University Presbyterian Church - Chapel Hill, NC

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A Sermon by Robert E. Dunham

University Presbyterian Church

Chapel Hill, North Carolina

Fifth Sunday of Easter May 10, 2009

            We regularly recite these words over the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. “I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing.”  Abide.  It’s an old-fashioned word. It almost seems to belong to another era.

            On Christmas Eve, we sing, “O come to us, abide with us, Our Lord, Emanuel.”  Today we sang in confession, “Thou hast not left me, oft as I left Thee; on to the close, O Lord, abide with me,” and shortly we will sing, “In life and death, O Lord, abide with me.” On other days we may sing, “God of the past, our times are in Thy hand; with us abide.”  Abide with me. Abide with us.

“To abide” has to do with lingering, persevering, continuing, lasting, or dwelling. It connotes staying power, holding fast, staying with another. No wonder the term is rare. What it means is rare, in this or any time.[1]  For the lack of a willingness to abide, our world, our communities, our families are impoverished and diminished.

The place where Jesus speaks these words in John’s Gospel is the Last Supper, during the same night in which he was betrayed… when those who loved him most failed to abide, to stay, with him.  Jesus is, in effect, saying farewell to his disciples. 

Jesus began his Upper Room discourse with the venerable image of the vine and branches, a favorite reference to Israel in the scriptures he knew. As the prophets so often lamented, Israel repeatedly failed to be fruitful branches that grow from the vine. The disciples would fail, too. As do disciples now.[2]

But then Jesus began to speak about abiding. I am the vine, he said; you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing. If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, he continued, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. My Father is glorified by this, he said, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples.

            Admittedly, abiding is not easy work within the human family, but abiding is so important, and indeed consistent with the very nature of Christ in human life. And this is a text about our connectedness with Him, and His connectedness with us... which is, of course, the ground of our connectedness with one another. And the quality that makes it so is Jesus’s willingness to stay, to abide with us.

            The disciples in Emmaus (Luke 24) say to Jesus before they realize who he is, “Stay (abide) with us...”  It is the same verb.  And in his doing so, they remember who he is.  Elsewhere in John’s Gospel, Jesus promises the abiding presence of the Comforter, the Holy Spirit, as their teacher and guide… the abiding One who then enables them to do the work of abiding with others.  And Paul, the apostle, would speak of the abiding power and presence of God when he said that there was nothing– neither death or life, neither messenger of Heaven nor monarch of earth, neither what happens today nor what may happen tomorrow, neither a power from on high nor a power from below, nor anything else in God's whole world – that had any power to separate us from the abiding love of God that we have known in the Christ. (Romans 8:37-39)

            “I fear no foe, with Thee at hand to bless:” says the old hymn,

            Ills have no weight, and tears no bitterness.

            Where is death’s sting? Where, grave, thy victory?

            I triumph still is Thou abide with me.”

            Recognizing God’s staying power gives us staying power

I read a story once about a monastery that had fallen on hard times. There were only a handful of monks left. Worried about the future, and floundering for ideas, the abbot of the monastery approached a neighboring rabbi for counsel. The rabbi replied, “I have no advice to give you really. The only thing I can tell is that one of you could well be the Messiah.” The abbot brought this thought back to his monks, but he said he really didn’t know what to make of it. In the months that followed, the monastic community pondered the thought. Without realizing, they began to treat each other differently. There was a new sense of love and respect. In time, others were attracted to their order, and the monastery began to take on new life and to flourish again. It makes a difference in our relationship with others who follow Christ when we see that he abides in them as within us.[3]

Recognizing God’s staying power with us gives us staying power. I have seen such abiding with my own eyes.

I’ve seen it in the dogged determination of the mission co-workers we support, who labor against hardship and seemingly heavy odds to bring the light of Christ to bear on a world in need.  I think of Frank and Nancy Dimmock, career missionaries, at work in the little south African mountain kingdom of Lesotho, working on public health and care for orphans, respectively, in a land where close to a third of all adults are infected with the HIV virus.  Staying power.  I saw it the week before last in Guatemala in the face of Karla Koll, a pastor and theologian who has chosen to work despite hardship and some danger to improve the lot of women in that culture that has not been kind to women, and in the commitment of our newest mission worker, Amanda Craft, who recently came back to that country in the midst of her pregnancy, because she felt called to work alongside the women who are still struggling to find their voice.  Staying power.  I think of the unflappable Nuhad Tomeh, our mission co-worker who continues to try to broker peace and to mirror Christ’s love in the Middle East, where peace and even mutual respect are so fleeting and elusive. Staying power.  The power of Christ’s abiding in us that strengthens our own capacity to abide.

            Of course, one doesn’t have to travel to exotic places to see it.  We can see it most every day if we but open our eyes.  I have seen it recently in the love that binds two parents to an autistic child who is so alone with his own self.  I’ve seen it in a family that has not abandoned one of its members who made a tragic and deadly choice and who now faces an uncertain future at best.  I’ve seen it in a wife who tenderly and steadfastly attends to and visits her husband, who no longer knows her name.  I’ve seen it in presbytery colleagues who have disagreed for years about so many things but who cherish the relationship they share in Christ.  I’ve seen it in a Stephen Minister whose own painful memories of a deep grief have not kept her from extending compassionate care to another who is plumbing the same depths. On this particular Sunday, I would surely be remiss if I did not note the abiding strength and love and patience of those who mothered us on our way, with countless gifts of love. Staying power… rooted in the staying power of Christ and of Christ’s Spirit.

Nowhere, of course, is such patience, steadfastness and staying power more evident than in the story of the church.  It has been so from the church’s beginnings, as Luke recorded and recounted the Spirit’s steady prodding of the early church to understand that God’s love was unending and expansive… leading to bold speech and powerful proclamation, to the baptism of Cornelius, a gentile, and of an Ethiopian eunuch, one who was ritually unclean.  The power of Christ’s abiding would lead those early disciples to wrestle with what it meant to say that God showed no partiality, to throw open the doors, even when so many wanted to shut them tight.  The power and presence of Christ’s love, abiding with us still, is yet urging us in the same directions today, ever expanding the reaches of God’s grace. 

Sometimes abiding takes on dimensions of courage, and of surging hope, and of bold steps forward.  At other times, says Dean Leuking, it manifests itself as simple steadiness in the face of all that would urge us to turn away from the grace that sustains us. To abide, in such a sense, is to leaven the world with steadiness in one’s calling without sliding into the blight of taking health, sight, hearing, mind and belief for granted. It is remembering what Psalm 121 teaches us: the Lord will keep your going out and your coming in from this time forth and forevermore.[4] Whether bold or quiet, strident or steadfast, abiding in Christ’s love is an act of grace.  It is a gift God first gives to us and, when we are at our best, it is a gift we give one another.

This morning we will witness/have witnessed the baptism of Pike Preyer, a child of the covenant; it is a moment when we will promise/promised, in behalf of the church universal, to abide with Pike... to be his shelter and his safe haven, to challenge him and to nurture him as a precious child of grace.  When John and Joanie brought Pike forward this morning, there was nothing clearer than that he could not make the trek to baptism alone.  Nor could John and Joanie promise to live out their promises to teach him and nurture him in the way of the faith by themselves.  Baptism is a sign of God’s grace and the act of an abiding community, a community that leans on one other for the strength and stamina, in the face of a dominant culture, to make and believe and live into counter-cultural claims that Pike’s well-being and his success as a person will not rest in what he accomplishes or the living he eventually makes, but in the character and quality of the life he makes with God and others, in short, in his capacity to abide.  These are big promises we all make to such a young child, and they weigh upon us, if we think for even a moment about what we are saying.

But we anchor those promises and our abiding as the community of faith in something larger than ourselves.  We anchor them in the Easter gospel we have heard proclaimed and seen lived, and we draw deeply from the well of baptismal grace and the nurture of the Lord’s Supper that enables us to feed our hunger for things that last. And the miracle of it all is that our connections with one another really take root from such moments, grow up and mature into fruitful living that binds us together across otherwise seemingly impassible boundaries.[5]  It is not our doing, not even our abiding, that makes such miracles happen; we owe them, rather, to the grace of God that instills in us the courage and the faith that comes from knowing that Christ abides with us.  Thus we can pray with confidence that Pike, and other children like him, will grow in this abiding community into those who bear much fruit, who know well what it means to abide in Christ, as they come to trust this One who abides in them.