John 15:1-8
Late thoughts on this Sunday.
I have always been interested in the way that we think about things influences/determines/limits/expands/improves/denigrates decisions that we can make. Our imaginative horizons and, even more especially, our metaphors are boundlessly influential in the way that we approach things.
One great example of this comes from the second story in a handy This American Life episode, where it talks about dinosaurs. When you see a dinosaur exhibit, we tend to think that we sit at the cutting edge of science. And yet, dinosaur exhibits more or less reflect the way we think, our metaphors for them, not the way they were. Once museums had their own plastic copies of dinosaur bones, they could arrange them any way they wanted. So, starting in the 1950s, dinosaurs were posed together in scenes of epic combat. It didn't matter who was from what era in history, whether they'd been alive at the same time or not, but they were arranged to gain maximum effect from paying customers. Big dinosaurs were popular--T-Rex, and the like.
In the 1980s, the focus grew to be about the personal prowess of the dinosaurs. If we went to an exhibit, we'd see them lauded for the swift, merciless learning and intelligence. At the same time our culture became crazy about capitalism, the visions we had cutthroat CEOs and their money-making, their adaptability and their predatory instinct, we began to arrange our dinosaurs so put the focus on the dinosaurs we imagined in this way. Think Jurassic Park, either the book or the Steven Spielberg movie. Velociraptors are the star of the show. T-Rex has become a side-show.
By the 1990s, a new metaphor for dinosaurs appeared, one you'll still mostly see if you go to a museum. Now, the emphasis is on the ecosystem, putting all the fossils with other fossils from the era, showing how dinosaurs raised their young, talking about the ecosystem they were all part of.
In short, our metaphors of dinosaurs have determined far more about how we have arranged them, understood them, than anything about the actual dinosaurs themselves.
So, I'd like to focus briefly on our lesson in John, where Jesus gives us an image, a new metaphor for thinking about our communities.
We're all so stuck on Paul, who tells us that our metaphor for the church is a human body. It's a fine metaphor--someone gets to be the eye, we all know people we are pretty sure are the assholes. We all have different parts to play, and we altogether make up the body.
But the metaphor Jesus offers in this gospel is quite different. God is the gardener, Jesus the true vine, and we are the branches on the vine. Think, for a minute, about ivy growing on the ground. Think about the way there are numerous branches, altogether, and we can't tell them apart. If you try to pick up one branch of ivy, you pick up the whole thing.
That's the image Jesus is offering of the church. Not a hierarchical body, but billions of branches, all tied into the true root. All are pruned so that the ivy covers only the parts of teh ground that it should. If one part grows separate from the whole, pulled off, it can't put out its own root.
The Pauline image of the body inevitably limits our choices of understanding how we must function as the church. Everyone has gifts, everyone uses them--a fundamental division of labor.
But here, Jesus challenges that notion. In this metaphor for the church, all are fundamentally equal. It's not about whether hands should say to feet "I have no need of you," but rather than in the vine-vision of the church, you can't actually tell the two apart. You and me are both parts, tied into the true vine, pruned, and encouraged to flower in the process of growing fruit. We don't make one large coordinated whole, guided to move in some direction--instead, we grow quickly, full of life, always pushing forward, offering new fruit moving altogether in every which direction. God sorts out the pruning--we just worry about producing new life, staying connected. So, this vine image is not hte image of extensions cords and a plug strip. It's not about being plugged into God.
It's about the web of life weaved together into a new community, tended by God, rooted in Christ.
What does this mean practically? Perhaps we should be less concerned with committees, those default tools for dividing up labor in the Pauline model, and more concerned with whether or not we're producing life. Perhaps we should remember not that we shouldn't chop off a body part, but that we can't chop off a body part. Perhaps, rather than focusing on the jobs we have, we should remember the being we share: in the end, we all bear the same fruit--fruits of love, trust, forgiveness, good humor, and compassion.
Perhaps our metaphors, like those of the dinosaurs, have reflected and reinforced what we already think, and not what we needed to hear. "The holly and the ivy" bear the crown, as the old carol has it, indeed.
