SPEAKER_00: One of the ways, maybe one of the main ways that the condition of sin and death presents itself, I think that gets really to the heart of the problem we're in that God has come in Christ to resolve, is that we become a walking contradiction.
SPEAKER_00: This is what sin does.
SPEAKER_00: We become a walking and living contradiction.
SPEAKER_00: Or in the words or the image of Jesus, right, he says that you become like salt that loses its saltiness.
SPEAKER_00: This is this is kind of the absurdity of sin, the condition of sin and death.
SPEAKER_00: And this is to say that things that should feel really natural for creatures created in the image of the God revealed in Jesus, like nothing should be more natural, right, for that creature than humility, compassion, worship, thanksgiving.
SPEAKER_00: And yet we find that like our attempt to cultivate the fruit of the Spirit in our life, it often feels like something's just meddling with our days, or worship, like coming together, singing or praying.
SPEAKER_00: Like we often, like this often takes, I mean, even speaking personally, like this often takes like extraordinary amounts of intention and and energy and deliberation and maybe even feelings of obligation.
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes we experience like it's just this is boring.
SPEAKER_00: Like this is the condition of sin.
SPEAKER_00: It's like a a walking contradiction, like creatures created in the image of God that find prayer and worship challenging, that find humility and compassion, uncompelling.
SPEAKER_00: And yet the things that should be unnatural to us, we can do with such ease.
SPEAKER_00: Like resentment, like anger.
SPEAKER_00: Like, you know, like have you noticed that like when you get really angry, it's like, oh, that's me.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I I I feel that.
SPEAKER_00: I have a good, strong sense of self, you know, I'm right there, wrong, whatever.
SPEAKER_00: Like it's like, oh yeah, we identify with that.
SPEAKER_00: That feels like me, or or despair, sadness, bitterness.
SPEAKER_00: These things that we give ourselves to with such ease.
SPEAKER_00: And yet the things that we were created for, that is, those pertaining to Christ, these often feel like, at least it's some sense, that like it doesn't fit.
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't feel like a groove that we can exactly get into.
SPEAKER_00: And this, I think, is one of the most insidious parts of sin, that we become this living contradiction.
SPEAKER_00: We become this creature that's created for this, and yet we find that for which we were created to be something that feels uncomfortable, burdensome, right?
SPEAKER_00: It's like we're starving for water, and it's like, but I cannot stand the taste of water.
SPEAKER_00: I'm not gonna it's meanwhile, we're like dehydrated, right?
SPEAKER_00: Or everything's going out of way, and it's just like, no, no, no, no, no, no.
SPEAKER_00: Get that away from me.
SPEAKER_00: Don't need that.
SPEAKER_00: And at the root of this condition, according to scripture and in Christian tradition, is the vice or the sin of pride.
SPEAKER_00: And pride can present itself in a myriad of ways, right?
SPEAKER_00: It could be just this hubris and kind of just disregard for people, especially the poor, the outcast.
SPEAKER_00: Or it can present itself as this inflated view of oneself, or this sense of self-importance.
SPEAKER_00: But at the root of pride, before it presents and manifests itself in all these ways, at the root of it, like the seed bank of pride, is a form of delusion.
SPEAKER_00: That is to say, that it's a belief based on a lie.
SPEAKER_00: The lie that pride believes is the belief that we are not dependent on God or neighbor.
SPEAKER_00: It's really the conviction of ultimate like independence, this idea fully that we are separate, that we're, if you would understand and imagine that God created, right, all of humanity, like what pride says is God created everyone and cut them from the same cloth, and then God made me and cut me from a different cloth.
SPEAKER_00: Right, everybody is cut from the same cloth, and I am cut from a different cloth.
SPEAKER_00: But I'm separate.
SPEAKER_00: And in this separateness, often uniquely superior.
SPEAKER_00: And it's this separateness, this kind of disconnection from people and God.
SPEAKER_00: This is kind of the mechanics, the scaffolding in which the passion and vice of pride presents itself.
SPEAKER_00: That's the scaffolding on which the plant of pride grows, as it were.
SPEAKER_00: This idea of separateness, not being like other people.
SPEAKER_00: You can hear the Pharisee praying, right?
SPEAKER_00: God, thank you so much that I'm not like those people.
SPEAKER_00: I'm different.
SPEAKER_00: Separate.
SPEAKER_00: What Jesus gives us in this reading in John's Gospel is the medicine for this.
SPEAKER_00: He gives us the elixir for this contradictory, this absurd walking contradiction kind of life.
SPEAKER_00: This life that's built on the illusion of separateness and independence and pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
SPEAKER_00: And he offers what is the solution of union.
SPEAKER_00: Union.
SPEAKER_00: Union with Christ and the disciples, union with God in us.
SPEAKER_00: Now the language of union is a way of talking about Christ and the disciples, that Jesus and his disciples are one thing.
SPEAKER_00: Yet they are one in a way that doesn't do away with either of their distinctions.
SPEAKER_00: This is the language, the language of union is the language of Christology.
SPEAKER_00: When we say that, right, that the human nature and divine nature exist in perfect union in the person of Christ.
SPEAKER_00: And then what does the church say?
SPEAKER_00: They're undivided.
SPEAKER_00: Like you can't pull this apart in Jesus without pull it doing damage to his person.
SPEAKER_00: They're undivided.
SPEAKER_00: They go together, but they're unconfused.
SPEAKER_00: That is, the divinity of Jesus doesn't do away with the humanity of Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: And the humanity of Jesus, it's not like a zero-sum game.
SPEAKER_00: Like, in other words, when Jesus is saying, speaking of this image of union, like more of Christ in your life doesn't translate into, oh, less me.
SPEAKER_00: But actually more, substantially more you, the true you, the true self, the real you.
SPEAKER_00: They go together.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus is using the image of vine and branches, likely thinking of grapes, maybe grapes on his mind.
SPEAKER_00: But uh you might think, right, uh picture a tree.
SPEAKER_00: This this uh agriculture metaphor and image can uh you can see it everywhere.
SPEAKER_00: But you're not gonna walk through the forest, right?
SPEAKER_00: You're not gonna see a healthy tree with just a trunk, right?
SPEAKER_00: Like an 80-foot oak trunk with no branches, right?
SPEAKER_00: That that doesn't exist.
SPEAKER_00: But you're also not going to be walking in the woods and see branches suspended in thin air.
SPEAKER_00: No, they go together.
SPEAKER_00: As we said last week, right, you go with God, you belong with God, your home is with God, and mysteriously and mystically, God's home is with you.
SPEAKER_00: Like Jesus and the disciples, they go together.
SPEAKER_00: You and God, you go together.
SPEAKER_00: This image of vine and branch, we often will speak, right?
SPEAKER_00: I was kind of raised on the language of like a personal relationship with Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: That was like, that was kind of the grammar that I grew up with, especially in like in youth group.
SPEAKER_00: And that's good language, and it's true language.
SPEAKER_00: But what Jesus is speaking of here is not simply that you have a relationship with God, but rather that you are a relationship with God.
SPEAKER_00: It's as though the movement is from you know relating to God as though God is another person, say, in the room, and we traverse space and time, you know, by prayer or whatever it might be, and we relate to God.
SPEAKER_00: But the language of union kind of collapses space and time and brings God here.
SPEAKER_00: It moves God to the place of identity.
SPEAKER_00: To speak of the vine and the branches, this image, when Jesus says, You are the branch and I am the vine, right?
SPEAKER_00: You are the branch and I am the tree, the trunk.
SPEAKER_00: What this means is that we are who we are because God is who God is.
SPEAKER_00: It's born of a radical humility rather than pride, the humility of poverty of spirit, right?
SPEAKER_00: Blessed, right, are those who are poor in spirit.
SPEAKER_00: This poverty of spirit is to say the recognition that we have absolutely nothing without God.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, absolutely nothing.
SPEAKER_00: We have absolutely nothing without God.
SPEAKER_00: Which makes our being here evidence that God is here.
SPEAKER_00: It's our littleness that we see the palpable power and presence of God in our life.
SPEAKER_00: And this is what Jesus is saying, right?
SPEAKER_00: What good is a branch that's not plugged in, abiding in a tree?
SPEAKER_00: And this language that Jesus uses regarding the branch that's been taken off, that's not abiding in the tree, in the trunk or in the vine.
SPEAKER_00: What happens to the branch?
SPEAKER_00: Well, it withers.
SPEAKER_00: Right?
SPEAKER_00: And Jesus says it's to be thrown into the brush fire.
SPEAKER_00: What is he saying?
SPEAKER_00: Jesus is saying that there is no you apart from you in God.
SPEAKER_00: There is no real you apart from you in connection and in union with God.
SPEAKER_00: The you that would insist upon being not in God is necessarily destructive.
SPEAKER_00: It's necessarily withering.
SPEAKER_00: It's a contradiction.
SPEAKER_00: It's the functional equivalent of a branch like sawing off the branch on which you're sitting.
SPEAKER_00: That's pride is disconnection, right?
SPEAKER_00: I am not abiding in this tree.
SPEAKER_00: I'm not dependent on that trunk.
SPEAKER_00: But this is just pure delusion.
SPEAKER_00: What we see in this image that Jesus gives us, this image of union, this call to abiding.
SPEAKER_00: The question then is, well, how do we abide?
SPEAKER_00: How do we remain?
SPEAKER_00: How do we stay plugged in?
SPEAKER_00: How do we stay connected?
SPEAKER_00: How do we cultivate or take seriously this connection?
SPEAKER_00: What does it actually mean to say that we are branches and Jesus the vine?
SPEAKER_00: What it means is that we are creatures that inhabit God.
SPEAKER_00: This is what it means.
SPEAKER_00: It means that we're creatures who are filled with the invisible spirit of God.
SPEAKER_00: In theological language, spirit, when when you see the word spirit, it often conveys like invisible.
SPEAKER_00: I don't know if you've noticed, but God is invisible.
SPEAKER_00: This is part of what we mean when we say God is spirit.
SPEAKER_00: God is invisible.
SPEAKER_00: But Jesus has been revealed paradoxically to get us out of this living contradiction.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus, Colossians says, Jesus is the image of the invisible God.
SPEAKER_00: Did you catch that?
SPEAKER_00: Jesus is the image of the invisible God.
SPEAKER_00: When we speak of being branches in Christ the vine, God the vine, we speak of being inhabited and possessed by this invisible God that is spirit.
SPEAKER_00: And this invisible God, Jesus says, will bear fruit.
SPEAKER_00: This is what we call the fruit of the spirit, right?
SPEAKER_00: Jesus says that those who abide in me will bear much fruit.
SPEAKER_00: And what is this fruit?
SPEAKER_00: What is the fruit of the spirit?
SPEAKER_00: This is where I love Maximus the confessor on this.
SPEAKER_00: So the fruit of the spirit, right?
SPEAKER_00: Joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, self-control.
SPEAKER_00: The fruit of the spirit, Maximus says, is you might think of it as a diamond, right?
SPEAKER_00: And it's got many facets to it.
SPEAKER_00: You can turn it different angles.
SPEAKER_00: You see patience, you see gentleness and humility.
SPEAKER_00: But the diamond itself, Maximus says, is love.
SPEAKER_00: All the virtues, it's just love.
SPEAKER_00: It's love manifesting in this circumstance.
SPEAKER_00: This is how Maximus thinks of all virtues.
SPEAKER_00: Just love.
SPEAKER_00: Love, oh, in this circumstance, it looks like patience.
SPEAKER_00: And love, oh, here, it looks like gentleness.
SPEAKER_00: And love here, it looks like self-control.
SPEAKER_00: And love here looks like joy.
SPEAKER_00: For Maximus, this love that we cultivate is the fruit of the Spirit, that is, this is what happens when the invisible God inhabits us who are visible and manifests God's life in and through us in love.
SPEAKER_00: And Saint Maximus the Confessor says that when we cultivate the fruit of the Spirit, that we're actually cultivating something that's uncreated in our life.
SPEAKER_00: When you give yourself to love, right, love is always existing.
SPEAKER_00: God is love.
SPEAKER_00: God has always existed outside of space and time.
SPEAKER_00: Maximus says, when you cultivate love in your life, you are cultivating the uncreated.
SPEAKER_00: That which is uncreated is coming and bringing express being expressed in that which is created.
SPEAKER_00: So much so that Maximus will even call this a type of incarnation.
SPEAKER_00: That Christ is being incarnated and fleshed in our life.
SPEAKER_00: And for him, it's a real, like that love that we see is Christ.
SPEAKER_00: And this is how I think Jesus is making sense out of abiding branches, love, and commandments, like all this, that it's all connected.
SPEAKER_00: So what does this mean?
SPEAKER_00: How do we abide?
SPEAKER_00: Friends, the next time you're in a circumstance that requires patience, and we have by the grace and the power and presence of God, the Spirit gently gives us this awareness to choose patience.
SPEAKER_00: When you choose that, when you choose love, you're it's like you're opening up space within yourself for the uncreated God to manifest.
SPEAKER_00: What we call the fruit of the Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: When you choose mercy, when you choose humility, you are welcoming the uncreated God.
SPEAKER_00: When you choose love, you are allowing that which is uncreated to be manifested in that which is created.
SPEAKER_00: This is the vision of union that Jesus puts forth.
SPEAKER_00: That we become these vessels of the Spirit.
SPEAKER_00: That we become, as we saw last week, these spiritual houses, royal priesthood, this mingling of God and us.
SPEAKER_00: That we are inhabited by the uncreated Spirit of God, manifest in the way that we share our life together.
SPEAKER_00: And we cannot be deceived into thinking that we can draw near to this God, that we can abide in this Christ without drawing near to one another.
SPEAKER_00: Scripture is very clear.
SPEAKER_00: We draw near to this Christ by drawing near to one another.
SPEAKER_00: We love this Christ by loving one another.
SPEAKER_00: We learn what it means to suffer, to be patient by bearing with one another, by holding on to one another.
SPEAKER_00: When we do this, when we hold on to each other, when we're resolved to love and to forgive, to show mercy, to be patient, we are welcoming the uncreated God in our life.
SPEAKER_00: We're abiding like the vine.
SPEAKER_00: So much so that we can say that Christ and his church, they're one thing.
SPEAKER_00: This is right, this is Eucharist.
SPEAKER_00: The body of Christ.
SPEAKER_00: Behold the body of Christ.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.