The Old South Church in Boston

The Old South Church in Boston

The Challenge and Joy of the Christian Life

Sermon by James W. Crawford

Second Sunday in Lent, March 11, 2001

John 15:1- 8

Some of you here this morning will remember Fannie Lou Hamer: African-American, the 20^th of twenty children born in Montgomery County, Mississippi, in 1917, to a share cropper family. She tells harrowing stories of her Mississippi childhood, how her parents fed the family on $1.25 a day. When her father showed a small sign of agricultural success, a neighbor poisoned all his cattle. They never recovered. As a domestic worker, she reports to her biographer, “When I was cleaning the boss’s house . . . his daughter came up to me and said, ‘You don’t have to clean this room too good . . . It’s just old Honey’s.’ Old Honey was the dog. I couldn’t get over the dog having a bathroom when the owner wouldn’t even have the toilet fixed for us. But then, Negroes in Mississippi were treated worse than dogs. . .”

In 1962 when she first went to register to vote, the plantation owner fired her. Later, when she was on a registration effort, someone laced the living room she sat in with bullets. On return from another effort to register voters in 1963, police arrested her in Winona, Mississippi, and she underwent a jailhouse beating beyond belief in its violence and brutality. In the 1960s Fannie Lou Hamer worked with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee for economic and social justice, an effort taking her to the Democratic National Convention in 1964 where, in one of the most memorable speeches on any convention floor at any time, she told her story, pleading that a new delegation be seated from Mississippi because the current delegation failed to represent the full constituency of Mississippi voters. President Lyndon Johnson, fearful of rocking the then hard-core Southern Democratic leadership in the Senate, refused to grant any elbow room. “Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we are threatened daily because we want to live as decent human beings?” Her story, her efforts at making changes, her eloquence, her courage, proved crucial in making possible the landmark US Voting Rights Law of 1965.

Now why tell this most abbreviated story of this heroic African-American woman? Because Fannie Lou Hamer was a Christian. She drew strength from Bible Study in the Stranger’s Home Baptist Church. She spoke of Christ as “a revolutionary person.” The sound of her voice singing, preaching, as one person writes, gave listeners hope. One person observed, “If Fannie Lou Hamer had had the same opportunities that Martin Luther King had, then we would have had a female Martin Luther King.” Another writes that her presence “made evangelist Billy Graham look like amateur night.” The song she would lead others in singing in the most chaotic moments and dangerous encounters, even in jail, after that horrific beating, when she could hardly stand up, and could sit only in agonizing pain, the song she sang? “This Little Light of Mine, I’m gonna let it shine.” She held two presumptions about her singing that song: one, that the light of her convictions would serve as a beacon for others, and two, that her light, as the Gospel of John infers, would reveal to the housetops the terrible, inhumane treatment done in the dark to her people.

Fannie Lou Hamer died in 1977. They buried her as Andrew Young led an ebullient, weeping throng singing, “This Little Light of Mine.”

Fannie Lou Hamer knew the challenge and joy of the Christian life. And our metaphors this morning, from John’s Gospel—of vine, branches and fruit-bearing—these metaphors in this unique Gospel parable help us to understand how we too may share the freedom, the challenge and the joy of the Christian life.

John tells us simply that our true freedom, our true joy issue from living in, residing in, dwelling in, abiding in vital, potent, dynamic, recreative love, seeking always to forge new community. Using Old Testament images, John calls this tightly-knit, solidarity-bound love-saturated new community the “true vine.” John insists the deepest, most profound source of our choices to compassionately and creatively serve in this world comes through our refusal to seek who we might be or what we might do from any other source, whether it be our racial or ethnic myths, patriotic or national motifs, our genealogies, our religious identity. John calls these alternative webs of identity, false vines.

“I am the true vine, and my Father is the vine grower,” affirms this Johannine Christ. All other sources of life, vocation, purpose constitute fraud. Loyalties we offer our corporations, our universities, our political parties, our churches; the pursuit of identities in particular income brackets, career positions, occupational credentials all mean we decide, as John sees it, to choose second or third or tenth best, resulting in competition over mutuality, individualism over community, self promotion over love for neighbor—illusory, fraudulent alternatives to identifying with and abiding in the “true vine.” u Fannie Lou Hamer, for instance, might well be identified with The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, or with the National Women’s Caucus, or for her numerous antipoverty cooperatives, but when amid all of these possible identities, even in time of severe persecution and rejection of those identities, when instead of violent reprisal she sang, “This Little Light of Mine” she disclosed her identity as a branch abiding in the vine of this transforming, dynamic love.

Now, we need be sure to understand: our abiding in Christ’s love cannot but bear fruit, fruit with the tang and taste of Fannie Lou Hamer. And that kind of fruit tells us something vitally important about the quality of love pulsing through this Vine and its branches. Be assured, we do not deal with sentimentality here. You will not find the recreative love John illustrates among Hallmark cards in the aisle at CVS. To participate and serve as an extension, to exist as a branch of the true vine in this world means we take initiative, confront evil, create new futures for the human family. Love from the Vine, flowing into branches, advocates, engages, initiates; it takes to the trenches, launches, breaks new ground; it questions, it challenges.

What does it look like? How do we see it at work? Well, surely one of the saints of our age is Bishop Desmond Tutu. He entitles his splendid memoir, “No Future Without Forgiveness.” He tells of his experience under apartheid, but even more he reflects on his leadership of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission following the radical change in South Africa’s apartheid conditions. Bishop Tutu’s Commission signified an effort to bring oppressor and victim together and to create a newly fashioned community there. Incredibly it has for the most part worked because of the astounding efforts of thousands, but surely because of the initiatives of Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu. Here is Bishop Tutu’s reflection:

God does have a sense of humor. Who in their right mind could ever have imagined South Africa to be an example of anything but the most ghastly awfulness, of how not to order a nation’s race relations and its governance? We South Africans were the unlikeliest lot and that is precisely why God has chosen us. We cannot really claim credit ourselves for what we have achieved. We were destined for perdition and we were plucked by God out of total annihilation. We were a hopeless case if ever there was one. God intends that others might look at us and take courage. God wants to point to us as a possible beacon of hope, a possible paradigm, and to say, “Look at South Africa. They had a nightmare called apartheid. It has ended. Northern Ireland—yes, Gaza, Israel, Indonesia, Sudan—you name it, your nightmare will end too. South Africa had a problem regarded as intractable. They are resolving it. No problem anywhere can ever again be considered intractable. There is hope for you, too.

That is Bishop Tutu quoting God. And he continues,

Our experiment is going to succeed because God wants us to succeed, not for our glory and aggrandizement but for the sake of God’s world. God wants to show that there is life after conflict and repression—that because of forgiveness there is a future.

In Desmond Tutu we see, as we see in Fannie Lou Hamer, love taking initiatives, love launching a new work, love bearing fruit. For the Gospel of John, anything else belies diversion; anything less indicates uselessness and deserves the treatment vine growers give to pruned and dead branches: the grower gathers the branches, bundles them, burns them. Rough stuff!

So then, in light of our Lord’s invitation to abide as branches on a vine and to bear fruit by loving as he does, how do we appear? How “useful” are we?

I have always loved that passage in Paul’s Letter to the Romans where he writes, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, that you may prove the good, acceptable and perfect will of God.” Paul begs us to get off the world’s bandwagons of marketing, moneymaking, and spin. “Do not be conformed to this world. . . Be transformed by the renewing of your minds.”

Can we do it? Can we be renewed here, you and me and Old South Church? Are we fruit bearers or withered branch? Are we a bundle of worldly conforming Christians here, friendly enough, but ignored as just another association of good citizens and nice neighbors? Are we what one person called “harmless Christians?” How might the world take us if we call on it to affirm the dignity of each person in this city, and the economic, educational, political and communal implication dignity commands?

Who knows? But be warned: the question goes beyond simple conformity with the tides of the times. For when churches confront cities and nations with the sharp-edged love of Fannie Lou Hamer and Desmond Tutu—with the searing love of Jesus Christ—we no longer find ourselves strictly in the business of dispensing the so-called cup of water we call charity. We find ourselves confronting the public order and powers-that-be with love, which in the public order works itself out as justice.

Do you remember President Bush’s inaugural address? He included some significant religious references. He indicated church and charity, synagogue and mosque lend humanity to our communities and promised, “they will have an honored place in our plans and in our laws.” Then he continued: “Many in our country do not know the pain of poverty. But we can listen to those who do. And I can pledge our nation to this goal; when we see that wounded traveler on the road to Jericho, we will not pass by on the other side.” When we see that wounded traveler on the road to Jericho we will not pass by on the other side. He refers, of course, to Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan.

What a marvelous reference! But I wonder. Is President Bush really saying enough? I am reminded again of how we in the churches may what to recast this parable in a different manner. Suppose on Monday, a good Samaritan finds herself on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho. In the course of the journey she discovers a man assaulted, robbed, left for dead in a ditch. She stops, dresses his wounds takes him to the hospital, pays the bill. Our Good Samaritan then makes the same trip on Tuesday. She finds another person in the ditch assaulted, robbed, left for dead. She again dresses the wounds, serves as an escort to the hospital, picks up the emergency room fees. This happens again on Wednesday. It happens on Thursday. If by Friday, that Good Samaritan is not insisting by letter to her state legislator, by personal appearance at his office, by a community sit-in at the precinct demanding police protection on the road, she may well fail the full responsibility of love.

And so for our churches we need be prepared to exercise the full responsibilities of love. Charity may work in emergencies, charity helps in the short run. Charity buys time. Charity may assist certain individuals. But in communities plagued by large differentials of wealth; in communities suffering because some people can buy all the housing while others get shuffled aside; in communities where resources to enhance the already privileged in education, or jobs, or healthcare, then to dispense charity may be necessary; but only to dispense charity plays into the hands of an unjust, self-serving, status quo. Those who insist the churches stick to charity are usually those whose interests have most to lose in a just resolution. Simply to dispense charity, to only pick up individuals being chewed up by systemic greed, tribal aggrandizement, self-justifying power, economic juggernauts, but take no positive, creative steps toward transforming a polity fueled by rapacious self and corporate interest, confusing itself often with the public interest, blinded often to the public good, in such situations we become managers of the establishment’s human scrap heap. We fail the full responsibilities of love and justice.

You see, in Christ’s name bearing fruit, we need be prepared to confront communal and corporate power with new visions of human community resulting in new allocations of resources, incentives, prerogatives, balances of power, designing and encouraging legislation to protect and empower victims. We need enable those of lesser means, influence and resources to participate in the human community, not as beggars, not as supplicants, not at the whim and sufferance of the powerful, but as full participants in community life: women and men of dignity. The world may, to use a later expression in John’s Gospel, the world may “hate” us when we do this; for we will be telling truth to power, and challenging it to consider alternatives to the present order. But such resistance from those quarters—such “hatred,” says John—is to be expected; for Jesus himself knew the hatred of the powers-that-be, while promising a new order founded and exercised on self-investing love.

Christians conformed to this world? Perhaps. But the metaphor of vine and branch say “NO” to conformist Christianity so long as we abide in Christ and Christ abides in us.

Just one brief word, but an important one about the joy coincident with the challenge of the Christian life. As John writes, “Jesus teaches us the challenges of love so our joy may be complete, and Christ’s joy may be within us.” Do you know what that means? Joy blossoms through exercising Christ’s recreative, transforming love. And just as we began this morning with Fannie Lou Hamer, a woman who in the face of threat, trouble, and violence could raise her voice to sing “This Little Light of Mine,” a woman who became engaged in the never-ending struggle for human rights for Christ’s sake because, as her gravestone asserts, “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired,” so let me close with another woman cut from the same cloth.

Dr. King tells of her: Mother Pollard, old, uneducated, a dedicated marcher day after day in the Montgomery bus boycott. “She possessed a deep understanding of the movement,” he writes. After walking for several weeks, Mother Pollard was asked if she felt tired. With ungrammatical profundity she answered, “My feets is tired, but my soul is rested.”

Right on, Fannie Lou Hamer. Right on, Mother Pollard. Branches on the vine abiding in Christ, and Christ abiding in you. What higher challenge! Indeed, what deeper joy!

Scripture Reading

John 15:1- 8

I am the true vine, and my Father is the vine grower. He removes every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit. You have already been cleansed by the word that I have spoken to you. Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing. Whoever does not abide in me is thrown away like a branch and withers; such branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned. If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples.