The thing that gets me in this passage, at least, this time around, is that nobody escapes the pruning. Whether you are failing to bear fruit, or whether you are actually bearing fruit, you are going to get the axe. God is that gardener who cuts off every branch in us - even in Jesus himself - that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit, God prunes so that it will be even more fruitful. So just when you think you’re on your way, just when you think you’ve got it figured out, just when you think you’re on the cusp of something new, just when you’re ready to stretch out your branches and take your place in the world, in comes the gardener with his pruning shears, and thwack, we’re back at square one. Jesus in this passage is prepping his disciples that things are going to get hard. They are going to lose important parts of themselves. They may think they have finally “arrived” because they have found Christ, but this is not the end of the story. Even the Church, even this church, is never complete. We are never done. The pruning never ends. We, as Christians, are always in process; we’re always arriving but never “arrived.” Our dying, unfruitful and callused parts of us are always being sloughed off and shaved away, and our life-giving, hope-centered, so-called “answers” are always being pruned so we can grow more life, more hope and more answers. This is the call of the church. This is the image of the Triune God: The one emptying into the other in communal self-giving, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit forever abiding in each other in mutual creating and recreating, a forever cycle of emptying and filling and emptying again, over and over again, in and out of each other, encountering one another as if for the first time. The vine and the branches, the trimming and the growing and the trimming again, always new, always sprouting, cutting back, and sprouting again so that new life can grow. The only thing that we can count on for sure, the only thing that remains the same, is change. Being a Christian means opening ourselves to being pruned, letting ourselves be vulnerable to the threshing floor even when, or maybe even especially when, we think we’ve got this whole Jesus thing figured out. We only need one thing: to abide in Christ as Christ abides in us, and as Christ abides in the Father and the Father abides in Christ. To abide: to stay. To show up. To return to. To let go. To strip away preconceptions. To get back to the heart of it all. To give in to. To gain your energy and nutrients and very life force from. To stay plugged in. To tether yourself. To dance together in mutual self-offering. To create and recreate. To be created and recreated. To participate. To live in to. To survive, even as we trim off the dead ends and cut back the overgrowth so that we can bear fruit. If we don’t abide, we simply won’t survive the cutting. We need to think hard about this as a church, as “The Church.” There’s a pruning going on in Christianity; we have to remember that nothing is exempt from the fire: not our buildings, not our rules, not our expectations, not our high walls or our thick lines that define who is in and who is out.
We were taking our usual walk through the park the other day. It was raining, but we’d been too busy for a walk the day before, and our nine month old miniature golden doodle, Eliza, was driving us crazy. She’s used to a walk and a fetch at the dog park every day. And if three o’clock rolls around and she’s still waiting, well, we are going to hear about it. Somehow, what with planning a wedding ceremony and reading for class and relearning second grade phonics and teaching the fifth grader the beauty that is the five paragraph essay, (complete with the three point thesis statement), we’d somehow gotten by with skipping a day of walking through Dormont Park, around past the playground, then up to the tennis-court-now-dog park for a good fifteen minutes of long distance fetching. But this day, there was no getting out of it, not if we wanted to keep our shoes, our carpet, our favorite second hand couch, or our sanity intact. So we grabbed her leash, a handful of plastic bags, and her favorite tennis ball, and with a slam of the screen door, dragging our reluctant seven year old along with us, we were off. It was just drizzling by that time, so we thought we had hit our window of opportunity: we could get this walk done as quickly and as efficiently as possible so that we could exhaust the dog, exercise the child, and get back home to our more pressing responsibilities of paper grading, bathroom cleaning, laundry folding, and sermon and worship planning. We were focused. We were gonna get it done. And we were getting wet. We had a list of things we needed to accomplish before bedtime, and had no time for distractions, detours, or any monkey business. So we walked down the same street we always walk down, past the elementary school, and through the park, Levi chasing ahead of us and then lagging behind, until he called out to us, “Mom! Dad! Look what I found! You gotta come see!” “Ugh!” I said. “Levi, it’s raining, can we just get this done? Can we just keep walking?” “Yeah, Levi, buddy, it’s starting to rain harder and we’ve got to get home,” Dan said. “But it’s something really cool!” Levi said. “It’s this giant mushroom! Come see!” Well, we’d spent more time arguing about it than if we’d just entertained the boy’s curiosities, so I gave in, and walked off the path and through the wet grass towards him. “Look!” He said. “Isn’t this crazy?” And we looked. And it was crazy. A beautiful, perfect, fresh, white morel mushroom, growing there right in the middle of a city park, next to a cigarillo filter, a coffee cup lid, and someone’s discarded face mask. Dan and I were amazed. I’d never seen one “in real life” before. I’d heard about them, of course. They were a delicacy. They were served in the fanciest of restaurants. They’re really hard to grow. The growing season is super short. And they’re sold for somewhere around a hundred bucks a pound. So we plucked it and carried it home. It was pizza night, so Dan sautéed it up and threw it in with the pepperoni and the mozzarella and tomatoes. It was so good. Woody and earthy, hearty and layered.
The next day, we all went to the park again, and this time, we were on the lookout. We slowed down, circled each tree, looked down, and found about five morels with a street value of about forty bucks. We had hot dogs and sautéed morel mushrooms that night. Levi even tried them. He was sort of awed and thrilled by the fact that we could eat something that had been randomly growing and randomly picked from the ground, right in the middle of the city.
We go on this same walk everyday. Eliza has memorized the route. She grows more insistent and the leash grows more taught at the same spot each day, right when she realizes that we are getting close to the dog park. We walk past my favorite pair of trees in the whole world, and we make sure to say hello to them each time. But because of the keen eyes of a seven year old, always ready to discover something new about the world, we found a treasure, growing randomly amongst the weeds and the dandelions, a meaty and earthy and delicious morel.
There’s this concept in Zen Buddhism called “Shoshin” or “Beginner’s mind.” It’s this idea of encountering everything as if you were experiencing it for the first time. It’s an experience of openness, eagerness, and a lack of preconceptions. Even if you are an expert at something, coming at that thing with a beginner’s mind frees you to explore, to be creative, to understand more deeply, and to participate in it more fully in that thing. Shunryu Suzuki, a Zen Buddhist teacher and author of the book, Zen Mind, Beginners Mind, says, “in the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities. In the expert’s mind, there are few.” Cellist Yo Yo Ma says that he tries to occupy this beginner’s mind every time he performs. When we approach things with a beginner’s mind, we encounter the everyday - the same walk through the same neighborhood to the same park - as if it is our first time to that park, our first time through that neighborhood, our first time taking precarious and tentative steps into our parent’s arms. This is an approach to life that sheds away preconceptions, that adopts an open, unbiased and curious mind, an approach that helps you find morels in the city park.
But to have a beginner’s mind, you have to be willing to let some things go. You’ve got to prune away and cut back the dead so that new life can grow. There’s no resting on your laurels when it comes to beginner’s mind. Beginner’s mind requires that we consistently tap in to the heart of the reason why we became so called “experts” in the first place. Beginner’s mind requires that we truly abide in the places that have become mundane and routine and rote. It requires that we go back to the heart of why all this matters in the first place, even if we’ve been over it and through it and done it a thousand times before. It requires that we look for morels in the city park.
To reclaim a beginner’s mind, or to get back to the taproot or the heart of what is life-giving, or to abide in Christ, we need to peel away layers of preconceived difference and constructed identities and supposed “expertise” and remember that we are just human, remember that we belong to God, that we need to cut away the parts of ourselves that don’t abide with Christ, and to even be ready to let go of those parts that do. It means going back to the beginning. It means going back to the heart. It means approaching life with a newness and a sense of curiosity and wonder that helps you find rare delicacies next to the hamburger wrappers and cigarette butts in the city park.
See, I used to think you had to be a monk and live in a closet kneeling on a board of nails wearing a hairshirt and praying every hour in order to truly have a spiritual experience. I thought encounters with God required a special sixth sense, a truly mystical outlook, an asceticism, and lots and lots of discipline. I had resigned myself to just hoping that all this stuff about Jesus and God is true, but accepting that it was just never going to feel real to me. But then one day, I think maybe I might have started over. I just showed up. I just came to God, whoever, wherever that was, whether it was just my imagination or a delusion or a hope against all hope that some small thing in all this faith stuff was actually true. I said, “I don’t know if I believe in you, or if you’re really real, or if this is just an opiate I give myself to get me through this day, but here I am, as I am, and I’m listening. Or. At least, I want to listen. Or. At least. I need to learn how to listen.” I entered in with a beginner’s mind, with no preconceived notions about how God ‘should’ show up, I’d cut off the weighty branches of doctrine or creed or shoulds, I let go of these deadened expectations about what it will mean if God shows up, or if it was really God who shows up. I had to cut all that out. I just walked through my familiar steps in the rain, but this time, I slowed down, I looked hard, and this one time, I found something. And it was good. And it was nourishing. I was meaty and woodsy and rich and delicate. And it made me want to come back the next day to look around for more. There was more to explore on that well-trod path; I just had to cut off all of the distractions that were keeping me from abiding in the heart of it all, and I had to enter in and explore as if it was my very first time.
T.S. Eliot, in his Four Quartets, said, “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all of our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” Let’s not stop looking and searching and exploring, even in our own backyards, even in our mundane chores or our often traversed sidewalks. With a beginner’s mind, we will always find something new; with a beginner’s mind, we will always go back to the heart of what matters, back to the taproot that gives us life, back to the Christ in whom we abide. No matter how many times we’ve been pruned, no matter how many of our branches have be thrown into the fire, if we abide, if we stay, if we keep going back and participating, keep showing up, keep plugging back in to the giver of life, if we keep abiding, we can always begin again. We are all going to get the axe one way or another. And oof, does it hurt. But, if we keep abiding, we will survive the cutting.
Thanks be to God.
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