2024-04-29
Brooke Strong
Sermon Text...
April 28, 2024 Hamilton Coe Throckmorton
John 15:1-8 The Federated Church, UCC
“There’s no such thing as a solitary Christian.” I heard those words decades ago, and maybe they’re familiar to you, as well. They brought me up short when I first heard them, and they continue to bring me up short now. And it’s because they smack right up against the pevailing ethos of the culture in which we live. In our culture, it’s what you do as an individual that counts. What’s your work? Do you make a difference? How much do you make? What place do you have in the social pecking order? What level of success have you achieved? We measure people by their individual accomplishments, by what they’ve achieved in their work or in the community. Some are seen as stellar and valuable, others not so much.
And it’s really no different in the religious sphere. We simply assume that our ultimate worth is determined, on an individual basis, by “what we’ve done and what we’ve left undone.” Have we done enough acts of mercy? Have we kept our offenses to a minimum? Have we made up for the sins of our youth with a more mature and generous adulthood?
As in the culture at large, people of faith are convinced that our eternal standing is determined solely by our personal accomplishments. Salvation, we think, is achieved by our own efforts—by whether we’ve tried hard enough, by whether we’ve been honest and diligent and prayerful and generous enough to tip the ledger in our favor. Because God knows, we assume, that some judging figure is tallying up the score and figuring out whether we’re good enough to make it or not. It’s like an athletic competition that we think we have to win if we’re to have any chance with God.
This emphasis on the individual seeps into every part of American culture. We tend to revere a kind of cowboy mentality of self-made people. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, we think, and just get it done. “God helps those who help themselves,” we offer as a kind of cultural mantra, as though it has some sort of biblical patina to it.
And what today’s words of Jesus do is throw cold water in the face of that sort of earned approach to faith and to our standing in the culture. When Jesus says, “I am the vine and you are the branches” (John 15:5), he evokes this familiar, almost cliched, image of Christ as a vine and the church as an assortment of branches growing on that vine.
What might at first glance seem trite, though, becomes arresting when we pause to fully take in that metaphor. Imagine for a moment the way a vine’s branches intermingle. The branches and leaves twist and turn and flow together and double back on each other. You don’t look at one leaf and say, “Ah, see that leaf—that’s the great one, that’s the one that’s most valuable.” You don’t say, “That leaf is so much better performing than the rest. That’s the one that has pulled itself up by its bootstraps. That’s the one that’s earned its keep.” You don’t see one leaf saying to another, “I have more of a right to that water than you do,” or “Get out of the way—I deserve that sunlight.” And if there’s such a thing as “vine heaven,” you don’t say, “That’s the leaf that’s saved.”
Just to say it is to see how ludicrous such an idea is. In this image of vine and branches, Jesus points to the inescapable interdependence of all life. The roots of trees form a system that intersects and communicates with and preserves each other. Coral reefs provide shelter and breeding grounds and food. If those reefs die, then fish die, and everything that depends on them dies. As indigenous cultures have understood for eons, everything is intertwined. The health of one part is integrally related to the whole. The universe isn’t an assortment of discrete parts, each one assertively declaring its worth. No, everything is intricately interwoven. As the ecotheologian Thomas Berry once wrote, “We must say of the universe that it is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects” (quoted in Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, p. 56).
And what we so often miss is that this is equally true of us as human beings. You and I, at the deepest level, are not competitive participants in some game of attrition or survival. We are, instead, each branches on a vine that is interwoven and interconnected. My life is inseparably connected to yours. There is no escaping our interdependence. As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., so incisively put it, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly” (“Letter from Birmingham Jail”).
In a culture, like ours, seemingly built on an inherent competitiveness and self-sufficiency, such sentiments seem like a virtual sacrilege. They claw at our assumptions and remind us that there is another way. And that way is of God. And that way is full of life and hope.
We are the branches. And Christ is the vine. We have life, and life together, because we have been given it by the Christ who holds us and sustains us. And we thrive together when we give that life to each other. I have life because of you. And you have life because of me. And we all have life because of each other. We are all branches on the same vine. And while the core of the matter is that it’s Christ, the vine, who gives us life, it is also true that we depend on each other for the fullness of that life.
In the same way that it’s patently absurd to imagine that a single leaf or branch, or a small group of them, would stand out to God and be rewarded for superior performance, I suspect Jesus is also suggesting that it’s patently absurd for me to imagine that I can secure my own future by my superior efforts while all around me, people suffer from poverty or isolation or bullying or Israeli violence or vicious anti-Semitism or transphobia or race-related toxic poisoning. In what possible way could it make theological sense for me to say, “Whew, at least I made it, even though all these others got the short end of the stick”? No, my wholeness is intricately tied to your wholeness and to the wholeness of the family whose medical bills skyrocket and of the person who can’t seem to escape their addiction and of the child begging in the streets of Mumbai.
Jesus is the vine, and together we are the branches. And each leaf or branch thrives only if the whole plant or tree thrives. When we come together as church, this is what we recognize. This is what we give ourselves to. I thrive only as the person heartbroken by the divorce thrives. I thrive only as the teenager undone in a vortex of social media vitriol thrives. I thrive only as the child disfigured by urban violence thrives. I thrive only as the trees and flowers and mountains and rivers and lakes and oceans and sky thrive. Jesus is the vine, and together we are the branches.
And this thriving is rooted in love. When Jesus talks about “bear[ing] fruit,” as he does six times in this passage (15:2 [x3], 4, 5, 8), it’s this deep and interdependent love that he’s evoking. We bear fruit as we love each other, as we watch out for each other, as we tend to each other’s needs. It’s as simple, and as challenging, as that. And everything depends on that. Not on my superiority. Not on my brilliant ethical gymnastics. Not on my showing how much more worthwhile I am than you. Only on love. Only on our recognizing that my branch thrives only when yours does.
Sharon Brous, the founding rabbi of a synagogue called IKAR in Los Angeles, says that about ten years ago, a young hipster Jewish man came to her after his father had died. He was distraught, and Rabbi Brous provided him some Jewish prayers that had comforted people over the centuries. The man was still at a loss, though, and Rabbi Brous began to realize that, as important as the traditions were—and they’re a vital part of our healing—there was still something missing. What that man needed was to be seen in his grief. He needed to be held. He needed to have his pain acknowledged by the community.
So Rabbi Brous preached a sermon, which she then turned into a book, called The Amen Effect. In it she stressed that the community needed to be there for each other in all the grief and failure and loss that come to its members, certainly, but also in the joy and success and elation that come their way—that the experience of community is vastly deepened by recognizing the fullness of each other’s lives.
Rabbi Brous reports Mother Teresa’s observation that “the problem with the world is that we draw the circle of our family too small,” that we too seldom make the jump from seeing people as just other, to seeing them as fellow image of God (p. 59). And she tells a story about a member of her synagogue. One day, this woman, Hanne “was out with her dog in the park . . . when she came across a young man, unhoused, lying on a bench. She started to chat with him—his name was Ryan. She took him out for breakfast, and by the end of the meal, she had insisted that he move into her spare bedroom, a safe place for him to rest and begin to heal. Ryan lived in Hanne’s home for a full year, until he was able to get back on his feet.
“I was worried for Hanne when I heard that she had invited Ryan into her home. All of her friends were. We didn’t know him, and we didn’t trust him. He was clearly struggling, maybe unwell. It was not inconceivable that he might, in a moment of desperation, harm our friend, physically, emotionally, or materially.
“But Hanne understood that her locus of moral concern extended to this man on the bench. And that gesture of unrestrained love, although profoundly unsettling for many of us, was also [a remarkable gift].
“Years later, when Hanne died, Ryan eulogized her, saying, ‘That woman saved my life.’
“I have to believe in some way that Hanne’s embrace of this young man was because of her forever broken heart after she lost her own son, Adam, to mesothelioma, a cruel and aggressive cancer. . .. I’ve always suspected that when she saw Ryan there, on the bench, she thought, How can I not see you as my son? She treated him as though he, an image of God, was someone’s child and, therefore, her shared responsibility. She lived as though we really do belong to one another” (pp. 60-61).
As we receive new members here at Federated Church today, this is some of what we’re to be about: to see each other as family, to know that we really do belong to one another, to embody the richness of Jesus’ simple image: we are all branches on the same vine. Jesus holds us close and gives us life. And we’re to hold each other close and give each other life. There’s no such thing as a solitary Christian. May it always be so.