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In the year 1914 not long after the Titanic sank, Congress convened a hearing to discuss another tragic ship accident. Earlier that year in January, there was thick fog off the coast of Virginia. A merchant vessel named the Nantucket rammed into the steamship Monroe. The Monroe tragically sank and 41 sailors lost their lives in the freezing Atlantic waters that night.
The captain of the Nantucket, Osmyn Berry, was brought to trial. But during the trial, Captain Edward Johnson of the Monroe was also grilled for over 5 hours. In the cross-examination, they learned that Captain Johnson (of the ship that sank) used a compass that had not been adjusted in more than a year. The NYT reported that the compass, “deviated as much as two degrees from the standard magnetic compass. Captain Johnson said the instrument was sufficiently true to run the ship, and that it was the custom of masters in the coastwide trade to use such compasses.”
While the compass had seemed to be sufficient to navigate his ship, it was eventually (and tragically) proved otherwise.
The Times reported that “Later the two Captains met, clasped hands, and sobbed on each other’s shoulders. The sobs of these two burley seamen,” the times wrote, “remind us of the tragic consequences of misorientation.”
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In today’s gospel reading, Jesus describes himself similar to a north star the homing device, the magnet that pulls us onto the course of life. At the same time, he’s the one that nudges, when we’re off kilter, to fix that course.
He’s the dance instructor that gets us to move in time with the music. He’s the coach that gets the team to play together. He’s the gardener that prunes the vines and gets them to grow in a certain fashion. Jesus emphasizes the need to orient our hearts towards him. But it’s not a one and done process. It’s a watchful process where the branches of our hearts are trained and pruned. In this, the unhealthy suckers or excess branches are trimmed off so that we direct our energy to cultivating the good stuff.
“I am the vine.” Jesus says. “You are the branches,” You have been pruned by my teachings. You have been shaped by my words.
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In the gospel of John, Jesus is famously talkative. On the night he was betrayed, Jesus grabbed the mic, and he didn’t give it back for a very long time. He had a lot to say, especially in this final night with his disciples. His teachings are many and those teachings are a north star. We orient our lives by them.
I mean, theoretically…
…right?
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It was the philosopher, Renee Descartes who said “I think, therefore I am.” Ever since he said this about 500 years ago, we have been really good at thinking. And we love thinking about the good ideas of Jesus.
Have you ever experienced a gap between the things you know and the things you do? Maybe the doctor tells you that you need to watch your cholesterol. But… you’re one of those people that agrees with me that butter is truly one of the finest foods on earth. (That’s to say nothing of bacon.)
And there you have it. You get it. You know you need to adjust. But you don’t.
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A couple of years ago, I ripped the facia in my foot. To this day, I’m not entirely sure how it happened. It was kind of an unusual injury and it took almost a year of PT to fix it. Eventually, the doctor traced the tear back (in part) to an old skiing injury from when I was 19 years old. It turns out that for many, many years, I had been almost imperceptibly favoring one of my legs so much so that I walked, ever so slightly, off kilter.
It was very subtle, but I had trained my body to walk, jog, jump, etc in such a way that I was unconsciously protecting one leg and stressing the other one out until something in my foot ripped.
When I realized I needed to change how I walk, I didn’t have the slightest idea how to do that. In fact, before the excruciating rip in my foot, I didn’t even know there was a problem. Fixing this problem was easier said than done. It wasn’t as easy as taking my ship’s compass to be recalibrated. In my case, it involved a wise physical therapist who guided me in lots of maddening little movements with exercise bands to intentionally retrain my leg and slowly rebuild that muscle. Turns out I had to train, rinse, repeat, train, rinse, repeat… until it was second nature and I walked, jogged and jumped the way I was designed to.
I had to do it until it became a habit.
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Maybe you really long to be like Jesus (here’s hoping that’s a little of the case given that if you’re sitting here in church this morning). Maybe you even drink up biblical ideas, and love learning reflecting about God. Great!
Captain Berry of the Nantucket knew he needed that compass adjusted. He knew he was sailing slightly off kilter. But, knowing wasn’t enough. After all, he couldn’t think his ship back on to the right course. He needed to adjust his compass.
We might have the best of intentions.
We might love all the right things on paper.
We might think Jesus’ ideas are great, smart and inspiring.
But we can’t think our way into holiness.
Just as you can train a plant to grow in a certain direction by pruning certain branches, we can train our hearts to grow in a certain way. We do this by practicing subtle exercises that will train and strengthen the love muscles of our souls.
If you want to learn to play the piano, you can read about music and even about music theory until you are blue in the face, but only by practicing and actually playing will you get there.
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I cannot say what exactly the daily patterns of your life are. But I do know that there are patterns—or let’s even call them rituals—to how we live our lives that subtly form us.
There’s an old secular parable that says “there are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ The two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, ‘What the hell is water?;”
So often, we don’t see the habits of our daily lives (good or bad!). We don’t see the skiing accident from when we were 19. We don’t see the magnets that pull us off course and teach us to worship other gods. We have to intentionally identify the patterns (the rituals) we’re immersed in and then work towards cultivating different ones that teach us to love.
Maybe you practice love through the way you approach people in your daily life, at the grocery store, at school, on your work team or on the corner where all the neighbors hang out with their dogs talking. Maybe you have a habit of eating dinner with people you love at least a couple times a week.
Those are likely good habits that cultivate love in your soul. I hate to break it to you, but you most certainly have some habits that are less charitable than these.
Maybe, you’re habitually cranky with your family in private but no one knows it because you’re a gem in public. Maybe, you are skilled at complaining about people behind their backs. Perhaps you have a pattern of, every time you leave a social event, picking everyone apart with your spouse or friend. Or, every time you read news about politics that differ from yours, you rage against people on the other side.
Whatever it is, that habit of loving (or not loving) is going to work on your heart.
I’m hoping you all can see that participation in a religious community like this one, or a regular practice of worship, or even serving in this sanctuary on a Sunday morning, is also a habit that forms us.
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In the 30th chapter of Deuteronomy, God tells the Israelites, through Moses, to trim, shape and fashion their hearts so that they might be fruitful in the land. Today, most of us read the Old Testament in English but the apostle John read it in Greek. When he wrote about Jesus’ vine and branches recap in his gospel, John lifted out this quirky Greek word from that 30th chapter of Deuteronomy and he used it to say that our hearts are "pruned" by God.
God works on us, shapes our hearts, forms and fashions us so that, just like the ancient Israelites, and generations passed, we too might bear fruit in the land.
As people of faith, as disciples of Jesus, we have to work on loving and fine tune it until it becomes habitual or as the letter of 1 John says until it is “perfected” in us. We do this until it becomes a part of our subconscious and bubbles up without even thinking about.
The way we weave love as a lifestyle into our subconscious is through practicing. Through training, retraining and recalibrating our hearts.
What are the habits you have that do something to you? What kind of person do those habits want you to become (for better or worse)? What practice is God calling you to cultivate in your heart?
Go find your gardening tools. Take your compass into the shop. For God desires abundant life for us. In fact, God desires abundant life for all of creation.
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