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You folks know I play the fiddle and you know the type of fiddling I do ain’t from around here. It’s that Hillbilly stuff called Old Time Mountain Music. The Traditional music particularly of Eastern and Central West Virginia is my first love. I got into it when I lived down there. I wanted to learn the people and in a place like that – a land that time forgot – learning the rhythm of the music is a broad avenue into the heart of the people. When you start playing down there, people will start talking, sharing stories. They’ll dance. They’ll laugh. Get a little weepy and not even know why. That type of music is a big part of what “home” is in West Virginia; of what it is to “abide” in West Virginia.
When I moved to Canada, I didn’t realize how musically lonely it was going to be for me. There was next to no one who played what I play. At my first Canadian church down in Caledon, we hosted a fiddle jam once a month. And there were some good fiddlers who played the music that’s “home” to people in southern Ontario. I tried to get into it, but it didn’t become my home like West Virginia music is. Fiddle jams can be quite lonely for me. When I play, it’s a novelty and it is rare to find accompanists that get that the rhythm is different than it is in Canadian fiddling and East Coast Fiddling. I eventually found a couple of people I could play with and we did some playing around. It was nice. Even in the Great White North I could still have a sense of still abiding in West Virginia. Yet, I have to say, not having the side of a mountain as my horizon was, is, and will always be difficult.
When I moved up here to Owen Sound, even that little bit of home got left behind, but I knew how to carry on. I knew how to abide. West Virginia Mountain Music continued to be all I listened to. I played at least once a day. I would routinely go on a binge of learning new songs. I kept inspired. I got myself on a regular schedule with some of the nursing homes to play for the residents monthly. I tried some of the fiddle jams and made a few friends. I did my best to continue to abide in West Virginia and to share my musical home with the locals up here. I found it got people to start talking, sharing stories. Some would dance and laugh and remember how there used to be fiddle music and dancing every weekend up here.
But now, COVID has hit. With these lockdowns people can’t get together. I haven’t played in the nursing homes in over a year. Weeks will go by that I haven’t even touched the fiddle or even cared to. I can’t really share it with anybody so I feel like “What’s the use?” I rarely listen to the music anymore. I’m realizing that my time in West Virginia was now 18 years ago. Most of the people I know down there have forgotten me or disowned me. I’m not sure which. There’s a person in my heart, a part of me, that hurts and wants to scream out, “I swam in the Greenbrier River, damn it! Why can’t I just go home?” It’s hard to abide in a place and not be able to be there. That’s grief. A part of me will always “abide” there. The depression these lockdowns bring on makes the grieving all the more acute. Well, I’m going to get off this horse before anyone gets any more uncomfortable.
So, I broached that subject to try to talk about what it is to abide in Jesus. What is it to abide in a person? Well, obviously that’s a relational kind of thing. Dana and I abide together. With the kids, we abide together as a family. The abiding at times can be quite deep and other times its distant, but its home. Good friendships are also places in which we abide. Abiding requires relationship.
Applying that to Jesus, the question arises how do we abide with a person who’s not physically present the way our friends and family are? Well, Jesus said, “Wherever two or three are gathered in my name, there I am among them.” To be gathered in Jesus’ name means to be gathered for his purposes, gathered to be those here who participate in what he does at and from where he’s seated at God the Father’s right hand. Jesus stands before his Father and ours never ceasing to worship and pray. So, to be gathered in his name is to be gathered to worship and pray with him. Then, as the Father sent him so he sends us into the world in the power of the Holy Spirit to embody his presence. To do that we must abide in him otherwise we are powerless to do anything. That brings me back to saying that abiding in Jesus requires relationship, a relationship that is found among the community of his disciples.
To be a gathering of people in his name is also to say that for all of us each he has left an abiding mark in us, the Holy Spirit, a sense of his presence active in our lives by which he in the name of God the Father has proved himself faithful. What I mean is that Jesus, by the presence of the Holy Spirit, has touched us and proved himself faithful throughout our lives and especially when we walked through our darkest places.
I once asked my grandfather if had he ever experienced the Holy Spirit. His answer, “Back in the war, I just had to of.” He was a machine gunner in World War II in the Battle of the Bulge. His life expectancy in battle was three minutes, but he lived. That was a pretty dark place filled with the shadow of death. Yet, he lived and he knew who got him through both the horror of war and having to live after having been through it. Jesus was with him.
Moving on, Jesus is a friend, a faithful friend and we find him among his friends. His presence, the presence of the Holy Spirit, can be felt there. Some of the Biblical ways of describing this presence is as light that can’t be seen, a weightiness but there’s nothing there. It’s good to be in it. It moves us. It lifts our burdens. It enlightens. It heals. It helps us to hear the truth about ourselves and gives us the strength to accept. It speaks to us. The personal devotional life is a profoundly appropriate response to Jesus abiding in and with us. We enrich our fellowship together when we each practice the daily reading of and meditating upon Scripture, when we take the time to sit and listen for him, when we take time to pray.
This abiding mark of his presence in us becomes outwardly visible as we love and are faithful to each other and to others outside our fellowship in the way that he has been to us. Jesus gave one commandment to us, his friends, that we love one another as he has loved us. That means we love unconditionally and sacrificially.
Love for one another is what I appreciate most about small churches. The abiding in Christ is really evident. The love, the loyalty to one another is so profoundly deep and rich. Larger churches have to work real hard to foster what happens naturally in smaller congregations as we simply go about being in Christ. Our love and commitment to him is mirrored in our love and commitment to one another.
Just to give an example. The Anglican Church in Chatsworth finally closed this time last year. They were six women strong and all pushing the age of 90. Many churches would have made a practical decision years ago to close up but they couldn’t. These women had been through thick and thin together. Loved and served together. Grew old together. Grieved together. Sat in those same familiar pews in that same familiar sanctuary together. If you were to ask them about the presence of God in their lives, I think it would be inconceivable for them to separate it from their shared experience in that congregation. So, it was hard to end it. They abided in Christ together. That relational bond is like no other.
Well, I think this profoundly deep fellowship that we have by abiding in Jesus is what he means when he says “I am the true vine.” In the Greek it’s worded, “I am the vine, the real (true) vine.” By this he means if we want real life, true life, then abiding in him is what we must do both as individuals and as congregations. Reflecting back on my fiddle life and the “abiding” home the music of West Virginia is for me. Until here recently, I managed to abide in my musical abode for 17 years separated from where the music is alive in the “heavenly sphere” of those mountains. But COVID is wreaking havoc on my relationship with my first love in fiddle music, but I’ll get back to it. This pandemic is a trauma event for all of us. It will take years for us to get over it and find a new normal.
So also with our congregations, when we are able to be back together without COVID restrictions, it’s going to be different. Things will not be the same. If you have ever had to live through a traumatic event, you know it takes a while to get going again. We’re going to have to figure out what it means to be the Church in our communities post-Pandemic. That won’t be easy. The most important thing we will need to do is abide in Christ – truly devote what energy we have just to getting together and fellowshipping in his name.
The Greek word we translate as abide means “to stay and wait”. After Jesus’ was raised the disciples didn’t do anything but gather together behind closed and usually locked doors. They stayed and waited. They prayed and ate together and occasionally Jesus showed up. After that wilderness experience of forty days Jesus ascended and within days God poured the Holy Spirit upon them and they became the dynamic body of Christ in the world. So also, when we are finally able to come together perhaps the way forward is to truly focus on how we are gathered in his name, on staying and waiting, and how he is in our midst and not let ourselves fall into the pattern of simply being church only on Sunday churches. Let’s take advantage of what we have missed most about our churches…each other…and spend more time together…in Jesus’ name and let him come to us and restore our vim and vigor. Amen.
