‘I am the vine, you are the branches’
Sermon delivered May 6, 2012, at Peace Mennonite Church, Lawrence, Kansas
by Larry Lewis
My thanks to my friend of fifty years, Roger Martin, for the invitation to be in your midst today. My thanks to Phil Esau and to all of you who agreed to let this event happen, who consented to welcome a stranger into your midst to speak about things of God. I believe my being here represents an act of courage on the part of all of us. It’s a help to my confidence that the scriptures of the day are drawn from the Revised Common Lectionary. That list of scripture readings is a feature of the mental space I live inside of. In that sense, at least, we’re at home together.
In the lectionary as my church understands it, today is a Sunday inside the Great Fifty Days of Easter, with its emphasis on the resurrection and the mystical life of the Risen Christ in our midst. In the Easter Season, typically all but one of the Gospel readings are from St. John the Evangelist. In the portion appointed for today, Jesus begins, “I am the vine, and my Father is the vinegrower.” And a little farther in, he says to the friends he’s having supper with, “I am the vine, you are the branches.”
One possible implication of that metaphor is that people from different Christian traditions are separate branches growing out of the same vine, which is Jesus Christ. I intend to come back to that later. It’s the third of three things I’m going to speak to you about this morning. It’s the one that gives me the confidence to be here in the first place. In the first two, I’ll tell you the reasons why when Roger asked me if I’d deliver the message here, I should have run in the other direction. One has to do with my being an Episcopalian speaking to people in a Mennonite congregation; the other relates to my being a deep-rooted native of a certain small town in western Missouri speaking in Lawrence, Kansas.
About Mennonites, I know in my head I shouldn’t be spooked by the very thought of them (including you), but it’s kind of how it is. It’s related to the little cloth hats the women and girls wear in places like the lobby of St. John’s Hospital in Springfield, Missouri. I steal a few glances and work to keep myself from staring. I’d add that at the Episcopal Church Ruth and I drive to most Sundays, I told someone at coffee hour that we expected to be at Peace Mennonite Church in Lawrence the next week. The person asked me if the service here would be in German.
Suffice it to say that to get prepared for today I did not begin to brush up on my little bit of book German. Rather, I went first to the ancient set of Encyclopedia Britannica on our shelves and looked up Menno Simons and Mennonite and second, to Wikipedia. Here’s how the encyclopedia described the first Mennonite settlers in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1685. “They became pioneers . . . living hardy and useful lives, and holding to freedom of conscience, opposition to war and slavery and such common practices as insurance and interest on money lent.”
Where I live in western Missouri those hardy and useful lives are present in Mennonite settlements more than three centuries later. That’s where the Episcopalians at our home-based church in Bolivar went when they needed a church building. They applied to the Mennonite builders of Tunas, Missouri, because of both the know-how and the integrity. That was a for-profit construction project, but I’ve heard about Mennonite relief teams applying their skills in the aftermath of earthquakes and tornadoes. Then there are the Mennonite farmers north of Versailles, Missouri. They have worked in cooperation with other vegetable growers in our region to develop wholesale marketing of produce to the Woods grocery chain. Any western Missouri veggies they succeed in putting on the shelf replace ones shipped a thousand or two thousand or more miles away. As the consequences of peak oil loom just out of the sight of most people, the small beginnings from the Versailles produce market promise to have very large, positive consequences one of these days.
People in the Amish branch of the Mennonite branch of the vine have established farms in our region in the past decade or so. They have skills the rest of society has mostly lost by now. There may come a day when others see the need to learn from them. My sense is that if we ask nicely, they will teach us. But right now we don’t even know we need to be learning from them.
I mentioned looking up Menno Simons, 1496-1561. He left the Catholic priesthood to carve out a spiritual path in accord with his understanding of scripture and his conscience. The article I read listed the towns in the Netherlands where he lived the last few years of his life. He moved from one place to another almost faster than you could file the change of address forms with your local post office. Menno was on the run. Look at the history of a lot of his fellow Anabaptists and you’ll find individuals executed for crimes like being baptized by immersion, and falling victim to more widespread genocidal acts by the authorities. There’s nothing like non-violent resistance to upset the representatives of what St. Paul refers to as the principalities and powers. Responding nonviolently is a great way to get yourself killed.
In my spiritual life, I’m in the tradition of mainline Protestantism with its inheritance from Roman Catholicism via Martin Luther and John Calvin. We in the Episcopal Church have a distinctly Catholic flavor to our liturgy. It works for me as a spiritual path, but in our luggage is the heritage of slavery, war and empire. I respect your “branch” for the ways it’s closer to the vine which is the non-violent Christ.
As if being an Episcopalian speaking to Mennonites wasn’t scary enough, here I am a native of Osceola, Missouri, speaking to people who live in Lawrence, Kansas. It was Jayhawkers under General Jim Lane who torched my home town in September, 1861. In those days it was a prominent trading center at the head of navigation on the Osage River. A few members of the home guard took potshots at the Kansans before they disappeared into the brush and into the dark of night. They made some hits. My great-grandmother Lewis was living in the first house the Kansans came to. They brought in their wounded and told her to take care of them. She did. She fixed food for them and at times she played her piano for them. The Kansans spared her house and missed one or two more, but they were otherwise very thorough in burning the town to ashes.
I don’t know how true it is, but it’s said that two years later, on August 21, 1863, when William Clarke Quantrill and his raiders attacked Lawrence, a rallying cry was “Remember Osceola.” Their immediate motivation was the death of four young southern sympathizing women when a rickety makeshift jail building collapsed in Kansas City but there are people in Osceola even today who believe Quantrill had us in mind. I’m sorry he did what he did. But then war dehumanizes people. Sunday school teachers are capable of turning into killers. Yes, I’m an inheritor of a religious tradition in which people have done bad things. But I have a deep admiration for the pacifist heritage that’s a gift to you from your spiritual and in many cases physical ancestors.
Jesus is the vine. We disciples of his over the ages have grown into branches that can look very different one from another. I’d guess that here in Lawrence, at Trinity Episcopal Church, you could find a few people who send in their dues to the Episcopal Peace Fellowship. I hope they and you are able to connect, as fellow branches of the vine, and to stay connected. What’s essential, as St. John the Evangelist knew, is love. There’s a Latin chant they sing at the ecumenical community of Taize in France. Ubi caritas et amor, Deus ibi est. Where love is, there is God. If we believe the writer of the First Letter of John, we’ll believe that “God is love.” So yes, where love is, there is God. Search, and find God in the love that is mutual respect, the love that cherishes and works for the common good. So thank you for your welcome to us outlanders; but I trust we are outlanders who remain connected to Christ the true vine, and through Christ, to one another. Thanks be to God.
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