Today’s gospel is about being pruned. Perfect for a week like this. The news has been bleak:
- Police in Baltimore apparently breaking the spine and killing Freddie Gray. This and the many other revelations of racism and violence in our law enforcement and judicial systems have provoked tears and outrage around the country.
- In our own neighborhood, we recently got the horrifying revelation that Amilcar Perez Lopez, the young Guatemalan immigrant killed by police, was killed not in self-defense as the police department had claimed. Rather, they fired six shots to his back as he was fleeing unarmed, running for his life.
- A terrible earthquake in Nepal, 7000 dead.
- And we just passed the one-year anniversary of the kidnapping of all those school girls in Nigeria by Boko Haram.
- And Nico, even under 24/7 hospital care still falls down at the least expected moment, leaving him black and blue and in pain.
- And I have friends who are going through some pretty hard things in their families and relationships and work.
And that’s the thing. At any given moment, even when things are going relatively well, there are still so many difficult things life throws at us and it often feels like we’re being pruned.
Or maybe it doesn’t. Maybe, as theologian David Lose suggests, it just feels like being cut, cut down by life’s tragedies great or small, cut down by disappointment or despair, cut down by illness or job loss or divorce or other circumstances beyond our control, and left to wither and die.
If you've ever seen pruned bushes, you know how they can look so ravaged that it's hard to believe it will ever bear fruit or flower again. It’s only with time that the new shoots and buds and blossoms can start to appear.
The question isn't, finally, whether you'll experience some difficulty, some heartbreak, some cutting. The question is whether that cutting will be just the beginning of more withering, or will be toward new growth.
A word about the context of today’s gospel passage.
As David Lose notes, Jesus is speaking to the disciples on the eve of his crucifixion. He is about to be cut down, and they are about to be cut down by his crucifixion and death, and he is assuring them that it will not be mere, senseless cutting, but that they will survive, even flourish, bear abundant fruit.
The second context is that of John’s own community for whom he is writing these words. By the time they hear these words, they will have already been scattered, likely thrown out of their synagogue and their families, and have had plenty of reason to feel like they’ve been abandoned, been cut down and thrown aside, withering. But John writes to assure them that while they have indeed been cut, it is the pruning for more abundant fruit and life.
No doubt that was hard to believe. To the disciples on the night before the crucifixion or to John’s scattered and outcast community, it definitely felt like they were being cut down, abandoned, left to wither. And it’s like that for us as well; so much of life simply tears at us with no evidence that it is toward some fuller, more fruitful future.
But amid this uncertainty and distress, Jesus still invites us – actually, not just invites but promises us – that he will not abandon us but rather will cling to us like a vine clings to a tree so that we endure, persevere, and even flourish, not in spite of, but in and through all these difficulties.
This is the mystery we immerse ourselves in during these Easter days: the promise that these hardships will not have the last word. Whenever our hearts get broken, this promise of Easter opens a way out of the darkness.
Because heartbreak and the pain of being cut away are an inevitable part of life, and the way we understand and deal with it can determine whether we are being cut to wither and die or pruned to flourish and grow.
Writing on the topic of violence, Parker Palmer suggests that violence is what happens when we don’t understand our own pain, when we don’t know what to do with it.
The violence can take many forms, some overt, others more subtle. “Sometimes we try to numb the pain of suffering in ways that dishonor our souls. We turn to noise and frenzy, nonstop work, or substance abuse as anesthetics that only deepen our suffering.
“Sometimes we visit violence upon others, as if causing them pain would mitigate our own. Racism, sexism, homophobia, and contempt for the poor are among the cruel outcomes of this demented strategy.”
Sometimes this violence is inflicted by individuals, other times by systems as we’ve seen in the established policies and practices of local law enforcement in Ferguson, Baltimore, and here in our neighborhood.
Nations sometimes don’t know what to do with their pain either, and so they become violent, inflicting pain on others through torture and warfare.
Palmer writes: “On September 11, 2001, more than three thousand Americans died from acts of terrorism. America needed to respond and plans for war were laid. Few were troubled by the fact that the country we eventually attacked had little or nothing to do with the terrorists who attacked us. We had suffered; we needed to do violence to someone, somewhere; and so we went to war, at tragic cost. A million Iraqis lost their lives, and another four million were driven into exile. Forty-five hundred Americans died in Iraq, and so many came home with grave wounds to body and mind that several thousand more have been victims of war via suicide.”
Violence is what happens when we don’t know what to do with our pain.
But there’s another way of handling our pain, one that actually leads to abundant fruit. “We all know people who’ve suffered the loss of the most important person in their lives, or suddenly found themselves unemployed or with a serious disability. At first, they disappear into grief, certain that life will never again be worth living. But, through some sort of spiritual alchemy, they eventually emerge to find that their hearts have grown larger and more compassionate. They have developed a greater capacity to take in others’ sorrows and joys, not in spite of their loss but because of it.”
This is the kind of suffering that Jesus is speaking of in today’s gospel: It is not simply a cutting away, but rather a pruning, and it leads not to abandonment or violence or death; but rather to more life and love, more compassion and justice, abundant fruit.
What about you? Is God doing some pruning in your life right now? Some loss or disappointment or pain? Can you allow yourself to acknowledge the very real pain of that moment? At the same time, can you see it not as a cutting that leads to withering and death, but as a pruning, as a step toward a more abundant life, abundant fruit? Perhaps even now you can see some of the new shoots and buds and blossoms already emerging, the first signs of more abundant fruit.
Perhaps in our country at this moment, the exposure of racist practices that have for centuries destroyed the lives of so many people of color will lead to a pruning that in turn will yield abundant fruit. Already it seems to be galvanizing the hope and determination of people of color to speak their word, tell their stories, demand justice. Perhaps it will also lead the rest of us to listen, honor their stories of oppression, join them in the struggle for a new day. Perhaps this time of painful revelation and outrage in our country can be a pruning that yields abundant fruit.
In the parish email of a couple of weeks ago, I included a poem by Mary Oliver. Let me close this sermon by reading that poem once again.
Lead
by Mary Oliver
Here is a story
to break your heart.
Are you willing?
This winter
the loons came to our harbor
and died, one by one,
of nothing we could see.
A friend told me
of one on the shore
that lifted its head and opened
the elegant beak and cried out
in the long, sweet savoring of its life
which, if you have heard it,
you know is a sacred thing,
and for which, if you have not heard it,
you had better hurry to where
they still sing.
And, believe me, tell no one
just where that is.
The next morning
this loon, speckled
and iridescent and with a plan
to fly home
to some hidden lake,
was dead on the shore.
I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again.
to the rest of the world.
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