George A. Mason Fourth Sunday of Easter Wilshire Baptist Church 3 May 2015 Fourth in a series from 1 John, Walking in the Light Dallas, Texas Abiding Our Time John 15:1-8; 1 Jn. 4:13-21 I love words. I think you know that. I love big words like ontological and obfuscation and obtuse. And sometimes when I talk about things ontological, I can get obtuse and end up leaving you in a state of obfuscation. I like small words that rhyme, too: words like raise and praise, say. And when we raise our praise, I love the way it rings in our ears when we sing, and even more I love imagining how raising praise by singing rings in the ear of God. I also like old words like abide. But I don t always know what they mean until I abide with them awhile, turn them over in my mind and let them abide with me. We don t use abide much any more. We do in church sometimes. We sing Abide with me, fast falls the eventide. Lovely hymn. We sing it at funerals mostly, and sometimes on Sunday mornings. It s an oldie and a goodie, but it s not one of those good old ones we talk about that put a little pep in your step, give your soul a little extra step in your get-along. Abide. What does that mean, abide? I m afraid we know more about how to bide our time than how to abide our time. We know about biding as waiting. It has the sense of being patient, but not the sense of really doing anything while we bide. Biding time feels like loitering, like we re standing on a street corner without any clue about what to do whether we re supposed to cross the road or wait for a bus or just hang out. John tells us that there s something spiritually powerful about abiding our time, but so far I think we can say that if so, it must be about more than biding our time. I m going on a sabbatical soon. The word sabbatical comes from the word Sabbath, which means to rest. It means not to work. But it doesn t mean just to bide our time. It means to fill our time differently. And maybe that s where abiding comes in. When we look at what St. John says in the Gospel and what John the Elder says in 1 John about abiding, the meaning doesn t seem to be about doing nothing.
It has an active sense about it. We are told to abide as if it involves doing something. But what? Back to the word again, then. Abide is related to abode. An abode is a dwelling place. It s where you are at home. You abide in your abode. In fact, if you abided there for a time in the past, you actually abode in your abode. So when do you feel at home? It s when you feel connected and safe, isn t it, when you feel alive and welcome? An abode is not about a place you go to feel at home; it s about whether wherever you go, you feel connected. Being connected, then, is the key to abiding. It s like a mobile abode. It s hard to believe today that there was time in my lifetime even when being connected took personal effort. You had to go knock on someone s door or call on a landline. If you wanted to know the news, you had to wait for the morning paper to be delivered or maybe watch the late evening news. Forget about the 24/7 news cycle of cable TV. Nowadays we carry our mobile phones with us wherever we go. If we are trying to reach someone, we can call anywhere from anywhere, we can text, we can send a Facebook message or a Twitter DM, or we SnapChat or CyberDust. And if the other person left her phone at home when she went to the store, say, and we really needed to get hold of her right then and I m only speaking hypothetically here, don t you know?!, because that sort of thing never happens to me with someone I m trying to get hold of we feel disconnected and frustrated. Worse still, when your Internet service is out at home or you can t find a Wi-Fi connection my goodness, it s a tragedy our ancestors would never have understood. Or would they? When we re talking about a connection of any kind, we re talking about life itself. At its heart, regardless of technology, we re talking about relationships that either give us life because we feel connected or drain the life right out of us because the connection is or feels broken. In his book A Blue Fire, psychologist James Hillman tells about an experience he had one day in a famous institute in Zurich where the words schizophrenia and complex were 2
born. Hillman watched a woman being interviewed. She sat in a wheelchair because she was elderly and feeble. She said that she was dead, for she had lost her heart. The psychiatrist asked her to place her hand over her breast to feel her heart beating: it must still be there if she could feel its beat. That, she said, is not my real heart. She and the psychiatrist looked at each other. There was nothing more to say, writes Hillman. she had lost the loving courageous connection to life. 1 It wasn t that she was abiding in an institution instead of being at home; it s that she had the sense that she was somehow cut off from life. And that feeling of being cut off from life was really a feeling of being cut off from love. This is why 1 John connects abiding in God with abiding in love. If you are connected to the God whose very nature and whole being and only way of acting are love itself, then you will be abiding in love. You will 1 James Hillman, A Blue Fire (New York: HarperPerennial, 1989), pp. 17-18, cited by King Duncan, How Connected Are You? be drawing the spiritual blood of love from the God whose heart just keeps pumping it out continually in order to give us life. The image Jesus uses in John s Gospel is the vine and the branches. If a branch is connected to the vine that is sunk deeply into fertile ground, the branch will grow and flourish. It will bear sweet fruit. But if it were cut off from the vine, if it somehow were to have the power to sever its connection to the vine, it wouldn t last long at all before dying because it would have no capacity to feed itself. So abiding involves first staying connected to the God who first gave us life through Jesus Christ. We live because we live through him. And we love only because God first loved us. We didn t make the connection with God ourselves; that was God s job. God sent the Son to connect with us, to love us when we were cut off and unlovable. God came to make God s abode with us. God dwelt among us, God abode with us. God came to stay and isn t going anywhere. The question is whether we will do the same. 3
Here is where the active part comes in. How do we stay connected to God in a way that allows us to abide in God s love? Here is where I think our spiritual formation would tell us that we need to pray more, read and meditate more upon God s word, the Bible, and go to church and gather as we do today to worship God. And that isn t wrong. That s a great way to stay connected to God. When we want to draw life from God, we have to abide in God s love by spending time with God. We want to know God better and to be reminded of God s abiding love for us. By all the spiritual disciplines of prayer and meditation and worship, we allow God to work in us and for us to conquer our fears and insecurities and to remind us that we belong to God forever. This is what you might call the vertical side of the Christian life the part that concerns our relationship to God. This is why John the Elder tells us that if we confess that Jesus is the Son of God, we abide in God. This is the believing part. To abide in God s love is to put our trust in Jesus Christ. It keeps us connected to God. It allows us to receive the gift of love that drives away fear and makes us feel at home in the world. But at the same time there s always a horizontal dimension, so to speak. First John may assume that prayer, meditation and worship are important, but he mostly wants us to get to the part that is actually harder for us. This is the part that says we must love others in order to abide in God s love. If we are to stay connected to God, we have to work to be connected to others. We cannot cut ourselves off from others. We cannot close off our hearts from others. Our sister church here in town, Northaven United Methodist, has a clever church motto that its members try to live by: We believe in the separation of church and hate. Nice. Baptists love to talk about our commitment to the separation of church and state, and we would do well to follow our Methodist kin on this one. First John says, Those who say, I love God, and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. 4
The Hebrew origin of the word hate, by the way, is not so much about a feeling of hostility to another as the idea of cutting oneself off from another. It s like saying I don t need you or want to be connected to you. I want to try to have life without you. But I would say that the better strategy is not to focus on not hating but instead to focus on loving. We should aim to be lovers, not aim not to be haters. What is life-giving and what constitutes abiding in God s love is positive action toward others. The terrible season we are in with riots in Baltimore over the death of Freddie Gray and the indictment of police officers feels like a recurring theme and a bad dream. It s a cycle that must be broken. In 1955, a 14-year-old African- American named Emmett Till was brutally murdered in Money, Mississippi, by two white men who believed he had been flirting with a white woman. They took him to a barn, beat him mercilessly, gouged out one of his eyes, and shot him in the head. Then they tied a cotton gin fan around his neck with barbed wire and threw his body into the river. His mother, Mamie Mobley, was asked some time later if she harbored bitterness toward the two white men who murdered her son. She said this: It would certainly be unnatural not to [hate them], yet I d have to say I m unnatural. The Lord gave me a shield, I don t know how to describe it myself. I did not wish them dead. I did not wish them in jail. If I had to, I could take their four little children they each had two and I could raise those children as if they were my own and I could have loved them. I believe the Lord meant what he said, and [I] try to live according to the way I ve been taught. 2 If you want to know the difference between biding your time and abiding your time, there it is. When you abide in God s love, when you are deeply connected to God s love, you will love others. Abide that. 2 Quoted in Studs Turkel, Race: How Blacks and Whites Feel About the American Obsession (New Press, 1992), pp. 21-22. 5