A missionary in the jungle is running away from a roaring lion. 'Lord', he prays in desperation, 'make this lion a Christian!' When all of a sudden the lion stops and sinks to its knees, and puts its paws together in prayer.
'Thank God' says the missionary.
'For what I am about to receive', prays the lion, 'may the Lord make me truly thankful. Amen'
A priest recently told me how he climbed up into a pulpit and said: “I have got nothing to say to you lot.. in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit”.
So… I wondered, is Christianity saying words like the Lion, or refraining from them like the priest. Or something much greater, like connection and fullness.
“Remain in me, and I will remain in you. I am the vine, and you are the branches, says Jesus. Apart from me, you can do nothing.”
The apocryphal Book of Sirach says something similar: “Though we speak much, we cannot reach the end, and the sum of our words is this: He is the All.”
He is the all. Apart from him you can do nothing.
The message from our gospel reading, John 15, is an experience of Unity.
On a damp windy morning last week I had my own experience of 15 - 15 kilometres, amoung hundreds of people racing across fields and roads.
Running is a simple sport, you just put one foot in front of another – and before my 15 K I prayed a simple prayer for awareness of God’s presence no matter how euphoric or dreadful I would feel. For all of us, Christian or not, the human race features these feelings of euphoria and dread, and so John’s Jesus, who is a mystic, gives us a special instruction:
Remain in Unity with the vine-grower. Jesus the vine implies a vine-grower who is much greater than us, but who is also intimately connected to us.
During my race, I passed a sign saying 11 kilometres, and as this happened, my prayer was returned to me.
But by then it didn’t feel like I was doing anything. One leg was still going in front of another, but my body was numb. I was beside myself, outside myself, and God was doing the running.
It was literally being done in and through me, and the Greek version of the Old Testament defines God as the fullness of Being. We seem to be individual disciples, but if we abide in him, we access a unity of Being.
But if anyone does not remain in me, he also says, they are like a branch that is thrown away and withers. Such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned.
Ah. The less subtle churches paraphrase this with that homely and welcoming slogan: “turn or burn”. Although the church can sound as if it wants people to be groveling, if you are really the branches, and Jesus really is the vine, and God really is the vine-grower, then you are connected to God.
“The Earth is the Lord’s and everything in it.” says Psalm 24:10. “Do I not fill heaven and earth?” says Jeremiah 23:24. “Where could I go from your presence? If I climb the heavens, you are there, if I lie underground, you are there too.” says Psalm 139.
John’s Jesus knows that on some mysterious level, we are God, but sin and burning comes as a result of making ourselves separate, and making ourselves more than God.
It would be quite irresponsible of me not to preach sin, but how can I preach sin without sounding like a Doctor creating an illness in order to sell you a cure? If Christianity is true, which I believe it to be, then it has to be more than the solution to a problem of its own making.
So I say this. Sin means failing to be in unity, and turning the human race into an individual contest, a personal possession, a fight to the death. Sin is trying to run without connection to the whole. Sin is separation from the eternity who holds everything in Being. Sin is an acrostic for Separation Is Normal.
To use Jesus’ middle-eastern agricultural metaphor, the sin of pride or self imposed separation is like the belief that braches can produce fruit without any involvement in the life of the entire tree. Or to update the metaphor, it is the belief we are light bulbs lit without any connection to a national and international grid.
Even on the purely natural physical level, sin is a lie and interconnectedness is true. We are all made from matter synthesised in the furnaces of stars. Star stuff exploded into space became the stuff of all our bodies.
We all share the same chemical instructions. Once one-celled animals had arisen on our planet, almost all the basic chemistry of life had been formed. Our ancestors, the polyps stuck to the ocean floor, the fish, amphibians, reptiles and shrews, the monkeys who came down from the trees, the apes who tamed fire and externalized inner noise to develop language and model the universe in their brains, we are all connected.
So when Jesus tells us to love our neighbour as ourself, he knows that on some level our neighbour is ourself -- if we can love our neighbour, we are loving ourselves, and vice versa. “Remain in me,” he says, “without me, you can do nothing.”
How much more connected are we when we acknowledge our truest selves to be in the vine-grower, God who holds us all in Being?
Society encourages individualism and boundaries, and individual boundaries have many uses, no matter how illusory they are. Where would the advertising industry be without contrasting people with one-other? Indeed, the sense that we are separate doesn’t just enable us to cross the road without being hit by a car, it is also extremely good for business.
We say in our liturgy: ‘Lord, I am not worthy to receive you’. But hold on… If God is really everywhere, who can possibly be unworthy?
This unworthy “I” is our separated ego, which has a sense of individuality. It is inwardly divided. It reacts as if it really is separate from the whole, and more important than the whole.
If we move up the branches and the vine towards the vinegrower we move our personal boundries outwards from ego to family. We move closer still to the vine-grower by moving out again to include community. Even closer by including our country in our sense of self. But that’s still not enough for God, and there is danger in stopping there.
We are citizens of the world, as Socrates said, and he was executed. Socrates was not content to be merely Greek. And Christ himself took it further. He knew that even the world is not enough. Our world is only one of many in the universe, and the universe is sitting in God. Anything less than the mystery we call God is failing to see the whole picture.
Abide in me, as I abide in you, says the perfect human. Without me, you can do nothing, whether you know it or not.
We know we are more than separate beings, and Perfect humanity *is* divinity. This is the fully human race. But religious systems can become a search for security instead of truth, and in our time the very word humanist has come to mean a life without the mention of God.
Always remember, the inventors of humanism were Christians. Here are the words of Marcilio Ficino, a renaissance humanist ordained Roman Catholic Priest:
“All the time that we are pursuing merely one thing after another, we are running away from the One itself, which is everything. But he who simply pursues the one itself, in that One soon attains everything.”
Or to put it another way, Abide in me. In the fully human race, it only seems like we run by ourselves. We may look like we work hard, but God is the only true eternal power, and God has already crossed the finish line. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment