A few years ago I was coming out of a slump in my faith. Some confessions call this backsliding, some call it lapsing, and I was close to giving up altogether and becoming yet another "none" or one who marks "none" under religious affiliation. I did not stop believing in God, but I certainly stopped trying to be a disciple. Several things then happened beginning in around 2014. Our family as a whole became captured by the plight of a small Anglo-Catholic parish in Phoenix that suffered a fire and we went to see, and slowly the fire of discipleship rekindled. Then I participated in a seminar to learn a new style of catechesis, of training newcomers about the faith they were about to embrace. There I met someone on his own faith journey, working through his process to become a priest in the Church. His example spoke to me, his counsel encouraged me, and thanks to his encouragement I began my process to become a Dominican friar. On a side note I was privileged to attend and serve at his ordination to the sacred order of the priesthood yesterday.
The core of that encouragement was discipleship, that is, abiding in Jesus. Our Gospel for Mass today (St. John 15.1-8) speaks of Our Lord being the Vine and we the Branches of that Vine. The gist of the passage is that we must graft ourselves in him like a new varietal branch on established stock. This means, as the Epistle (1 Jn. 4.7-21) expressed, we must follow His way of love to abide in Him. It is clear: if we hate people, we aren't abiding in His love. If we make exceptions to exlude those we do not like, we are having no part of what he came for. And without abiding in Him, we become dead and essentially fall off. A favourite author of mine once wrote, "Hate is a sterile thing," and that is the truth. Hate kills everything around it. Do we turn our backs on people because they are the wrong denomination or religion? Because they are the wrong tribe, nationality, race, or political party? Because they are a complete and total nutcase? (Yes, those are VERY difficult to love, and no one promised it would be easy!)
If St. Philip had been wary of strangers, non-Jews, he would have perhaps decided not to talk about Our Lord to the Ethiopian courtier he met on the road, and so the seeds that later bloomed in the third and fourth centuries to become one of the great Christian civilizations would not have come to be (our reading in Acts 8.26-40 tells the story). Much of our woes in the United States and indeed the West and the rest of the world is because of this exclusionary hatred, that fear of the other, and the idolatry of the self and those like our selves. Indeed, that is the crux of the matter. Not abiding in Jesus, who is the perfect image of the Father, is not to abide in the Father, and that failure is idolatry. We end up abiding elsewhere, and we wither, and we die. Not the biological death necessarily, but definitely spiritually.
Mosaic of peacocks and grape vines, Byazanine 6th century, Antioch