves: we make choices about which environment we choose to form us. Even if there is failure in pruning and watering and caring, God can enter our lives. God can relove us. God can relove our children. One of the meanings of the resurrection is right here: we are given another chance to love each another. We may rechoose the spiritual environment in which we grow.
Dominick Crossan, the New Testament scholar, says that Christians often mistake sin and salvation as matters of individual choice. They are not. They are matters of social or group choice. Both sin and salvation are systemic; they are system-wide. They are like the vine and the branches: things connect in our world. In relationships and connections, things are what they are.
Individual choice matters so much precisely because it is part of the vining and branching. When we choose to disconnect from God, the vinegrower, and begin to act as though we can manage ourselves, we die.
Salvation begins with God's choice to save the world through Jesus, and ends with our personal and communal choices to say yes to that choice, to allow ourselves to be reloved and remade and reborn, over and over again.
Specific moral choices will show what I mean. I think of "Sunday Morning Soccer" and what pastors and churches and parents can do both to open and to protect our "slot." I think of the battle we have about whether it takes a "village" or a family to raise a child, when obviously it takes both. What matters is how we create environments that branch salvation to our children.
On the one hand, churches must defend our Sabbath time. On the other, we must find ways to include youth in worship times that are more friendly to their actual life and commitments.
Sports are not so much a leisure activity as a sacred activity. It is not accidental that they occupy "prime time." What churches must face in the competition for our once sacred slot is that we aren't speaking the holy in a language people can understand.
Our loss of cultural dominance is nowhere so visibly seen as in the competition over Sunday mornings. This lost imperialism is both a positive and a negative. For too long that imperialism worked as a kind of tenure: we thought we had it made and therefore didn't "work" very hard to make sense of our message. We became civil servant employees of the gospel. (No, not all tenured faculty slack off once secure, nor do all civil servants abuse their security. But the churches did.) Now that we have to make plain our vision we are better off. It was harmful to the gospel itself to have it so firmly supported by culture.
Religion is not individual choice. And I do say that as a parent raising children in two magnificent faith traditions. We are not setting our children up for choice so much as immersing them. We are stewing them! We are depending on the village and the parish and the synagogue to help us raise the children. We want them to be deep enough inside religious tradition that they can see the magnificent vining and branching that is going on, by the action of God in history.
Jews assumed they would be sidelined by culture. They assume lots of activities on Saturdays. Their religion had none of the chutzpah of Christianity. Christianity is fast on its way to becoming more "Jewish." We too have to make our case to the world. We too are a genuine alternative to culture's sense of religion, including most basically American culture's myth of individualism.
There is great advantage in having to make our vine visibly fruit in front of our children. We have to make our argument over and over and to make it well. Why do we love Jesus?
The negative side of these advantages lies in the simple surplus of choices that the modern family faces. A pastor in a small hill town north of here said, "I don't think I could face the daily stress my fifteen-year-old faces." What stress is there in Shelburne Falls, we might ask? The same stress that is in the big cities: the stress is the surplus of stimulation.
People argue that the average person today negotiates fifteen times as much stimulation as people in a previous era. Children multiply that stimulation by the kinds of games and television they watch. Getting them to choose between a patterned, Sabbathed life and a jumpy chaotic menu is stressful. Ask the soccer moms. Consider the difference between a rooted vine twisted around an old arbor -- place that image in your mind as an image of the kind of salvation Jesus promised. Then replace that image with energy on a screen. You will begin to see two versions of systems. You will begin to see the world our children see. They see both the old images and the new images. Their world of images is at least doubled!
Another loss, beyond the management of surplus choices, is the loss of sacred or "enchanted" time. Time becomes all the same when a culture refuses to enjoy a Sabbath, whether Saturday or Sunday.
The church has a stake in sacred time -- even more a stake than it has in its time slot. We have a stake in getting our message to our children: that time is sacred, that God is real and involved in our history, that Jesus Christ has saved us, and that "it's not all up to us."
When we remember the message of Jesus about the vines and the branches, we are really only hearing common sense, religiously spoken. One parent all by himself or herself cannot change the environment our children live in. If parents really want to do something about Sunday mornings and about a more patterned and less stressful time, the solution is fairly simple. It is a secular solution. We have to organize the soccer moms and players in our group. If one speaks, nothing will happen. In my experience, if several speak, children not showing up for Sunday practices will not result in sports penalties and not being able to play. There is also an important community conversation that happens when "time" becomes a subject. The church acts for God, and God's sacralizing message, instead of on behalf of its "slot."
"Abide in me as I abide in you," said Jesus. "Apart from me you can do nothing." But with him, and with each other, we can do everything. We can grow to our full maturity in Christ, as can our children.
Jesus speaks of God as his Father, the vinegrower. He attributes his ability to fruit to his parent. How does he fruit? He abides in God. We have the same choice, the same good news, the same capacity for maturity and fruiting.
I am always amazed by the myth of individualism! We really do imagine that we make ourselves when in fact we make each other. Our parents make us and then we make our children. God made Jesus who makes, and remakes, us. We have tremendous personal, if not individual, responsibility for ourselves: we make choices about which environment we choose to form us. Even if there is failure in pruning and watering and caring, God can enter our lives. God can relove us. God can relove our children. One of the meanings of the resurrection is right here: we are given another chance to love each another. We may rechoose the spiritual environment in which we grow.
Dominick Crossan, the New Testament scholar, says that Christians often mistake sin and salvation as matters of individual choice. They are not. They are matters of social or group choice. Both sin and salvation are systemic; they are system-wide. They are like the vine and the branches: things connect in our world. In relationships and connections, things are what they are.
Individual choice matters so much precisely because it is part of the vining and branching. When we choose to disconnect from God, the vinegrower, and begin to act as though we can manage ourselves, we die.
Salvation begins with God's choice to save the world through Jesus, and ends with our personal and communal choices to say yes to that choice, to allow ourselves to be reloved and remade and reborn, over and over again.
Specific moral choices will show what I mean. I think of "Sunday Morning Soccer" and what pastors and churches and parents can do both to open and to protect our "slot." I think of the battle we have about whether it takes a "village" or a family to raise a child, when obviously it takes both. What matters is how we create environments that branch salvation to our children.
On the one hand, churches must defend our Sabbath time. On the other, we must find ways to include youth in worship times that are more friendly to their actual life and commitments.
Sports are not so much a leisure activity as a sacred activity. It is not accidental that they occupy "prime time." What churches must face in the competition for our once sacred slot is that we aren't speaking the holy in a language people can understand.
Our loss of cultural dominance is nowhere so visibly seen as in the competition over Sunday mornings. This lost imperialism is both a positive and a negative. For too long that imperialism worked as a kind of tenure: we thought we had it made and therefore didn't "work" very hard to make sense of our message. We became civil servant employees of the gospel. (No, not all tenured faculty slack off once secure, nor do all civil servants abuse their security. But the churches did.) Now that we have to make plain our vision we are better off. It was harmful to the gospel itself to have it so firmly supported by culture.
Religion is not individual choice. And I do say that as a parent raising children in two magnificent faith traditions. We are not setting our children up for choice so much as immersing them. We are stewing them! We are depending on the village and the parish and the synagogue to help us raise the children. We want them to be deep enough inside religious tradition that they can see the magnificent vining and branching that is going on, by the action of God in history.
Jews assumed they would be sidelined by culture. They assume lots of activities on Saturdays. Their religion had none of the chutzpah of Christianity. Christianity is fast on its way to becoming more "Jewish." We too have to make our case to the world. We too are a genuine alternative to culture's sense of religion, including most basically American culture's myth of individualism.
There is great advantage in having to make our vine visibly fruit in front of our children. We have to make our argument over and over and to make it well. Why do we love Jesus?
The negative side of these advantages lies in the simple surplus of choices that the modern family faces. A pastor in a small hill town north of here said, "I don't think I could face the daily stress my fifteen-year-old faces." What stress is there in Shelburne Falls, we might ask? The same stress that is in the big cities: the stress is the surplus of stimulation.
People argue that the average person today negotiates fifteen times as much stimulation as people in a previous era. Children multiply that stimulation by the kinds of games and television they watch. Getting them to choose between a patterned, Sabbathed life and a jumpy chaotic menu is stressful. Ask the soccer moms. Consider the difference between a rooted vine twisted around an old arbor -- place that image in your mind as an image of the kind of salvation Jesus promised. Then replace that image with energy on a screen. You will begin to see two versions of systems. You will begin to see the world our children see. They see both the old images and the new images. Their world of images is at least doubled!
Another loss, beyond the management of surplus choices, is the loss of sacred or "enchanted" time. Time becomes all the same when a culture refuses to enjoy a Sabbath, whether Saturday or Sunday.
The church has a stake in sacred time -- even more a stake than it has in its time slot. We have a stake in getting our message to our children: that time is sacred, that God is real and involved in our history, that Jesus Christ has saved us, and that "it's not all up to us."
When we remember the message of Jesus about the vines and the branches, we are really only hearing common sense, religiously spoken. One parent all by himself or herself cannot change the environment our children live in. If parents really want to do something about Sunday mornings and about a more patterned and less stressful time, the solution is fairly simple. It is a secular solution. We have to organize the soccer moms and players in our group. If one speaks, nothing will happen. In my experience, if several speak, children not showing up for Sunday practices will not result in sports penalties and not being able to play. There is also an important community conversation that happens when "time" becomes a subject. The church acts for God, and God's sacralizing message, instead of on behalf of its "slot."
"Abide in me as I abide in you," said Jesus. "Apart from me you can do nothing." But with him, and with each other, we can do everything. We can grow to our full maturity in Christ, as can our children.
