Connections

The Fifth Sunday of Easter (RCL, Year B)
May 10, 2009

The Reverend Paul Abernathy

Mother’s Day. Our annual national homage to the women who have given us birth and those who, in the grace and generosity of their love, have been mothers for us. The relationships of mothers and children can be joy-filled and fraught with difficulty. Yet, either-or or both-and, we give thanks this day for our mothers and our connections to them – our literal, umbilical connections to our birth mothers and for those who have been mothers for us, whether through birth or no, the connection of the bonds of affection without which there is or can be little in the way of good fruit.

In much the same way, Jesus speaks of himself as the vine.^[1] Only as the branch “abides,” remains attached can it produce fruit.

Connection to Jesus. However we conceive of it – whether understood as a declaration of faith in Jesus as redeemer, whose death and resurrection liberate us from our sin, our inherent predisposition to follow our own way and, therefore, not God’s will or as our human endeavor to follow Jesus, seeking to apply his teaching to our lives or something else – without that connection, there is or can be little else.

Life-giving connections…

But what happens when there is little or no – or a broken – connection? This question lies at the heart of the musical, Parade, the title referring to the annual Confederate Memorial Day celebration in Georgia.^[1]

Based on a true story, Parade concerns the real-life 1913 trial of Leo Frank, a Brooklyn-born, Jewish factory manager accused of murdering a 13-year old employee, Mary Phagan. The trial, sensationalized by the media, aroused anti-Semitic sentiments so virulent that, justice, impossible to attain, led Governor Slayton of Georgia to commute the inevitable death sentence. Tragically, in the end, Leo, seized by a vigilante mob, was lynched.

In this morning’s scene, Leo desperately dis-eased in the deeply Christian Bible-belt South where he lives and works, sings, “How Can I Call This Home?”

I go to bed at night hoping when I wake…
I’ll be home again…in Brooklyn…
with people who look…talk…and think like I do.
But then, the sun rises in Atlanta again.^[3]

Later, Leo sings,

These people make me tense…
These people make no sense…
It’s like a foreign land.
I didn’t understand that being Southern’s
not just being in the South.
When I look out on all this,
how can I call this home?^[4]

Leo, like his Hebrew forebears centuries before in exile in Babylon might well have cried out, “How can I sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?^[5] He is cut off, disconnected, and there is no good fruit that can come of it. No end but death.

Yet, it is not only Leo who is severed from the life-giving vine. Everyone is. The townspeople, rooted in a racially-stratified culture – the whites, many wedded to a long past, never to return antebellum era, thus, living not in the present and the blacks, many steeped, drowning in long-learned patterns of subservience – all cut off, disconnected from their better selves. The better selves who, confessing the fear and hatred that shadow their own souls, yearn to be free to walk humbly with God, striving to do justice, loving mercy.^[6] The better selves that can look into the face of “the other” and, regardless of the color, shape, or texture, behold the instantly recognizable, clearly identifiable similitude of another human being.

This capacity to see in the eyes of another one’s own reflection and, therefore, to treat that other accordingly is, I believe, the fruit that comes from abiding in Jesus. Verily, the fruit of Jesus himself. His life was the proclamation in word and deed that “the kingdom of God is at hand!”^[7] God’s realm of love and justice is this near to us, for us, in us. His death was the declaration that love and justice are the prima materia, the prime matter of the universe, priceless and, therefore, worth laying down his life. Our Easter celebration of his resurrection is our acclamation that love and justice must take new life, must bear new fruit in us, our words, our deeds – lest his life, his death, our connection to him, and our celebration of him mean nothing; lest the people who make us tense, the people who make no sense are our very selves.

[1] John 15.1. The gospel passage appointed for the day is John 15.1-8.

[2] During the morning’s liturgies, the St. Mark’s Players, the parish’s residential community theater group, presented a scene from the upcoming production of Parade.

[3] From Parade, Act 1, Scene 2A – How Can I Call This Home? Jason Robert Brown, lyricist.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Psalm 137.4

[6] Micah 6.8, paraphrased

[7] Mark 1.15