Sermon at Parish Mass Easter 5 2015

Acts 8.26-40

1 John 4.7-21

John 15.1-8

Well the election campaign is in its last frenzied week, relieved a little by the joyful news of the birth of a new princess. But I expect the headlines will soon be back to the various promises and claims of the various political parties.

One of the factors that is very much present in our political dialogue at the moment, it seems to me, is a sense of belonging. Where do you belong? Who do you belong with? Scotland, England, the EU, the poor, working families, the well off, and so on. Which group do you identify with? Where do you feel you are connected, plugged in? And of course the extremes in politics are trying to use our desire for a sense of belonging to play on people’s fears, and trying to use our nastier side that wants to cast out and exclude those we think are different to us.

Belonging. Abiding, as the Bible puts it. Where you abide is where you are real, where you are deeply rooted and connected. Where you abide is where your life is.

And the Bible uses various images for that. The vine is one of them.

In the Old Testament the vine is a metaphor for the people of Israel, planted in the land of Israel. It is an image of belonging. We meet it for example in Psalm 80:

You brought a vine out of Egypt;

   you drove out the nations and planted it.

You cleared the ground for it;

   it took deep root and filled the land.

The mountains were covered with its shade,

   the mighty cedars with its branches;

it sent out its branches to the sea,

   and its shoots to the River.

Last week we heard another image of the people, another aspect of belonging. The image was that of sheep, belonging to the good shepherd. That too was a well known Old Testament image for the people of God, and the good shepherd was God himself, or the kings who ruled in his name.

But as we heard last week Jesus took that image of the Good Shepherd and gave it a new meaning.  Jesus is the Good Shepherd who lays down his life for the sheep, instead of the other way round, which we would normally expect.

And Jesus does the same this week. He takes that Old Testament image of the vine, very familiar to the Jewish people, and gives it a new and unexpected meaning.

The vine is an image of the people. So we would perhaps expect Jesus to say to the disciples, the people he has gathered to himself, “you are the true vine”. But he does not. Instead, he says, “I am the vine”. And you the disciples are in the vine, the people, if you abide in me. This is new. This is revolutionary. To belong to the people of God means abiding in Jesus. It doesn’t mean belonging to some specific race or location or political system. It means that anyone Jesus chooses is planted in him, like a vine, rooted in the spiritual ground that is God. Anyone at all, drawn together in him, regardless of whether those people would naturally group together or not. In Jesus all our divisions are overcome. All our sense of insiders and outsiders, who belongs and who doesn’t, is left behind, because Jesus establishes a new reality in himself, which all are called to enter.

Jesus is offering a completely new idea of what it means to be the people of God, and it is centred and rooted in himself. The people of God is not any particular human group agreeing among itself to belong together. It is not a human initiative at all. Instead, it is God’s initiative, in Jesus. And if we are to belong to the people of God, we must belong in Jesus.

And as Jesus makes clear, and as the first letter of John repeats many times, love and faith are the key to abiding in Jesus. Love for God and for one another, as we heard last week, that is the commandment of Jesus – that we believe in him and love one another. St John reiterates that this week:

God abides in those who confess that Jesus is the Son of God, and they abide in God. So we have known and believe the love that God has for us.

God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.

In this belonging together we do not choose one another. Rather we are all chosen and called by Jesus. Therefore we have to accept one another as his gift, in all our diversity. And not just this little congregation but disciples all round the world in every time and place and culture. People with whom we might think we have nothing in common – except that Jesus has chosen us.

The church, the people of God, is the new way of being human. In the choice of Jesus for us all our old human categories of insiders and outsiders are overturned. All are called to enter this new reality. We can reject no-one, nor may anyone reject us.

This may seem to stand at a bit of a distance from our oppositional politics and the trading of promises and accusations that we get in election week. But those who have faith are called to be salt of the earth and the leaven in the lump. Those who foundationally are present and abiding in Jesus are called to be a persistent patient presence in wider society, the community of the Church transforming the communities in which we are set.

So we have to engage with the society around us, however imperfect the system is. We have to live Jesus’ command to believe in him, and to love one another, in a way that makes a difference. We have to live in a way that shows that everyone matters, that no-one can be rejected. And part of the practical way we make a difference is by engaging in the political system we are part of, and by taking part in the democratic process.

So I would urge you to vote, even though no candidate or party is perfect. Vote because we believe in love for one another. We take part in our society as it is, because we believe in the new reality, the new way of being human, which Jesus taught in his ministry and instituted in his church, the reality of abiding in love that he calls us and all human beings to enter.