We love our “lone wolf” heroes. In movies like High Noon, Jeremiah Johnson, Die Hard and John Wick, not to mention the entire James Bond franchise, we love the idea that one man can be so ultra-competent as to defeat a legion of bad guys. And none of those heroes have superpowers. According to moviebodycounts.com (you just know that someone out there had such a website) in the 2008 film Rambo, 247 people were killed, perhaps hundreds more if you include a bomb detonated by the title character. That's almost as many as Saving Private Ryan (255) which included the Normandy invasion! I was surprised to find that the highest body count for James Bond was only 91 in You Only Live Twice and he had an army of ninjas helping him. Batman is practically a pacifist in comparison.
I wish I could say this is all nonsense. But as we see over and over again, one person with a semi-automatic weapon can do that much damage. The Las Vegas shooter fired off more than 1100 rounds, killing 58 people and injuring 851. And they weren't an army of bad guys. They were innocent concert-goers taken completely by surprise. And the coward killed himself before the police could get to him. Thanks to technology, one person can do a lot of damage.
On the other hand, our movies also feature science heroes who single-handedly research and build time machines, or turn a man into an armored, flying weapon, or create lifeforms, either biological or artificially intelligent androids, or analyze unknown toxins and engineer antidotes in less time that it takes to fill a prescription. Often these geniuses can do all of those things, as if “science” was a single subject and not a number of quite different disciplines. Physician/engineer/physicist Dr. Bruce Banner, the alterego of the incredible Hulk, holds 7 PhDs, according to Thor:Ragnarok, though, as tvtropes.org points out, none of them should equip him to fly an alien spaceship. At least Dr. Leonard McCoy in the original Star Trek, stuck to his specialty, repeatedly telling the captain, “Dammit, Jim, I'm a doctor, not a...mechanic/physicist/coal miner/bricklayer/moon shuttle conductor!”
Despite our fantasies, nobody knows everything or can do everything and almost nothing on a large scale can be accomplished by one person alone. One person may have a great idea. One person might lead a project or or drive a movement. One person may raise awareness of an issue. But they need others to do or support all of the work involved or get the word out. Bill Gates or Steve Jobs did not personally develop the software that runs your phone or computer, just as Jonas Salk did not do all of the work on the vaccine which bears his name. He had a staff. And when they decided to field test it, it took 20,000 physicians and public health officers, 64,000 school officials and 220,000 volunteers. Salk was essential, perhaps, but he wasn't sufficient to do all that needed to be done.
We live in a society that is only possible because billions of people around the world cooperate to build it and make it run. Recently we saw how useless one lone rugged individual would be in the face of a huge problem. I am talking about the fire we just had on this island. When the vegetation, killed by the saltwater storm surge of Irma, and dried out by heat and lack of rain, went up like tinder last Sunday, an army of official, trained experts sprung into action. We had 60 firefighters from Monroe County Fire Rescue, NAS Key West, the National Park Service, U.S. Forest Service, Key West Fire Department and from Miami/Dade working together, with 13 vehicles and helicopters from U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service dropping 800 gallons of water on the fire every minute. I would love to see how the survivalists and “sovereign citizens” and others who think we don't need government would propose how to fight a conflagration that ravaged 100 acres over 3 days.
It used to be that scientists attributed the dominance of humans over the other animals to our superior intelligence. But now many are pointing as well to our incredible ability to cooperate way outside the bounds of kinship. One zoologist said that you don't see that kind of cooperation among our closest relatives, the chimpanzees. So we needn't worry about a Planet of the Apes revolt.
Of course if you are a Christian, this is exactly what we would expect to see. If God is love, as our passage from 1 John points out, and we are created in the image of God, you would expect to at least see phenomenal cooperation in human society. And yet we see other things in human society as well: cruelty, exploitation of the disadvantaged, violence and discord. Where do they come from? From those who put their desires above the needs of others. Not everyone wants to cooperate.
Cooperation inevitably means some compromise along the way. Working for the greater good means some measure of self-sacrifice. If you are part of a community, you can't drive however fast you want or dump your trash wherever you like or play your music as loudly as you'd prefer, especially at 3 am. Being part of a larger group of people means some self-limitation on the part of all of us. And in some cases, such as serving as a firefighter, first responder, or law enforcement officer, it means putting your life on the line. You rarely see see that level of selflessness outside of love.
Mutual love, each person putting the welfare of others above their own, is a greater motivator for holding a community together than mere tolerance or a desire for order or a hatred or fear of disorder. Love makes people go the second mile. To Jesus the distinguishing mark of his followers is our love for one another. (John 13:35) And while it is relatively easy to love family and close friends, it is harder to do so when it comes to people you barely know. To love people who are strangers or very different from you or who are your enemy, opposed to you and what you believe in, takes superhuman effort. In fact, it takes divine power. Which means we need to be plugged into Jesus.
Both our gospel and our New Testament readings are about being connected to Jesus and to each other. In the gospel of John, Jesus compares himself to a vine and us to its branches. Obviously it is better for the branches to be connected to the main vine. The Greek word for “vine” can mean “vineyard” as well. In choosing this metaphor, Jesus is probably thinking of the passage in Isaiah where Israel is compared to a vineyard the Lord plants and nurtures. (Isaiah 5:1-7) Or he may have been thinking of Psalm 80 where Israel is compared to a vine transplanted from Egypt. In both of those passages the tone is one of judgment. In Isaiah the problem is that the grapes are sour. In John the problem is with branches that aren't producing any fruit.
The fruit you expect a vine to produce is grapes. Christians should produce the things you would expect someone connected to Jesus would. He said that just as you can tell what a plant is by what it produces, so you can tell what a person is by what they produce. We are to produce good fruit. (Matthew 7:15-20) Paul lists the fruit of the Spirit as love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. (Galatians 5:22-23) Those are the kinds of things you expect in a Christian.
But if you are having a hard time manifesting those qualities, don't panic. No plant produces fruit instantly. Jesus frequently compares the kingdom of God to growing things. In fact, at one point he says, “This is what the kingdom of God is like. A man scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. All by itself the soil produces grain—first the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head.” (Mark 4:26-28) Jesus lived in an agrarian society. He knew these things take time. What he is saying in this parable is that spiritual growth also takes time.
So, too, the stuff that makes us wince, the pruning of the branches and the removal of the ones that don't produce, is not immediate but takes place over a reasonable amount of time of sterility. But you should be seeing some progress eventually. It's like when someone is hired for a new job. It will take them a while to master it. But you should over time see them growing into the job and picking up more and more skills and getting better at it.
The secret to bearing fruit is abiding or staying in Jesus. You have to maintain that intimate connection to him. You have to be getting nourishment and support from him. If you try to live the Christian life under your own power you will fail. Nobody can be that good. Certain natural tendencies, like anger at those who don't get it and envy of those doing better than you, or just succumbing to temptation, will trip you up. We all know or know of people who claim to be Christian, and who may even have achieved some great things for the church, but are not loving, trusting people. And every week we hear of someone exposed as a sexual predator and some of those people are prominent church leaders. They used their charisma and the power of their position to take advantage of others. And it's not like the requirement for Christians to be faithful and avoid sexual promiscuous is something new. Even before this awareness of sexual misconduct in society became pervasive, the Bible taught that Christians and especially church leaders, should be faithful to their spouses and above reproach. (1 Timothy 3:2-12) Neither Jesus nor Paul would have countenanced men grabbing women by any body part nor would they have dismissed it with a “boys will be boys” attitude. As for children, Jesus said, “...whoever welcomes a little child like this in my name welcomes me. But if anyone causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a large millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.” (Matthew 18:5-6) An adult knows better.
And a Christian has to know that greatest commandments are to love, first God and then others. Thus it says in 1 John, “Those who say, 'I love God,' and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.” The 2 loves are connected. As our passage from 1 John begins, “Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.” The word used for love is agape, which is distinct from the Greek words for family affection, friendship or romantic love. Agape is benevolence, good will, love that is unselfish.
But if God is such love, and no one has seen God, how do we know what it is? 1 John continues, “God's love is revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world that we might live though him.” Again we need to be connected to Jesus; we are to live through him. But the first readers of John's epistle, like us, hadn't met Jesus in the flesh. How can we experience him? John writes, “No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.” Loving one another shows that God lives in us and like fruit, it will come to maturity in us.
“By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit.” In the Old Testament, God anointed the leaders of his people with his Spirit, in other words, kings, priests and prophets. But at Pentecost, all believers were anointed with his Spirit. We receive his Spirit at baptism. The Spirit enables us to live the Christian life and equips us to minister to others. But how can we know for sure?
1 John lists 3 ways and you may recall them from last week: belief, belonging, and behavior. The Spirit enables us to believe that Jesus is God's Son sent to save us from our sins. The Spirit enables us to belong to one another, kindling our love for each other. And the Spirit enables us to love boldly. Because “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.” If you saw a bully beating your child, I don't care how big he was, you would charge into that situation and stop him. Fear would not be a factor. You would not be thinking of yourself, only of the person you loved and their welfare.
How did Jesus get the courage to go to the cross for us? Love. Last week we read this in 1 John “We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us—and we ought to lay down our lives for one another.” (1 John 3:16) Jesus loves us enough that not even the prospect of being skewered to a cross to bleed out and slowly suffocate while people mocked him could stop him.
You want to summarize the core of Christianity? It is all about Jesus: who he is, what he has done for us and how we should respond to him. He is the God who is love incarnate; he died to save us; and we should love him and love one another. And we are told to love one another over and over again: in John 13:34, 13:35, 15:12, and 15:17, Romans 13:8, 1 Thessalonians 3:12 and 4:19, 1 Peter 3:8 and 4:8, 1 John 3:1, 3:23, 4:7, 4:11 and 4:12, and 2 John 5. This is not an obscure or trivial command. It is at the heart of Christian ethics.
There are no Lone Ranger Christians. Our God is love; our every act is to be an act of love. We may express that love through teaching or healing or leading or listening or sharing or building or forgiving or reconciling or supporting or confessing or laughing or giving or protecting or befriending or singing or learning or encouraging or thanking or serving or strengthening or understanding or making art or any one of a million ways. But love requires more than one person. You can't love alone. And you can't show this broken and dysfunctional world all the love it needs by yourself. We need each other—to help and to practice loving with.
Jesus actually tells us that we will do greater works than he did. (John 14:12) Is that possible? Only if we band together and put all of our talents and skills and insights to work not for our own good but the good of all, not for our glory but the glory of God. And when the world sees all our acts of love, they will know that God is love and that we are his disciples.
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