St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Sunday May 17, 2009 6 Easter Year B
John 15: 9-17
Preacher: Christopher McLaren
I have a strong affection for the 15th chapter of John with its repeated admonition to Abide. At one point in my life that single profound word hung framed above my desk calligraphied in four inch letters as a daily reminder of what each Christian is called to in this beautiful passage. Abide in me as I abide in you (15:4). Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit (15:5). As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you, abide in my love.
Yet while this passage was one of my favorites, I struggled to understand the concept of abide. This numinous word abide caused me to wonder, what it might be to abide, how is it one achieves such an intimate state with Jesus? Abiding sounds so wonderful, how could I experience it? But the gospel of John does not give us much to go on in terms of what abiding means. There is no self-help section, no easy 3-step process to abiding in the footnotes.
At the core of the Christian faith is the persistent mystery and paradox that the God who is beyond all knowing, invisible, immortal, source of all being is also deliciously near, intimately present in the minds and hearts of all living souls.
In fact this presumption of presence is something that is found throughout the Gospel writings. Over and over again the New Testament writings remind us that God is present to believers in a way that they can know and acknowledge. From the very beginning this is the message: “Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel” which means “God is with us,”; and “where two or three are gathered together in my name, I am there among them; and “remember I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 1:23; 18:20:28:20); Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?”; (I Corinthians 3:16). Abiding is one way of talking about this same experience or presence.
However, as I said earlier this is not an easy experience to wrap our hearts and minds around. One rich and creative attempt to express this intimacy between Jesus and those who are his followers comes from within Celtic Spirituality. In the ancient Celtic prayer known as “St. Patrick’s Breastplate” we get a stirring and many-faceted look at how to imagine our spiritual life our abiding with Christ.
You can find the words to this in the blue hymnal in front of you on page 370. It is one of my favorites hymns because of course the Irish are my people. Here is the portion I want to focus on. (sing hymn)
Christ be with me,
Christ within me,
Christ behind me,
Christ before me,
Christ beside me,
Christ to win me,
Christ to comfort and restore me,
Christ beneath me,
Christ above me,
Christ in quiet,
Christ in danger,
Christ in hearts of all that love me,
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.
Each line of this Irish poem, each preposition is a way of understanding the intimacy of abiding in the divine presence that was so much a part of the early Christian experience.
Christ Be With Me
One of our deepest human needs is companionship. Each night I treasure the time with my children sitting on the couch reading the books they have chosen for the night and then laying in the dark with them as they drift off to sleep. Just being with them is a blessing, hearing news of the day, whispering our prayers into the dark, singing bedtime songs and giving them a blessing. We know what it means to have others with us and this makes Jesus’ promise, “Lo I am with you always” one of the most comforting. In fact this is probably one of the most important ways that we minister to one another. Simply being there for each other, “being with” is not always easy in the midst of tragedy, loss, depression, or confusion. Often we are not sure what to say, but our presence even our silent companionship can mean more than anything.
So when Jesus says “abide in me as I abide in you” this is an assurance that we desire and value. We will not be alone. We will not be abandoned. Though we may not always be comfortable with God’s presence in our lives and it may not always be exactly what we had in mind, God will show up, be our companion on the way, and as the Gospel of John begins, “And the Word became flesh and lived among us” (John 1:14).
Christ Within Me
This line reminds me of on of my favorite prayers from the morning office that begins, “Heavenly Father, in you we live and move and have our being (collect BCP p. 100 or Acts 17:28). Not only is it true that Christ lives within each of us, intimately and personally but it is also true that we are in Christ. “If anyone is in Christ they are a new creation; the old has passed away, behold the new has come” (2 Cor. 5:17). I remember as a child my pastor working to impress upon us that being “in Christ” meant that we stand before God clothed with the Christ, that God sees us as if we were his own beloved.
As catholic Christians we are well aware of the notion that God dwells in us. This indwelling of God’s Spirit is made tangible as we ingest the bread and wine of the Eucharist. It is a testimony to the ongoing intimacy we are called to with Christ, God entering us and abiding in our very person. What we can say is that God is our dwelling place just as each of us is God’s dwelling place. It is a wild idea that God humbly inhabits our bodies. It places enormous importance upon our physical body, the care of our soul and the unnerving knowledge that we are ourselves a site of God’s revelation to the world.
Christ Behind Me
On a pilgrimage retreat I participated in, I was given the job of wrangler which meant that I was to bring up the rear on our travels, attending to those who had fallen behind, care for the injured, encourage the tired and try to motivate the lazy.
The Christ that is “behind me” is the Christ who guards my back. We have all see too many scary scenes in movies where danger comes from behind. The hero keeps looking behind, sure that someone or something is following in the shadows, the footsteps coming nearer. The fact that we only have eyes in the front of our heads may seem like a design flaw in moments of fear but it is also a way of making us dependent upon one another. To know that Christ is behind me, to know that Christ has our back is to know safety. If frees us to attend to what is truly important in front of us. Christ is our holy wrangler, walking behind us always there to lend a hand, to encourage the feint hearted, protecting us from unseen danger and to share our load when things seem overwhelming.
Christ Before Me
Recently our Rite13 youth read Psalm 139 as part of our worship that celebrated their transition into manhood and womanhood. This psalm is a wonderful meditation on finding God ahead of us. “Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I feel from your presence?” the psalmist asks. and the answers to these questions are deeply reassuring. “If I climb up to heaven, you are there; if I make the grave my bed, you are there also. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the utter most parts of the sea, even there your hand will lead me and your right hand hold me fast.”
Wherever we go, God has arrived ahead of us. I remember as a young candidate for Holy Orders, my sponsoring priest reminding me that in every situation Christ is present, he is already there ahead of us, our job is simply to discover this live-giving presence. We are never in a situation God doesn’t know intimately because God has “been there” before us.
To understand abiding in Christ as knowing that Christ goes before us places a great emphasis upon listening for God’s voice in our lives, discerning the leading of the Spirit. It challenges us to a life that is as open to following as it is to leading. Our culture seems to worship leadership at times but there is something profound and wonderfully countercultural about following. Becoming a follower of Jesus requires that we stay in relationship, watching, listening, loving, taking the next steps as they become clear, saying yes to the adventure of following the one leader who truly has our best interests at heart.
Christ Beside Me
Evidently the original text of St. Patrick’s Breastplate reads “Christ on my right, Christ on my left”. But the hymn writer Cecil Francis Alexander who wrote or adapted many hymns in our hymnal like Once in Royal David’s city and All things bright and beautiful compressed this line into one “Christ beside me”. It is a comforting thought that abiding with Christ means that we are flanked by God, by one who knows us, supports us and accompanies us. It is also provocative to think that Christ walks with us in our strengths our right hand (sorry lefties) and in our weakness or shadow side. This leads to a knowledge that God is to be found in our skills and abilities our strong hand as well as in the midst of our weaknesses our faults and our unconscious.
Christ Beneath Me
As a child I remember a song about a wise man building his house upon rock. As the great theologian, Paul Tillich, put it, God is the “ground of our being.” We all need a rock. We need a firm foundation a touching place from which to operate with confidence. John 15 uses the image of a strong vine from which the branches obtain their nourishment. It is by the root stock of God that we are supported and this is to be our orientation, refusing every temptation to turn elsewhere for security, companionship or hope.
There of course is a great deal more one could say about the prepositions in this beautiful piece of Irish poetry and prayer. Together they remind us that God’s embrace is so intimate, so comprehensive that we are never outside of it. To abide is to relax into these prepositions. To surrender yourself to the presence of God that surrounds you already. To abide in Christ is to find the love of God at the center of all things. It is to be taken captive by this love, to recognize it as the pearl of great price and to have gladly abandoned everything for the sake of it. Abiding means turning toward God again and again, struggling to hear God’s voice and to begin to follow Christ again after we have lost our way. It asks of us a kind of attentiveness to God’s presence that is actually open to following in unexpected ways, rather than determining on our own what path we will take. Abiding is neither effortless nor is it something so demanding as to be impossible. Abiding is to discover that God indeed surrounds us, is within, behind, before, beside, beneath, and above. There is no place we can go away from this loving presence and in Christ we find our abiding joy.
Christ be with me,
Christ within me,
Christ behind me,
Christ before me,
Christ beside me,
Christ to win me,
Christ to comfort and restore me,
Christ beneath me,
Christ above me,
Christ in quiet,
Christ in danger,
Christ in hearts of all that love me,
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.
Abide.
I wish to acknowledge my debt to Marilyn Chandler McEntyre for her wonderful meditation on St. Patrick’s Breastplate in her article The Encompassing Embrace that forms the basis for this sermon. May this sermon be an encouragement into the abiding place of Christ.
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Sunday May 17, 2009 6 Easter Year B
John 15: 9-17
Preacher: Christopher McLaren
I have a strong affection for the 15th chapter of John with its repeated admonition to Abide. At one point in my life that single profound word hung framed above my desk calligraphied in four inch letters as a daily reminder of what each Christian is called to in this beautiful passage. Abide in me as I abide in you (15:4). Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit (15:5). As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you, abide in my love.
Yet while this passage was one of my favorites, I struggled to understand the concept of abide. This numinous word abide caused me to wonder, what it might be to abide, how is it one achieves such an intimate state with Jesus? Abiding sounds so wonderful, how could I experience it? But the gospel of John does not give us much to go on in terms of what abiding means. There is no self-help section, no easy 3-step process to abiding in the footnotes.
At the core of the Christian faith is the persistent mystery and paradox that the God who is beyond all knowing, invisible, immortal, source of all being is also deliciously near, intimately present in the minds and hearts of all living souls.
In fact this presumption of presence is something that is found throughout the Gospel writings. Over and over again the New Testament writings remind us that God is present to believers in a way that they can know and acknowledge. From the very beginning this is the message: “Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel” which means “God is with us,”; and “where two or three are gathered together in my name, I am there among them; and “remember I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 1:23; 18:20:28:20); Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?”; (I Corinthians 3:16). Abiding is one way of talking about this same experience or presence.
However, as I said earlier this is not an easy experience to wrap our hearts and minds around. One rich and creative attempt to express this intimacy between Jesus and those who are his followers comes from within Celtic Spirituality. In the ancient Celtic prayer known as “St. Patrick’s Breastplate” we get a stirring and many-faceted look at how to imagine our spiritual life our abiding with Christ.
You can find the words to this in the blue hymnal in front of you on page 370. It is one of my favorites hymns because of course the Irish are my people. Here is the portion I want to focus on. (sing hymn)
Christ be with me,
Christ within me,
Christ behind me,
Christ before me,
Christ beside me,
Christ to win me,
Christ to comfort and restore me,
Christ beneath me,
Christ above me,
Christ in quiet,
Christ in danger,
Christ in hearts of all that love me,
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.
Each line of this Irish poem, each preposition is a way of understanding the intimacy of abiding in the divine presence that was so much a part of the early Christian experience.
Christ Be With Me
One of our deepest human needs is companionship. Each night I treasure the time with my children sitting on the couch reading the books they have chosen for the night and then laying in the dark with them as they drift off to sleep. Just being with them is a blessing, hearing news of the day, whispering our prayers into the dark, singing bedtime songs and giving them a blessing. We know what it means to have others with us and this makes Jesus’ promise, “Lo I am with you always” one of the most comforting. In fact this is probably one of the most important ways that we minister to one another. Simply being there for each other, “being with” is not always easy in the midst of tragedy, loss, depression, or confusion. Often we are not sure what to say, but our presence even our silent companionship can mean more than anything.
So when Jesus says “abide in me as I abide in you” this is an assurance that we desire and value. We will not be alone. We will not be abandoned. Though we may not always be comfortable with God’s presence in our lives and it may not always be exactly what we had in mind, God will show up, be our companion on the way, and as the Gospel of John begins, “And the Word became flesh and lived among us” (John 1:14).
Christ Within Me
This line reminds me of on of my favorite prayers from the morning office that begins, “Heavenly Father, in you we live and move and have our being (collect BCP p. 100 or Acts 17:28). Not only is it true that Christ lives within each of us, intimately and personally but it is also true that we are in Christ. “If anyone is in Christ they are a new creation; the old has passed away, behold the new has come” (2 Cor. 5:17). I remember as a child my pastor working to impress upon us that being “in Christ” meant that we stand before God clothed with the Christ, that God sees us as if we were his own beloved.
As catholic Christians we are well aware of the notion that God dwells in us. This indwelling of God’s Spirit is made tangible as we ingest the bread and wine of the Eucharist. It is a testimony to the ongoing intimacy we are called to with Christ, God entering us and abiding in our very person. What we can say is that God is our dwelling place just as each of us is God’s dwelling place. It is a wild idea that God humbly inhabits our bodies. It places enormous importance upon our physical body, the care of our soul and the unnerving knowledge that we are ourselves a site of God’s revelation to the world.
Christ Behind Me
On a pilgrimage retreat I participated in, I was given the job of wrangler which meant that I was to bring up the rear on our travels, attending to those who had fallen behind, care for the injured, encourage the tired and try to motivate the lazy.
The Christ that is “behind me” is the Christ who guards my back. We have all see too many scary scenes in movies where danger comes from behind. The hero keeps looking behind, sure that someone or something is following in the shadows, the footsteps coming nearer. The fact that we only have eyes in the front of our heads may seem like a design flaw in moments of fear but it is also a way of making us dependent upon one another. To know that Christ is behind me, to know that Christ has our back is to know safety. If frees us to attend to what is truly important in front of us. Christ is our holy wrangler, walking behind us always there to lend a hand, to encourage the feint hearted, protecting us from unseen danger and to share our load when things seem overwhelming.
Christ Before Me
Recently our Rite13 youth read Psalm 139 as part of our worship that celebrated their transition into manhood and womanhood. This psalm is a wonderful meditation on finding God ahead of us. “Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I feel from your presence?” the psalmist asks. and the answers to these questions are deeply reassuring. “If I climb up to heaven, you are there; if I make the grave my bed, you are there also. If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the utter most parts of the sea, even there your hand will lead me and your right hand hold me fast.”
Wherever we go, God has arrived ahead of us. I remember as a young candidate for Holy Orders, my sponsoring priest reminding me that in every situation Christ is present, he is already there ahead of us, our job is simply to discover this live-giving presence. We are never in a situation God doesn’t know intimately because God has “been there” before us.
To understand abiding in Christ as knowing that Christ goes before us places a great emphasis upon listening for God’s voice in our lives, discerning the leading of the Spirit. It challenges us to a life that is as open to following as it is to leading. Our culture seems to worship leadership at times but there is something profound and wonderfully countercultural about following. Becoming a follower of Jesus requires that we stay in relationship, watching, listening, loving, taking the next steps as they become clear, saying yes to the adventure of following the one leader who truly has our best interests at heart.
Christ Beside Me
Evidently the original text of St. Patrick’s Breastplate reads “Christ on my right, Christ on my left”. But the hymn writer Cecil Francis Alexander who wrote or adapted many hymns in our hymnal like Once in Royal David’s city and All things bright and beautiful compressed this line into one “Christ beside me”. It is a comforting thought that abiding with Christ means that we are flanked by God, by one who knows us, supports us and accompanies us. It is also provocative to think that Christ walks with us in our strengths our right hand (sorry lefties) and in our weakness or shadow side. This leads to a knowledge that God is to be found in our skills and abilities our strong hand as well as in the midst of our weaknesses our faults and our unconscious.
Christ Beneath Me
As a child I remember a song about a wise man building his house upon rock. As the great theologian, Paul Tillich, put it, God is the “ground of our being.” We all need a rock. We need a firm foundation a touching place from which to operate with confidence. John 15 uses the image of a strong vine from which the branches obtain their nourishment. It is by the root stock of God that we are supported and this is to be our orientation, refusing every temptation to turn elsewhere for security, companionship or hope.
There of course is a great deal more one could say about the prepositions in this beautiful piece of Irish poetry and prayer. Together they remind us that God’s embrace is so intimate, so comprehensive that we are never outside of it. To abide is to relax into these prepositions. To surrender yourself to the presence of God that surrounds you already. To abide in Christ is to find the love of God at the center of all things. It is to be taken captive by this love, to recognize it as the pearl of great price and to have gladly abandoned everything for the sake of it. Abiding means turning toward God again and again, struggling to hear God’s voice and to begin to follow Christ again after we have lost our way. It asks of us a kind of attentiveness to God’s presence that is actually open to following in unexpected ways, rather than determining on our own what path we will take. Abiding is neither effortless nor is it something so demanding as to be impossible. Abiding is to discover that God indeed surrounds us, is within, behind, before, beside, beneath, and above. There is no place we can go away from this loving presence and in Christ we find our abiding joy.
Christ be with me,
Christ within me,
Christ behind me,
Christ before me,
Christ beside me,
Christ to win me,
Christ to comfort and restore me,
Christ beneath me,
Christ above me,
Christ in quiet,
Christ in danger,
Christ in hearts of all that love me,
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.
Abide.
I wish to acknowledge my debt to Marilyn Chandler McEntyre for her wonderful meditation on St. Patrick’s Breastplate in her article The Encompassing Embrace that forms the basis for this sermon. May this sermon be an encouragement into the abiding place of Christ.
