The world teaches us to rely on ourselves, to create our own truth, and to chase the world’s idea of happiness. We are told that it’s all up to the individual to shape his or her own reality. We have formed a consumer culture that claims to enable us to do this.
But what is the upshot of millions of isolated individuals struggling against all the others for a model of happiness not their own? How well is it working, do you think?
There are millions of people who are doing just fine, at least from their own perspective and the world’s. They followed the rules the world taught them and they were rewarded accordingly. And yet even these folks have found that the promise that they would be happy and fulfilled if they achieved the things they set out to achieve ends up seeming strangely empty and strikingly fragile. It doesn’t take much to tear the feeling of pride and security to pieces.
But there are also millions of people who say they have followed the world’s rules, but the reward didn’t come as promised. It doesn’t really matter which side of political divide one might be on. All sides blame all the others.
For me the upshot of a self-centered life was disaster and suffering, and I frankly see the same disease afflicting many in our world today. The rates of addiction, suicide, senseless violence, depression and anxiety have all increased over these past decades. As our world becomes more and more complex, it also becomes more and more unstable, more and more vulnerable to the millions of small variables in the system, resulting in more and more frequent unprecedented disasters, or “black swans” as they are called. As we absorb shock after shock, our spirits begin to sag and wither, like those dry branches Jesus talks about.
We give ourselves to the world we have made, but the world we have made isn’t able to give us the happiness and fulfillment it promises. In fact, the world’s demands may finally turn out to be sick and inhuman.
The problem is insoluble as long as the people who caused it are the ones trying to solve it. Self-centeredness puts blinders and ear plugs on our souls, and shackles on our hands and feet. Self-centered souls are small, and they suffer from spiritual disability, blindness and deafness to themselves, God and each other.
Dependent on our very limited wisdom and our almost non-existent personal power, we become emotionally vulnerable to every twist and turn of history. Self-centeredness denies this reality however, insisting that the self alone knows the right path, and all obstacles can be overcome by the sheer force of our wills. But the wisdom and power of a mere human being is a dry well.
Jesus invites us to a different approach to the pursuit of happiness. Instead of bowing at the feet of human powers and principalities with their lies and empty promises, Jesus calls us to turn away from them, not to become his subject, but his friend.
Jesus revealed a strange and powerful truth in all that he said and did: the passionate desire to know and do the will of God is itself the will of God, and is the key to salvation from the world and its empty promises. The desire to know and do the will of God is the sap in the vine Jesus identifies himself with, that provides the two essential gifts we need to live joyfully and peacefully in the full truth. Those gifts are God’s wisdom, by which we come to know his will, and God’s power, by which we become able to carry it out.
Instead of ruling over us, Jesus’ lordship consists in loving us with that agape love that the first letter of John talks about today, and which we will be preaching about next week. Agape is love that is not so much felt as decided, a commitment to give one’s life at the service of the beloved. The solemn promises exchanged in a wedding are examples of agape. A couple might find each other attractive and sexy. They might be entranced with each other’s good traits and respond with an involuntary emotional love. But those promises recited in a formal public ceremony are not about attraction or mushy feelings. In them, a couple promises to become a home to each other, to abide with each other, to give their lives to each other.
A ruler who demonstrates such love by literally laying down his life for his friends is a rare ruler indeed. And it points to the many paradoxes of a spiritual life. We must surrender to win. We must die to live. We must give it away if we want to keep it. We must die to our false selves to rise to our true selves. We must give up our foolishness to receive God’s wisdom. We must acknowledge our powerlessness to receive God’s power.
We live in a culture that not only affirms self-centeredness, but rewards and celebrates it, to the spiritual collapse of all.
Jesus tells us this morning that we can do nothing without the sap of the vine. We can neither know God’s will or have the power to carry it out. We wither and become useless to God’s plan, fit only to be gathered with all the other dry branches and burned. We see those dry branches burning all over the world today.
In our own community, I sense there are thousands that are suffering in their self-centered hells. We hear that mental illness, crime and drug addiction are on a steep rise in Middlesex County, and I have been asking God to help our church to graft more securely to the vine of Christ, so that his wisdom might show us how to reach those who need to hear this good news, and his power might flow through us to carry out his mission.
At the end of the narrow road Jesus is leading us along is what I have been calling the joy of resurrection life. Jesus teaches us that the world is constantly changing as God brings it closer and closer to his fulfillment. Without the sap of the vine, the heartfelt desire to know and do the will of God, these changes may seem unwelcome and terrifying. But to those who are grafted to the vine, these changes are just more signs of God’s unfolding salvation, and his wisdom and power will guide us through them.
Our congregation is full of examples of the joy of resurrection life, fruit-bearing branches that move through each day under God’s guidance and with his power. They don’t look like revolutionaries, but they are, because every day, their work and their words chip away at the powers of darkness toward that beautiful and bright day when God will be all in all.
Amen.
Sermon based on:
Acts 8:26-40
Psalm 22:25-31
1 John 4:7-21
John 15:1-8
