(To hear a version of this sermon as preached, click here.)
John
15:1-8
”I am the true vine,
and my Father is the vine-grower. He removes every branch in me that bears
no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more
fruit. You have already been cleansed by the word that I have spoken to
you. Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit
by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in
me. 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. Whoever
does not abide in me is thrown away like a branch and withers; such branches
are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned. If you abide in me, and my
words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for
you. My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit and become
my disciples.
Acts
8:26-40
Then an angel of
the Lord said to Philip, “Get up and go toward the south to the road that goes
down from Jerusalem to Gaza.” (This is a wilderness road.) So he got up and went. Now there was
an Ethiopian eunuch, a court official of the Candace, queen of the Ethiopians,
in charge of her entire treasury. He had come to Jerusalem to worship and was returning home; seated in his
chariot, he was reading the prophet Isaiah. Then
the Spirit said to Philip, “Go over to this chariot and join it.” So Philip ran
up to it and heard him reading the prophet Isaiah. He asked, “Do you understand
what you are reading?” He
replied, “How can I, unless someone guides me?” And he invited Philip to get in
and sit beside him. Now the
passage of the scripture that he was reading was this: “Like a sheep he was led
to the slaughter, and like a lamb silent before its shearer, so he does not
open his mouth. In his
humiliation justice was denied him. Who can describe his generation? For his
life is taken away from the earth.” The
eunuch asked Philip, “About whom, may I ask you, does the prophet say this,
about himself or about someone else?” Then
Philip began to speak, and starting with this scripture, he proclaimed to him
the good news about Jesus. As they
were going along the road, they came to some water; and the eunuch said, “Look,
here is water! What is to prevent me from being baptized?” He commanded the
chariot to stop, and both of them, Philip and the eunuch, went down into the
water, and Philip baptized him. When
they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord snatched Philip away; the
eunuch saw him no more, and went on his way rejoicing. But Philip found himself at Azotus,
and as he was passing through the region, he proclaimed the good news to all
the towns until he came to Caesarea.
----
This has not
been an easy week to be a citizen of the world. An earthquake in Nepal. Race
riots in Baltimore. The United States and its adversaries on the brink of war,
always, it seems, on the brink of war. Complicated questions about love and
marriage and what it means to be a society that respects all people, affords
rights to all people.
Come to think
of it, while it’s been a complicated, difficult week, it’s not just this week.
Things are changing, around this place, of course, but everywhere, really,
sometimes for the better, depending on your point of view, sometimes for the
worse.
And in the
midst of this great change, thank God for the church. Thank God we can continue
to come here, meet in this room, as we have done every single Sunday for the
sixty years since this sanctuary was built, three thousand, one hundred and
thirty Sundays including today. When we feel so overwhelmed by the state of the
world that we can barely move, church connects us, stills us, holds us
accountable to one another and to God, and roots us in a common community, a
common understanding of life and faith.
And so I am
thinking God this week for the traditions of the church. They root us. They
connect us, year after year, so that when we worship with our friends across
the street on Good Friday, or when we share a covered dish dinner after
Homecoming, or when we sing Silent Night on Christmas Eve, we can quit worrying
just for a moment about all that has become unfamiliar in the world and rest in
the familiar, in these well-worn pews, in this holy place.
Thank God for
the traditions of the church. A church needs traditions, needs rootedness, even
as it looks forward. Why, just this week, here at the church, we discovered
that due to some of the updating and renovating we’ve been doing around here,
the frames holding the pictures of all the former pastors of this church, our
sort of Wall of Fame, had been put in a cabinet and nearly forgotten about.
Well, do I think that the pastors are the most important part of the church? Of
course not. But there’s history there, there’s rootedness. And so we’re talking
about how to honor that history: where to hang those pictures so that people
see them regularly, not so that we can get stuck on how things were, but so
that we can remember—even those of us new to this place can remember that we do
not come to faith alone, nor are we the first ones to do so. We are connected,
we are rooted, we have a particular history.
But what
happens when the traditions of the church become the most important thing? I
have seen churches unwilling to bend on anything, unwilling to recognize that
love of tradition is not the same thing as love of Jesus. In other words, what
happens when the way we’ve always done it gets in the way of the mission of
God?
That’s not to
say that just because something doesn’t work anymore means it’s bad. Oh, that’s
not the case at all. There are plenty of things we don’t do that we once did
that are deeply good! Listen, I am a person who collects vinyl records. I am
not a throw-it-all-away-and-start-over kind of guy. Do I want to go back to the
days when all music is on records, where I’d have to lug crates of music around
just to have half as many songs as I have on my phone? No! But that doesn’t
mean vinyl is bad. Not at all.
Just because
something doesn’t work anymore doesn’t mean it’s bad. But neither does it mean
that we ought to keep everything as it always was forever and ever just because
it once was good. I may collect vinyl, because of the superior sound, but I do
not bother with 8-tracks! The faith I had as a child was good, but I have
outgrown it. I hope you have outgrown the things you believed when you were
five, six, seven years old, or at least, I hope you have a more nuanced view of
the world.
Don’t take my
word for it. Take Jesus’s. In the Gospel passage Mary Gene read this morning,
the word of the day is pruning,
cutting away that which was once viable growth so that the faster-growing parts
can thrive. This is what it means to be part of God’s family, of the Body of
Christ, for, we learn in scripture, that Christ is the vine and we are the
branches, and God prunes the branches so that they will bear more fruit.
This sounds
all right, I suppose, but pruning is not exactly fun stuff. In the yard of the
house where we used to live, we had a number of beautiful crepe myrtle trees,
and every year, to keep them from getting so large as to be unmanageable, we
had to go out in the yard with a long chainsaw thing on a pole and commit what
we called crepe murder. It is a good thing that plants can’t scream! And yet it
was for the best, so that they kept their shape, kept putting out leaves, kept
from growing so large they split in two.
Pruning was
important, and I think we can agree on that, at least as long as it’s plants
we’re talking about pruning and not us. It’s not so easy when it is me that
needs pruning, that needs to cut some things away so that new growth can
happen. Put another way, everybody’s fine with change as long as they are left
alone. And yet the mission of God is bigger than me, bigger than us, bigger
than the way we do church and the things we like. And I can’t get out of my
head the idea that if the mission of God really is the most important thing,
then it is more important than our methods of conveying it. If the mission of
God really is the most important thing, are there things about my faith, or
about our shared faith, that we need to prune?
And if you need
an example of what this means, practically, look no further than the story we
read this morning from the Book of Acts, which is the story of the creation of
the church in the days after Jesus. The apostle Philip is on a journey in the
wilderness, and he comes across a chariot, in which sat an Ethiopian Eunuch, a
man who had been cruelly castrated against his will and forced into slavery.
Philip walks up to him and hears him reading scripture, of all things! He’s
reading the Bible.
Philip is
impressed and so he gets into the chariot and they ride off together in the
chariot for a while, talking about the Bible and what it means to be a person
of faith, and they come to some water, a lake or a stream running alongside the
road, and the Ethiopian eunuch points at the water and says, “Look! There is
water. What is to prevent me from being baptized?”
“What is to
prevent me from being baptized?” he asks. And the answer is that it depends on
who you’re talking to. If you’re talking to the kind of person who, in the
course of cleaning out the church basement, says, oh, you can’t throw that
away, what if a situation comes up where we need a broken television, or
whatever, if you you’re talking to that person, there’s a lot to keep the
Ethiopian eunuch from being baptized. For one thing, there’s Deuteronomy
chapter twenty-three, verse two, which says, and forgive me, this is a quote,
“no one whose testicles are crushed or whose penis is cut off shall be admitted
to the assembly of the Lord,” and I mean, I don’t think that could be any
clearer. I wish it weren’t so clear, it would make it less awkward to read it
from the pulpit of the church! But if you’re somebody that says, no, we can’t
dispense with that, it’s one of our traditions, the answer is that there is a lot
to keep the Ethiopian eunuch from being baptized.
And yet, even
though there’s this clear verse, even though it is part of the Bible and it is
in yours and it is in mine, Philip says, “Stop! Stop the chariot!” And they get
out of the chariot, the two of them, they go down into the water, and he
baptizes him.
Because
Philip was willing to let grace lead the way, the man goes down into the water
as an Ethiopian eunuch and comes back up as God’s beloved child, part of the
family of God.
Friends, when
we allow God to prune our hearts and our lives so that we may attend to the
mission of God, amazing things happen. It’s not that we’re casting judgment on
things, on traditions, on parts of God’s church that don’t work anymore. It’s
that we’re honoring the past, giving thanks that these things helped us to
attend to the mission of God, but acknowledging that there are parts of church,
parts of our own personal histories that are no longer viable parts of the
vine. If we choose to focus on the nonviable parts, we lose out on the new
growth, which is of course, the only thing that keeps the vine growing, all the
way from the tips of the leaves to the roots in the ground.
Let me bring
this down to earth. I shared an article with the Church council this week by an
author who says that if you want a church to grow, there are literally only
three options. Only three.
The first is
to have enough babies that it increases your total worship attendance. And
while I appreciate those of you who have been helping in this effort, obviously,
it’s not enough.
The second
option is to take people from other churches. Now, I want to acknowledge, that
if you are looking for an authentic church home, you could do worse than North
Decatur UMC. I think everybody ought to be part of this church. But even while
we keep the doors open to whoever wants to make this their church home, I have
to say, only relying on people who were
already members of other churches doesn’t seem to me to feel right. Does it
to you? Do you think that what God wants us to do, what God really wants us to
do is to only reach out to people who
are already in other churches, only
those who have already experienced the grace that comes through a life lived
with Jesus? No, of course not. We welcome those folks, particularly those who
need the North Decatur message of grace and unconditional love, those who will
help us reach out in love, but it is not enough in and of itself.
And so the
third option is this: reach out to people who are part of no church, who need
to hear, to experience that great love, that great hope for the first time.
People who don’t know Christ, who have not experienced the kind of radical
forgiveness, the radical love that we have experienced.
That’s it.
There are three options. And I just have to wonder: are there things that stand
in the way of our reaching out to these folks? Are there things that are
diverting our attention from attending to the mission of God, which is to
proclaim good news to the poor, freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight
to the blind, to set the oppressed free and to declare the year of the Lord’s
favor? Because if there are things that once bore fruit but now distract us, I
think you know what needs to happen.
I’m just
saying. I hear the story of the beloved child of God who was once known only as
the Ethiopian eunuch, I see hopelessness in the streets of Baltimore, I see
millions of people displaced by natural disaster, people who have lost
everything, I see people who crave legal recognition and protection for their families,
and it’s not hard to figure out where God would have us focus our efforts. And
I get the sneaking suspicion that anything that gets in the way, whether it has
been fruitful in the past or not—anything that gets in the way has got to go.
“What is to
prevent me from being baptized?” he asked. And in the kingdom of God, the
answer is, the answer must be, “Nothing.” Nothing.
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