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SERMONS

Fifth Sunday of Easter
May 10, 2009

By The Rev. Alston Johnson

One of the great Christian voices of the modern world is that of Catholic priest and writer Henri Nouwen. Although he was a priest, Nouwen began writing very early in his academic career, and by the time he was in his late forties, early fifties, Nouwen was teaching, lecturing, writing best-sellers, beginning at the famous Menninger Clinic, passing through Notre Dame, Yale, and finally landing at Harvard.

If you were to take your "run of the mill" pastor and clergyman, and place before him a half-dozen career highlights both in universities and the church, Henri Nouwen had achieved all of them by the time he was fifty.

Looking from the outside, judging from the standards of what most folks call success, Henri Nouwen’s life was tremendously fruitful, important, and successful. He himself admits that he had hit the priest’s proverbial home run - secular recognition and status, in short celebrity, in the midst of a vocation that expressly invites one to forgo pursuing those very things for the sake of another Kingdom.

Surrounded by all the trappings of a successful ministry and career, Nouwen came to a sobering realization. "After twenty-five years of priesthood, I found myself praying poorly, living somewhat isolated from other people, and very much preoccupied with burning issues . . . I woke up one day with the realization that I was living in a very dark place and that the term ‘burnout’ was a convenient psychological translation for a spiritual death."
Henri Nouwen, In the Name of Jesus: Reflections on Christian Leadership (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1989), 10-11.

Essentially, Henri Nouwen the celebrity, found himself cut off from the source of goodness and life that ostensibly should have been the at the very heartbeat of his work - he had become a branch without a vine.

And that is precisely when God opened a door for him that would change his life, and the life of others, forever. Nouwen accepted an invitation to spend some sabbatical time living in a community of handicapped people in France. At first, he went with the intention of adding another sort of religious trophy to his trophy case of spiritual experiences; this would be another boutique encounter of serving Christ in the modern world - go spend some time with those "less fortunate," add another paragraph to the curricula vitae.

The surprise came when Nouwen realized that he was the less fortunate one. Although busy about the religious business of being a spiritual person, he had forgotten Christ.

Living with...handicapped people, I realize how success-oriented I am. Living with men and women who cannot compete in the worlds of business, industry, sports, or academics, but for whom dressing, walking, speaking, eating, drinking, and playing are the main "accomplishments," is extremely frustrating for me. I may have come to the theoretical insight that being is more important than doing, but when asked to just be with people who can do very little I realize how far I am from the realization of that insight.... Some of us might be productive and others not, but we are all called to bear fruit: fruitfulness is a true quality of love.
Henri J. M. Nouwen in Lifesigns

Later that same year, Henri Nouwen, superstar of classroom, pulpit, and best-seller list, took the counter-intuitive step, and stepped off the world stage, and accepted an invitation to serve as a friend and pastor to people who would never understand his books, have no use for best-sellers, never sit in a college classroom . . . but who had that remarkable and blessed gift of bearing a holy fruit, a joy, an innocence, that the world, try as it might, can never reproduce.

It was among the illiterate, the mentally handicapped, that Henri Nouwen found the Vine of Christ, the source, the heartbeat.

We each take a journey in this life, and like Henri Nouwen, and I imagine the disciples, our Lord is giving us advice on how we might not become lost, or cut off from him. Because it can happen either slowly or quickly, and it can happen even when we tell ourselves that we have a great meaning or purpose at hand.

"I am doing all of this for others. I am doing all of this for God. I am doing all of this for my children." When the hardest thing to say is that, "I am doing all of this for myself." We can go far in life using the ostensible good of others as a means to our ends, and find that we are not bearing the fruit that is from Christ.

Jesus’ words are both a gift and a warning, especially to those of us, myself included, who are hard bent on manufacturing good, when God would invite us to bear fruit. Jesus’ invitation to "abide" in Him is so often hard to bear because it is an invitation to become powerless as the world understands power, to perhaps forgo success, as the world understands success, and to love, as the world understands love.

There are no rugged individualists, no solo pilots, no self-made men and women within the vineyard that is God’s vineyard. There are only, only, dependents - individual branches dependent upon and attached to the true vine.

And as one Christian wag has said "In Christian service the branches that bear the most fruit - hang the lowest - the hardest to see - are closest to the ground."