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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 20 some years ago. I learned it because I wanted to learn the people and in a place like that – a land that time forgot – learning the uniqueness 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.
You know, you can live somewhere and not really abide there; not really feel at home, not really belong. 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 affectionately call it “Messered up” because it’s heavily influenced by that beloved and iconic Canadian fiddler, Don Messer who had a Canadian-wide presence on radio and TV from 1940-60’s. 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 for what I play from 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.
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 fiddled 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 then, COVID hit. With those lockdowns people couldn’t get together. I couldn’t play in the nursing homes. Weeks would go by that I didn’t even touch the fiddle or even care to. I stopped listening to the music. Today, I haven’t really gotten it back. I do Country Lane in Chatsworth every now and then, but I just ain’t got it anymore. To be honest, there’s too much not so happy stuff going on with me and I need to really go home and abide, but I can’t and so abiding in my musical home kind of makes me sadder. I find myself just wanting to abide with God the Father Son and Holy Spirit these days and that’s just where I’m at. How about you folks?
Anyway, I broached that subject of my “abiding” in my musical home of West Virginia music in order to try to talk about what it is to “abide” in Jesus. In John’s Gospel three key words John has for our relationship to Jesus “knowing” him (that was last week) and abiding in him. Next week, we’ll look at believing in him.
So, what is it to abide in a person? Well, obviously that’s a relational kind of thing. Spouses abide together in each other. That two becoming one flesh thing we find in Genesis. Add children to the mix and there’s abiding together in and as a family. The sense of abiding can at times be quite deep and joyfully content and other times it’s distant and even painful, but it’s our home and that’s where we abide. Good friendships are also places in which we abide. Abiding, for good or for bad, requires relationship.
Applying that to our relationship with Jesus, the question arises how do we abide with a person who’s not physically present the way our family and friends are? Well, as a starter, Jesus calls us his friends. This means the obvious – Jesus is our friend, a faithful friend whom we find him among his friends. His presence, the presence of the Holy Spirit, can be felt among his friends, among us.
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. It speaks to us. Though I was raised in the church, so to speak, it wasn’t until I was about nineteen that I felt the need to get to know Jesus. It was a painful time in my life then, transitioning into adulthood while limping from a painful childhood. A girlfriend took me to her church, a hand-waiving-praising-God Nazarene congregation that met in a school cafeteria. They were 30-40 people strong. As soon as I stepped in the door I felt the Presence. And I kept going back Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday night because I wanted to know Jesus and abide in his Presence.
The personal devotional life is a profoundly appropriate response to Jesus abiding in and with us. We abide with him here in his home and we want to take him home and abide with him in our homes. In fact, it enriches 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 at home.
Jesus said, “Wherever two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in their midst.” To be a gathering of people in his name is to say that for all of us each he has left an abiding mark in us, the Holy Spirit, a sense of his presence, and a sense of his being active in our lives, a sense of his having been faithful in love towards us. 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 have walked through our darkest places, our most painful times.
When those who are his friends get together it is different than a party at somebody’s house or going to a hockey game. It’s different because he is in and among us and his Presence can be felt. 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.
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. Fostering our personal devotional lives and bringing that richness of his Presence that we find in abiding in him at home with us here to where we are gathered together in his name as friends, his friends, makes our fellowship a place on earth where the true vine is growing. The true vine, the real vine is growing here with real, true life – life filled with his Presence, life he gives, life in which he leads, life with purpose.
When I was nineteen, my first experience of having a sense of God speaking to me through a passage of Scripture happened one day as I was reading chapter 15 of John’s Gospel. It was verse 16, “You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit.” It was that moment, that moment for the very first time in my life that I felt like I mattered. Jesus chose me. Jesus chose me to come to him and live in the real, true life. For 39 years he has proved himself my faithful friend for no other reason than he just loves me. Come and abide in him. Amen.
