May 3, 2015
John 15:1-8
Ferguson felt far away. So did Cleveland and Staten Island and Sanford. But not Baltimore. Freddie Gray’s death, and all that has come afterward, feels much closer to home.
I was born in Baltimore. For my first months of life I slept on the dining room table of my parents little one-bedroom apartment downtown. Then we moved to Columbia, about 20 minutes away, but Baltimore was always the city we claimed, like DC is now for my family. We went to the Science Museum and the Baltimore Museum of Art and Little Italy and walked around the Inner Harbor. My dad taught at the University of Baltimore. I even jump-roped in a half-time show or two at Orioles games. My senior prom was at one of the fancy hotels by the water.
But I never experienced Freddie Gray’s Baltimore.
Unlike Freddie Gray, who was poisoned by the lead paint in his rundown home and raised by a drug-addicted mother, I lived in safe homes with loving and gentle parents.
Unlike Freddy Gray, who grew up in an unsafe neighborhood never sure what might be around the corner, I spent afternoons biking on bike paths, playing in sunny playgrounds, meeting friends to climb trees and play kick-the-can.
Unlike Freddy Gray, whose schools were overpopulated and underfunded and who may not have known anyone who attended college, I went to some of the best schools in the country and my bright future was always assured.
Unlike for Freddie Gray, arrested, it seems, for avoiding meeting a police officer’s eye and whose community’s experience with police officers was frightening at best, for me police officers were proven community helpers, always safe to turn to in times of trouble.
Unlike for Freddie Gray, whose neighborhood saw a quarter of its young men go to jail and whose homicide rate was twice Baltimore’s average, where I grew up I never knew anyone that got more than a traffic ticket or was hurt by more than a fistfight.
My Baltimore and Freddie Gray’s Baltimore were not the same. My life experience and Freddie Gray’s life experience were not the same. And unfortunately, I’m pretty sure that disparity holds truer than we’d like here in Alexandria as well.
My kids can walk to a great school in a safe neighborhood. They can play outside without any real worries. They are involved in things that interest and challenge them — sports, dance, Boy and Girl Scouts, Odyssey of the Mind. They have an abundance of adults that love and support them, and role models for just about any future they can imagine for themselves.
But not far away are kids who are barely hanging on. Part of families (if they are lucky) for whom jobs are scarce, housing is temporary, and food on the weekends is not a given.
Langston Hughes asked “What happens to a dream deferred?” He gave a bunch of possibilities and if we were paying attention we’d have seen them all in Baltimore. Sometimes the dream dries up, like a raisin in the sun. Sometimes it just sags, like a heavy load. And sometimes it explodes. Is it any wonder that dire poverty, unemployment, drugs, crime and injustice can be a combustible mix? Is it any wonder that sometimes despair and hopelessness turn into violence? 50 years ago Martin Luther King Jr. called rioting “the language of the unheard.”
There are two Baltimores, two Alexandrias, two Washington D.C.s — name a location where people live and I’m betting there are two of them. And the truth is, I’m guessing that most of us in this room could spend our entire lives without really experiencing the second one. What happened to Freddie Gray could never happen to any of us.
And yet it did. It does. It will.
If we have the ears to hear and the eyes to see and the hearts to abide.
And if we change our metaphor.
I know I already preached about him two weeks ago, but Greg Boyle is still on my mind. He’s the Jesuit who works with kids embroiled in gang violence in the second Los Angeles. He says that “if you want to change the world, you have to change the metaphor.”
I think today Jesus shows us how.
The words that we hear in our Gospel are some of Jesus’ last words to his disciples on the night he was betrayed and arrested. Surrounding him were the twelve who would come short in their attempts to abide with him at the end. Jesus was trying to give them strength for their journey. He knows he is about to leave them, first with his death and later when the Spirit comes at Pentecost. And so he wants to sear this image of a vine into their minds - an image that he hopes will stick with them and give them strength long after he is gone. He wants to change the metaphor for this small group that is full of fear and will soon feel like they are being torn apart. He is the vine and they are the branches and as long as they receive their sustenance from him he will always be part of them.
The writer of the Gospel of John has a similar purpose in mind for his readers. The early church was in a frightful position. Following Jesus made believers subject to violence and excommunication. John was trying to change the metaphor, redefining community for the band of believers that was losing the world as they knew it. And so he shares with them this image of a vine that might experience some pruning but only to make it more hearty and fruitful.
And now we can — we must — claim the metaphor as our own. Jesus invites us to see ourselves as part of one vine, growing and thriving together with branches nearby and far away, all receiving our sustenance from the same source. As Christians we aren’t called to be independent and self-sufficient. We aren’t called just to worry about the fruit we and those close to us produce. We are called to be connected - to be in genuine relationship that goes beyond the lines that the world draws for us. To see the other branches as part of the same vine. Our connection to the vine makes us more than scattered individuals, divided and frightened and combustible.
Jesus’ vine image reminds me of the African notion of “ubuntu” that Desmond Tutu often talks about. The essence of being human is knowing ourselves to be part of each other. Because you are, I am. Our humanity is all caught up together.
It’s part of our baptismal covenant too. “Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?” “Yes,” we promise. “We will.” But we can only do it with God’s help. With the help of Jesus, the vine, who holds us all together and sustains us with his compassionate loving kindness. And with the help of the gardener who will prune me when I forget that only because you are, I am.
What might happen if we take Jesus’ metaphor seriously? How could the world change if we acknowledge ourselves to be intimately connected, part of the same vine as the branches in Baltimore, and Ferguson, and the other Alexandria, and every other grieving, torn-apart place? How might Jesus be calling you to change your metaphor? Amen.
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