sermon notes 5/6 I John 4:7-21, John 15:1-8

May 6 John 15:1-8, I John 4:7-21 This is one of those Sundays when we have such an array of passages that I scarcely knew where to start. At this point, I want to work with the natural image of the vine and connect it to the great evocation of love in I John. We were assigned the vine passage to introduce our planning session for the new organizational structure of presbytery for the 21st Century. Some stressed Christ of course, but others went from there to stress the relationships, the connections made with this image all the way through. This organic image speaks of an inter-relationship, of the vine and branches. It also indicates that to think we can go off on our own, depend on our own resources, is the kiss of death. Unconnected to the vine, we wither and perish. Whenever I get hung up on working through my image of God, when I deal with my underlying suspicion of God’s disappointment and frustration with me, I go back to this passage and its signal statement: God is love. You take some theology classes in seminary and can get so sophisticated that this three word sentence can get lost, but it is the very heart of our conception of God in Christ.Again, I heard some folks, mostly men, again criticize the mainline churches for emphasizing love. this time it was on two grounds: people need fear to be motivated and that love was too weak a word to speak of God.So, I urge us all to converse with this section of I John. Putting the passages together, we find God in the relationships, in the connections of love. What feeds the church is the life of Christ flowing through all of us together. God is a gardener here. I have heard it said that a good marriage often occurs when a gardener marries a garden. the love of God lives in the core of a marriage.Our vision is obscured with that signal fact. Young marriage is fueled by hormone and attraction, middle age love by children and grandchildren perhaps, so perhaps it becomes most evident in a long term marriage, where the couple can finish each other’s sentences and speak in a sort of code, where they know each other’s habits and preferences, and where they take care of each other and look past the limitations with an easy acceptance. After all, many Presbyterian weddings begin with the words that those who abide in love abide in God and god abides in them.We find the living god in our relationships. Greg told me a great story a while back. He and Carol operated a program to work with a bell choir, and they developed a color coded system to help with the cuing of ringing the bell with the notes. A woman came up and said that her deaf child had never been in a group before and it was a good experience. that little girl grew up to get a doctorate and part of her research agenda is developing and charting the impact of group activities for various disable groups of folks. We touch a life and it ripples out into the world in ways we could not imagine.(data mining??) To abide can mean to dwell to live in, to remain with. It has such a sense of mutuality of the vine and the branches. I like it as it is a living image, not a mechanical one, or one that can slip easily into hierarchy of who is on the bottom and who is on top. while Jesus is ascended, he remains through the spirit, the paraclete. God is present in the love we share together and in the church.