GOD’S ABIDING LOVE
A Sermon for Mother’s Day

Both of my grandparents had a green thumb. Actually, I think all their fingers were green, and their toes, too. Corn, melons, apples, peas, beans, tomatoes. You name it, they grew it, and it tasted great. When we visited them after they retired to Florida, I remember eating grapefruit fresh from a tree outside their kitchen door. Dripping tart and sweet, it would have been a sin to put sugar on those grapefruit. We resisted temptation, we did not sin, and we ate them au naturel.

Clarence Melvin and Edna Austin Reed, my mother’s parents, had a garden in their Ohio backyard that, in today’s lingo, was so “green,” it boggled my pre-adolescent mind. I loved going to visit them and spend the day outdoors. What I remember most was their grapes. Luscious, juicy grapes on big, full clusters within easy reach. An arbor that made shade on a hot summer day. A place to hide and not be found, for hours. I would stand at the foot of a trellis, look up and wonder in amazement. How did this take those grapes so high, almost out of sight? Did the grapes grow so fast, they asked for help? Just who was it that taught my grandparents how to do this?

What I didn’t know as a boy was that, in addition to rain and sunshine, grapes can’t become jelly for my peanut butter sandwich without two more essential things: an appropriate supporting structure, like a trellis, and annual pruning. Otherwise vines and branches become just an unloved plant, sprawling along the ground. When I was a boy I also didn’t know how much love went deep down into those grapes.

Two weeks ago, grandparents, parents, children of all ages – dozens of you spent a good bit of your weekend outdoors, with a grandmother in Myersville. Mary Tinney, her granddaughter and her cat all watched, as you transformed her broken-down house, and the land it has been sitting on since 1776, into a new home. The house at 4445 Fishers Hollow Road needed a strong structure, and the land longed for some long-needed pruning. If you haven’t gone to our church website and seen the before-and-after pictures of Mary’s home, please do. It’s amazing!

On that Saturday evening I came to Myersville and celebrated the Eucharist outdoors, with you and Mary. After rebuilding together all day, you shared some bread and wine with each other. I was privileged to be with you in that wonderful moment. We could easily have sung, “We will work with each other, we will work side by side…and they’ll know we are Christians, by our love….”

Jesus shows us all about God’s love and God’s reign, on earth as it is heaven. He taught his friends how to love, using signs from nature: mustard seeds, fig trees, weeds and wheat. He used signs and symbols to describe himself and where he fits in God’s creation. “I am the vine, you are the branches.” Let me suggest one way to think about this grape-producing image. Without Jesus, there is no church. But without disciples, without followers of Jesus, without Christians, there is also no church, no body of Christ. Jesus shows us that the vine and the branches are all about being “inter” – inter-related, inter-dependent, inter-woven, inter-connected. You can’t have branches without a vine, but you also don’t need a vine if there are no branches.

And in today’s gospel passage, Jesus keeps using one word to describe that interconnection: abide. Eight times in the eight verses of our lesson for today. Forty times throughout John’s gospel. We don’t tend to notice the frequency because the Greek word, “meno,” is also translated “remain,” “stay,” “live,” “dwell,” “endure,” “continue,” and “wait for.” In John’s first chapter, the disciples ask Jesus where he is staying. Same root word. They remained with him all day (1:38-39). Same word again. Then Jesus tells them to continue in his word (8:31). Same word, yet again. The very fact that John uses it forty times in his gospel account should give us a clue, it seems, that Jesus has something really important to say.

To love like God is to abide. And God shows us love that abides in Jesus. Love that is always at home in us. Love that dwells deeply in us. Love that makes its abode in us. Love that abides. In our epistle, from the first letter of John, we heard: “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.” That’s what loving and being God’s beloved is all about: luscious, juicy, branch-to-branch, branch-to-vine. Now that’s about as green as green can be.

But how do we respond to this abiding love? One theologian, Sallie McFague, speaks of love for all God’s creation as not looking at others with an arrogant eye, but a loving one. An arrogant eye sees other people and other creatures of God as objects for us to use. A loving eye sees all of God’s creation – plant, animal and human – as subjects of God’s love, fellow creatures, just like us.

So…who shows us vine-and-branches love, love that abides? An intimate inter-connectedness? A home where true love dwells? An eye that is not arrogant but loving? The green, abiding love of God for us and for our mother earth? Who shows us God’s green, abiding love better than our mothers and our grandmothers?

Thank God for the grandmothers and the mothers of this world! May we learn as much as we can from them about vine-and-branches love. And let us teach others in this world what we are learning, by practicing God’s green love, love that abides in Jesus Christ.

The Rev. Thomas A. Momberg
All Saints’ Episcopal Church Frederick, Maryland
May 10, 2009