“I’m taking a coffee break. You want me to make you some?” my brother Sam asked. “Definitely,” I replied. Today is a three-cup day. We sat at the round mahogany table that my granddad made.

This is where Sam and I sit for our two o’clock coffee break most days. We both work from home, and we stop here for meals and conversation. We check in: “What are you working on today?” “How is such and such coming along?” We bounce ideas around, and just let the conversation drift.  When I get excited about something I’ve read, Sam is patient to let me ramble about it. Sam talks through dreams that he’ll shape into clay characters when he goes back to work.

Here we remain, working together. We don’t do the same things. We work in different rooms and different materials – music and clay. All the same, we work together. If you ever visit the house you’ll be greeted by Sam’s grinning company of coffee trolls and dragons that read bedtime stories to little boys and girls perched upon their backs or tails. And there’s always a guitar at hand and usually a song on standby.

This week, I’ve been struggling again to write. I wrote half the day yesterday, and deleted every word in the end. When today’s coffee break was over, I complained to Sam that I had nothing to write about for the podcast. “What should I write about, Sam?” And he said, “Well, you know how some really good words have gotten a bad feeling attached to them? Like obedience, for instance?”  

I do know. I know because I used to feel like obedience was a bad word. Here’s what that word felt like to me for most of my life:

…I would see a stranger growling out orders. We were not on the same team. The strange loud commander would point off to the distance where I would be sent to perform some arbitrary task. It would be a task that made no sense to me, that I cared nothing about, and that I would inevitably make a fool of myself failing to do well. Then I’d slump back to the commander to be evaluated and sent out to perform more tasks.  

Obedience was a word that signaled isolation and embarrassment.

I knew I was supposed to obey, but I couldn’t find any way in my imagination for Obedience and Joy to cohere. So the liturgical prayer that lodged in my memory from church growing up – Free us for joyful obedience – was memorable for all the wrong reasons. It was stuck in my mind because it seemed like a non-sequitur. I couldn’t make sense of it. How in the world could you plant isolation and embarrassment in the ground and joy be the fruit?

For years, I took it on faith that there just must be something I was missing. I was willing to entertain the possibility that the ancient tradition of attaching joy to obedience held a truth about life that I didn’t yet know. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve found that it’s pretty much always true that when some long-standing teaching of Christianity doesn’t make sense to me it’s an invitation to investigate and discover some harmony my ears hadn’t known to listen for. Maybe the seeming non-sequitur was really a forgotten interval with astonishing overtones?

So what made the change? Well, it was a passage I’d read and heard many times. The Gospel of John Chapter 15. The Vine and the branches. Here’s how it starts; Jesus says,  

I am the true vine and my Father is the gardener. He takes away every branch that does not bear fruit in me. He prunes every branch that bears fruit so that it will bear more fruit. You are clean already because of the word that I have spoken to you. Abide in me, and I will abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it remains in the vine, so neither can you unless you remain in me.

Gardens and fruit and a lot of talk about abiding. Whatever abiding means, it means to be close to someone like living in the same house. There’s more than proximity – there’s literal ongoing physical contact. Branches aren’t just near a vine, they’re touching it. This is about being lovingly bonded to another person. Jesus goes on…

I am the vine; you are the branches. The one who remains in me – and I in him – bears much fruit, because apart from me you can accomplish nothing. If anyone does not remain in me, he is thrown out like a branch, and dries up; and such branches are gathered up and thrown into the fire, and are burned up.

So, there’s a kind of transfusion of life going on here. The sap is being intravenously fed to the branches that would otherwise be withering apart from the vine. So far so good, but it was really the next part that dislodged my sad associations with the word obedience. Jesus says…

Just like the Father has loved me, I have also loved you; remain in my love. If you obey my commandments, you will remain in my love, just like I have obeyed my Father’s commandments and remain in his love.

Ok, let me stop here. So far we’ve got Abide or remain, right? How do we abide?  By obeying. Obeying what? Jesus’s commandments. Okay, what comes next? Jesus says…

I have told you these things so that my joy may be in you, and your joy may be complete.

Well, there’s my old hang-up! Jesus says this is all about joy. Abiding leads to obeying leads to commands which lead to… joy? So what’s the command?

My commandment is this – to love one another just like I have loved you. No one has greater love than this – than to lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I no longer call you slaves, because the slave does not understand what his master is doing. But I have called you friends, because I have revealed to you everything I heard from my Father.

Wait, so obedience is about friendship? And abiding is just something the Father and the Son do, and now we’ve been elevated from slaves outside of their family business to friends and children who are participating in it?

I had always thought obedience meant to be sent away from God; Jesus says, no, it’s to be bonded to him. I had always thought obedience was to be told to go “over there” and do some random task; Jesus says, no, it’s to be invited “over here” to “do with God what he’s already doing”. I thought obedience was something slaves had to do for slave-drivers; Jesus says, no, it’s something friends do together for one another. I had thought it was a trap set to embarrass me; Jesus says, no, you’re already clean; obedience is when you have a place in a family where you bring your gifts to bear.

It turns out joy and obedience do belong together, because obedience is ultimately about being together with the one who died for his friends. One who invites any and all to come live with him, to join the family business. Obedience is to be made a real participant in the beautiful life of God, to go where he goes and do with him what he is already doing.  

When we pray, “Lord, I want to be with you where you are,” we are talking about obedience. We’re talking about friendship, family, and cultivating a fruitful garden together – and gardens lead to tables set with feasts, don’t they? Yes. Friends, we’re talking about joy.

Links: 

Visit: www.thecultivatingproject.com 

Learn more and register for Cofferstowe here: www.cofferstowe.com