The Disciple Abides

Sermon on John 15:9-17 offered to the people of the Church of the Redeemer in Bryn Mawr, PA. Audio for this sermon may be found here.

In 1998, Joel and Ethan Coen introduced us to the Dude, the main character in a movie called The Big Lebowski. I won’t summarize the whole movie for you (it’s really worth watching), but I will tell you that it follows the Dude as he gets caught up in an escalating series of predicaments in which he is used by various powerful people for their nefarious purposes. It is an homage to the film noir genre, but unlike those films, in which the protagonist tends to get so caught up in the spiral of events that he ends up in a ditch somewhere, the Dude is unperturbed and ultimately unaffected by the drama that surrounds him. Indeed, the Dude seems to practice the Zen art of detachment; nothing seems to bother him all that much. This works out well for him; by the end of the movie, in spite of everything that happens to him, the Dude is back where he started. He summarizes his resilience with a memorable phrase: “the Dude abides.”

“Abide” is one of those words that tends to show up only in very specific contexts. Even though it just means “stay” or “remain,” we tend not to use it in everyday conversation. It shows up in hymnody all the time: “Abide with me, fast falls the eventide,” “O come with us, abide with us, our Lord Emmanuel.” And as a result of its frequent appearance in hymns, “abide” has become something of an explicitly religious word. Perhaps this is why we don’t use “abide” regularly; it is reserved for loftier purposes. But I wonder if there is a deeper reason that abide is not part of the modern lexicon. “Abide” shares a root with “abode”; if we say that we abide somewhere, we imply that we are making that place our home. “Abide” implies permanence, contentment, a sense that we are not going anywhere for a while. Is there anything that is more at odds with our contemporary preoccupation with progress than a sense of permanence? Our culture insists that we shouldn’t stay in any one place for too long, that should move out of the starter home as soon as it’s financially feasible, that we should always be on the lookout for new job opportunities, that we should always be thinking about what comes next. This impatience for what comes next is motivated by a profound anxiety that there is much more to do, much more to strive for before we can achieve peace and contentment. In this anxious cultural context, the worst thing we can possibly do is abide.

This kind of anxiety is nothing new. When Jesus gathers with his friends prior to his crucifixion, the disciples are riddled with apprehension, uncertain about what will happen next. This morning’s gospel reading comes from a section of John in which everything the disciples say betrays their trepidation: “Are you going to wash my feet?”, “Lord, we don’t know where you are going, how can we know the way?”, “Lord, just show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.” It’s no wonder that the disciples are anxious. After all, Jesus has predicted his execution; the disciples know that it is only a matter of time before the authorities come to arrest him. It is in the midst of this swirling anxiety that Jesus offers these startlingly simple words of assurance: “As the Father has loved me, so I love you; abide in my love.” These words are surprising because they do very little to alleviate the anxiety of the disciples; indeed, Jesus doesn’t even address their concern about what will happen next. Rather than engaging their concerns about the future, Jesus challenges the disciples to embrace the present.

This would have been countercultural for the disciples even if they weren’t worried about Jesus’ impending Passion. Much of the first century Jewish experience was about waiting for what comes next. There are two pivotal stories from the Hebrew Bible that gave shape to the way the Jewish people understood the world. One was the Exodus, the story of how God liberated God’s people from slavery and led them to the Promised Land. The other was the exile, the fact that God’s people were removed from the place God promised and forced to live in a strange land. The centrality of the exile meant that the Jewish worldview was one of yearning and expectation. This continued into the first century because even though the Jewish people lived in the land promised to them by God, they did not posses it; it was a territory of the Roman Empire. The centrality of both Exodus and exile meant much of the first-century Jewish experience was about looking to the future: the future when God would expel the foreign occupiers from the promised land, the future when the Messiah would rule with justice and equity, the future when God’s people would be free to live in peace.

So when Jesus tells his disciples to abide in his love, he challenges this worldview. And by telling his disciples to abide, Jesus taps into another deep tradition from the Hebrew Bible, one affirmed by the psalmist when he calls us to make “the Lord our refuge and the Most High our habitation.” Jesus taps into God’s promise that we will abide with God regardless of what happens to us. The story told in the Bible is the story of a God who abides with his people even when they have been cut off from everything they know. The Exodus, therefore, is not a story about a circuitous journey to the Promised Land; it is a story about a God who remains with his people as they fail and falter their way through the desert. The exile is not a story of mere deportation, it is the story of how God’s faithfulness endured even though God’s people had been removed from the promised land. Moreover, the incarnation is the embodiment of the reality that God abides among us, and the resurrection the affirmation that not even death can disrupt God’s abiding presence. Jesus challenges the disciples to recognize that God is with them even in the midst of their anxiety and uncertainty. Jesus challenges the disciples to abide in the knowledge that God’s love endures even the most difficult circumstances of their lives. Jesus challenges the disciples and challenges all of us to get out of the endless cycle of striving, to buck the culture of “what’s next,” and recognize that we have a home in God.

For many of us, the very idea of abiding is frightening. We think that if we stay in one place, the world will pass us by. We assume that in order to abide, we have to adopt the the Dude’s perspective, detached and disengaged from the world. But Jesus does not tell his disciples to abide in blissful ignorance; he tells them to abide in his love. Abiding is not just about remaining in one place oblivious to the realities of life; it is about being in a mutual, dynamic relationship with the one who created and redeemed us. We enter this relationship through worship, through the practice of sabbath. The practice of sabbath, the discipline of staying put, allows us to understand that God sustains creation even when we take a break. The discipline of sabbath allows us to understand that the time we have is a gift from God. At its best, our worship is about providing a space in which we can put away anxiety and abide in God’s love.

 

Worry

Today is Saint Joseph’s Day.

Most of the information we get about Joseph comes from the first chapters of the gospel according to Matthew.  Matthew tells us that Joseph was a righteous man who had great respect for and devotion to God’s law.  Matthew’s gospel also indicates that Joseph is of the line of King David; he is the means by which Jesus is connected to Israel’s storied monarchy.  Finally, the First Gospel makes a pretty strong connection between our St. Joseph, who is told in a dream to hide the Messiah in Egypt, and Joseph the son of Jacob, the dreamer who saves his people by bringing them into the land of Egypt at the end of Genesis.  The Gospel of Matthew, in other words, paints Joseph as a noble and righteous protector, the first-century equivalent of a knight in shining armor.

So it’s a little surprising that the gospel reading appointed for St. Joseph’s Day comes not from Matthew’s gospel, but from the gospel according to Luke, in which Joseph is a parenthetical character at best.  The reading is the one story canonical story that describes the young life of Jesus: when Jesus is twelve, he and his parents go to Jerusalem to celebrate Passover.  On the way home, Mary and Joseph realize that Jesus is not with them and they return to Jerusalem, only to find Jesus holding forth among the elders in the Temple.  Mary scolds him, saying, “Child, why have you treated us like this? Look, your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety.”  It’s striking to me that in this gospel reading appointed for his feast day, Joseph neither says nor does anything of significance.  The only thing we are told he does in this particular situation is worry.

I don’t know why they were worried…

When I was a kid, I had a tendency to wander.  Most notably, I got lost at the State Capitol building in Connecticut and at the cliff walk in Newport, RI.  None of these incidents ever seemed like a big deal to me; after all, I knew where I was the whole time.  Needless to say, my parents did not feel the same way.  When I finally turned up after these unaccompanied sojourns, my parents would greet me with that strange mixture of relief, anger, and concern that is typical of worried parents.  As I’ve entered adulthood, I’ve come to understand that the worried emotions my parents exhibited stemmed entirely from love.  I think this is why the lectionary appoints the reading from Luke’s gospel for Saint Joseph’s day.  Joseph’s anxiety is typical of all worried parents who would rather die than see something bad happen to their children.  This is particularly extraordinary when you consider the unusual circumstances of Jesus’ birth.  In spite of the fact that Jesus was not technically his son, Joseph loved Jesus as his own.  This sacrificial love is emblematic of the love that God has for each and every one of us.  We put our trust in a God who worries for the creation he loves, who is concerned those who are his children by adoption.  And the ultimate message of Lent is that God would rather die than see something bad happen to God’s children.