Fruitful

Acts 8:26-40; John 15:1-8

The story we heard from the Acts of the Apostles this morning is one of my favorite stories, and not just because it ends with perhaps the only recorded instance of teleportation in scripture, when the Spirit of God picks Philip up from a river along the Gaza road, and – like a divine Star Trek transporter – drops him at Azotus for his continuing mission of preaching the good news in new worlds.

It’s not just that Philip – fresh off a successful church planting mission in Samaria – is led by the Spirit to exactly the place where he meets someone ready, eager, and longing to hear the good news about Jesus (enough to envy, in a day and age that’s gotten pretty jaded about Jesus).

It’s not just how powerfully the conversation works, so that the traveler is ready to be baptized – to make a commitment of life – on the spot.

It’s the number of barriers shattered or transcended in this story.

Luke’s first readers would know, of course, that while it wasn’t all that unusual for an Ethiopian to be interested in the prophet Isaiah, or even – as this man seems to have done – to travel to Jerusalem to worship the God of Israel, this particular man would never have been fully included in the worship at the Temple he had traveled to. Scriptural laws, in both Deuteronomy and Leviticus, prohibit eunuchs from “entering the assembly of the Lord”, or “approaching the altar.”

Because, you see, eunuchs are not fruitful.

Eunuchs, unable to have children to carry on their name, or to multiply God’s people, are almost like walking dead men in the mind of the world that formed the Temple traditions and most of our scripture. Many of the laws of ritual purity – the laws that define not whom God loves, but those who belong in the holy spaces of the Temple and can fulfill their vows and duties to God –were created to protect the community from death, or the fear of death.

Contact with dead bodies, leprosy which created a corpse-like appearance, any type of bodily emission that represents a lost possibility for life; all of these made you too closely connected with death to take part in Temple worship – for close contact with the holiness of God. Most of those conditions, of course, could be healed or ritually cleansed. But being a eunuch made you unfruitful, a man of death, your whole life.

So when this particular eunuch asks Philip, “What is to prevent me from being baptized?” he may very well be expecting that something will prevent him. After all, how can eternal life come to a person conditioned, in the eyes of his world, to eternal death?

I am the vine, Jesus says, and you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit.

Neither Philip nor the eunuch had read those words when they met on the Gaza road. John’s gospel hadn’t been written yet, and Philip might not even have been in the room at the Last Supper, when Jesus spoke those words to help prepare his disciples for life after his death. But both of them lived those words and promise when they met one another traveling down from Jerusalem.

Philip, abiding in Jesus as a matter of course, an everyday matter in his living and preaching of the gospel, knew the life-giving power of baptism. He knew that Jesus’ resurrection could conquer not only death, but the implications of death, the fear of death, that had been keeping this man from the center of religious life, from full participation in the community of God.

More than that perhaps, Philip, abiding in Jesus, saw that Jesus was already abiding in this man; already bearing fruit. After all, here he is, on the road home from the Temple, not just opening his heart to God through his study of scripture, but opening his chariot, his wealth and comfort, to a dusty itinerant preacher who accosts him on the road. One commentator compares this moment to a UN diplomat welcoming a street preacher into his limo with generous hospitality. A generous hospitality that is already the fruit of abiding in Jesus, before Philip ever mentions Jesus’ name.

With open spirit and heart, this Ethiopian court official crosses barriers of class and wealth and privilege (the privilege not only of the Ethiopian’s secular power, but of Philip’s religious status as a whole and holy man of Israel), to know God and to make God known.

Years ago, the congregation I attended in Chicago began to open up the parish hall to people waiting to be fed at the food pantry. It started with shelter from the freezing weather, and moved on to hot drinks, to fellowship, to shared meals and service together.
I remember my first night volunteering in the open house, knowing we needed to make people welcome, but tied up in knots of anxiety about simply starting a conversation. And then one of the men – a man I would have unconsciously avoided on the street; a man whose appearance represented almost everything I feared though I wouldn’t have admitted it: hunger, poverty, exclusion, misfortune – one man greeted me warmly and invited me to sit down at his table.

I “belonged” in that church hall; I had authority of a sort, the privilege of race and economic security, the identity of a member of the congregation, and he – a stranger to that place – welcomed me, gracefully and generously, and made me at home in the Body of Christ that evening.

Abide in me, says Jesus, 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.

None of us bear fruit by our own birth, or privilege, or merit. None of us make converts, show God’s hospitality, increase the people of God (grow the church), or create life by ourselves, any more than either that eunuch from Ethopia or Philip the apostle bore fruit by themselves. But Jesus, abiding in us, as we abide in him, makes any of us fruitful, makes us bear much fruit, in spite of obstacles; sometimes, in spite of ourselves.

We can help, of course. Jesus invites us to help. Not by a flurry of effort to increase our productivity, but by abiding in him, placing our hearts and selves into Christ, not occasionally when we think of it, but constantly; always.

Abiding in Jesus takes practice, of course. The study of scripture helps us, as it helped that Ethiopian. Openness to the leading of the Spirit helps us, as it helped Philip on the Gaza road. Prayer never hurts. That’s how we practice abiding in Jesus.

And when we abide in Jesus, Jesus, abiding in us, crosses all the barriers of fear and privilege and even death, to bear much fruit, with us and in us, to the glory of God.

Gracious and Extravagant

Psalm 23; 1 John 3:16-24; John 10:11-18

Did you notice a theme this morning, in the Psalm and the Gospel, the prayer and the music?

Yes - it’s “Good Shepherd Sunday”. This is not an official holiday of the church, but three weeks after Easter every year, we pause to think about Jesus’ identity as the Good Shepherd.

It’s one of the most popular images of Jesus, from the earliest years of Christian faith through today, when the world is drenched in stained glass windows, postcards, paintings, statues, mugs and candles of Jesus with a lamb on his shoulders or a herd of sheep around his feet. It’s an identity that resonates with the 23^rd psalm, probably the psalm most familiar to many Christians

Knowing Jesus as the Good Shepherd promises protection and guidance to the flock - to you and me - God’s care for our every need, a shield against darkness or fear or hunger or scarcity. And the images are beautiful and comforting, bright and tender and gentle.

But every year around this time, I find a raft of biblical commentators ready to point out to me that – for all the times our scripture compares God or Jesus to a shepherd – first century Palestinian shepherds were not generally seen as bright, gentle, happy and comforting. Quite the opposite, in fact. Depending on the commentator, you can read that shepherds were regarded merely as outsiders, as terrible dirty thieves. People you would definitely move away from (though you still shouldn’t call the cops) if they settled in at your neighborhood Starbucks.

After all, the actual work of a shepherd – like most farm work – requires some very close contact with a herd of animals who don’t bathe regularly, and probably a fair amount of cleaning up after them. Doing this day and night in the hills of Judea would, well, not make you very popular in what used to be called “polite company.”

There are certainly jobs like that in our world, too. Jobs that make lots of us wrinkle our noses, though we know how necessary they are.

One commentator on today’s readings tells of an amusement park that dressed their grounds crew – their garbage collectors and street sweepers – in formal wear. Imagine men in tuxes and women in evening dress, picking up the litter, wiping down benches, constantly cleaning away the debris of thousands of people passing through the park.

It doesn’t feel quite “right”, does it, according to the habits of our world, for a lady in a long satin skirt to be picking up the sticky napkin that didn’t quite make it into the garbage bin, or a gentleman in a tux sweeping up the popcorn that fell carelessly out of the bag?  A little embarrassing to think about, actually.

All of a sudden, I suspect, at that park the almost invisible, messy and thankless work of cleaning up after the rest of us becomes visible. Gracious, extravagant, even, by the cultural assumptions and codes that follow tuxes and evening gowns in our world.

It feels gracious, extravagant, or a little embarrassing, to have someone who appears so elegant and important taking care of the little messes we leave, just as many of us feel embarrassed by the extravagance of asking God’s help for the mundane details of our daily lives, or embarrassed to share with God the burden of our dirty laundry, literal or metaphorical, or shy of trusting God’s interest in our dreams to be as strong as God’s protection in crisis.

But that’s what those pictures of Jesus holding lambs, and the poetry of the Shepherd Psalm are all about: God’s extravagant, gracious, all-encompassing willingness to get mucky or tired or cold or stinky with us. Pursuing us with goodness and mercy when we’re careless, when we fail, or make a mess; even – at the extreme of gracious extravagance – laying down God’s life for us.

In the years since I’ve been ordained, and put this collar on, I’ve often been told by church folks and strangers alike that I have more important things to do than listen to them, staple worship booklets, or help clean up the parish hall.

Sometimes, I believe it myself.

And sometimes it’s perfectly true.

But very often, the most important thing I can do in that moment is in fact to wash a pile of dishes or wipe down tables. To listen to the story or the worry you don’t yet know how to tell. To share in the small or yucky or boring tasks because they matter; to be interested in the “small” or messy griefs and hopes and angers and joys that mean more to our spiritual lives than we often want to think they do.

So sometimes, I sweat under this collar, or get cleaning fluid or baby spit on my clergy shirt.  Sometimes, I lay down precious free time I’ll never get back.

But so do you.

Because that’s how we lay down our lives for one another, as the Good Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. This interest in the little things, this investment in helping clean up messes and carry the burdens, isn’t just the life of a priest or a divine shepherd. The image of the Good Shepherd is a model for every Christian. 

Three times in a few sentences Jesus defines the good shepherd as the one who lays down his life – putting aside all the vestiges of divine elegance to take on the messy, mucky holiness of human life and death so that you and I get to live with cleaner hearts and spirits day by day. And then John the letter writer reminds us to follow the model Shepherd and do the same.

Very few of us, fortunately, are called upon to be crucified for the transformation of the world. But all of us are called to lay down our lives for one another; to get our formal wear messy in the actions of caring for the careless, loving the unlovable; or making a messed up world welcoming again. Exactly what we give up to do that – what we lay down –is often different from person to person, but we’re all called to risk what is nice or precious in our lives with gracious extravagance for the sake of someone else’s everyday need.

We’re called to do that, but also to receive that gift from one another: to receive each other’s service, and God’s, with the same extravagant graciousness with which God offers it. Because that extravagant, abundant grace is God’s dream and promise for us, and for every one of God’s people, following the Good Shepherd into the paradise pictured in that beautiful familiar psalm.

Following the Good Shepherd to where we are surrounded by abundance for every need, guided in all that is right, protected from evil and fear, and pursued by mercy, accepting the extravagant graciousness of God’s messy care for us, and passing that gift on to one another, until all are at home and at peace with God, now and always.

Bearing Witness

Acts 3:12-19; Luke 24:36b-48

Did they know that they were fulfilling prophecy, I wonder?

When Peter and John – disciples of Jesus, leaders of the newborn Christian community in Jerusalem – went up to the Temple to pray, and come across a lame beggar, and heal him.

Peter just tells him to stand up and walk, in the name of Jesus the Messiah, of Nazareth, and he leaps up healed, just as if Jesus himself had stood there and said that to him, full of the power of God.

Peter and John and the healed man quickly attract a crowd of astonishment, and Peter has to say something. “Why are you staring at us?” he says. “Why are you acting as if we made this man walk by our own power or holiness? What you’re seeing – what you should be noticing – is the power of God, accomplished through faith in the name of Jesus.”

He goes on preaching, now that he’s got an audience. You killed Jesus, he says. We know you didn’t know what you were doing, but when you killed him, God raised him. We are witnesses. And faith in his name has given this man strength and perfect health, as you see, so repent and return to God to receive forgiveness.

Did Peter or John remember, in that moment, that this is exactly what Jesus told them would happen, when they saw him on that first uncertain and confusing night of resurrection, when everything changed as they watched the risen Jesus eat a piece of fish.

The Messiah is to suffer and to rise from the dead and repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. Jesus said then. You are witnesses.

Exactly.

So did Peter and John set out on this healing and preaching because they’d thought about their assignment and worked out a strategy? Or did it seem to just happen to them? Did they just find themselves in the right place at the right time, following their gut and their faith as an everyday thing?

I don’t know. Luke doesn’t tell us.

But I do know that this is supposed to happen to us, too.

To you and me, disciples of Jesus, given the Holy Spirit in baptism, and empowered in our very daily lives, through faith in Jesus’ name. Just like the disciples were commissioned as witnesses on the night of the resurrection, and empowered by the Spirit at Pentecost.

So what would you do, if you knew you were supposed to do miracles of faith? To open eyes and hearts to repentance and forgiveness in a stunning wash of awe and hope?

Would you set about it strategically, identifying the person who needs a miracle, the crowds who need your preaching, and declaring healing in the Name of Jesus with full confidence in the results?

Or would if have to happen more by accident, letting your faith lead you, step-by-step, into the right place at the right time to speak in God’s name and see miracles happen?

Think about it. Because you and I, like Peter and John, are witnesses of Jesus, empowered and charged to proclaim repentance and forgiveness in all nations, charged with healing for the world.

It’s easier for Peter and John, I sometimes think. I mean, they were THERE. They knew Jesus, personally, before he died. They saw all those miracles. They were THERE when he appeared in that room, and invited them to touch him, and ate fish, living and resurrected and changing everything. They had that experience of transformation, of living the before and after of resurrection, of being set afire with the Spirit.

That had to give them confidence in their proclamation and power, right?

I just grew up in the church, where this was all good news but old news, and we’ve gotten used to expecting dramatic, unexplainable miracles to stay inside the pages of the Bible.

And yet the church insists that we too were there. We too, you know, experience resurrection, when we eat and drink the Body and Blood of Christ. We too are subject to impossible miracles, no matter how we rationalize them. We too, are changed forever in baptism, given the gift of the Holy Spirit, conveniently conveyed these days by water instead of fire on our heads.

It might not feel the same. But while we might not feel like eyewitnesses of the resurrection, every one of us is a witness to the power and presence of God.

Last Tuesday night, in our Vestry meeting, we did an exercise which included this meditation:

Bede Griffiths, a Benedictine monk, details something he experienced as a boy. He was walking in the evening when he was suddenly dazzled by the beautiful song of a flock of birds. The beauty of their singing seemed to awaken senses he’d never used before. In an instant the world seemed magically transformed, and everything in it seemed to burst with what he calls a “kind of sacramental character. I remember now the feeling of awe which came over me,” he wrote, “I felt inclined to kneel on the ground… and I hardly dared to look on the face of the sky, because it seemed as though it was but a veil before the face of God.”

When have you experienced something like this? we were asked. Take time to re-imagine that time in your mind, re-creating the sensory experience.

We took a minute or so of silence to really put ourselves in that moment of God’s presence from our own lives. From that place of presence, different people reported feeling loved, awed, revived, peaceful, and free. And now you could feel God’s presence in the room, because we’d taken time to notice it in our lives.

We were witnesses, in those moments, to the immediate, life-giving presence of God.

Just like Peter and John and a dozen or so others, watching the newly risen Jesus eat fish, and explain scripture.

We don’t all witness the resurrection firsthand. 

But I am a witness to the all-encompassing love of God, wrapped around me by my friend in some of my darkest hours. I am a witness to the transformative compassion of God, giving life through the quiet action and open hearts of many of you in this congregation. I am a witness to the way the vividness of God’s presence in a freezing, cloudless winter sky freed my soul from the dragging anxieties of grief. 

I am a witness to much more.

And so are you.

And both of us – all of us – are “sent into the world in witness to God’s love” (as we pray for Sloane and Reed to be baptized today); charged, like Peter and John, with proclaiming resurrection, repentance, and forgiveness to all nations.

It’s a big job, but we don’t do it alone. We don’t have to plan miracles, and create them from our own power. Instead, the miracles and revelation and repentance and forgiveness that we are charged with in baptism are actually Jesus’ job. Just like Peter said. “Don’t look at me like I healed this man. God did this. I’m just the witness.”

All the proclamation, the healing, the miracles, the forgiveness and transformation you and I are charged with in baptism are God’s mission, and Jesus is doing it already.

We are witnesses. 

Because our witnessing helps Jesus use us in this mission. We help Jesus, like Peter and John, Continually putting ourselves in that place in which you know you’re experiencing the presence and power of God - doing over and over what we did in Vestry last Tuesday. By continually noticing how God’s presence brings revival, or profound peace, or magnificent awe.

Because when we are in that place, bearing witness by paying attention to the presence of God, God can pour presence and power through us to touch others, to heal, revive, love and free, and transform the world.

And we too are transformed, by bearing witness.

Amen.