I Am Because You Are

5 Easter, Year B 
May 3, 2015

Saint Mark’s Episcopal Church, Bay City, TX

1 John 4:7-21
John 15:1-8

I’m going to talk today about a concept called “Ubuntu”.  Ubuntu comes from the Bantu language in southern Africa, and roughly translates as “humanity toward others”.  Ubuntu is also a concept of our interconnectedness as people, the basic idea being, “I am because you are.”   We are not human beings by ourselves, and we cannot be truly human without others.

Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the first black archbishop of Cape Town South Africa, spoke often of the concept of Ubuntu in his and a major voice in ending apartheid there.  He preached peace and reconciliation

Of Ubunto, he said:

Ubuntu is a concept that we have in our Bantu languages at home.  Ubuntu is the essence of being a person. It means that we are people through other people. We can’t be fully human alone. We are made for interdependence, we are made for family. Indeed, my humanity is caught up in your humanity, and when your humanity is enhanced mine is enhanced as well. Likewise, when you are dehumanized, inexorably, I am dehumanized as well. As an individual, when you have Ubuntu, you embrace others. You are generous, compassionate.

As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. preached,

In a real sense all life is inter-related. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.  Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.

This doesn’t exactly square with rugged American individualism, but Ubuntu does square with Jesus’ teachings. 

Ubuntu is the essence of Jesus’ teaching about the vine.  Jesus is the vine.  His Father is the vinegrower.  We are the branches.  We are connected to one another, even when we feel that we are disconnected.  These feelings of disconnection were made clear again last week with the riots and looting in Baltimore, following the death of a man while in police custody. 

Folks seemed to feel they were on different vines than each other.  I doubt if one of the looters saw his best friends’ store, that he would harm it.  Seeing a strangers’ store, however, it seemed like something on a different vine.  I’m not defending the looting.  It was wrong.  It highlights, however, that people feel very disconnected from each other, even as if on two different vines which attack each other then in contact. 

In reality, we all belong to one another, and none of us can grow as we should when some of us are not growing as we should. 

It only seems right, then, that Jesus talks not only of pruning those branches that do bear fruit, so they can grow more fully, but Jesus also talks of cutting off and casting away those branches that do not bear fruit.  The branches that do not abide in him are cut off. 

We hear this part of the parable and may be a bit scared by it.  I always was.  There always seemed this threat that you better abide in Jesus or else.  Jesus’ teaching about the vine seems, however, to be less of a threat and more of a description of how life is.  If we don’t abide in God, the source of all life, then how can we flourish and bear fruit?  If we don’t abide in Jesus, then we’ve severed our connection to life already.  “Being cut off” is then finishing that removal, that disconnection. 

This does not give us the authority to determine who is cut off.  As I’ve said for the past couple of weeks, we don’t get to say that someone isn’t good enough or Christian enough and therefore kick them out. 

God does the cutting, not the branches. 

What we are to do is to live Ubuntu, to abide in love.  That’s what we hear in 1 John, “if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us.”  Loving one another is how we abide in Jesus.  Abiding in Jesus is how we bear fruit. 

We have an opportunity this fall to live Ubuntu as we will be mentoring children in Linnie Roberts Elementary School.  The kids we will be mentoring may not have the best situation at home.  Their parents may be struggling to provide the necessities and may be suffering under that stress. 

The lives of these kids may seem like a different vine. 

They aren’t.

We’re all on the same vine. 

We’ve got a chance to live that truth out, providing love and encouragement for children who need it.  We have an opportunity to live love and to bear fruit as Jesus told us to. 

In order to bear fruit, we are dependent not only on Jesus, the true vine, and we are dependent not only on God, the vine dresser.  We are interdependent on each other.  Amen.