This is the Lo-Fi Gospel Minute, a five-minute podcast about eternity. I’m Tripp Hudgins.
The blackberries are starting to come in and I’m thinking about salvation.
This is our second season with the fruity vines in our back yard. We were, of course, warned that they might try to take over. But this is Virginia. This is the land of vines. We have creeper, potato, and wisteria vines aplenty. We have vines with thorns and vines with flowers and vines with both. Some are cultivated. Most are volunteers.
So, blackberries.
Vines are abundant in this climate. You cannot tame them, control them, much less prune or farm them here. People grow grape vines of a sort in the mountains west of where we live. Sweet wines abound. I wonder how it’s done. I would love to know their secrets.
What do vines have to do with salvation?
The Gospel of John chapter 15, verses 5 & 6 read…
5 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. 6 Whoever does not abide in me is thrown away like a branch and withers; such branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned.
Ominous stuff. Or so I’ve heard it preached. That fire is the fire of Hell. That burning is eternal. But that just doesn’t make any sense. Does it? Are you an unbeliever? Then prepare to be thrown away.
What a lousy understanding of grace.
My friend, Aaron Klinefelter, an Episcopal priest in Cupertino, CA, preached a series of sermons on abiding. Preaching from the same passage, he said, “We are invited to remain, to abide, to rest, to dwell in the extravagant, radical love of Jesus.” See? That sounds like grace to me.
Another way to say it is this: The Dude abides. In her book, THE DUDE ABIDES: THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO THE COHEN BROTHERS, Cathleen Falsani pulls at the spiritual threads of the Cohen brothers’ opus. The Big Lebowski is a treatise on such grace, that abiding Aaron preached about. She writes, “[grace is] an unexpected kindness, granting unmerited goodwill, giving someone a break when they don’t deserve it, showing up for the semis even when you have a bad attitude just because it means so much to the rest of the team, hugging it out instead of slugging it out.” Abiding is hard work. It’s a challenging lifestyle. Those among us who embody this spiritual gift are to be treasured. Like the Dude.
So, back to the vines.
There’s some very serious abiding happening in my back yard. In. With. Around. Above. Below. All kinds of prepositions are represented in the vines of my garden. I confess that the vines have taken over the garden I am supposed to tend. And yet, the blooms shine beautifully in spite of my neglect. And isn’t that just like grace? Even in the midst of neglect, it blooms.
What a treasure.
So, what do we do with this verse?
Preacher and theologian, Gennifer Benjamin Brooks, says that this is a verse about growth and not judgement.
What does growth look like? It looks like being connected to the vine. We, the branches, thrive when we are connected to the vine. We wither when we are not. It’s that simple. Withering is not judgement. It simply is. We are called to abide, to be connected to the vine. This means being connected to Christ and to one another. We wither when we lose our connection to Christ and one another. Just like there’s no such thing as a “self-made man,” our salvation, that gracefulness, is not an individual act. Salvation is a web of relationship in which we abide with one another and God.
Abiding. Salvation is abiding with God. Here. Hereafter.
My name is Tripp Hudgins. Thank you for joining me this week on the Lo-Fi Gospel Minute, a five minute podcast about eternity.
Episode 2