Sermon 5/14/06
At Home with God - 1 John 4:7-21, John 15:1-8
(view lectionary notes for this text)
Today we celebrate an ecumenical special Sunday in the life of the church, the Festival of the Christian Home. Of course, you’ll notice that the Festival of the Christian Home falls on a holiday we also know as Mother’s Day. After doing a little research, I found out that Mother’s Day, first celebrated loosely in 1907, has it’s origins in Methodism, under the direction of a Methodist laywoman named Anna Jarvis. But here, in worship, we take a broader focus by celebrating the Christian Home. I’m blessed with a great Mom – but we all know that we have so many different kinds of families in this world, so many different loving configurations that make a ‘home’. Today, we celebrate God’s gift to us of family. The Bible is filled with stories of some of the craziest families we’ve probably ever encountered. Families in the Bible make our families look fairly normal, and you know that’s saying a lot! But the main message that the Bible communicates to us about families is that our home is with God, and God’s home is with us. As usual, the scriptures urge us to expand our vision, expand our definitions. We know about earthly parents – but the Bible presents us with God who is fatherly and mothering to us. We know about siblings – but the Bible teaches that we are all brothers and sisters with family responsibilities to care for and love one another. We are all someone’s child, but the scriptures tell us about being God’s child – born of God. We know what a home is, but the scriptures tell us God wants to make a home within our hearts, and invites us to make a home in God’s heart. We celebrate the Festival of the Christian Home because God just can’t tell us enough about being family and what that means for our lives.
Today’s scripture lessons, from the first letter of John and from the gospel John, help us focus in on the home God has in mind. From our gospel lesson, we find one of Jesus’ “I am” statements. Throughout John, Jesus spoke about his identity in everyday images that his contemporaries could have related too, instead of describing himself in the sometimes-distant theological language. Last week, for example, we heard about Jesus as the Good Shepherd, an image that meant a lot to the agricultural community where Jesus lived. Today, Jesus presents us with another image that ties into the land and the people that were close to him. “I am the true vine,” Jesus declares. “I am the vine, and you are the branches.” God is the vinegrower. Jesus talks about how the branches – us – can’t have live if they are separated from the vine – himself. And as branches, we’re meant to be the bearers of much fruit – fruit that we’re able to grow because we abide in him as he abides in us. We literally take our life from the vine, and through Christ, we can become fruit-bearing disciples.
From the epistle lesson, John picks up the theme of abiding in one another, God and God’s children. John focuses his passage on God’s nature – God is love. We love because God is love and we’re born of this loving God. If we don’t love, we don’t know God. The best love we can know is in God’s loving us, and because we know this love, we ought to love one another. When we do this, even though we can’t see God, John says, we get something better – God lives in us, and God’s love dwells within us. So God is love, John says, in case we missed it, and abiding in love we abide in God because God is – that’s right – love. Not just any love – perfect love – love that is so perfect that there is not fear in this love. And we love because God loves us first. And we can’t love God if we don’t really love our brothers and sisters, John says logically, because we can’t even see God, and we can see our brothers and sisters. How could we more easily love that which we can’t even see? So, if we claim to love God, we know how to show it: in loving others.
You’ll notice that in both passages today, the word “abide” appears repeatedly – six times in the epistle, eight in the gospel. The repetition helps signal us of the importance of the concept. The word ‘abide’ here is from the Greek word meno^, which means literally, “to stay at home.” It has the sense of ‘lasting’ or ‘remaining’ – not stirring from where one is settled. So when Jesus and John speak of “abiding,” we can think of them as speaking about ‘remaining at home.’ If we go back through the passages and substitute this phrase where we see the word ‘abide,’ we get a clearer picture of what these passages are about. In First John we would read, “By this we know that we remain at home in Christ and Christ in us, because he has given us of his spirit,” and “God is love, and those who remain at home in love remain at home in God, and God remains at home in them.” In the gospel, we would hear Jesus saying, “Remain at home in me as I remain at home in you . . . those who remain at home in me and I in them bear much fruit.”
To abide in someone – to let someone abide in you – these acts suggest intimate relationships – family relationships. As I shared with our group at worship last Saturday, you can think of this image – when you have company over, or you visit someone at their house, sometimes you are just that – company. But other times, someone will say to you, “please, make yourself at home.” When they say this, what they mean is, “be yourself here. Act here as you would act at your own home. My home is your home.” What does it mean to make God at home in us? God grows us, shapes us, prunes us. So the message from the scriptures today is clear: God tells us repeatedly that we are meant to feel at home in God’s heart. We’re meant to be ourselves. To be welcome family. To be able to kick our shoes off and act like we’re not just visiting, but ready to settle in and stay awhile. And what God wants in return is the same welcome from us. God wants to be welcomed into our lives, our homes, our hearts too. God wants not to be an occasional visitor, but someone always there, remaining, always, within us.
We abide in God and God abides in us. What a great arrangement, right? If the deal is so nice – God living us and us living in God and all – why don’t more of us seem to take God up on the invitation? Why do we seem so reluctant to make God at home in our lives? Well, it turns out that God has some very specific ideas about what it means to be at home in our lives. If we turn back to our gospel lesson, we read Jesus reminding us that God is the vinedresser. When we welcome God into our homes – our hearts – God isn’t content just to lounge around the house. God, it seems, does a little housework. We read, “God removes every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit.” If we are the branches to Christ’s vine, then it sounds very much like God wants to come in and change us. God wants to come into our homes, our hearts, and rearrange all the furniture, redecorate. God wants to clean out and throw away when we’d rather be pack rats. Suddenly, we’re not sure if we want God as a guest after all. Are we willing to invite someone into our homes, and let them change everything? Can we invite God in, and then allow God to be the one in control? The thought of giving up control might make us a bit afraid of what God might do to the parts of our lives we’d rather not have ‘pruned,’ as Jesus so nicely puts us. But God promises that even if it feels like we’re being torn out, actually, we’re being built up, into stronger, healthier branches, branches that bear good fruit. With God dwelling within us, John promises that love is perfected in us, and that we, perfected by God’s love, find boldness.
But there’s still more to challenge us. Even when we let God in, welcome God to abide in us, and us in God, even when we boldly let God prune us and shape us, God is not done with us yet. That’s because as part of this family, this ever-expanding family, our relationship with God is never just about God and us – it’s never just the two of us. How we love God and how God loves us always involves our love for our brothers and sisters too. This house that we’ve invited God to stay in with us – God has taken the liberty of inviting over some guests – namely, everybody else.
Jesus says that we are part of the vine – we’re the branches, growing out of Christ, our common ground. That means that the same vine that nourishes and sustains me is the vine that nourishes and sustains you and is the vine that nourishes and sustains others. We’re connected. In fact, John argues, we can’t even claim to love God unless we first claim to love our brothers and sisters. We love God by loving others. God remains at home in us when we invite others to be at home in our hearts as well. When it comes to being part of the vine, we might get more excited about pruning and removing branches if we think we get to be in charge of pruning our neighbors’ branches. It is easy for us to look at others and figure out how we could clean up their lives. We know what they need to do to be better people. But we’re forgetting our place – God is the vinedresser. We are the branches. And branches don’t cut off other branches. Instead, branches function together, as part of one and the same vine.
So today, on this day when we might be thinking about our earthly families, I encourage you to consider also the other family to which you belong. Beloved, John says, let us love one another, because love is from God. Everyone who loves is born of God and knows God . . . God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.” Make yourself at home with God. Amen.