“Presentiate”
“Presentiate”
Acts 8:26-40 John 15:1-8
Year B, Fifth Sunday of Easter, April 28, 2024
Pastor Andy Kennaly, Sandpoint, Idaho
Abide is one of the most popular words in the Gospel of John. Abide. Abide. We don’t use that word much. While on the one hand, abide means to put up with or tolerate, to bear or take or accept; on the other hand, Jesus uses it in a sense of indwelling, focuses on the habitation quality, to live within. To abide. This has a mutual quality, the disciple in Jesus, and Jesus in the disciple.
But what does it mean to abide in Jesus?
John’s Gospel uses metaphor to illustrate ongoing, deep truth. In this scene the image of a grapevine is shared. Jesus is the vine, we are the branches, and the connection is life-giving and purposeful, to bear much fruit. But this involves pruning. Even Jesus gets pruned.
He says, I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinegrower. He removes every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit.
If Jesus gets pruned, if God carefully shapes his life, then we should expect no less in our own life. Jesus is the blueprint, and what is true for him is true for everyone. Life unfolds within, and needs, periods of growth and pruning.
At my house we have a garden and within that garden is a grapevine. Our friend gave us the vine years ago and now it has claimed a home under a trellis along a fence, with growth that spreads up and out, even over the top of a gate into another section. Shawna’s Uncle Bill instructed me on how to properly prune it each year. This is done in the later part of the winter, snow still on the ground.
When a grapevine grows, out of it comes a tangled menagerie of branches and large, green leaves. They spread, and clusters of green grapes dangle as they ripen into rosy red. In the winter, the grapes are gone, the leaves have fallen, but the tangled mess of branches remains. But the branches are thin, fragile, and if you don’t deal with them, the next year, they impersonate the vine and try to grow their own branches, and soon you’ll have a huge mess and too much going on. It is better to have the branches last for one season.
The vine is thick, rooted, and remains year after year. In pruning the branches, the vine gets isolated once again to five or six main shoots, all of which stem from one; they are extensions of the main vine which comes out of the ground.
Pruning removes the menagerie, the jumble of branches. They get tossed onto the snow down on the ground. They can get used, turned into wreaths, or woven into other things. In this story from John, they’re burned, which is not destruction, but a changing of form. Even the ash is returned to the garden as a fertilizer to help the soil so the vine blossoms and grows more fruit.
As the plant is pruned, that main vine remains and over the years it gets thicker. In the spring, it sprouts new branches, and these branches create more fruit than the year before, because the vine is also growing, it reaches a little further than prior years.
One of the tourism stops in Slovenia during the 2017 Sabbatical was to Maribor, a city that features the oldest grapevine in the world. It grows along a wall in a horizonal way, and it takes up the length of the wall. The stocky vine below, the leafy branches reaching out along a railing for a walkway on the second floor of that building. No wonder they have wineries and festivals to celebrate the abundant harvest. But each year, even that very old vine needs work and much pruning.
Back at my house in North Idaho, in the winter, in the pruning, the vine seems so stark, so barren, and the days of summer like a dream. But that vine contains the energy of all the prior years, and it is available for all future seasons. That present moment, even in the gray shadows of winter, is in relationship to all other moments, and the vine is just as alive in early March as it is in July, just in a different state of activity.
The title of this spiritual reflection is Presentiate. This is a term used by Jean Gebser in his book, The Ever-Present Origin, which is the English translation from the original German volumes. He shares a framework that describes structures of consciousness, from Archaic, to Magic, Mythic, and Mental. Each of these structures have modes of efficiency and qualities of deficiency, yet all the structures, in all their modes, are important. He uses the word, mutations as these structures of consciousness unfold over time. As humanity grows through cycles within each structure, the efficiencies reach a climax, kind of like those grapevines at harvest, but then come deficiencies that resist the decline, as if the vine struggles to keep the leaves even as fall frosts and winter snows develop new seasons.
Modern civilization is experiencing the emergence of a new season of consciousness. The Integral Consciousness Structure, gifted from the future, grounded in the energy of ongoing creativity within creation, can be glimpsed here and there. The unseen becomes Incarnate, Origin is ever-present through material reality.
This process also involves grieving, for what was before is let go to embrace what is to come. Yet, like that vinegrower knows, this is needed, pruning is part of the deal, and what comes is fruitful with many benefits. What comes depends on what came before, and as the present moment presentiates the past, allows all those structures to have affect, it also leans into the future with trust.
One aspect of this story about the vineyard, and the other story about the Ethiopian and Philip, involves the importance of making oneself available. The vinegrower is the one who takes action and shapes the vine, trims the branches. And in Acts, the Ethiopian sits in the chariot, the scriptures open, he invites Philip to sit next to him. Philip, who notices the Spirit who guides him, he chooses to respond, and they journey together for a while.
The Ethiopian was confused, and Jesus says the branches can’t do anything without the vine. Presentiation depends on presence, a relational and incarnational process as things embody the spiritual. Christian mystics share how this presence is experienced in contemplation. But contemplation is something that cannot be understood or contained by the mind, by thought, by concepts. Experiential faith is more of an intuitive, poetic art; it involves deep perception that overlaps the material and spiritual, and weaves the temporal into a new relationship with time.
These stories hint at this new relationship with time, as time is revealed as a fourth dimension. Like Philip disappearing and suddenly appearing somewhere else, the limits of time and space are played with; creative process and divine promise change everything as perspective expands and assumptions are reframed. But Philip and the Ethiopian trust this, they go on their way rejoicing.
What does it mean to abide in Jesus?
To abide in Jesus involves living in trust, that faith opens more than our visual eyes, but spiritual modes of perception, clears the lens of perspective, and invites new dimensions of reality to be revealed. To abide in Jesus makes one available with a Yes to the creative power in the universe, and to the process of pruning where nothing is wasted, nothing is destroyed, but everything contributes to the process of becoming as God’s Is-ness is revealed. To abide in Jesus is to also allow what Gebser calls, the It-self to co-mingle with the human being. In church-talk, we may say, to live in Jesus allows God to live in us. God is already there, and things like baptism serve as outward signs of inner realities, and become markers, points of awareness in our lives, points that claim truths we can embody and trust.
As the call to discipleship echoes through the ages, as the Integral Structure of Consciousness unfolds and invites a new relationship with time, as we learn ways to presentiate, to allow the past to inform and shape the present, even as future draws us on; may we find connection to wholeness, grounded in Originary Presence, and growth infused by Love so that we can bear much fruit, fruit that will last.
Thanks be to God, who holds us and guides us into direct participation of the world, seen and unseen. May we abide in Jesus, as Jesus abides in us. And may God be glorified, now, even as forever. Amen.