Abiding in Jesus

 John 15:1-17

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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. 

  

 

An Abiding Home

 John 15:1-17

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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.

  

 

The Hothouse of Discipleship

John 15:1-17; Romans 12

This is the seventh in a series of eight sermons based on Greg Ogden’s book Essential Guide to Becoming a Disciple: Eight Sessions for Mentoring and Discipleship.

I like to make authentic fresh salsa.  By that I mean if you go to a dinner or picnic in southern Mexico and there is something on the table called salsa, I want mine to be as close to that as I can get it.  That cooked up stuff in a jar we buy at the store is obviously not fresh nor is authentic salsa either.  The manufacturers of that stuff make us want to believe it is the real deal and we buy it because we were raised to believe that the Old El Paso taco kit was real Mexican food too.

To make good, authentic fresh salsa you need fresh ripe tomatoes.  In late summer when the tomatoes are in season my salsa is really good.  Out of season, it’s still good but I have to use hothouse tomatoes, tomatoes grown in a green house.  Actually, almost all the tomatoes we buy in grocery stores and no matter the time of year are hothouse tomatoes, i.e., industrially produced food. 

Industrially produced hothouse tomatoes are deceptive.  The seeds are genetically modified to produce fast growing plants that yield tomatoes that will be visually appealing, have tough enough skin to endure packing and handling, and have relatively the same nutrient content as tomatoes grown outdoors in season.  But, we all know that no matter how ripe that tomato looks in the store, even the expensive and deceptively labeled vine-ripened ones, it will still taste like cardboard.  Ripened only means they started to ripen while still on the vine.  If you want them to “fully ripen”, you need to let them sit on kitchen counter for a week or so preferably in sunlight.  Even then, the taste is still wanting.

The hothouse or green house is not the problem.  The hothouse is actually a good idea.  It provides a controlled optimal environment for vegetables to grow in and out of season.  We can indeed have tomatoes in February that are just like the tomatoes we have in August.  The problem lies in the industrial modifications made to mass-produce vegetables that are at most visually appealing, picture perfect, regardless of what they actually taste like.  The consumer is at the heart of the matter here.  We are the ones who prefer to make food purchases based on visual appeal rather than the quality of its actual taste.

Now, let’s apply this insight of hothouses and industrially produced tomatoes to our life in Christ.  Bearing fruit is a frequent metaphor that Jesus uses to describe the goal of our life in him.  Ripening in Christ is our maturing to be more and more as he is.  This is true for us as individuals and for our life together as a congregation. 

Authenticity is the crucial word here.  We are to be authentically like Jesus.  We each and we together are to be as much like Jesus as we can be.  This authenticity requires our yielding to the work of the Holy Spirit in us.  This yielding necessitates the we daily we set aside time to just be in the presence of Jesus by means of the presence of the Holy Spirit with us and with Jesus worship God the Father thanking him for his love and faithfulness knowing that he will neither leave us nor abandon us; time to just be in God’s presence with a heart that says “Lord, make me who you want me to be.  This yielding to the Holy Spirit’s work also requires that we dive deeply and prayerfully into the scriptures, studying them not only to learn the details but also listening with an openness for God speaking to us through them. 

This yielding to the Holy Spirit also requires we do intentional Jesus time with some sisters and brothers in Christ.  A small group of three, four, or five followers of Jesus is the hothouse of the Jesus Way.  Small groups of believers gathered intentionally to share our lives and our journeys with Christ together is the optimal environment for bearing fruit in Christ.  Following Jesus isn’t simply a matter of belief.  It is a matter of relationship, growing to be more authentically like Jesus requires relationship.  The sooner we come to accept that relationship is the necessary condition for authentic growth in Christ, the sooner and faster we will begin to bear quality Jesus-fruit.  Small group discipleship is the hothouse of the Jesus Way.  Small groups provide accountability, support, guidance, and unconditional love; the prime nutrients for bearing authentic Jesus-fruit.

Now let’s take a minute to look at the other side of the hothouse tomato metaphor; the industrialized mass-produced fruit side of things.  The idea of what church is and how to do it that most of us have is primarily a post-World War Two phenomenon.  The church in North America probably had its greatest growth spurt between 1945 and 1965.  The reason for it was that those who lived through the Great Depression and the WWII wanted to have a lot of babies and build a better world for them. 

The suburb arose at this time and provided the church with a new model for doing things.  To plant a church in the suburb required no evangelism because most everybody moving out to the burbs was Christian already.  You just had to put signs up advertising your denomination, location, time, and minister and people would turn out in big numbers. 

Church programming came to its fore in this time as well - Sunday School Programs, Adult Education programs, Outreach programs, Stewardship programs, Women’s programs, Men’s programs, Fellowship programs, programs ad nauseum.  This programing model of doing church quickly became the way to do church.  It got to the point that if your programs, and particularly if your children’s programs were super-fantastic, people would even cross denominational lines to consume your product.

This is when Church began to look like industrialized agriculture.  The church was here to moralize and teach Christian values to our already Christian culture in the same way public education was meant to make good, employable citizens out of us all.  History has now proven that fun and exciting programming failed to produce fruit pleasing to our Lord.  Even though in its day it produced great numbers of church members,…well, let’s just say a really tasty tomato was hard to find.

In the food industry, the only way to get rid of industrialized food is for the consumer to stop buying it.  To demand their grocers bring in affordable, locally grown real food.  In order to do that, we the consumer have to stop being so swayed by what things look like.  So also, we who follow Jesus need to decide whether we want to bear authentic fruit in Christ or keep trying to offer the community around us the same industrialized Jesus-like fruit that they started to balk on en masse in 1965.  North American has since gone from being predominantly Christian to being a mission field.  Maybe the people out there would prefer we set before them authentic Jesus-fruit grown in the hothouse of discipleship rather than the industrialized not so authentic fruit that we don’t even have the resources to produce anymore anyway.  Just saying.  Amen.