“I am the vine; you are the branches”

The Love of Jesus and the mystery of evil

A sermon by the Rev. C. Dean Taylor

Several years ago there was a famous series of satires on Saturday Night Live called, “Deep Thoughts by Jack Handy.” It was a parody of those saccharine sweet, sentimental late night moments of inspiration that you used to hear just before the station went off the air. (That was the era, you remember, when stations actually went off the air at night).

In the Saturday Night Live parody, there was wavy organ music in the background, the scene of a waterfall, and some kind of inspirational words would scroll down the screen. My very favorite one went something like this:

Welcome to another “Deep Thoughts,” by Jack Handy.

The other day, my daughter asked me, “Daddy, why is it raining?”

And I answered, “Oh, my child, that’s God’s tears.

When it rains, that’s God’s weeping, probably over something

You did.” This has been another Deep Thought, by Jack Handy.

I have to tell you that I think about that parody from time to time when I hear many of the explanations that religion gives for human pain. When bad things happens to us, we human beings question, “Why? Why is this happening to me?” And over the years, religion has given some pretty terrible answers. Answers that sometimes say, in effect, “Well, it’s probably something you did.”

Or sometimes, answers that throw us in the wrong direction

“Well, you know, God doesn’t give us any burden that we can’t bear.” Oh, so, if I weren’t as strong as I am, then this wouldn’t be happening to me?

Or answers that make God seem cruel or callous. At the death of an infant, “Well, you know, God picks the brightest flower for his garden.”

As a priest, I go back and forth over whether these popular answers give comfort or not (they wouldn’t for me, but sometimes they seem to for others, and the funeral home is not the time for a theological debate.) But I know that many of them don’t give me comfort.

Today’s Gospel has in it an attempt to do that: to provide at least one answer to some of our pain. I am the vine, says Jesus, and you are the branches. In other words, we’re all connected, one human family. Now God is the vinedresser, the caretaker of the vineyard, and as everybody knows (at least in Jesus’ audience), from time to time you need to prune back branches so that new branches can grow and flourish—bear fruit.

2.

Now, there’s some truth to that. Much as I hate to say it, unfortunately, most human spiritual growth comes out of those times in our life when something in our life has been cut back—something has been taken away, stripped away from us, and the wound is sore and tender.

Maybe the college senior graduates and believes he can sail into the business world, make it big, be immediately successful. But soon that illusion is stripped away, cut off like a branch, and he learns that in the work world, it takes hard, hard work, and even then, you sometimes fall down.

Or the wife who has always sort of “looked down” on those around her who have divorced, and thought, “If they only had the love of Jesus in their hearts, and knew how to keep a successful family going, that wouldn’t be happening.” That illusion gets stripped away when it happens to her. And so in her spiritual life, she’s a little more humble, a little less likely to judge.

So there’s some truth to this. Much of the pain in our lives can be seen as God’s pruning back this or that in our personalities so that we might grow into more mature spiritual people.

But that does not cover all the pain in human life. Sometimes things happen to people that overwhelm them, that are far more than correctives or teachable moments. Sometimes things happen to people that no “Deep Thought” on the late night inspiration moment can possibly answer.

And so, on a Wednesday morning, my brother and I walk together into the Rehab Unit of the Eufaula Nursing Home, with my father trailing behind, to bring my mother back home.

We go into the room, and there she is. The nurse has dressed her, and she sits in a chair by the window, with suitcase ready, and flowers ready to be taken home. She looks up, sees us, and her face brightens with a great smile, a smile of recognition. She has had a series of what the doctors call “TIA’s”, or hundreds of mini-stokes, and the last, more major one, she could not stand up, or speak.

Here is this remarkable woman, one of the most remarkable woman that I have ever known, who graduated with a double major in English and Speech, had two babies already the day she got her Masters in Speech, taught Shakespeare and Faulkner and the novels of Joseph Conrad, and taught debate and persuasive speaking for thirty years, was a driving force in all our lives—wanted us all to be like the Kennedy’s, she often said, to be well read and educated and have informed opinions, and to go out and change the world. This small woman who sits waiting for us, who now cannot speak.

3.

We have interviewed the Nurse, the Physical Therapist, the Occupational Therapist, and the Speech Therapist—all of whom, by the way, are in my book certifiable saints, saints in light. Brain tissue does not heal. That is a fact. She will never be the person she was. But there are things that can be done, they say, to make the most out of what is left.

It’s like going down stairs, they say. Things are going down. But there can be level places, as well as times down, and there are things we can do. She can’t get up on her own, but she can walk, or shuffle, with help. No, no wheelchairs, because she needs to exercise, to walk.

That night we are sitting in the kitchen, and I try to remember what the speech therapist has said. Try to keep yourself from rescuing her, she says. Try to not be too anxious and finish her sentences. Ask a question that perhaps requires a one word answer and wait, wait for her to struggle and form an answer.

And so I say, “Now who was it that used to live in the Gwen Conner’s house down the street?” knowing myself that the answer is, “The Bledsoe’s”. She furrows her brow, then concentrates, and I wait, and wait, desperately wanting to say it for her. And she gives the correct answer, an answer that comes out like someone else’s voice, someone else’s word, a word that I recognize as “Bledsoe’s.” And we all pretend that this is a normal conversation.

The speech of stoke victims—It’s almost like another language, almost like a song, where the vowels and consonants are no more. They slur and slide into one another. And sitting there, waiting for her answers, I am reminded of a time, years ago, when I awoke one morning and heard what I thought was somebody talking in the next room, but there were no words, not exactly.

Then I realized that it was our nine-month old, our first born, who had not learned of course to talk yet, but he was doing what babies do, as my mother used to say, “when they have their sentences before their words.” The content of the words were not as important as, simply, the soul yearning to express itself. Yearning to connect.

I am the vine, you are the branches, says Jesus. Abide in me. Abide in my love. Some of our pain forms us, shapes us into mature human beings. But not all of it can be explained away easily or put into a neat, “Deep Thoughts” proverb. For those times, we are called to Abide. Abide in God’s love, even as we surround one another in that love.

We will surround her in our love. One day, maybe our world will surround everyone as if we were, all of us, family. For we are. All the branches are connected. No matter what branch you are, no matter what has been sheered away in pain, no matter how despondent or lonely or hopeless—May the love of God in Christ Jesus envelop us all. Amen.