We’ve been talking about living as if you’ve already died. And during Lent we spoke a great deal about what we need to die to; how we need to separate ourselves from the ways of the perishing, those who do not live the lives of mercy, love and tending to the suffering. And we admit that it is very difficult in the time and place we find ourselves in.

And so tonight our scripture reminds us that we can’t possibly do this by ourselves. We can’t without specifically abiding in Christ, or, to use a more colloquial word, remaining in Christ. I’ve said before that a relationship with God takes work; prayer, meditation, contemplation, reading scripture, and the intimate act of the Eucharist.

The metaphor of the vine is a good metaphor for this, a good way of thinking about the importance of cultivating a relationship with God through Jesus. It may be John’s writing style or a lack of agricultural understanding, but I find this passage brings a somewhat limited understanding of a relationship with Jesus Christ. It is true that from Christ I get power, or metaphorically sap or however the branch feeds the vine. I get strength to deal with what I can’t handle on my own – overcoming my social anxiety in order to do justice work for example. It’s in John’s letter, though, that I get a sense of what abiding in Christ really means.

We love because he first loved us. It’s not enough to take John’s word on this. To truly abide in Christ we have to develop our own sense of this. I used to say I never understood God’s love until I got into a relationship where someone actually showed me what real love is. Nowadays however, I see and understand that people did truly love me prior to that relationship. What I took as “true” love was the experience of someone delighting in me.

And that’s my personal take on God’s words at Jesus’ baptism, “In whom I am well pleased.” There’s a tendency to read merit into those words. I rather hear that as akin to what I experienced with my ex. She showed joy in my mere presence, admiration of my little quirks, giddiness in seeing my own joy, and more - Which is not to say we didn’t have our differences and arguments. What I should be clear about is that these displays of love continued well past the honeymoon period. They were genuine and sincere.

Jesus tells us that God has counted every hair on our head. That’s how much God delights in us. Embrace that, sink into it, God, creator of the entire Universe, doesn’t dispassionately love us, but loves us joyfully. So what is there to fear? Abiding in this is how we live as if we’re already dead.

Like anything else on the spiritual journey, this takes work. One technique I was taught was to imagine someone you know loved you, a relative or friend that had passed on, to imagine them embracing you from behind and saying “I love you” as you prayed or meditated. Eventually, over time, I came to understand that as God saying it.

There are certainly more ways to pray and meditate on this, ways that may suit you better. I will tell you when I first started cultivating this sense of God’s love there was a lot of pushback from my internalized negative messages. It wasn’t pleasant work. Get support in doing this.

A lot of Christians, myself included, were taught to love our neighbors instead of ourselves, not as ourselves. We equate self-love with narcissism. But seriously, there are times and places in the Christian year for self-examination and righting our wrongs. In Easter we do not say the confession, because this is the time to learn to abide in God’s joy in our mere existence. To find joy not just in Christ’s resurrection, but that it was for delight in us, that the cross, tomb and resurrection happened.

To love others, our neighbors, our enemies even, we need to abide in God’s love for us. It’s the only way it can happen. In this world, loving ourselves can be the hardest thing of all. Especially if you’re not a white, straight, wealthy, Anglo-Saxon, protestant cis man, because if you are not, you’ve been told in one way or another that you’re fundamentally wrong. The work of Christ is ahead of us, for now, finding joy in God’s love for us, for each other and for ourselves is our task.