Abide!  Abide is a funny word to read out loud.  Between Brennan’s reading last week, and Bonnie’s reading today of the Gospel of John, “abide” was said thirteen times.  That’s probably thirteen times more than you said “abide” in the last year.  It’s an old-fashioned word.  Highway motel signs read “Stay Here,” not “Abide with us.”  Baseball announcers don’t sum up an inning with, “One hit, one walk, and two abiding on base.”  Mick Jagger never sang, “Let’s abide the night together.”  The word “abide” belongs to another time.  Abiding has to do with persevering, continuing, and lasting, so it’s no wonder the word is rare.  Staying with someone is becoming uncommon.  Maybe the word abide is usually absent because friendships break up, so do treaties between nations, business contracts appear tissue-thin, marriage covenants get broken.  Staying with anyone can be so hard, most people don’t — more often than they do. Even staying with God is hard.  Twelve of Jesus’ closest friends are with him on the night of his betrayal.   All of them will fail to abide with him when he most needs them.

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It is my pleasure to have the honor to speak to you guys as my church family today.  All of this congregation has helped and supported me no matter if I was here every Sunday, or if I missed a few for basketball (and sometimes sleep).  It is also my honor to be able to represent the youth today, who have helped me mature as a man and as a Presbyterian.  Today we look at the well-known scripture about the vine and the branches.  The scripture to me is perfect to preach about at this point in my life.  When I first read the passage, a lot of things stood out to me.  The first was the image of God as a gardener.  God nurtures us and watches us grow.  This brings me back to everybody who I look out upon today.  I know that God must have put me here for a purpose so that y’all could nurture me and help me grow.  God might be a gardener, but Woodhaven is the rest of his lawn crew.

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In his book of essays, Me Talk Pretty One Day, David Sedaris describes a day in a French class that he enrolled in shortly after moving to Paris.  During the second month of class, students were learning about the holidays.  The textbook listed a series of holidays with accompanying pictures.  The students were to match the picture with the holiday.  A student from Morocco piped up, “Excuse me, but what’s an Easter?”  The other students, within the limits of their extremely limited French, struggled to explain.  One said, “It is a party of the little boy of God who call hisself Jesus.”  And another chimed in, “He die one day and then he go above my head to live with your father.”  And another, “He weared of himself the long hair and after he died the first day he come back here for to say hello to the people.”  Another: “He is nice the Jesus.”  The students’ meager vocabulary and grammar were no match for the mystery of Easter, but they were inspired by the textbook’s illustration.  The picture they were to associate with Easter: a chocolate bell.

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Imagine you have just witnessed the torturous death of your dearest friend.  Sorrow has filled your every thought. Denial has started to set it. It didn’t really happen, even though you know, deep down, it did.  You are in a state of shock.  You don’t want to be left alone with your own feelings, but you want to be around those who you love and who dearly love you.  You want to feel safe. You are paralyzed with fear and you want nothing more than to sink into that comfortable sofa, close your eyes, in a secure locked place where no one can get in unless you choose to let them in.  And you are separated, away from all the realities and the problems that you are choosing to ignore.  I think this is what the disciples must have been thinking in our text today.

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What’s your favorite religious holiday?  When I was growing up Christmas ranked ahead of Easter in almost every category.  For one thing you always know when Christmas is coming.  Easter kind of moves around, but it’s simple enough, I suppose: after the spring equinox, Easter is the first Sunday after the first full moon.  But I’m sure I didn’t need to tell you all that, you knew that, right?  On the other hand at Easter you get to dye eggs, eat chocolate with sanctioned abandonment, and perhaps get a real bunny or chick.  And let’s not forget the additions to your wardrobe.  How many of you have on a new Easter outfit?

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Track 1 (Scripture and Meditation)
John 13:1-17, 31b-35

Everyone has a last time for everything.  The last time a person sees the rain fall or writes a letter or hears your name spoken or hugs his best friend.  It is part of God’s mercy that people usually don’t know when each last time comes.  We’re never sure when we’re saying goodbye for good.  Somehow Jesus knows.  When it comes time to eat his last meal with his friends, he understands it is his last.  In most paintings of the Last Supper, Jesus’ friends look wise, almost scholarly.  But we know sometimes they are not the sharpest knives in the drawer.  And the writers would like to say that the disciples rise to the occasion at the Last Supper and behave as depicted in art, but that’s not what happened.  They start bickering about which one of them is the greatest.  The disciples have every reason to know that something tragic is about to happen and they are still jockeying for a position.  Jesus looks at his foolish followers and you can hear the weariness in his voice as he says it yet once more: “The greatest among you is the one that serves.”

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Track 2 (Offertory Anthem)
Cross-Cry, Arr. By Gilbert Martin
Woodhaven Sanctuary Choir
Andrew Miller, Soloist

People.  People everywhere.  Packed like peanuts in an airtight can, all jumbled up, so close together you wish you could reach for your Tic-Tacs in your hip pocket and pass a few around, but your arms are pinned to your sides by the swelling crowd.  For a few brief moments you almost have a  panic attack.  You try to slow your pulse down by breathing deeply through your nose and exhaling through your mouth, feeling your stomach, chest and shoulders rise and fall with each breath of air.  You know this all worth it, getting up at the crack of dawn, trying to find a place to park your car, searching for the perfect vantage point.  Why?  Because you’re going to see a parade!

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Self-Development of People funds economically poor community groups, and we make grants to economically poor community groups.  The economically poor community groups that we fund must be groups that are going to benefit themselves from the work that they do and they must control that work themselves.  So, we don’t fund one group of people to do something for another group of people.  We only fund the people in need to do it for themselves.  It is very much a ministry of empowerment giving people who have been economically poor, usually all their lives, an opportunity to take control of their lives and to make their communities a better place to live.  It is a very special ministry.

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John 3:16.  Most of us learned this Bible verse in utero.  Some memorized it as a Vacation Bible School activity.  And others learned it during Bible Sword Drills.  How many of you remember Bible Sword Drills?  I learned most of my Bible verses using this methodology as a child on Wednesday night church.  After we had Wednesday night supper in Fellowship Hall, Brother East would dismiss the youth – or the children, as he insisted on calling us – to our Training Union classes.  Boys to one group and class, girls to another.  No mixing.  Except when we did Bible Sword Drills.  I’m not sure why Brother East didn’t think it was fanning the flames to mix boys and girls for Sword Drills, but most of us kids were so worried about our performance we didn’t pay much attention to the gender mixing.

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The Roman military occupied Palestine every day of Jesus’ life.  When Jesus was about 11 years old a Jewish nationalist named Judas the Galilean led a rebellion against Rome.  The rebels raided the royal armory at Sepphoris about four miles from Nazareth where Jesus lived.  The Roman vengeance was swift and sudden.  The city of Sepphoris was burned to the ground.  Its inhabitants were sold into slavery.  2,000 Jewish rebels were crucified on crosses set in a line along the main road to warn others tempted to fight.  Throughout Jesus’ life there were frequent revolts, battles and executions. Jesus never knew a moment when his country was at peace.  For Jews going to the Temple in the midst of such conflict could have seemed small and useless even on the best days, even on the most holy days.  It was Passover, Israel’s Easter, Thanksgiving and Christmas all rolled into one. The streets are filled with people heading to the Temple.  Jesus arrives in Jerusalem like the center of a storm.

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I think most of you know this about me, but for the visitors that don’t, I love going out to eat.  I love to go out to eat.  It’s not that I don’t like to cook, or that I’m not good at it, it’s just that it’s not fun cooking for one (oops, two — because I have to remember Edison, my dog).  I like going to the same restaurants, I don’t mind experimenting, but I like going to the same restaurants because you know when you go in they say, “Oh would you like your usual table?” And I say, “Oh of course,” and then you sit down and they say, “Would you like your usual?” and sometimes I’m bold and I say, “No I think I’m going to experiment this afternoon (or tonight).”  And they go, “Oh what will that be?”  And they always know that I have extra ice in whatever I’m drinking.  So I select my restaurant based on what I like to refer to as Baldwin’s Hierarchy of Needs.  You know Maslow has the triangle with the hierarchy of needs.  And on the bottom is the greatest need, and for me that’s hunger. And then above that is cash flow, and then above that is attentiveness of waitstaff, and then at the very top is dining adventure.  But overriding all of this is my number one ultimate criteria: Pepsi or Diet Coke, instant or brewed tea.

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Global warming.  Global warming has become perhaps the most complicated issue facing world leaders.  Warnings from the scientific community are becoming louder as an increasing body of science points to the rising dangers from the ongoing buildup of human-related greenhouse gasses, produced mainly by the burning of fossil fuels and the forests. Global emissions of carbon dioxide jumped to the largest amount on record in 2010, upending the notion that the brief decline during the recession might persist through the recovery.  The increase solidified a trend of ever-rising emissions that scientists fear will make it difficult, if not impossible, to forestall severe climate change in coming decades.

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Friday I drove my mother down to Kerrville to see her sister.  On my drive back to Irving on Saturday I found myself dicing with death on I-35.  Visibility was about one car length.  My Diet Coke with extra ice was just about gone, and I could crack rocks on my shoulders they were so tense and tight.  To relax myself I turned on National Public Radio.  Unfortunately Marketplace was on.  That’s only slightly less terrifying than my driving conditions.  The program announcer, I think her name was Tess, announced, “Of course, while we focus on savings next week the President would much rather you went shopping, to save the economy of course.  That message is music to the ears of Zoe Webster.  She wrote to tell us that she’s been a saver all her life and she’s sick of it.”  I thought this is going to be very interesting; very interesting.  This is what Zoe Webster’s story was, and I heard this as I was hurtling through space on I-35.

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When I first met Max he was in about the sixth grade.  Max was large for his age, he was awkward, he was clumsy, and frankly he was not very comfortable in his own skin.  He was the only child of a single mom, and in school one would have thought because of his size that he should be the center in the football team, but no, Max was in the band.  Early on, his mom saw that he had an incredible ability for music and she was not about to let Max squander that.  She wanted him to become disciplined in his practice, and so she encouraged him, and she nudged him, and nurtured him and cajoled him and then forced him to be more disciplined.  And you know what, she also encouraged that discipline when it came to church attendance, too.  She made certain that she and Max were in church every Sunday morning, and he was supposed to be in those youth activities on Sunday nights, and he participated fully.

(…excerpt from podcast)