Easter V

What does it mean to come alive in God?

What does it mean to come alive?

(I mean, writing this, sitting here, I am alive. De facto. My heart is beating, thanks be to God.)

John's community concerned itself a lot with this 'coming alive' in Christ. Dying to certain things so as to be alive in other ways -- to come alive in a true life that lives even now beyond the grave's return, a true life that is constantly beginning, opening to us now: now. not some post-death notional reality over which we can all fight.

What does it mean to live in God - to come alive in God? John uses many images; this week is the famous one of the vine and the branches and the vine-grower/tender. All abide in one another, all are one -- we abide in Christ, who abides in the Father, who abides in us... it's all one cosmic transitive property.

How do we come alive in the vine? What is this pruning? What does it mean to ask for something (anything!) in Jesus' name and be granted it?

To abide in God is to abide in the Truth. To abide is to remain, to stay put even as we grow and change -- for God (and the cosmos?) are both unchanging (ever-present) and ever-dynamic.

In John's first letter/sermon, which we also read from this season, the author writes that to live in this Truth is to live in the perfect Love of God - cosmic, huh? - and that 'perfect love casts out fear.' Live without fear, then - that is partly what it means to come alive in God.

Fear of?

This section of the letter begins with the beautiful admonition: 'Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God.' Everyone who loves is coming alive in God, and knows and will know God, no matter how long the journey.

This is not the love of momentary sensation, though - even as ecstatic knowledge of this love can be real and can reveal and point like a signpost to love that abides. This Abiding Love is the way of self-sacrifice, of forgiveness: the way of love via loving specific sisters and brothers and others, and other creatures of God including the Earth, that most vulnerable creature... These are not always easy to feel love toward. Our protectiveness, fear, greed, hesitancy... oh, you know the way I describe.

To come alive in this way of loving is to adopt (...a stance, a practice: choose the word that makes sense, O postModern People) a stance of Love toward the phenomena of the world and of our lives: a stance of forgiveness and self-examination being a necessary part of this. This is why this is to come alive in God, alive into this way of abiding and remaining even as we change, grow, and are transformed. This Love then lives in us -- or, it might be better to say that this Love lives us. And, this is why we could not but ask for what Love would ask for, in Love's name, and it will be so. For, love asks not for cheap things or quick gratification. Love asks for truth, for wholeness and healing, for forgiveness and a way forward. Love asks for peace-making and peace-abiding-in.

Let us live as branches of the true vine, this Love in which we abide, and which abides in and with, and through us.