Preached on the Fifth Sunday of Easter (Year B), April 28, 2024, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington by The Reverend Stephen Crippen.
Acts 8:26-40
Psalm 22:24-30
1 John 4:7-21
John 15:1-8
The Vine and Branches, by Soloman Raj
I made it all the way to the seventeenth book in Louise Penny’s mystery series before I burst into tears. I am a person of deep and powerful feelings, but that’s how difficult it is for me to cry. My problem is an ordinary, predictable one: I was socialized as a boy in the upper Midwest by the children of prairie farmers. Boys don’t cry. Farmers don’t cry. Midwesterners definitely don’t cry.
I wish this were not so, if only because, as Rosey Grier sings so memorably in that 1970s musical, Free to Be You and Me, “It’s alright to cry; crying gets the sad out of you.” And in these days of vocational challenges and personal grief, I surely have “sad in me.” But we all do, don’t we? We feel furious sadness as we lament the relentless warfare that ravages Philip’s wilderness road from Jerusalem to Gaza. We lose sleep contemplating climate devastation and our precarious, beleaguered democracy. It’s rough out there, and our gathered community is in profound need of the Good News. It is alright to cry.
So maybe you think I need a new author, someone who doesn’t have to write seventeen books to get me to cry. In fact I do need a new author: I’ve finished Louise Penny’s eighteen published mysteries, and number 19 doesn’t come out until October. But it’s really not her fault that it took her so long to find the sad in me and get it out. She’s good. She’s insightful and funny, and she has a knack for finding and reflecting on deep truths. I recommend her. And her characters cry plenty themselves, and they deeply move me.
But ultimately, I will forever be thankful to and for Louise Penny for creating one character in particular. His name — right out of French Canada – is Jean-Guy Beauvoir. Jean-Guy: it’s one of those fun French names that Anglophones like me love to say. Jean-Guy. (The Trekkie in me also loves Jean-Luc.) Jean-Guy Beauvoir is not the hero of the novels. The hero is Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, Jean-Guy’s boss.
Now, Armand and Jean-Guy are police officers, but Louise Penny takes great care to portray them not just heroically, but also honestly, and she returns often to the atrocious problem of police brutality as our earnest characters try to do the right thing and solve crimes. Often enough, the bad guys in her novels are other cops. And sadly, for a little while in the middle of the series, Jean-Guy takes a job with a corrupt detachment.
Somehow he manages to safeguard his good character even in the darkest nights of his soul, but it’s touch and go for a while, as Jean-Guy descends into the madness and despair of opioid addiction and breaks his relationships with everyone in his life, including his boss, Armand Gamache. In the depths of addiction and self-destruction, Jean-Guy begins to hate his former boss, and maybe you can understand why. When you’re betraying the people you love by betraying your own best self, the people you love and respect the most can’t help but be living reminders of your wretchedness. As Jean-Guy Beauvoir was dying by slow suicide, his love for Gamache curdled into dreadful rage.
Jean-Guy’s addiction story is much more harrowing than my own, so I anxiously read my way through his descent among the dead. “Oh Jean-Guy,” I’d murmur, as I watched this impressive but flawed young man make a mess of his life. Jean-Guy is a sharp, dry, world-wise kind of person who loves rich food and frowns sarcastically at the freer spirits around him. He’s difficult, handsome, funny, impatient, and all too willing to listen to his inner demons. Oh, how I love Jean-Guy.
I’ll now share a story from Jean-Guy’s worst days, when he was in the lethal throes of addiction and had joined a corrupt and brutal detachment of the Quebec police force. Jean-Guy and Armand had pointedly avoided each other, working on separate floors of the building. But then, one day, Chief Inspector Gamache comes to work with his German Shepherd dog, named Henri. Gamache, Henri, and Gamache’s new second-in-command, Isabelle Lacoste, signal an elevator to attend a meeting upstairs. The doors open, and… well, you can guess who’s inside. Here’s the scene:
“Jean-Guy Beauvoir despised Armand Gamache. This wasn’t an act. Isabelle Lacoste wondered what would have happened if she hadn’t been in the elevator with them. Two armed men. And one with the advantage, if it could be called that, of near bottomless rage. Here was a man with a gun and nothing more to lose. If Jean-Guy Beauvoir loathed Gamache, Lacoste wondered how the Chief felt. She studied [Gamache] again in the scratched and dented elevator door. He seemed perfectly at ease…
[Then Gamache’s dog Henri’s] huge brown eyes glanced up at the man beside him. Not the one who held his leash. But the other man. A familiar man. [Floor] 14… [Floor] 15.
The elevator stopped and the door opened... Gamache held it open for Lacoste and she left as quickly as possible… But before Gamache could step out, Henri turned to Beauvoir, and licked his hand. Beauvoir pulled it back, as though scalded.
The German shepherd followed the Chief from the elevator. And the doors closed behind them. As the three walked toward the glass doors into the homicide division, Lacoste noticed that the hand that held the leash trembled. It was slight, but it was there. And Lacoste realized that Gamache had perfect control over Henri... He could have held the leash tight, preventing the German Shepherd from getting anywhere close to Beauvoir. But Gamache hadn’t. He [had] allowed the lick. [He had] allowed the small kiss.”
Oh, I loved that dog for licking Jean-Guy’s hand, and I loved his brave, faithful, and loving owner who allowed this kind gesture to happen. Even in the moments when their friendship was in grave peril, their connection was not lost.
And that is what we are talking about when we share, again and again, these precious stories from the Good News according to John, stories of Jesus, the One who abides with us, the One who never breaks the connection, the One who descends the length of the universe to board our elevator right here, just here, where we have almost given up all hope.
“I am the vine, you are the branches,” Jesus says, and it’s easy to miss the wrenching intimacy in that image. Vine and branches: they can’t separate; they are bound together; they are ride-or-die.
And so we watch as Jesus feeds Judas Iscariot alongside all his other companions, and then reclines quietly as Judas goes into the night to betray him. We watch as the risen Jesus appears to his male disciples, even though all but one of them abandoned him in his fatal hour. (The women disciples, like Isabelle Lacoste, stayed faithfully with Jesus, of course.) We watch as Jesus carefully repairs his friendship with Peter, after a seaside breakfast, walking back Peter’s three denials with a threefold conversation about their love for each other.
Jesus feeds his betrayer. Jesus appears to his faithless friends. Jesus repairs a relationship shattered by his friend’s fear and foolishness.
“I am the vine, you are the branches,” Jesus says. This is one of the seven great I AM statements in the Good News according to John. Each of them begins with the significant, resonant “I AM,” a conscious reference to God revealing God’s name to Moses at the burning thornbush, where God says, “I AM WHO I AM.” We are meant to hear the booming Exodus echo of “I AM” when Jesus says, “I AM the bread of life; I AM the light of the world; I AM the resurrection and the life; I AM the way, the truth, and the life; I AM the door [to the sheepfold]; I AM the Good Shepherd; I AM the vine.” But only the I AM statement about the vine tells us who we are. “I am the vine, you are the branches,” Jesus says. That’s unique among these seven majestic proclamations.
We are the branches. Our identity is fused with the identity of Jesus. Forever. We abide intimately with Jesus. Forever. And in Jesus, our identities are fused with one another, and we abide intimately with one another. Forever.
And if you’re looking for me in all of this, come over here where I’m sitting next to my beloved friend, Jean-Guy Beauvoir, a troubled but beautiful soul, a good man but a flawed human, a sardonic but passionate public servant who is trying not to drink or use today. A bunch of mystery novels ago, Jean-Guy tensely stood in an elevator while his greatest friend revealed his enduring, indestructible love for him. And now, in grateful recovery, Jean-Guy is healthy, married to Gamache’s daughter, and the passionate, good, fierce father of two children.
Finally, at great long last, seventeen books into their friendship, Louise Penny gives Armand Gamache the line that got the sad out of me, the words I wished so long for him to say. Here is what this good man said to his ride-or-die friend, fused forever with him like a branch to a vine:
“As Jean-Guy slipped by, Armand laid a hand on his arm. ‘You don't look anything like me,’ he said. ‘But you're still my son.’”