Rooted + Grounded in Love: A Sermon for 5 Easter

In a few moments, you will hear from Travis Meyer, who, along with his wife Rachel, is chairing our Rooted + Grounded in Love Giving Campaign. Today marks the day when we officially “go public” with the campaign, and Travis will tell you more about the event in Sandefur Hall that will follow the worship service today. So please plan on staying and joining us afterwards in Sandefur Hall.

What I’d like to do now is help us make the connection between this very crucial moment in our life together at Christ the King and our scripture lessons for today. A prevalent theme that runs throughout today’s readings is our call to abide in God, make space for God to abide in us, and consequently to bear fruit beyond ourselves. 

Our campaign steering committee chose the “Rooted + Grounded in Love” theme because more than anything else, we want this campaign to be about the scriptural call to abide in God’s love, and making room for God’s love to abide in us. I truly believe that when parish churches keep that as their missional and programmatic focus, they can’t help but to bear good fruit.  

Now, what I have said can come dangerously close to sounding sentimental or cliche. The word “love” gets batted around a good bit and has almost lost its power, particularly in the Christian context. But when I look around this wonderful parish church, Christ’s love is what I see, and Christ’s love is what I feel. And I know that many others feel the same sort of thing.

Those who preceded us here - clergy and lay people alike - abided in God’s love, and made the space for God’s love to abide in them. And the result was the bearing of good, healthy fruit. We are sitting in the midst of and experiencing that faithful fruit right now. In our Gospel lesson today, Jesus speaks to this sort phenomenon - “Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. 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.” So all that we have here at Christ the King is the result of steadfast, faithful Christians abiding in God and God in them, and the resulting fruit from that mutual abiding.

Some of you here - and tuning in via the Livestream - were a part of planting the seeds for this remarkable parish. But many - if not most - of us here are relative newcomers to Christ the King. And if you are like Emily and me, you have fallen in love with this church and the surrounding community. As founding member Alice Opielinski once said, when you drive down the driveway here, “don’t you just feel the love?” Emily and I find it to be an incredibly exciting place to be, and a wonderful place to raise, educate, and nurture our children. And as we approach our sixth anniversary here at Christ the King, it has become imperative that we not only enjoy the delicious fruit that Christ the King has produced, but that we also become productive, fruit-bearing branches ourselves. But not just for our own benefit at the present moment, but future generations as well. And that is why we have chosen to give sacrificially to this campaign. 

Perhaps one of the greatest challenges to Christianity today is the trend towards individualism, self-actualization, self-help, and self-everything else. One of the shadow sides of the Protestant Reformation was the disproportionate  focus on the individual’s personal salvation, personal relationship with Christ, and the like. Coupled with the American emphasis on one’s own personal rights, freedom, and liberty, you have a recipe for a highly individualistic, self-absorbed culture. Now don’t get me wrong - I think both the Protetsant Reformation and the founding of the United States of America were both good and necessary things. My life has been enriched by the results of both. Yet any large movement, culture, or institution ends up developing a shadow side. We just have to be aware of when the pendulum swings too far in the other direction. 

We simply have to remember that one of the foundational, essential, and non-negotiable tenets of Christianity is community. We - the community of believers called the Church - are Christ’s Body in the world. As St. Paul wrote in his first letter to the Corinthians, “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.” 

But here is the challenging part - as I mentioned before - we are not called to be a community simply so we can get our own needs met. Quite the contrary - Christ calls us into communities so that we can bear good fruit - not just for our own nourishment, but for the nourishment of others, and for future generations. 

But this life-giving fruit cannot grow on its own. Jesus uses the metaphor of the vine and branches to communicate his point when he said to his disciples, “I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinegrower... Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. 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.”

The faithful people who envisioned an Episcopal Church in Santa Rosa Beach a little over 30 years ago planted seeds that have continued to bear good, healthy fruit. Christ the King is a parish church that has abided in God’s love, and has made the space for God’s love to abide in them. And today we can see, hear, and feel the results of that good, faithful work. 

And now it is our turn to plant and nurture some new, fruit-bearing seeds for today and tomorrow. That is what the Rooted + Grounded in Love campaign is all about. We want Christ the King Episcopal Church and the Tree House Episcopal Montessori School to continue to be a place where God’s love can be experienced, tasted, heard, and seen. And most importantly, we want to be a place where we can bear witness to Christ’s love by the fruit we plant, nurture, bear, share.