Being a Vine

A sermon preached by Christopher L. Webber at All Saints Church, Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco, on April 29, 2018.

“I AM the vine.” St. John 15:5

There’s a little history book discussion group I belong to that has been reading a book called “The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America” (Frances Fitzgerald, Simon and Schuster, 2017) and we meet next Tuesday to discuss it. I was looking forward to reading it, hoping for some insights, but I’m not sure I got any. What I did notice was that what started as a religious movement two centuries ago seemed to become more and more a political movement as we came down to the present day What started out with a particular teaching about the Holy Spirit and religious revival became more and more about names like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and organizations like the Family Research Council and Christian Broadcasting Network and narrowly focused groups aimed at enlisting politicians and winning elections and something called “the Christian right”

The book actually ended on a fairly hopeful note with a discussion of the increasing influence of “millennials” and concern for social justice issues. But better yet, one member of the discussion group sent us a copy of a speech he found on line by the President of Fuller Seminary, one of the most prestigious evangelical seminaries anywhere. Maybe you’ve heard of it. It’s in Menlo Park – not far away – and it claims approximately 4,000 students from 90 countries and 110 denominations. I read the speech with amazement and hope. Dr. Labberton, the president of the seminary, told his evangelical audience:

“When evangelical leaders like us gather, it is often with a spirit of optimistic hope, known for “pressing on” in the work of the gospel. For me, this is not a time of pressing on. I feel a personal urgency to stop, to pray, to listen, to confess, and to repent and want to call us to do the same. Only the Spirit “who is in the world to convict us of sin and righteousness and judgment” (John 16:8) can bring us to clarity about the crisis we face. As I have sought that conviction, here is what I have come to believe: The central crisis facing us is that the gospel of Jesus Christ has been betrayed and shamed by an evangelicalism that has violated its own moral and spiritual integrity. This is not a crisis imposed from outside the household of faith, but from within. The core of the crisis is not specifically about Trump, or Hillary, or Obama, or the electoral college, or Comey, or Mueller, (MULLER) or abortion, or LGBTQIA+ debates, or Supreme Court appointees. Instead the crisis is caused by the way a toxic evangelicalism has engaged with these issues in such a way as to turn the gospel into Good News that is fake. Now on public display is an indisputable collusion between prominent evangelicalism and many forms of insidious racist, misogynistic, materialistic, and political power. The wind and the rain and the floods have come, and, as Jesus said, they will reveal our foundation. In this moment for evangelicalism, what the storms have exposed is a foundation not of solid rock but of sand.”

So OK – we have things to talk about. We do have elements of a common faith. And we need to ask, Who are we as Christians? What unites us? Why are we here? How can we get to work to serve Jesus here and now? What’s obvious is that we are not ready for the Second Coming, and we do have things to talk about and maybe we have some on both sides prepared to talk and more important prepared to listen.

The basic problem of course is that we are human beings who need structure to shape our lives We need rules, budgets, buildings, programs, meetings. That’s where it really comes apart: meetings: vestries, conventions, synods, committees, sub-committees. . . Why do we do this to ourselves? Why do we do it to Jesus? We do it because we have to – without structure our lives fall apart – but with structure, we lose the spirit and have to refocus again and again and remind ourselves what it’s all about, why we are here. The Gospel this morning tells us. It says, “I am the vine, you are the branches.”

It all come back to that, to our relationship with Jesus. It’s just as simple as that – and just as complicated: our relationship with Jesus. “I am the vine,” Jesus said; “And you are the branches.” “Abide in me.” It’s simple. It’s simple to be branches of a vine: just don’t fall off. Hang in there. It’s simple. Just be there, be where the nourishment is. Simple. But being human, we always make it complicated. I am the vine; you are the branches. Abide in me.” Simple. And we mess it up. Time after time.

But of course, this idea of a vine is what the English teachers call a “metaphor”: like reality, but different. We may be a metaphorical vine, with metaphorical roots, but we’re actually human beings with unmetaphorical feet that walk us away from where we ought to be. We don’t have visible roots; we don’t have an obvious structure that just naturally draws nourishment up out of the ground, along the trunk, into the branches. We have the disadvantage of being seemingly separate human beings who have the ability to go our own way, think our own thoughts, and be vegetarians or carnivores, Democrats or Republicans, Christians or Muslims, Shiites or Sunnis, Episcopalians or Seventh Day Adventists or Two-seed in the Spirit Predestinarian Baptists. So where the vine just does its thing, we make it hard for ourselves. We have to figure out first what our thing is. Who are we? Who do we want to be – not what, but who. Are we going to be like a vine or like a bunch of lego pieces that may fit together and may not.

Where do we go wrong? The simple answer is that we don’t listen to today’s Gospel and Jesus’ words. It’s about life in the vine. It’s about sharing life, Jesus’ risen life, and we also call that “communion,” Food for the journey and that food for the journey is here at the altar: shared life, sharing eternal life, Jesus’ risen life, right here, right now, in a living relationship, we are branches drawing life from the vine.

I’m sorry for Christians who lack that center. It goes back to ancient controversies – times when people argued over what it meant to be in communion, to receive communion, what specifically it meant. And some walked away from the ancient pattern: better not to have communion at all than to do it wrong or share it with someone we disagree with as to what it meant. We’re getting over that. More and more churches are bringing communion back to a central place, but meanwhile we find ourselves divided over issues and rules and structures – yes, and politics. And we walk away from communion as if that would solve something. Ideally it should be Communion first, not last. We need to share life, But lots of Christians aren’t ready for that; don’t value it, don’t see it as central. We’ve got a long way to go even to get to square one.

Jesus said “Do this” and that ought to be the beginning, but instead it’s a goal. But we need to keep focused on that goal. Jesus said, “I am the vine, you are the branches, abide in me.” He never said, so far as I know, “Here’s the rule book; obey it.” Or “here’s an organization chart and rules for electing Vestries.” Rules can be very helpful; because we’re human we have to have them but they’re not the gospel and they can be changed. We keep trying to put rules first and communion second.

But the goal is communion. We belong to a communion, the Anglican communion. We’re not Congregationalists where each local church is self-governing or at the other extreme Roman Catholics governed by the Bishop of Rome. We’re not Methodists with a particular Method or Baptists insisting on believer baptism or Lutherans with allegiance to a particular 16th century theologian. We’re a communion, united in worship, united by the life we share at the altar. But even in communion we find ourselves divided by the same issues Dr. Labberton was talking about at Fuller Seminary: There are, he said, “many forms of insidious racist, misogynistic, materialistic, and political power . . . that turn the gospel into good news that is fake.” For example: let’s talk about sex. Jesus never said, “You have to agree about sex.” But some people won’t talk to people who disagree with them about sex. And what makes it so tragic is that none of us – none of us – really knows what we’re talking about when it comes to sex.

Let me tell you some history. Ten years ago, the last time the bishops of our worldwide Anglican Communion tried to come together in England, as they have usually done every ten years, some of the bishops wouldn’t even go to the meeting because they disagreed with their brother and sister bishops. about various issues concerning sex – what was allowable and what wasn’t. They made it that important even though, on the record, Anglican Bishops would get a failing grade on that subject. I made a study the last time they met, about ten years ago of the history of the Lambeth Conference and I paid particular attention to their changing wisdom about sex. It all began in the nineteenth century when they first met and were confronted by a question from African bishops about polygamy. It wasn’t something English or American bishops had thought about very much, but they quickly agreed that polygamy was bad and polygamists couldn’t be baptized. There were missionaries in Africa who were saying, “We’ve got this man who wants to be baptized, but he’s got ten wives. What should we do?” And the bishops said, “Well, you can baptize his wives, but not him – not unless he sends nine of them away.” And the missionaries said, “But what would happen to all those wives without his support and protection? What would become of nine-tenths of the children?” And the bishops said, “Not our problem; we don’t do polygamy.” That was in 1888. In 1998 they looked at it again and said, “Well, actually, maybe; if he promises not to marry again, it might be OK.” Times have changed; so the rules have changed. If you are a rule-bound church, you wind up in big trouble. In 1908 the bishops said, “If you get a divorce, you can’t marry again and if you do marry again, you can’t come to communion. In 1968 they said, “Divorce happens but life has to go on. We all make mistakes, but there’s forgiveness in Jesus.” In 1920 the bishops said “Birth control is really bad.” In 1968 they said, “Family planning is really good.” Right now a lot of them still want to say that same sex unions are bad and I’d be more inclined to accept that if they had ever gotten it right about sex before. So, yes, give the bishops an F on sex, but fortunately it’s not critical because we’re not a church governed by rules; our unity is in communion, in the vine, in Jesus. Rules can be changed.

And still we have problems. There are Anglican dioceses in both America and Africa that want to divide the church over issues of sexuality. There are African dioceses that refuse to come to Anglican Communion meetings because they say they are just holding to the faith that western missionaries taught them a hundred years ago and they’re right – that is what they were taught and how do you account for change when you were taught an unchanging faith? The one thing I’m sure of is that we can’t solve issues by division: We can only solve them in the vine, only when we all draw our life from the same source. Anything else fundamentally alters the nature of our communion and puts us at odds with the gospel this morning that tells us to abide in Jesus, in communion, in the vine.

Why, at this point in human history, with attitudes toward sexuality changing from day to day , would we choose to draw a line in the sand and say “This is it: my way or the highway.” That baffles me. I know how much my own ideas have changed on this subject over the years and I’m glad I’ve been free to change. I want to keep my options open, not set in concrete in 2018. Evangelicals could maybe learn from us – that is from our mistakes – and we could learn from them and we could both learn by our own experience that it’s easy to put the emphasis in the wrong place – to worry about the wrong things, to care more about the rules than the vine. But we desperately need to work toward a deeper and fuller communion so that we can move forward on the things that matter like homelessness and the environment and medical policies and tax policies shaped by a concern for others rather than personal greed or our own narrow and limited understanding.

I don’t expect evangelicals to adopt the Book of Common Prayer any time soon and I don’t expect Anglicans, Episcopalians, to figure out ways to come to a common mind on issues of human sexuality, but maybe we can agree on what today’s Gospel reminds us of: that life comes first – the sharing of the life that flows through the vine to the branches.

The Anglican Communion has a seal it adopted maybe 60-70 years ago that shows a globe and a bishop’s miter and around the globe in Greek it says – “The truth shall make you free.” (John 8:32) That’s a great verse to take as emblematic of what we’re all about: truth and freedom. It’s just that simple and just that hard. Apart from love it’s impossible. But with God, with Love, all things are possible and it begins here at the altar where we are nourished in a common life. He is the vine; we are the branches; our life is in him.