Love the Ones You’re With
May 13, 2007
Rev. Dr. Jon Smoot
2 Corinthians 4: 1-12 and John 15: 1-17

Today is Mother’s Day – I sincerely hope that you all got that message by now. My own mother has been dead for 51/2 years, so I guess I save $3.99 on a card – but I still think about her: Mostly I remember her prayer-life, her steadiness, her integrity, her apple pies, and her fierceness – she backed up her inherent authority with a wooden spoon that all five of us kids assiduously avoided where possible. I also owe her a big part of my work ethic. I’ll never forget that when I was 10 she rousted me out of bed way early on a dark Saturday morning. She brandished a snow shovel and said, “It snowed last night – get out there and shovel walks and don’t come back until you’ve earned $10.00.” So I did. We all have our mother stories. I came from my mother – so did all of you come from your mothers. Mothers, dead or alive, keep teaching us a great truth; none of is self-made. Sometimes they directly remind us of that fact: My son Joel volunteered at the National Zoo two summers ago. I was picking him up one day and we heard a harried mother say to her recalcitrant little boy: “Remember, I brought you into the world, and I can take you out of it.”

While many of us are still trying to escape the gravitational pull of our mothers (and fathers) we also still have to confess that none of us are truly self-made human beings. It’s also true of our faith – we are not self-made believers in God. Since faith is primarily relational, we learned much of our faith practice, or lack thereof, at the knee of many, many others, or in antagonistic reaction to others. Face it – we’re an amalgamation of the best and worst impulses and influences of other human beings. That doesn’t sound very pleasant, does it? In fact, we don’t really believe that it is true – that we are not self-made, in life or faith. It offends our sense of sovereignty of self – of our eclectic, individual identities that we so fondly nourish and foist on each other.

Individualism is, after all, enshrined in our American way of life, whether political left or right. Nothing is more sacred than the right to choose, pursue options, to safeguard our privacy and independence, at all costs. No wonder the American way of life is so hard a sell, except at the end of a pointed gun, to nations and cultures that value community and tradition and long memories (for good or for ill). I’m reminded of a New Yorker cartoon some time ago that depicts a Crusader on a huge horse, with his lance poised against the throat of a sprawled out, hapless Moor, who is saying: “Tell me about this Christianity of yours, I’m terribly interested.”

In America, we’ve created our own little amnesia-riddled, autonomous world where privacy is sought more than community, where no one is asked (or required) to suffer for anyone else. Church relationships are something that you can take or leave by shopping around for the best deal for you – and even our marriages and friendships are contracts between sovereign individuals, renewable or disposable at our whim. In America, too many people are bowling alone

Writer Barbara Brown Taylor notes that we’ve been living under the illusion of separateness for at least 300 years now, so the quantum physicists tell us. Newton said that the universe worked like a great clock – the world is a collection of individual gears and springs that act in perfectly predictable ways. You can take them apart and put them back together again with no effect on the whole. The discovery of sub-atomic reality put paid to all of that, dispelling the illusion of separateness. The universe behaves more like a body than a clock. It is not possible to understand the parts without understanding the whole. We can’t observe an electron without changing the way it acts, because we are all knit together in this invisible, unfathomable web of relationship.

It has its own gorgeous order, but it is never entirely predictable, because every time a butterfly beats its wings in that web, every time a baby yawns, every time a Senator sneezes, the whole web shifts to accommodate it. Quantum physicists call this chaos theory – the Bible calls this the Body of Christ – that great mystery of God that binds us together whether we know it, feel it, like it or not.

Which brings us to our Gospel text. Jesus uses a well-known and beloved image for Israel as the vine of God, but now expands it to us Gentiles – and calls himself the True Vine, which undoubtedly deeply irked some of his listeners. Here are a couple of thoughts for us from Jesus’ teaching. Living as branches of the one vine is to belong to an organic unity shaped by the love of Christ, and the vine is tended, not by us, but by God, the gardener. One vine, many branches, God the gardener. There are implications for Bradley Hills Church.

First, we figure God’s rather lucky to have us. We’re so busy for God, serving, organizing, forming committees and task forces, volunteering, starting new programs, stretching ourselves to the breaking point – all ostensibly for God. Yep, God is so lucky to have us. Au contraire. Jesus says that God chose us to bear fruit, we didn’t choose God. We are not self-made or autonomous individuals making up this love and justice thing as we go along out of the goodness and largesse of our heart. And so God reserves the right as the gardener to snip off, or lop off, that which is not what God wants us to do and be. It may take us a long time to figure that out, usually when we run out of gas and scratch our heads, and form a task force to try to figure out why something is not working. Jesus says this is not rocket science: stick close to God and to one another and we will bear fruit, not produce fruit – Big difference! In a word, fruit happens. Love and justice and compassion will naturally flow from us as a result of the life of God flowing unchecked through us.

What does that mean for us? It means that if we believe that our church’s health and growth and mission are completely up to us, we are seriously, and perhaps fatally, mistaken. If we sublimate or diffuse our own spiritual growth into ever-increasing programs, or if we expect the next permanent installed pastor to come charging in on a white horse, fix us, reenergize us and give us an identity, we are in very serious trouble. Martin Luther once claimed that he led the Protestant Reformation by sitting in the tavern drinking good beer and minding his own business. The Holy Spirit did the rest. He fails to mention, in uncharacteristic humility, that he did arise every morning at 4:30 and prayed for three hours. We keep forgetting that the church’s life and mission is the work of the Holy Spirit, not a product of our breathless, earnest efforts. We receive the graces and gifts of compassion and love from the Holy Spirit. In other words, we learn to breathe. Deeply. We receive our life and mission together as a gift as invisible as the air, and then prepare to be astonished by all the forms that breath can take.

Here is a second implication from this teaching that God has chosen us to bear fruit – and it is echoed in St Paul’s remarks about our being vulnerable, earthen vessels, yet chosen to contain the inestimable treasure of God’s Love: “The church that we are given is never quite the church we had in mind,” as one writer puts it. We are a human community – and so the church partakes of the very failures we ironically have come to the church to have fixed. The church is, after all, a bunch of eclectic and sometimes fractious human beings doing the best and worst they can do to each other for Christ’s sake. For the most part we believe that it is not enough – that there must be some ideal community out there. It is simply not so.


Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in Life Together, “We who love our dream of community more than the Christian community itself become destroyers of the latter, even though our personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest and sacrificial.” You see, God has put us together, in all of our glorious and humbling humanity, for God’s purposes, not ours. That’s God’s way. We did not choose God, God chose us, to bear the wonderful fruit of doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly and gratefully with our God and one another. We did not choose each other. God sticks us next to each other as branches of the common vine, and God shapes the branches as God pleases, for God’s glory and for the healing of the world. This is why we are to love one another, warts and all – not for sentimental reasons, but for God’s glory and for the healing of the world.

Last year, Mary and I went to see Stephen Stills at the Birchmere in Alexandria. As he sang one of my favorite songs, “Love the One You’re With,” the words took on a different cast for me than what clearly was originally intended: “Well there’s a rose in a fisted glove; and the Eagle flies with the dove; and if you can’t be with the one you love, honey, love the one you’re with.” Since we can’t be with the One we were created to ultimately love – that would be God – than we’re to love the ones we’re with, even those whom we didn’t choose. Thanks be to God.