Below is the audio and text of my sermon, "What We're Doing Here," based on 1 John 4:7-21 and John 15:1-8.
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“I don’t even remember what I’m doing
here.”
I’m not much of a tent revivalist, so
I’m not going to ask for a show of hands, but if I did ask people in this room
to raise their hands if they have uttered these words during their time at
Wesley Seminary, I bet it would look a lot less mainline and a whole lot more
charismatic in here.
“I don’t even remember what I’m
doing here.”
Maybe you came into seminary, fresh
out of your campus ministry or your young adult mission program, or perhaps
transitioning into a new career of calling and passion, fired up for
disciple-making and world transformation.
Maybe you thought that the seminary
experience would be like Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Life Together,[i] a
time of deepening commitment and community and spiritual discipline.
Maybe you came in having experienced
the anointing of the Spirit, filled with passion for God’s Word.
And then one day, you found yourself
lying in bed or staring at a blank Word document, looking around for that fire,
that spirit, that motivation, that discipline.
Maybe it was the seemingly endless
barrage of papers and reading.
Maybe it was a mental health crisis
or a physical health breakdown – or both.
Maybe it was a disappointing
encounter with a classmate or professor, or an experience of racism or sexism
or homophobia in what you figured would be a safe space.
But whatever it was, you found
yourself saying:
“I don’t even remember what I’m doing
here.”
Call it burnout, or diagnose it as depression
or anxiety, or name it the dark night of the soul, but I don’t know a single
seminarian who hasn’t felt this way, at one point or another during their time
here. And I would be remiss if I didn’t say, that it seems to me that if
everyone has this experience, then maybe – with respect to all of the wonderful
things happening at Wesley, and all the wonderful people – maybe we are doing
something wrong, here.
That maybe a system in which grade
point averages seem to be weighted heavier than spiritual growth; in which busy-ness
and burnout seem to be the norm; and in which monetary and staffing resources
can be mobilized for recruitment or new buildings but are suddenly scarce when
it comes to spiritual and mental health; is not just a system with some flaws
in need of administrative fixes but an unhealthy system in need of some serious
healing.
If that sounds harsh, let me put it
to you this way:
I think all of us, whether
graduating folks such as myself or first year students or the president of the
seminary, all of us could use a good,
healthy reminder about what it is that we are even doing here.
Fortunately for us, I think our
lectionary texts for this week offer us just such a healthy reminder.
Now, scholars debate the exact relationship
between the gospel of John and the first epistle of John, neither of which, in
the oldest manuscripts, are attributed to anyone in particular. But there are
enough linguistic resonances between the two texts for most scholars to agree
that there is at least a shared context, perhaps a shared community or group of
communities, from which both of today’s passages emerged.[ii]
Both texts make the claim that there
is no Christian community, no fruitful Christian discipleship, without a deep
connection to – and an inhabiting of – the love of God. God’s love, made
present to us in real and material ways in Jesus Christ through the power of
the Holy Spirit, is the source of Christian life. It is the vine of which we
are intertwined branches, the sustenance that produces fruit, the shelter under
which we dwell.
The literature of the Johannine
community calls us back to the place we started, to the original source of our
calling as disciples. I don’t mean our individual “call stories.” I mean the
love that vastly precedes our stories, the fertile soil out of which our
experiences of Christian community grow. These texts are a re-membering, a re-turning
to, the love that’s loved us from the start.
In English translation, the
Johannine literature can seem complex, but that’s because we’re struggling to
translate simplistic Greek without sounding redundant. Our own Dr. Sharon Ringe
theorizes that the vocabulary had to be simple because the Johannine community
was an in-between community, an immigrant community in the Jewish diaspora
struggling to translate concepts between an Aramaic-speaking older generation
and Greek-speaking young folks.[iii] African
American New Testament scholar Thomas B. Slater refers to the Johannine
epistles as an example of “Grandma Theology” – with simple, repeated refrains
and riffs on traditional sayings that even your grandma can say “Amen!” to.[iv]
One of those repeated refrains is
the Greek word, meno. The word shows
up a combined total of 16 times in our two texts this morning, although English
versions often obscure the repetition with various interpretive choices. You
could translate it as “abide,” or “remain,” or “stay,” or “dwell,” or “live
in.” It’s a word that speaks of rootedness in an uprooted world; interconnection
in a world of disconnection; indwelling in a world of isolation and alienation.
And it offers us exactly the healing antidote we need to that sinking feeling
when we don’t even remember what it is that we’re doing here.
The Johannine authors imagine this
divine, loving interconnection with a three-fold directionality: from God to
us; from us to God; and between all of us in community. First, God initiates
connection. John’s Jesus is the vine from which the branches must sprout. No
vine, no branches. The epistle writer puts it simply: “Love is from God,” and
also, “In this is love, not that we
loved God but that God loved us,”
sending Jesus to atone, to reconcile, to overcome disconnection and alienation
and to express solidarity and incarnational love. Before we can act, it is God
who meno-s, abides, dwells,
interconnects with us. So the first thing we are reminded of this morning is
that when we do not know what we are doing, God takes the initiative to heal
and to restore our sense of connection.
But our texts also make it clear
that God’s initiative invites response. As God menos with us, we meno –
we re-connect – with God. The language of John 15 seems harsh at first: “Whoever
does not abide in Jesus is thrown away like a branch and withers; such branches
are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned.” Sounds merciless. But have you
ever felt that way? Cut off from the source of your life and your call?
Withered, dried up, burnt out? I sure have. It feels a whole lot like, “I don’t
even remember what I’m doing here.” How easy it is to lose our sense of
connection with the divine. How easy to forget to pray, to forget to find
spaces of worship and wonder in our lives. How easily cut off we are, how
easily burnt out.
The Johannine authors also emphasize
that there is no abiding in God separate from reconnecting with each other in a
community of disciples. The epistle writer is characteristically blunt: “those
who do not love a brother or sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.” Jesus doesn’t do the incarnational love thing so
that we don’t have to. The branches
of the vine do not exist in isolation from each other – they all intertwine.
So there you have it. Three point
sermon. God connects with us, we connect with God, we connect with each other.
Easy, right?
Of course it isn’t.
Of course there’s a million and one
things in this world that are trying to cut us off from God and each other.
When depression and anxiety come
calling, making us feel cut off and isolated – we experience disconnection.
When shame and fear override our
willingness to take creative risks – we experience disconnection.
When stress and burnout obscure our
vision and our call – we experience disconnection.
When systemic racism, sexism,
homophobia, and transphobia inhibit us from seeing each other as fully human –
we experience disconnection.
When sexual violence becomes
stunningly commonplace on college campuses --
When yet another unarmed African American
man is killed by police --
And yet another transgender woman of
color is murdered for who she is --
And yet another natural disaster
causes havoc and unmasks economic disparities --
And yet another violent conflict fueled
by U.S.-funded militaries breaks out in the Middle East –
We
experience disconnection.
It is easy to sentimentalize this
morning’s texts. It is easy to make words like “abide” and “love” into
pastel-colored bookmarks and Christian bookstore kitsch.
But it is hard, in the midst of a world fraught with disconnection,
alienation, and isolation, to live lives of connection, lives of abiding and
indwelling love. And that’s our original call, vastly prior
to any considerations about ordination committees and seminary degrees.
A lot of us have been taught, I
think, that we need self-care and spiritual practices and supportive community
so that we can be rested and healthy when the time comes to go back out and do
all that hard church work that we’re just temporarily taking a break from. The
unintended consequence of this way of thinking is that we end up believing that
if we just bear down, if we just push through, if we just finish one more paper
or schedule one more meeting or create one more program, then we’ll have done enough, then
we can rest, then we can enjoy
life together. What the Johannine authors challenge us to see is that time
spent abiding – praying and playing, connecting with God through the means of
grace and with each other through the tough work of Christian community – isn’t
a break from the real work of the church. It is the church. It’s who we are created to be. The fruit-bearing
ministry of Christian discipleship is only ever a participation in the work of
God in the world. And it turns out that God is up to exactly what God’s been up
to from the beginning: overcoming disconnection and alienation; re-creating
connection and community; through risky vulnerability, incarnational solidarity,
and abiding love.
What does that look like in action?
As usual, there are more questions than answers, and more stories than how-to
guides. So here is one such story. Last January I had the opportunity to spend
a week or so in Baltimore with Wesley’s urban ministry immersion. We were a
diverse group, with students from as far away as South Korea and as close to
home as Sandtown. We were quite a sight, a gaggle of seminarians, African
American and White and Korean and Latina, wandering around in a city which,
like so many of our cities, is still largely divided along lines of race and power.
One of the sites we visited during our
time together was the United Methodist Board of Child Care, a ministry for
children who need levels of support beyond what the traditional foster care
system can provide. As we toured the campus, one of those children, a young boy
who couldn’t have been older than 10, turned the corner and found himself face-to-face
with a big group of strangers.
He stopped in his tracks. He stared at
us. And he said, with the sort of direct candor that comes naturally to kids:
“Who are all these white people and black people?”
What might it look like to reconnect
with our original calling, to go forth to participate in God’s fruit-bearing
mission of overcoming disconnection and re-creating connection?
Well, I don’t know, exactly. I’ve got a
long way to go, myself.
But I’m pretty sure we’re doing
something right when people stop in their tracks. And stare at us. And say:
“Who are all these white people and
black people? Who are all these Korean people and African people, these
Hispanic/Latina people and Filipina people? Who are all these gay people and
these straight people, these cis people and these trans people, these people
with varying levels of physical and mental ability? Who are all these people – together?”
And that -- not out of the mouth of the
preaching award recipient, but out of the mouth of a kid who’s already been
taught too many lessons about disconnection – that
Is what it is that we are supposed to be
doing here.
[i] I totally stole this line from
Leigh Finnegan.
[ii] See C. Clifton Black’s
discussion of this topic in “The First, Second, and Third Letters of John –
Introduction,” in The New Interpreter’s
Bible: A Commentary in Twelve Volumes, Volume XII (Nashville: Abingdon,
1998), 366ff.
[iii] I owe this idea, and many of the
ideas driving this sermon, to Dr. Ringe’s class on the Fourth Gospel that I
took in the spring of 2014. Many of Dr. Ringe’s insights about John’s gospel
are capture in her book, Wisdom’s
Friends: Community and Christology in the Fourth Gospel (Louisville:
Wesminster John Knox, 1999).
[iv] Thomas B. Slater, “1-3 John,” in
True to Our Native Land: An African
American New Testament Commentary (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007), 504.
