Mass readings for the 5th Sunday of Easter:
Acts 9.26-31 Psalm 22.25b-26, 27, 29, 30-31 1 John 3. 18-24 John 15.1-8
Today’s gospel is familiar, it’s about our connection to Christ, and to each other through him; and of the expectation that this will bear fruit. It seems so lovely! A romantic image evoking a sundrenched rolling Mediterranean landscape; rows of verdant growth, vines heavy with delicious fruit, ready for the picking – and this is us!
We all know the reality doesn’t match up. Indeed, Jesus clarifies the picture. Those branches of the vine that don’t produce, they are cut away, gathered up and burned. Those producing nothing sap the strength of the vine, they deprive the others of energy – a vineyard owner would do the cutting. We can recognize this is true, but we know Jesus isn’t talking about grapevines, he is talking about people. And it should grieve us all when we see a withered faith in another, a person disconnected and not bearing the fruit Christ expects – this foreshadows their spiritual death and ultimate destruction.
Now, for non-Christians this is lost on them. But what do we make of those who have been baptized, who’ve professed through public ritual acts such as confirmation and communion that they are part of the Body of Christ, yet insist upon being apart from the Church, even resenting the Church for the quiet reminders it makes concerning our obligations to Christ: to be joined with him meaningfully, and to produce the fruit he asks for?
At the ALPHA last week, we watched a video featuring Nicky Gumbel – who is he? We might call him “the founder” of ALPHA, but to be accurate, he is best described as the man who reconceived ALPHA in the 1990s and under his leadership the movement took off.
He has an interesting biography: raised in an atheist household, it was only at university that he encountered people of faith, and they were Christians; and they terrified him. They were these people who walked around with stupid smiles on their faces, were a little too happy. What they believed, as far as he knew anything about Christianity, was rubbish.
At one point in his university career, good friends of his announced they had become Christians, and this greatly disturbed him: oh my God! They’ve joined a cult.
He picked up a Bible and read the gospels, but his motivation was to find evidence with which to argue his friends out of being Christian. He wasn’t doing it out of curiousity, but rather animosity.
I think this a typical response in our society to religious enthusiasm, especially where Christianity is involved – perhaps it’s our culture of hyper-individualism, and the legacy of the 1960s turn against traditional authority. People have become jealous of their autonomy; they want their freedom in absolute terms.
So, to hear Jesus speak of himself as a vine onto which we are grafted, imagery that speaks of a profound connection to our Lord and to each other, it likely gives some people the creeps.
Some of you might know the sci-fi classic, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. That film was a metaphor for the communist takeover of America; and it became fashionable to mock it as a silly paranoid fantasy. I don’t know if many are laughing now. Anyway, the movie’s plot was simple: A doctor learns that the population of his small town is being replaced by emotionless alien duplicates; and no one believes him! But the really scary thing about it was that the replacement people were grown from what looked like vegetable pods; vines cultivated in green houses that were growing the duplicates. As a kid watching this I was thoroughly creeped out; most who watch the film also find this vegetable process very disturbing (I avoided zucchini for a time after my first watch of the film!). Today you get references to this movie in the mention of “pod people” –those who mindlessly conform to new ideas, join new movements without critical reflection, and they appear to be controlled by an outside mysterious force.
So, you get how so many look at religion this way, Catholics included. And we should remember that in the midst of all the social changes of the past sixty years, the acceptance of Catholics into the mainstream of the English-speaking world happened. These were all Protestant societies that were very suspicious of Catholicism. Our acceptance into polite society, into politics beyond the special case of Quebec, was celebrated, and there was a desire to “fit in,” And boy, have we ever. The vast majority of North American Catholics are culturally indistinguishable from their Protestant and atheist/agnostic neighbours including an attitude toward faith that is highly individualistic.
We know that one of the greatest impediments for our children and young people, indeed for all age groups, to deepening their relationship with God are those who are Christian and Catholic! Send some of our kids to talk to their classmates about ALPHA, coming to lunch here (but not Mass!) and having an hour’s time to talk about the big questions of life, and while during the presentation there is interest from some of the students, this all evaporates over recess when any sign of taking faith seriously is discouraged and ridiculed. We know this happens in our Catholic secondary schools where the faithful few among the student body are regarded with suspicion.
I’ve had adult parishioners come to me worried about how members of their families, including Catholic spouses and their own children, are critical, dismissive, even disrespectful toward the faith; how they roll their eyes when told that there is a special mass or even the regular Sunday obligation to be taken into account when planning for the weekend.
In one sad case, I had a young woman come to me distraught that her parents forbade her from visiting a convent to help her discern a vocation to religious life. Her parents wanted grandchildren. Heartbroken, she was contemplating leaving the Church, maybe becoming a protestant minister, so as to live out something of her call to a closer walk with Christ.
I’ve encountered this repeatedly in my career in ministry, – a strange concern among Christians that we not take our faith too seriously. Indeed, that if we stop being engaged in worship, prayer, study of scripture, receiving sacraments, only doing so occasionally, that’s likely for the best – don’t want to stick out. And so, the pruning shears in human hands lop off fresh green branches before they ever bear fruit.
Now we know some will protest: I might not come to Mass, we might not pray much, I don’t read the Bible, but I’m a good person; I volunteer, I teach my children the importance of kindness, and so on.
One wonders about the specifics of these homemade catechisms; how accurate it is to the faith as believed, professed and lived for the past two thousand years when the teacher or parent doesn’t actually practice it, and reduces it to a few secularized principles mostly about not judging others, and “doing unto others,” etc. We have to be careful of the error of deciding what we will give, what fruit we will produce; not what Christ asked of us, but what we’re willing to do and give. Remember his mandate to us is to go forth, make disciples, baptize and to do all that he commanded, and that includes gathering, listening to God’s Word and celebrating the Eucharist.
So many have no qualms about the technological umbilical cord we have attached to ourselves and to the brains of our children in the form of smartphones, even as the evidence mounts that it is making us all miserable. If we discourage a healthy faith and understanding of life, we shouldn’t be surprised when people look for it elsewhere to the kind of unsettling results we see around us: those who mindlessly advocate all kinds of horrors and call it justice, who bully and censor and call it democracy, who threaten and do violence and say its righteousness; and they do all this with frightening enthusiasm and terrifying anger. And I ask, what comes of people who get excited about Jesus, what do they do? Well, they build hospitals in Africa, teach poor children to read, visit nursing homes, go on missionary trips to Central America – and they are, by and large, happy. Is that not to be preferred?
So many today are asking for a return to some version of the “good old days.” Well, let’s not look at the past uncritically, but I understand the sentiment: it’s a desire for true community, sanity in the public square and a sense of peace in our homes no matter the big challenges – a confidence about who we are and what our future – what we once knew as faith.
Well, abide in Christ, abide with us in Christ! Let his words abide in you, lest something else not of God make a home in you, and you in it. If you abide in him, are nourished by him through sacrament, are instructed by him through his word, then ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. Glorify him, so that you will bear fruit, glorify him for this is what his disciples do.
Amen.