SERMON

THE PRESENCE WITHIN

MAY 21, 2000

Fifth Sunday of Easter

Readings: Acts 8:26-40; 1 John 4:7-21; John 15:1-8

The Call to Worship: (Psalm 22:25-31):

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The Children's Sermon:

Well, good morning! I want you to take a deep breath. Now don't go to sleep, just take a deep breath. You can feel something inside. Do it again. Do you feel something inside? What is that? Air. Air. All right. Good. There is a word for air and sometimes the word for air that we talk about is "spirit." Now if you take a deep breath you get filled up with air. Right?

There are a lot of things in the air. Smells are in the air. If you go around certain things out on the farm, you have different kinds of smells. If you walk through the woods and come upon a polecat, you have one kind of smell. If you come up on a cow pasture, you have another kind of smell. If you come upon a slaughterhouse, you have yet a different kind of smell. There are all kinds of smells.

If you take a deep breath and fill your lungs up with that good air, you pull all kinds of things into your body, don't you? If you are around people who smoke, with a deep breath of air you pull cigarette smoke into your lungs. So we take in breath and we take in air. We have to have air to live. Otherwise we wouldn't have any oxygen and our brains would quit.

We also have other things that we get into our bodies and we talk about that as another kind of spirit, the Spirit of God. Breathing the Spirit of God. You've heard that expression? That is a different kind of inhaling, the taking it in. You want to have the Spirit of God in you as much as you possibly can. If you are open to the Spirit of God, God moves within you. Now even though you might have been filled with the Spirit of God, sometimes we do things and we kind of get cut off from the supply.

Have you ever had anybody try to put their hand over your mouth and you couldn't breathe? That's mean, that's really bad. And sometimes you get real mad at people and hit them -- you don't do that? Good. Because if you hit somebody in the neck a certain way you make it where they cannot breathe even though they want to. So don't ever hit anybody in the throat with a stick or something, because that could kill them. One little hit and the throat could go into a spasm that would cut off the air supply and they couldn't get a breath. You don't want to do that sort of thing.

Air is very important.

What happens if you don't get air? You do what? Die. You die. What happens if you lose the Spirit of God? Die. And we don't want to do that. We don't want to cut off our supply of air and we don't want to cut off our supply of Spirit. God's Spirit comes in and fills us when we love people. Sometimes we don't like people very much, but down deep inside when there is just the two of you around, you have to like them. Even your brothers and sisters you have to like. I know that sometimes they get to be a drag, but that's okay.

We love. And the Apostle John says that if we don't love people -- I mean love enough to take what we have and share with them -- then God's not in us or else we are liars. When we say we love the Lord and we don't share our things with others, then the Apostle says that we are liars.

When I was growing up, I was never allowed to use that word. That word was a curse word. Did you know that? If you say to someone, "You're a liar," there's a Bible verse that says you are in danger of hell fire. I don't want to be in that position either. That's really strong stuff and we just don't want to do that.

This morning I will be talking about what the Apostle John wrote about the love of God. So, filled with the Spirit of God, let the love of God come into you. How do you do that? You pray to God and you keep on doing that until you begin to feel love. God loves you. Jesus loves you. Let us pray.

Father, take these, your children. Bless them with Your Presence and fill them with Your Love, so that regardless of what happens in their lives, they always remember that with God in their hearts, they can love people. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.

The Scripture Reading:

Our first reading this morning comes from Acts 8:26-40. It is a very familiar passage, one of those we have heard many times, but let's hear it again and see what we can learn from it.

Our second lesson for the morning comes from 1 John 4:7-21.

The gospel reading for the morning is again from John 15:1-8. It is that passage that occurs during the evening before the crucifixion when Jesus is speaking to his disciples. Would you stand with us, if you can and would, as we hear the gospel read?

The word of God for the people of God! Thanks be to God.

The Sermon:

Martha and I have this beautiful redbud tree out in our back yard or lawn -- if you want to call it that. Every year it grows, and in the early spring it looks as though it erupts with beautiful, beautiful flowers. Every year it has done that for twenty-something years, twenty years, but the last couple of years it didn't erupt. Now the stump of the tree is quite good sized and as you know, redbuds seem to grow almost like vines, but they are trees, and as it has grown through the years, those flowering branches have gradually gotten to where fewer and fewer of them are popping open in the spring. This year, in fact, as we looked at it the other day, we didn't see many branches that were popping open. As you look at it, it is almost like a dead tree, but here are branches here and there. So the next thing for us to do is to trim off the limbs, saw them off, more realistically, hoping that by doing that, by next year maybe new branches will come out from that old stump.

But when I think about that tree I think sometimes about us. Jesus talks about the vine, that he was the vine. He was like a productive vine and off of him came all of these branches, and actually, off of the branches came more branches. Now if a branch dies, it is not good for anything. And if a branch has done too much too long, you have to prune it back so it will grow better. And some trees -- vines, grape vines for example -- have to be pruned every year faithfully or they won't produce for very long.

It seems contradictory, doesn't it, to cut off a branch so that it will produce more, because certainly it seems the longer the branch, the more it would produce. I didn't prune our redbud last year and there are a lot of dead branches that do not produce. I should have pruned it back so it would produce. So, we prune things back. And I'm going to have to prune back our beautiful redbud tree and hope it is not too late.

Jesus said to his disciples, "I am the vine, you are the branches. But if you are going to be productive branches, I am going to prune you back from time to time so that you will produce more." Doesn't that sound contradictory? How can we produce more if we are less?

My brother-in-law in Kosicusko has some grape vines, a little vineyard, and I think of how he prunes those back. Well, I've found myself thinking not only about the redbud and the grapevine, I've thought about my own life and those things that grow in my own life. There are those things that just grow and grow and if you leave them and don't do something with them, they could get out of hand and out of control. So we individually need to prune back, as it were. In the Spirit of Christ and with his spirit working within us, that presence within us will help us to see if this we need to cut back on or this we need to stop or this we need to change. If you can think about it in that way, I think the analogy fits pretty well with our lives.

We also think about the fact of what life comes through in the tree -- in the vine -- life flows through the sap that comes in from the roots. If you take that a step with Jesus, you see that he said to his disciples, "I am the vine. I provide for you that supportive juice of life, the very sap that keeps you going, that makes you green and makes you grow." I wonder sometimes why is it that this healthy looking tree has dead branches up above. What happens with the inside of a tree that makes one branch die while another prospers?

We might ask the same thing about life. Why is it that some people, equal in opportunities and training and all the rest, why is it that some seem to prosper and grow and the others don't? Perhaps it is one of the mysteries of life, but I'm sure a good horticulturist could tell me why it is that with the tree branches, one over here dies and one over there grows. There has to be some type of scientific explanation, right?

Why is it that some parts of our lives grow while other parts do not? Jesus said, "I will prune you from time to time." Pruning, it seems to me, is always a radical thing to do. I mean you go out and you look at the vines and there are certain signs that the grower knows to look for. When I walked with my brother-in-law, Bill, and he looked at his vines, he said, "This one needs to be cut and this one and this one." He picked them out. He had signs that he went by. If Jesus is going to prune our lives so that we can be more productive, what is he going to cut out? You see, he knows the signs.

Do we know the signs? What is it within us that makes us to know that this has got to go? Well, as I ponder this, what I come up with is that there has to be something more than just our ordinary-ness to help us get through this whole process. There has to be something within us that is special. There has to be something more than the ordinary within us.

So then as I listen, I listen to the writing in the epistle of John. I hear him talking about that God is in us. We abide in God, and God abides in us. And if God is in us, God is love and love is that which shows us what we need to do and that helps us to know what to prune from our lives.

One of those big things that really astonishes me is that when John is writing, he talks about this thing of caring for one another. If you say you love and have not God, you don't know what you are talking about. If you say you love God and you don't care for what's going on around you with your brothers and sisters, or you hate them, he uses a very strong word. He uses that "L" word. You are a liar. Now God is love, he says. He drives that point. He keeps hitting it. He hits the same nail over and over again and he drives it clear through us. If God is love and we are going to be like God, we're going to love, too. Sometimes that is not so easy. Oh, I know, we think it is easy to love. Some people are easier to love than others. There is no question about that. But you see, sometimes it is the same person, but just different circumstances that make it easier to love. Oh, it is easy to love a nice little baby when they are cooing and swatting the air and kicking the air. You see pictures of mothers and babies and you just get all bubbly inside and warm. As they say, you get a fuzzy feeling. It is so nice to see that.

But if you see that same duo in the early morning hours of a sleepless night, when the baby won't hush up and keeps on crying, and nothing you do seems to stop it or muffle it, there have been mothers who have literally taken those babies and thrown them on the floor. It is easy to love when one is loveable. It is not easy to love, my friends, when one is not loveable.

John is talking about a kind of love that goes so deep. It goes beyond the warm fuzzies. It goes down to loving someone that is despicable and hateful. We live to use the analogy of brothers and sisters because most children have some conflicts with one another. If you didn't have some conflict with your mother or sister -- if you had one -- I think, almost, you would be abnormal. But the point is, that's what he is talking about because he moves it to a higher plane and each of us is a brother or a sister to someone else in the kingdom of God. It doesn't matter where we come from or what we look like, what our language is or anything else, if we have God within us we have that special ability to love that person, to talk with them, commune with them, be a part of them, accept them into our family, as John says.

But if we can't do that, he says that God is missing. Now when we come face to face with our spiritual development, we come face to face with who we are, who God is, and how the two of us will be able to interact. When we do like Thomas did and fall at the feet of Jesus and say, "My Lord and my God," we acknowledge that this is the relationship. When we can "surrender all," as the old song says, then we can feel the spirit filling us and we can be moved and changed and made different.

So how do you recognize, how do you go about understanding this presence that is within you? What is that presence within you? What is that within you, in your mind and in your soul, that drives you and guides you throughout life? What motivates you? What pulls you? What pushes you? What makes you to do, and then when you don't do, you don't feel satisfied? Is it the spirit of the risen Christ? I would hope so. I would hope that we would understand and feel and have compassion for those about us because of the presence of God in Christ within us.

We are, in this church, very fortunate to have the wherewithal -- the resources -- to help those who are in need. I would hope that you always would do that, that you always apply this principle from John's epistle to all the neighbors and everyone else who might come by, so that those needs that they have would be met and never would someone say, "I lived in Biggersville or in the New Hope Community and I went hungry!"

"If you say you love God and you see your brother or your sister in want and you don't take care of them, you are a liar," he says. We can do that and I'm glad that we can. We can take care of those needs. May we always be able to do that.

The question then is, "What's the presence within you -- not only as a church, but as an individual, not only here in this sanctuary, but out in the world at work?" I am reminded every day in my life that it is much easier to hate than it is to love. It is much easier to hate than it is to love! You have to have a presence within you in order to be able to love in the world. My prayer is that we will be filled with that presence, that presence of God, himself, on this day and every day. In the name of Jesus. Amen.