The Holy Spirit, God's Breath as a Sign of Life

Day of Pentecost   May 27, 2012  

Acts 2:1-21  Psalm 104: 25-35,37
Romans 8:22-27  John 15:26-27; 16:4b-15

 Lectionary Link

  I have a harmonica here.  What makes this harmonica make a sound?  I blow in the little holes, and my breath pushes across some little reeds. The reeds in each hole are different sizes and that is what makes each sound higher or lower.  I also have a Pan Flute.  And when I blow across these bamboo tubes I can make many sounds.  What is the difference between a whistle and the harmonica and the Pan Flute?  How many sounds can a whistle make, you know that whistle that the referee uses at the soccer game.  A whistle only makes one sound.

  Today is a special feast day.  It is the feast of Pentecost. It means that the season of Easter is finished.  It means that the season of Pentecost begins.  And what is the color for the Day of Pentecost?  How did you know?

  Pentecost is the day when we celebrate the birth of the church. So it is our birthday party.

  And how was the church born?

  Well, more than 2000 years ago after Jesus left this earth, his friends were wondering if God was going to be gone and absent from their lives.  But you know what they discovered?  They discovered that God was still with them.  They discovered a wonderful energy and a wonderful happiness and joy within them.  And even though Jesus was gone, they felt that God was very close to them and with them.

  And so when God was close to them and with them, do you know what they called God?  They called God the Holy Spirit.

  The word for Spirit means wind or breath.  Can you blow air out of your mouth?  What does blowing air out your mouth mean?  Does it mean that you are alive?  Can you see your breath when you blow it?  You can’t see it but you can feel it, right.  How do you know your breath is there?  You feel it against your hand.

  So do you see why people began to call God, the Holy Spirit.  Even though God’s Spirit could not be seen, the results of God’s presence was known.

  So we can know God’s presence without seeing God or without seeing Jesus, because God is the Holy Spirit.  And the Holy Spirit gave birth to the church, because the church feels and knows the presence of God without seeing God.

  Just as I blow into the harmonica and the Pan flute and make different sounds.  Can you imagine the breath of God blowing through you?  Can you imagine God’s Spirit in you, living through you and doing something special in this world?  Just like each sound in my harmonica is different when I blow through, so each one of us is different and when the Holy Spirit blows through and lives through us, the Holy Spirit is able to do something special and different through each of us.

  Today, on Pentecost Sunday, let us each know that God’s Spirit is in us, teaching us to love and help this world in a special way.  I want you to remember always that the Holy Spirit is living in you.  Can you remember that?

The Church as a Pipe Organ

Day of Pentecost  Cycle B  May 27, 2012  

Acts 2:1-21  Psalm 104: 25-35,37

Romans 8:22-27  John 15:26-27; 16:4b-15

Lectionary Link

  The name of our parish newsletter is “In the Spirit.”  Where did that name come from?  The author of the book of Revelation is St. John the Divine.  And where have you heard that name before?  St. John the Divine is the patron saint of our parish.  And why is he called the divine and not the apostle or the evangelist?  The author of the book of Revelations was caught up in a visionary state and he wrote that he was “in the Spirit.”   It was such a unique visionary state that I do not think that anyone can fully understand it.  Being in the spirit, being in this visionary state is what the ancients used to call divining God’s truth or being divinized to some extent as a human being

  The Feast of Pentecost is about being In the Spirit, or to be more exact,  being  in the Holy Spirit.  How did the early Jewish followers of Jesus come to accept the religious experience of non-Jewish followers of Christ?  They discovered that Jews and non-Jews could be In the Spirit.  They discovered that Gentiles could be filled with the Holy Spirit.

  As we consider the Holy Spirit in the church on the feast of Pentecost,  let us liken the dynamics of the Holy Spirit to one of the most fascinating musical instruments of all time, the pipe organ.  What is a pipe organ?  It is essentially lots of different sizes and shapes of whistles that make distinctive sounds when wind or air is forced through them.  Imagine a very large pipe organ with more than 10,000 pipes in an old European Cathedral.  A very old pipe organ that is still in use today has most likely been rebuilt many times.  Each time an organ is rebuilt older pipes are retained and new pipes are added to present the sound desired by the organ builder and organ tuner.  An old pipe organ then is a mixture of pipes of varying ages. In a pipe organ, the sound comes from the wind of one blower and it is fed through bellows and wind chests with many holes and a pipe sits on each hole.  There is one wind source and that wind is made to sound in 10,000 different ways, some times in harmony, and some times in dissonance.

  This is image that I would like for us to ponder to consider the feast of Pentecost.  Let us think of ourselves as the pipes in the God’s pipe organ.  And the Holy Spirit is the Wind of God that plays through us to make us a beautiful work of art to benefit this world and to prove the work of God in our world.  Imagine God as the Total Organ, the Spirit as the Wind within the Pipe Organ and imagine Jesus as the composer and the organist who plays the music.  And so you have an image of the Trinity on Pentecost Sunday.

  When you hear a pipe organ play, you feel like there is wonderful life within those apparent lifeless pipes.  Those lifeless pipes can come alive with power, beauty, grace, softness, thundering, trumpeting and rhythms fast and slow.  And the music is the end result of the life of wind being blown through all of those different pipes.

  Can you and I begin to see our lives as lives that are given over to God and composed and played by Jesus and animated by the Wind of God’s Spirit?  Wouldn’t it be boring if all of the pipes on a pipe organ were of one size and shape?  Wouldn’t it be boring if God’s Spirit had only one human body and personality proto-type that was cloned over and over as a sort of robotic Christian?

  On the feast of Pentecost we recognize that we are not robotic and cloned Christians.   We are people of diverse shapes and sizes that represent our bodies, souls and spirits and the special time and place where we find our selves living.  God has made us to be played by the Holy Spirit in our special time and place.

  So today on Pentecost Sunday, let each of us find the special way that the Holy Spirit wants to sound through our lives.  Let us not worry too much that the Holy Spirit makes different sounds through other people.  Why?  Because we all have special places and ministries given to us by the Holy Spirit because of the unique shape and constitution of our life experience.

  Let us pray that we will accept the One Spirit, the one breath of God to blow through us to make wonderful music for the benefit of our world through the ministry of our lives.  And if we do this, we will know that Jesus Christ is the Composer, and the music maker of our lives.  Amen.

The Risen Christ: Oracle of Prayer

 7 Easter B            May 20, 2012   

Acts 1:15-17, 21-26  Psalm 1
1 John 5:9-13  John 17:6-19

Lectionary Link

  You have seen the four letters WWJD, meaning what would Jesus do?   WWJP could mean What would Jesus pray?   WWTAOJTTJWP would mean, What would the author of John think that Jesus would pray?  And with all of these unpronounceable alphabetic acronyms, I hope that I am confusing you.

  Today in our Gospel lesson we have the longest recorded prayer of Jesus.  It is not in any other Gospel.  And one wonders how in the days when there were no hidden microphones, how such a verbatim prayer of Jesus could have been remembered by someone particularly if Jesus was praying alone.

  The sheer logical confusion does invite us to look at the oracular function in the early Christian community.  How did the early followers of Jesus understand oracle or the channeling of the insights of Jesus within the community long after he was gone?  Could the channeled words of Jesus through one of his followers be regarded as the words of Jesus himself?  Such a question is only raised by us who live in the age of ownership of so-called intellectual property.

  The prayer of Jesus in the seventeenth chapter of John requires us to ponder the conditional verb tenses in  if-then statements.  The writer of John’s Gospel wrote the prayer assuming a relationship with the risen Christ in this conditional mode: If Jesus were here now, then he would be praying in this way.  And now as we read it move to conditional past-perfect tense: If Jesus had been present with the community of John, then he would have prayed in the way that it is written in John 17.

  I mean to be confusing because art and oracle can make present those who are absent.  Does Shakespeare become present when his plays are read or performed?  Does Mozart become present when his music is played or performed?

  The community of John took very seriously this belief about being one with Christ and one with God the Father.  They believed that Christ was their vine and they were branches and their branches were coursing with the interior sap of the Spirit of Christ so that there was a sharing in their inner life, the very life of Christ.  And that sharing of inner life could produce “words of Christ” and “prayers of Christ.”  And because of this oneness factor, the spoken words and written words that came from the state of unity with Christ could be regarded as the words of Christ or the oracle of Christ who was alive and speaking within the community of followers.

  Art and oracle confuse time; how else could this Gospel quote Jesus as praying, “And now I am no longer in the world….and while I was with them.”  Where is the physical location of such a Jesus who is praying these words?  Where is Mozart when some musician is channeling his music?  Does Mozart attain a trans-historical presence and immortality in his creations?

  Today is Ascension Sunday; I remind you that the Feast of the Ascension was celebrated on Thursday to a less than standing room crowd.  The ascended Christ is the inspired imagination of the church’s dealing with the obvious sense of Christ continuing presence even while he could no longer be seen or touched.  But the ascended Christ could definitely still be heard and could be known as a continuing oracle with the people who gathered to pray in his name.

  As we move on toward Pentecost and Trinity Sunday, we see that it is Jesus who is responsible for the Trinitarian confusion: “I and the Father are one,” said he.  The Father-God aspect of the personality of Jesus and his teaching of the Parent-God aspect of the personality of his followers created this “alternate” family and this alternate way of being in the world, but not just the world, but also an alternate world, the world into which one was born by the Spirit of God.

  Art, poetry and oracle confuse time and space and for that reason I believe that the communities that generated the New Testament writings as God’s word presented those words as an aesthetic bending of the dimension of time and space.  The aesthetic bending of the dimension of time and space account for the apparent logical confusion in the use of the same words in multivalent ways.  Take the case of the Greek word,  cosmos  or world.  Cosmos or world in John’s Gospel is a world that is loved by God, but not supposed to be loved by the followers of Christ.  The kingdom of Jesus was not supposed to be of this world; so the kingdom of Jesus was an alternate and parallel world.  The followers of Jesus were to be in the world but not of the world.  The writer of John’s Gospel believed that Jesus taught us to live in two families, our natural and spiritual families.  Jesus taught us to live in two worlds, the natural world and the spiritual world.  The apparent confusion of language has to do with the fact that every word can be interpreted from the point of view of the natural world or from the spiritual world.  If we don’t understand this in John’s Gospel, we can find it to be a very confusing book indeed.

  Consistent with John’s Gospel theme, “In the beginning was the Word”  the Risen Christ is still the One who has ascended to a closer proximity with his heavenly parent.  And as the older sibling, Christ is the one who prays words for us and for our success in befriending each other toward the values of the Gospel.  The Gospel of John portrays Jesus as an ever present oracle of prayer who offers endless words of petition for our well-being.  In our recognition of Christ as ever-present oracle, we in our attention to prayer try to enter into the words of Christ who has gone to that other interior world which we can only partially perceive and live in now but we can become more aware of it as we make the effort to attend to this alternate world.

  I hope that my words today have confused you; made you bend time and space dimension not to some TV Twilight Zone do-do-do-do reality, but to the reality of the sacred, which is a parallel reality that all of us can experience in this very seeming “ordinary” world.

  And if my words seem to confuse you now, in just wait a few minutes and I’ll be selling you an even bigger Brooklyn bridge, when I hand you bread and wine and tell you that they are the body and blood of Christ.

  Good art, poetry and our experience of their sublime effects seems to bend space and time and so does the experience of the sacred.  As we have read what Jesus might have prayed, we see that the words invite us to know another kind of relationship of oneness to a parent who is not an earthly parent but who is a spiritual parent who is known because the metaphor borrows from the notion of what an ideal parent-child relationship might be. What does a parent want?  A parent wants to be able to share the very best with one’s child.  Jesus came to teach us that God wants to share everything of the Godly world with the family of people who inhabit this earth.

  Let us continue to go to the risen Christ as our oracle; we need not claim that we have any infallible interpretations of this oracle.  We but ask for insights from Christ as our oracle to get us through this day with the excellence that we need to be the best we can be for the well being of the world that we live in.

  The writer of John’s Gospel believed that he knew what Jesus would have prayed.  And now and you and I turn to Christ again as our oracle, and ask what Jesus would pray even now?  And what would the risen Christ pray through us?  To the answer of this question we now give our lives.  Amen.

The Origins of the Church? Mothering, Befriending Love

6 Easter cycle b         May 13, 2012

Acts     Ps. 33:1-8,18-22

1 John 4:7-21      John 15:9-17      

Lectionary Link

  On Mother’s Day, it might be appropriate to speak about love and the Gospel lesson certainly also gives us the occasion to speak about love.

  If we are to believe the Gospel lesson, we might say that the Christian movement was founded upon love.  The followers of Jesus came into a friendship with Jesus.  They understood that Jesus call them his friends.  The very word in Greek for the word friend is another word for “love.”  Philos is the Greek word for friend and phileo is the verb form for “love.”  The Greek language has four words for love, agape, phileo, eros and storge.  In English we might specify the kinds of love that encompass these four notions of love; love as justice and respecting the dignity of all.  Love as friendship, fondness, favoring preference, affinity and affection.  Love as sensual attraction.  Love  as familial affection.  And what more can I say about love that Country Western Music has not already said?

  There are many quotable phrases about love in the Bible.  We are to love God with all our hearts and love our neighbors as we love our selves.  We cannot say that we love God who is not seen, if we do not love our brothers and sisters who are seen.  Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.  Love never ends. Love is greater than faith or hope. We are to love our enemies.  Love is also expressed in the negative: The love of money is said to be the root of all evil.  In the Gospel of John, we aren’t supposed to love the world or the things of the world.  And also some people love darkness better than light because their deeds are evil.

  Love is one of those oceanic words that we use all of the time and it has inspired lots of clichés because most people at some time in their lives relate to the cliché of love.  At some point in one’s life, the word love seems to be the right word at the right time that says what needs to be said.

  I think love is a word that in its most general sense designates the cosmic personal glue of the universe.  We cannot live in this world without acknowledging that we are with other people and with other things.  And love is one of those words that is used to specify the quality of our relationship with everything in life.  When we try to assess what we value in life we must deal with the word love.  Love expresses how we are attached to the people and things in our life.

  Why do we love someone?  Why do we love sports?  Why do we love baseball or football?  Why do we love the San Francisco Giants, the Forty-Niners, the Raiders, the  Cal Bears?  Why do we love pizza and not love broccoli? Why do some people like anchovies and others do not?   Why do we like certain fashions or clothes?  Why do we love the Episcopal Church?  Or our political ideas and affiliations?  Why do we like certain locations?  Why do we like Music?  Not just music but certain kinds of music?  And not just certain kinds of music but certain songs or tunes that are performed by certain artists?  How is it that people, things, events, activities, beliefs come to be our favorites and our preferences such that they become part of the repetitive patterns of our lives?  How do we become attracted to what and whom we like in life?  I am not sure that even as we acknowledge love as the glue of all life, that we ever understand how we come to love what we do love or how other people come to love us.  I think that we all must confess that we are partakers in love without fully understanding all of the motivations of love.

  For people who don’t think that they have religion or belief, I ask them to take an exercise in discovering the loves of their own life.  And if they can discover the loves of their own life they may discover their values, their gods and beliefs.  The way in which you and I can analyze the loves of our lives in honesty is to be honest about the objects of our desire?   To track your own relationship with love, sit down and write out an entire series of top ten lists.

  What were the top ten experiences of your life?  Who are the top ten most influential mentors in your life?  Who are the top ten friends or lovers in your life?  What are the 10 best things that you have done for other people?  Best books you’ve read?  10 most influential people in world history?  10 most wonderful places you have been?  10 happiest occasions of joy?  10 favorite meals?  10 favorite articles of clothing?  10 times you felt closest to God?  On and on make your top ten lists and when you’ve finished that make your “bottom”10  list.  List the 10 worst things in every category of your life.  If you can produce a whole series of lists you may be able to look at your relationship with what we call love or the glue that keeps us connected to what we are experiencing in life.

  And it will probably turn out that in many of your top ten lists, it will involve other people.  Such people will turn out to be those who we might call friends.  And if we understand the notion of friend, we can understand the founding the church.  The church began with the friendship that Jesus had with his disciples.  Friendship was a quality of life together which involved the early followers of Jesus using such expressions as love, joy and laying down of one’s life for the other.

  Friendship love is a mystery.  How does it happen?  It does involve what we call a projection of our selves.  Why do we love others?  Because in some way we find our own personal fulfillment connected with the people whom draw our desire.  We find personal enjoyment or fun or opportunity for the release of our mentoring gifts with the people who draw from us our creativity.  But in friendship love we find our limitation since our profound desire expects much more of the people, events and things of our life.  Even while people, events, places and things can provide great enjoyment, we still have a gnawing desire for more.  And that should tell us something about love and our capacity to love.  St. Augustine in his confession said that our hearts are restless until they find their rest in God.  Eventually we find that our hearts are made for more than our environment can contain in terms of people, events, or things onto which our desire can be drawn.  Our hearts ultimately desire God who has no environment, because God is the one in whom we live and move and have our being.  And in accepting our love for God, we can learn to understand love as a way to regulate the enjoyment in life for people, events and things so that we can learn the balance of justice.  Justice is the eternal quest to give everything and everyone proper dignity in life.  As such justice is never finished because love is never finished.  Love is always a commandment for the next occasion of doing justice to the people, events and things in our lives.

  We are most fortunate in life if we had a mother who befriended us with her love.  We are fortunate that Jesus came and befriended his disciples and followers in such a special way that this Christian tradition of befriending has continued for all of these years.  Befriending involves being drawn into relationship where we find it appropriate to lay down our lives.  The Greek word for life here is psuche, our psychological life or soul life.  Befriending is a love that makes us check our egos at the door so that community and communion can occur.  Certainly, mothers lay down their lives for their children.  They check their egos and give psychical space to let the identities of their children come forth.  This is what Jesus did for his friends and the result was the communion of the church coming into being.

  It is to this communion of befriending that you and I have been called.  And it is a type of befriending that we dare to call Christian love.  Amen. 

A Parable

  A parable: There was a coastal city that had marvelous sandy beaches and each year they had sand sculpture contest in the summer.  And each year they chose a theme for the sand sculpture contest.  One year they chose the theme of “lakes” and so each sand sculpture had to incorporate water in their created sand cities or villas.  So this meant running to the ocean and fetching buckets of ocean water to fill their miniature lakes.  At the end of the day the entire beach was filled with marvelous sand structures of every sort, all incorporating miniature bodies of water.  And so it was time for the judging to begin.  There were judges from every age group and one judge happened to be a six year old girl.  And the judges were reminded that they were to judge based upon the best incorporation of a body of water into their sand creation.  When it came time for the young girl judge to render her decision, they ask her to go and point to her winner.  And they were startled to see that she ran past all of the sand creations toward the ocean and she pointed at the ocean and said, “This is the winner!”

  Sometimes we spend our time in religion filling our little human made lakes from the abundance of the ocean and we take those little lakes so seriously that we forget the plenitude from which they came.  We do the same in our religious metaphors about God; sometimes we let the metaphors serve as a replacement for the plenitude of God, who is grander than even the ocean.

Riddle: The water of the beach lakes is and is not the ocean.

Christ as the Vine; a Baptismal Sermon for Children

5 Easter  B         May 6, 2012

Acts 8:26-40 Psalm 22:24-30
1 John 4:7-21  John 15:1-8

 Lectionary Link

  Today is a special day of Holy Baptism for Bailey.  And we are going to look at Bailey's life as a branch growing out of the Vine of Christ.  In the Gospel lesson, we read that Jesus said I am the Vine, you are the branches.

  What happens if a branch is cut off a vine?  Can it continue to grow or live?  No, why?  Because the branch gets its food from the sap that flow in the branch.

  This parable was used as a teaching riddle by Jesus and the early teachers about Jesus.

  If a grapevine is going to produce good grapes what is needed?  You have to have a good grape plant.  You have to have good soil and the right amount of water.  And you need a good gardener to make sure the grape vine is taken care of.  The branches have to be protected from birds and insects and deer and any plant diseases so that good grapes can grow on the vine.  And the branch has to be supported and not get cut off from the vine or the branch will die.

  So what do Bailey and you and I need to be good Christians?  We need to have a good source of life.  Bailey has a good source of life; her mom and dad.  And even though David and Taryn are almost perfect, all of us need a more perfect source for our Christian life.

  And that source of life is Jesus Christ.  Jesus Christ is the vine and we are his branches.  And we can know that we are connected to Christ as our vine since way down inside of each of us we are connected to the Spirit of God and the Spirit of Christ.  And this is like a sap or an energy or a power for our lives.  And it is always there, but sometimes we need to remember to go there for this energy or power of life.

  And so we are going to baptize Bailey today and we are going to promise to remind her and ourselves about Jesus Christ as a source of energy and power for our lives.

  Just as a grapevine has to be taken care of so that the branches do not get damaged or broken off from the vine; so we need to take care of Bailey and each other so that we do not get cut off from Jesus Christ as the Vine and the source of our lives of love and faith and joy and hope.

  So we are here today to remember that we can find a wonderful connection with Christ.  And when we baptize Bailey, we are celebrating the fact that her life is connected with Christ too.  And we are going to remind her every Sunday and every day of her life that her life is connected to Christ.  Can you make that promise to her today?  Can we make that promise to each other?  To remember that our lives are connected to Jesus Christ because God’s Spirit is within us as a place where we are connected to Christ.

  Jesus said that he was like a Vine and we are like his branches.  He said this to remind us how closely connected we are to him.  And today we are here to celebrate that Bailey too is a branch of the Vine of Christ.  Amen.

What Did You Hear from the Grapevine?

5 Easter  Cycle B        May 6, 2012

Acts 8:26-40 Psalm 22:24-30

1 John 4:7-21  John 15:1-8

 Lectionary Link

  A parable: There was a coastal city that had marvelous sandy beaches and each year they had a sand sculpture contest in the summer.  And each year they chose a theme for the sand sculpture contest.  One year they chose the theme of “lakes” and so each sand sculpture had to incorporate water in their created sand cities, castles or villas.  So this meant running to the ocean and fetching buckets of ocean water to fill their miniature lakes.  At the end of the day the entire beach was filled with marvelous sand structures of every sort, all incorporating miniature bodies of water.  And so it was time for the judging to begin.  There were judges from every age group and one judge happened to be a six year old girl.  And the judges were reminded that they were to judge based upon the best incorporation of a body of water into their sand creation.  When it came time for the young girl judge to render her decision, they ask her to go and point to her winner.  And they were startled to see that she ran past all of the sand creations toward the ocean and she pointed at the ocean and said, “This is the winner!”

  Sometimes we spend our time in religion filling our little human made lakes from the abundance of the ocean and we take those little lakes so seriously that we forget the plenitude from which they came.  We do the same in our religious metaphors about God; sometimes we let the metaphors serve as a replacement for the plenitude of God, who is grander than even the ocean.  Riddle: The water of the little beach lakes is and is not the ocean.
  Every metaphor in our lives is and is not God.  Each metaphor is divine in its derivation from plenitude, but it is not in its limited contextual use.

  And with that as a prelude, we might infer a question from the Gospel metaphor that we’ve read today:  What have you heard from the Grapevine?  In legal terms, hearing something from the grapevine is not admissible in the court;  it is called hearsay.  The famous Motown song, “I Heard it through the Grapevine” popularized this expression.

  The Gospel of John is a type of grapevine message; it is the hearsay that was passed within the early Christian communities.  And though hearsay may not be admissible in court, the Gospel is addressing our hearts and minds to see if a grapevine message about Christ as the Vine and us as the branches is a metaphor that can yield for us some insights about our lives of faith.

  This metaphor of the grapevine and branches is right down our alley here in California where we presume to have developed viticulture and enology to levels surpassing the French or so we like to think.

  The ocean of plenitude known as God is too big to understand and the interrelationships of an infinite number of particulars is too complex to understand; we but can reduce the complexity to metaphors of insights to help us live in our day to day lives.

  The vine and branch metaphor addresses the age old question of which is more telling, nature or nurture?  And it is a “what comes first the chicken or the egg”  type of question.  What makes for good grapes, the hybrid of the plant stock or the environment and vine dresser’s skill?   What makes for fruitful lives of faith, our interior heritage or the environment wherein we live our lives that includes our mentors and care givers?

  In the nature and nurture question there is no easy answer or either/or answer.  Sometimes we just choose an answer that is convenient for the moment.  And so when our children were misbehaving, my dear wife referred to them as “my children” as though the Cooke side of the family was responsible for the “misbehaving.”  Or I would retort, “Can’t you control “your” children?

  What is it that the writer of John is trying to teach us regarding our lives of faith?  In the midst of human nature we can find another more profound Nature with which we can learn to abide and gain strength.  By the presence of God’s Spirit we can access within us the Christ Nature; this nature  is a profound source of inspiration and a continuing vision of what we can yet become in our lives.  The Vine or the Christ Nature is a source of freedom and why do we need to access such a source of freedom?

  We need a seeming transcendent source of freedom as an empowerment for our lives.  And why do we need such empowerment?  In our lives we can experience the downside of our human nature.  We can come to think that our own resources are very limited in empowering us beyond such challenges of despair, despondency, disillusionment and a sense of being over-whelmed by some tasks of our lives that seem to require success.  We can experience our human nature as leading into addictions.  We often find ourselves in need of a seeming transcendent source of empowerment? 

  What makes for good grapes?  Good care and good climate and propitious weather conditions.  These conditions affect the quality of the grape no matter what kind of hybrid the plant stock is.  In our lives we can find ourselves in very imperfect conditions for us to develop the optimal responses for living.  Sometimes we can come to believe that our human nature and our environment totally determine us toward losing or unsuccessful outcomes.   When we feel as though we are helpless against our nature and the challenges of our environment we can be living lives of dread and anxiety.

  Certainly we should not minimize the environmental factors in healthy living and healthy lives of faith.  And even though we can find heroes who have overcome great odds to triumph in seemingly hopeless situations, we know that such stories may just make us in middle class and upper middle class setting feel guilty about our lack of triumphs.

  I believe that the message from the Grapevine today is something akin to the Serenity Prayer:  God grant me the serenity to accept the things that I cannot change; the courage to change the things that I can and the wisdom to know the difference.

  Taping into our Vine being branches that can grow from the Christ Nature means that we first look for wisdom to assess and choose our battles.  The majority of our problems in life are caused by environments that have presented us with unrealistic vision of who we think that we should be and so we are invited to perpetual failure involving futile attempts to be richer, smarter, more acceptable to other people, or more beautiful than we think we currently are.

  A first sign of abiding in our Christ Nature is to have the wisdom of realistic vision of our lives and the current setting of our lives.  With this realistic vision, we can then deploy the limits of our freedom in effective ways to make actual incremental choices towards what the next step in excellence means for us today.

  What do you hear through the grapevine of John’s Gospel today?  Abide in Christ; abide in the Christ nature that we can access in our lives, not to escape the imperfections of our human nature or the imperfections of the nurture of our situations, but to have the power and authority to orchestrate new excellent outcomes for this day.  And if we practice doing this each day, then we find in ourselves a habit of faith, a habit of abiding in our Christ-nature who is the true vine of our lives.  Amen.