Fifth Sunday of Easter

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

This week my personal experience coincided with the lesson from Acts in today’s lectionary. I had someone come to me to inquire about being baptized. The conversation was friendly, but it included one statement that left me momentarily not knowing how to respond. When I asked “have you been baptized?” the response was “I haven’t been, but I’m a Christian.” For those of us within the church, our way of thinking makes that statement a contradiction. But apparently, there are those who understand it differently than we do. What I have frequently heard from people new to the church, or returning after a long absence is that when they come to the church seeking to learn or be included, the response is little more than a recitation of the rules and requirements that must be fulfilled in order to be considered or an explanation of all that they have done wrong in being absent from the church. I didn’t want this person to have that experience. So we simply continued to talk for a while. We left it that if she hadn’t visited on a Sunday by the end of this month, I would call her back to find out how she was doing.
The metaphor of the vine in today’s lesson from John’s gospel is a brilliant one for explaining the central ideas of the fourth gospel. John is determined that the reader clearly understand the relationship between Jesus and God. Its author is also struggling with issues of community – who is inside it and outside it, and what the consequences will be for that latter group. The richness of his metaphor and the clarity of his vision have made his words and ideas compelling to Christians through the centuries. The fourth gospel is full of quotable phrases like “I am the way, the truth and the life,” “nobody comes to the father except through me,” “ love one another as I have loved you.” They are statements that set clear boundaries; a community that embraces them is sure to be identified as standing for something specific and unambiguous.
But a lot of different kinds of things grow on vines – things as diverse as grapes, flowers, sweet potatoes, and ivy. My sense is that there are a lot of different kinds of spiritual foliage out there claiming to lie within John’s clear cut boundaries and making pronouncements about who is about to be pruned.
All three of today’s lectionary texts are about the importance of community for teaching and growing people’s faith and religious experience. I don’t think there’s any doubt that we uphold that ideal here. The church made it work relatively effortlessly for centuries. Our challenge now is to figure out how to preserve it within a larger culture, the presumptions of which are all about individuality, its expressions and demands. John points out the importance of the attachment of the fruit to the vine. The world we live in is focused on celebrating the variations in size and color of each grape and developing marketing strategies to meet their individual needs. The church’s way of doing things isn’t an easy fit with the expectations of a consumer culture. I can begin to understand why, when someone comes to one of my colleagues saying something like “I’ve never been baptized, but I’m a Christian,” his first impulse is to set that person straight about the traditions of Christian initiation.
What Philip does in today’s lesson from Acts may be an example for us. He looks for opportunity to bring a new person into Christian community. His spirit is open to the encounter with the Ethiopian. He makes the approach, but leaves room for questions. He responds with generosity. He realizes that the spirit moves others in the same way it does him. He allows its leading to move the Ethiopian to ask for baptism, rather than presuming to order the man’s spiritual life for him.
Human nature being what it is, those who are inclined to quote John’s gospel seem to focus more on the parts about the unproductive branches being removed and thrown into the fire. But throughout the gospels Jesus’ message has much more to say about the patience and forgiveness of God, both for those who do and do not produce good fruit. We and our companions among the spiritual foliage will always be tempted to express an opinion about the growth and productivity of others, but the gospel makes it clear that God will always be more generous than any of us can imagine. The communities we build ought to be guided by that ideal of generosity and acceptance, no matter what challenges we face in making that happen. Fear of those challenges may tempt us to build walls rather than opening doors. But, as we are reminded in today’s epistle lesson there truly is no fear in love and we can love because God first loved us.