Easter 5 B At The Right Moment, I Must Prune

 Easter 5 B   At The Right Moment, I Must Prune

The Catalan artist Joan Miro once said, “I work like a gardener…leaves must be cut so the fruit can grow. At the right moment, I must prune.” Which very well describes the mysterious ways in which God grows the people of God. The Bible describes an ebb and flow of growth and pruning that leads to new and more inclusive growth, beginning with a couple from Ur of the Chaldees, Abram and Sarai, who, as the book of Hebrews puts it, “and they as good as dead!” The goal of creating “a people” at all was to be a “blessing to all the peoples of the earth.” [Genesis 22:18]

 

Some of the pruning, however, was not always the work of the Almighty: the enslavement in Egypt, the destruction of the First Temple, Exile to Babylon, and in the days of Jesus and the early Jesus Movement, the brutal occupation by Rome that led to burning the Second Temple to the ground: all forced pruning. This is the background for Jesus’s final “I am” speech in John 15: I am the Vine, my Father the vine grower, you are the branches. He removes every branch that does not bear fruit, and every branch that bears fruit he prunes to bear more fruit. Abide in me.

 

The word ‘abide’, meno in Greek, can mean: abide, continue, remain, dwell and much more. It is used 40 time in John’s gospel, of which chapter 15 accounts for eleven uses! It can mean to endure courageously even when the going gets tough, and with the Temple’s demise things got very tough for everyone. A major branch had been removed by Rome. The center of worship life for Jews and Christians was and is no longer. The pruning this time had been most severe. What is everyone to do now?

 

The Book of the Acts of the Apostles seeks to answer this for the nascent Jesus Movement: keep doing the things Jesus did, and greater things than these, as Jesus himself had said we would in John 14! So it is that we find Philip, a disciple from Bethsaida, northeast of the Sea of Galilee, instructed by an Angel of the Lord to head south to the wilderness road from Jerusalem to Gaza whereupon he comes across an Ethiopian Eunuch, an official in charge of the treasury for the Candace, Queen of the Kushites in what is now Sudan or southern Egypt. He was heading home to Africa by way of Gaza, and passing the time in his chariot reading the prophet Isaiah, chapter 53 about the Suffering Servant: “Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter, and like a lamb silent before its shearer, so he does not open his mouth.” The Spirit urges Philip to join him and Philip

asks if he understands what he is reading.

 

‘The eunuch replied, “About whom, may I ask you, does the prophet say this, about himself or about someone else?” Then Philip began to speak, and starting with this scripture, he proclaimed to him the good news about Jesus. Then as they come upon “some water,” the Eunuch asks Philip to baptize him, which Philip does. When they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord snatched Philip away; the eunuch saw him no more, and went on his way rejoicing. But Philip found himself at Azotus, and as he was passing through the region, he proclaimed the good news to all the towns until he came to Caesarea.’

 

Putting this all together, we won’t even try to understand how Philip ends up in Azotus. The removal of a branch and the pruning of others Jesus speaks of is for his followers, not foreigners, not the Jews or any other religious group. Philip, from the looks of things, must have been a productive branch of the vine, and judging from his work after baptizing the Ethiopian Eunuch, he continued to spread the word. We know from John’s telling of the story, that beginning with the Last Supper, and following the crucifixion, there were some who had fallen away, who did not abide, who did not courageously remain in the Jesus Movement. Those who did, like Philip, pooled their resources to help any and all who were in need while Rome set about persecuting Christians and Jews.

 

Then there is the Ethiopian Eunuch: from Africa, sexually neutered, and unable to continue a family line, he would have been considered unfit to enter the Temple according to the original covenant’s purity code. Yet, as he was reading Isaiah chapter 53 about the suffering servant, it is possible that Philip, helping him to understand the scripture, also shared chapter 56 which reads: “Do not let the foreigner joined to the Lord say, “The Lord will surely separate me from his people”; and do not let the eunuch say, “I am just a dry tree.” For thus says the Lord: To the eunuchs who keep my sabbaths, who choose the things that please me and hold fast my covenant, I will give, in my house and within my walls, a monument and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off.”

 

That is, despite being black, a foreigner and a eunuch, it turns out it is not what you are but what you do that counts for being accepted into the covenant of the God of Israel. As Paul would put it in Galatians, “there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female; all are One in Christ Jesus!” Jesus practiced a ministry of Reconciliation – bringing people together rather than causing division. It is one of the Sins of his Body, the Church, that long after Resurrection and Pentecost we became a cause for division through so many sad episodes like the Crusades, the treatment of women, anti-Semitism, and the enmity between denominations not allowing those from other traditions to share in Holy Communion – the Sacrament that is meant to unite us.

 

As we will hear next Sunday as a continuation of this week’s reading from John 15, “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.”

 

At Noonday Prayer, Monday through Friday on Facebook Live, we have been examining the implications of what it means to abide in Jesus’s love. What it means to love neighbor and self equally, just as we love God and God loves us and forgives us. It is not an easy road to walk. It is hard, but it is necessary if we are to abide with Jesus and bear much fruit – the fruit of his peace, his Shalom, his turning the world right-side-up again, a world in which we recognize that we all are One with one another and One with God.

 

Until next week, let us all consider what extraordinary courage it took to abide, to remain in the Jesus Movement, for someone like Philip. And how extraordinary it was for him to reach out to a foreigner, a person of color, a eunuch, one considered unclean and outside the realm of the covenant of God’s people. How it took over 500 years from Isaiah chapter 56 to that moment when Philip made the vision of the prophet-poet alive by taking the Ethiopian down to the waters of baptism and saying, “Yes, you are one of us. You always have been. Join us in spreading the Good News!” Think of the pruning of tradition it has taken from Isaiah to Jesus to Philip to accepting women, foreigners, people of color and LGBTQ people into full membership in the Body of Christ today, so that we can truly be the community of love all three of them imagined we could be. Amen. It is truth. It is so.