You know what I am talking about here about good news/bad news jokes. It is like the old chestnut about the crew of the Viking long ship and their bos’n. One day the men are at the oars when the bos’n yells out, “Men, today I have good news and bad news. What would ye hear first?” “The good news, the good news,” the oarsmen yell out hopefully. “The good news,” the bos’n replies, “is that the captain has ordered a double share of mead all around.” “Huzzah, huzzah,” the oarsmen sing out. “The bad news,” the bos'n continues, “is that the captain has a fancy to try something new he calls ‘waterskiing.’”

In that spirit, let’s start today with the good news. The good news is that here Jesus is telling us once again about God and God’s relationship with us. You know how easy it is for us to emphasize the mysteriousness and distance of God, how we often think of God as somehow “up there”, in heaven, watching over us and judging us from afar, perhaps only to be met once this life is over. But the message of all the church’s principal holy days is just the opposite. On Christmas we celebrate that this supposedly distant and aloof God humbled himself to the point of taking on our humanity, being born to an ordinary human being. On Good Friday we celebrate that God will stay connected to us even to the point of suffering and dying on a cross – even here there is no “Get Out of Jail Free” card for this God. On Easter we celebrate that God will not let even death keep God away from us, and on Pentecost we celebrate God’s gift of the Holy Spirit to us – that God’s very self will be loose in this world, among us, empowering us. And here, in this reading, Jesus reaffirms the point. We are so connected, he to us and us to him, that it is like we are part of the same living, fruit bearing grapevine. If we abide in him, he will abide in us.

But now the bad news. “Abide in me as I abide in you,” says Jesus. Friends, do you understand just how terrible these words are? Do you understand what Jesus is saying here? It is like Jesus saying, “Follow me”, only worse, because the connection is so much stronger, the bond that much tighter, the wiggle-room for escape so much less. When he says “abide in me as I abide in you”, it means where he goes, we go. And do we really want to be where Jesus is?

For if we leaf through the Bible we see that Jesus did not hang out in immaculate, varnished, sun-lit sanctuaries, did not cloister himself away behind stained-glass windows in satin-covered pews with needle-point kneelers, did not consider his faith to be something that he set aside a hour for once a week.

No, Jesus may have been in synagogue each week, but the rest of the time Jesus was out in the messy world, and not for a nature walk. He was hob-nobbing with lepers and whores, sitting at meals with those who collaborated with Imperial Rome, sharing a drink with morally disreputable folk, breaking the law, hanging out in graveyards and with low-lifes, and ending up first in jail, then nailed to a cross. Follow Jesus, go where he goes, and you will not, I am afraid, be making the cover of GQ or Ladies Home Journal, will not end up in that mansion in the Hamptons, and probably will always be thought of by your peers as slightly kooky, to say the least.

Abide in Jesus, and you will likely find yourself digging a cesspool with Timmy and Kathy Warren for a retreat center in the Andes of Chile. Abide in Jesus, and you will likely find yourself teaching in the Cook Islands, or in Pakistan, or in Turkey, or in the Bahamas, like Jane Alcock and Margaret Housman and Jackie Clayton and Sarah Wyatt.

Abide in Jesus, and you will likely find yourself down at the Sheriff’s Youth Ranch with Lily Tu, or with the Board of Outreach at the Pine Street Inn and Noah Shelter, or sorting used clothing at A Baby Center in Hyannis with Christine Burns.

Abide in Jesus and you may end up on Beacon Hill demonstrating for marriage equality with Tom Cathcart, or standing on the Hyannis Rotary protesting a war of choice that you know is going to happen anyway, but which you just know is wrong.

Abide in Jesus and maybe you will find yourself giving up a night or two a month to sit around a table here at the church working with others to provide a Christian education program for our children, or overseeing the finances here, or maintaining the building and grounds.

Abide in Jesus and you just might find yourself not examining the checkbook at the end of the month to see if there is anything left over you might share with the church to advance its work locally and around the world; no, abide in Jesus and maybe you find yourself writing the first check of the month to the church, and then taking it from there, confident that God will provide for what you really need.

Abide in me, Jesus says, and what burdensome words they can be. For despite what the slick purveyors of the prosperity gospel would have us believe, abiding in Jesus is not the ticket to economic prosperity and social success; church membership does not come with a bar of gold but with a cross to bear. Jesus told us that he came to serve, not to be served, and it is no different for those who claim to be his followers. Sometimes we come to church looking to have our burdens lifted, and yet, if we listen to what Jesus is saying, it may be that we come away feeling burdened all the more.

I think part of the burden comes from the inevitable feeling, for any clear thinking person, of the enormousness of the tasks Jesus lays at our feet. Think back on the parable I shared earlier in the Time For Children, the one about the child walking along a beach strewn with beached starfish, throwing back one at a time. Even as she took comfort from knowing that her actions made a difference for each starfish she was able to save, surely she must have been discouraged by the number beyond her reach. I think it can be the same for us. We look at the problems of the world, the hunger, the poverty, the war, the inequity in our societies, and we know that what we do can hardly make a dent in the big picture.

And yet it is precisely here that we can take comfort from Jesus’ image of the vine and the branches, here we can find even more good news, the good news of this passage, part two. If this passage is indeed like a good news/bad news joke, in truth it is more like good news/bad news/good news.

On our own, cut off from our life source, trusting in our limited strength and resources, we are sure to fail. But if we abide in Jesus, and he in us, we are attached to the source of all the strength and courage and grace that we need in our lives. We do not need to dig down deep and rely only on ourselves; together, we are more powerful than we can ever imagine. And the result is fruit that blesses the world, fruit that reveals us as followers of Jesus, a community of love and sharing and joy. And that, my friends, is no joke.

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