Our Sunday Message

The Vine and the Branches: John 15:1-8
Rev. Richard Wright
May 14, 2006
Fifth Sunday of Eastertide

  We find ourselves on the city streets of Jerusalem and there is tension in the air. Jesus and his friends have left the upper room and along those same city streets stood the Temple. At the entrance of the Temple there were steps that led to a linen curtain covered with purple, scarlet, and blue flowers. Solid gold chains hung alongside the curtain from the door beam and above that curtain was a large grapevine of pure gold that represented Israel, the vine of God. It was customary to have the wealthy citizens bring gifts and offer them up as decoration for this golden vine. Furthermore, the beautiful vine captured an accurate interpretation of God as the one who tended to the needs of his people and provided protection along the way.
  Now we find Jesus walking the streets introducing a new way in which he would relate to his disciples. You can imagine the surprise of his listeners when he began to describe himself as the vine. No longer is it necessary to offer your gifts as before; Jesus says now my desire is for you to offer your entire lives to me.
  On this night, he has gathered his friends together to comfort their fears. For the disciples were not immune to uncertainty either. In addition, Jesus simply needed companionship. Jesus… needed his friends.
  This may have not been the first time that Jesus needed his friends. But tonight is different. It is a dreadful night, one of fear, doubt, and vagueness; and the disciples are in need of valuable information. After all, they have entered the city for the last time, their teacher is speaking about his impending death, and they are experiencing emotions ranging from shame to even disillusionment.
  Keep in mind that it has only been a few years since Jesus first asked his followers to drop everything in order to be identified with his way, a new way. The feelings of his followers in this late passage were not too different than those first few encounters with Jesus. This is because just like those first few days, there is an anxiety about the future. However, instead of questions about how to live now that Jesus has arrived, the questions are now about how we are going to live after he is gone.
  I often wonder what my reaction would have been if the person into which I had poured my life began to tell me of his departure. So I will ask you the question. Do you ever feel that the original 12 disciples had a distinct faith advantage over you? I have read works by Bonhoeffer that explain in vivid detail the reason why the early followers of Christ did not have a faith advantage over modern day Christians. To believe otherwise would be to discredit the sending and presence of the Holy Spirit among all believers.
  But something still tugs at me and tries to convince me otherwise. After all, Jesus was there among them and he spoke in ways that would surely convince listeners that in order to truly live, they must place their trust in him. But would it really be that easy? Would we listen to his words as the ultimate truth and identify ourselves with him if he was standing before us, or would we be quick to dismiss his statements as being a bit over the top?
  The truth, and this may be a surprise, is that the faith advantage is distinctly ours because the Heavenly Father has sent an Advocate, the Holy Spirit. Beforehand, Jesus could only be in one place at a time, accessible to only a few. But now Jesus says he will remain in all of us if we remain in him. Jesus now dwells within us through the power of the Holy Spirit.
  I say all of this concerning faith advantage and faith disadvantage because we must be honest about the tension that was present among the disciples. Their uncertain fears are not so far removed from our fears of uncertainty. Often faith and doubt go hand in hand. Yet we have the Holy Spirit working with in us in a way that the disciples did not. The faith advantage is ours.
  “What will it mean to truly follow Jesus when he is gone?” they most surely asked. “What will it mean to live in the Spirit?” These are the real questions that materialized over time and we have to resist the temptation to take them out of context and simply interpret them as nice words of encouragement. Jesus is not simply encouraging the disciples to be good fruit bearers. Neither is he telling them to simply remember his teachings. Rather, he is asking for full spiritual participation; participation in his life, his impending death, and his startling, unrealized resurrection. It would be participation with the one who came and planted himself deeply in the hearts of humankind.
  And for this reason, the teachings of the vine and the branches must be seen as vital to our existence. If we resist seeing them as so then we give into this trendy gospel of encouragement; a gospel that is gaining a considerable amount of headway in the American church; a gospel that keeps God at a safe distance and is individualized in such a way that talk of being completely dependent on God is foreign.
  Rather, the words of Christ must touch us at our core for they are not simply there to help us get along better in our lives. Kenda Creasy Dean, a professor at Princeton Theological Seminary has a term for it. She refers to this cultural crisis that has made its way into the church as “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism”. Moralistic because this line of thinking about the Devine is primarily based on God just making us into better people, therapeutic because it is mostly concerned with just helping us get along in life with the central goal of making us happy, and deism because it has a thin veneer of God-talk that goes along with it. Jesus’ metaphor of the vine and the branches stands in stark contrast with this cultural shift because without experiencing God as necessary to our spiritual survival, it is impossible to live a fruitful life.
  I recently had the honor of listening to a lecture by Harold Recinos from the Perkins School of Theology. Dr. Recinos spoke about his life and the need for the liberating gospel to be taken up by the church. He grew up in the South Bronx where even local missionaries were afraid to live and serve. He spoke about his early childhood addiction to heroine and how finding a Bible, while resting on the floor in a windowless housing complex, changed his life. Being an addict was at that time romanticized by the musicians and artists in the NY area but the only art form that he excelled in was how to best find food in trash cans as a boy. In addition, he spent many years attempting to articulate why his 9 year old friend died by a knife that was actually intended for him.
  He noticed one day that the musicians of his time, although the music may not appeal to everyone and is often offensive, contained a common thread crying out for change in an unfair world. Recinos learned throughout his victimized adolescence that Jesus dropped many lyrical bombshells similar to the rappers and edgy musicians of his day.
  Jesus came from across town and challenged the status quo and the accepted traditions of the day. And just as the poor, under-privileged inner city youth of today gather to sing about injustice, crime, and the call for change; Jesus who came from the other side of town, spoke in his own way telling people to do outlandish things such as love enemies no matter who they are, to leave their possessions for him, and in this case be liberated not by following religious law but by abiding in him like a branch remains on a vine. This is an entirely different type of expression because his own disciples were accustomed to Israel being the vineyard of God. Now Jesus is proclaiming that it is not about national identity. Rather, true life now rests on identifying yourself with the one True Vine, Jesus Christ.
  From the very beginning of chapter 15, Jesus sets the stage as he describes a relationship of love and intimacy that would exist between the Holy Spirit and the believer. It is a relationship or connectedness that involves protection, continuous care, and sometimes pruning. Sometimes the branch has to be trimmed up a bit in order to allow new growth to take place.
  As I read the metaphor of the branches and the vine, I am unaware of any passage in the Bible that better expresses the love and intimacy that exists between Jesus and his followers. Indeed Jesus is the great shepherd as he watches over us. Indeed he is the bread of life that sustains us. He is the door. He is the way, he is the truth, and he is the life. He is the resurrection. But there is no other passage that expresses the connectedness, the dependence, and God’s intimate love as the metaphor of the vine and the branches.
  As branches, we must accept the fact that we are utterly dependent on the vine that gives us life.
  When you stop and think about it, a branch is incapable of doing much on its own. In fact, I’m fairly sure that this was the point he was making. And to me, this is liberating because any good fruit that comes from me is purely and literally from Christ, the True Vine, who planted himself in this world many centuries ago and has now planted himself in your heart. Or as Jerome NyRie claims, “this final I am expression is the criterion of authentic discipleship, linking those who make such a confession…with the world above.” “I am the vine, you are the branches,” Jesus says.
  This is a strange terminology for our American ears. We are busy and we are taught to always be busy. If anything, we have been instructed not to behave like branches and simply remain. But in a way that Jesus is saying just that.
  “Abide in me and I will abide in you.” Or to paraphrase, “Behave like a branch and receive from me the only possible chance of having a worthy existence that produces grapes for the world around you. To do otherwise is to be alone.” Abide in him and he will abide in us; behave like a branch as a branch does nothing.
  Now behaving like a branch is not exactly going to get the 1st Century church off to a good start is it? “And what about those acts of healing?” “What about the many commandments to work on behalf of the less fortunate?” “What about the church’s role in social injustice and mission work?” “Is it really OK to simply rest and do what a branch does….meaning nothing?”
  Well yes…but also no. For it is a spiritual discipline in and of itself. To simply rest in the presence of the risen Christ and draw from his life is not easy. But it must begin with having the courage to stop, rest, and rediscover the fact that there is little good in us outside of the workings of Christ.
  To tell you the truth, through the years I’ve lost a certain amount of confidence in humankind to do any good outside of some type of spiritual connection. The non-religious, humanistic vine of our world will always be there and has always been in existence. The fruit of this worldly vine offers a tantalizing fruit that all of us have bitten at one time in our lives. None of us are immune from having to deal with this vine of the world but we all must eventually make a choice about what type of branch we would like to be. Marcus Borg, in his book The Heart of Christianity, tells a true story that expresses the seriousness of the predicament that characterizes all human beings.
  It was an exciting time for a family that had just brought their newborn baby home from the hospital. It was their second child. The first one was a girl and the second a boy. The parents thought it very peculiar when the older sibling asked if she could remain in the room along with the baby while he took his first nap in the house. You can imagine their reservations concerning the strange request. “What if the girl tries to pick the baby up? What if she is noisy and disturbs the baby’s sleep? But the parents gave in to the request, shut the door behind them, and did what all parents would do….they darted to the monitor so they could hear every sound in the baby’s room.
  It didn’t take long for those tiny footsteps of the daughter to be heard tiptoeing across the room but to the parents’ astonishment, they heard the four year old girl pose a request to her new baby brother. She looked down at the baby and said, “Tell me about God, I’ve almost forgotten.” That story is haunting yet very telling as it exposes our need to be connected or even reconnected to the True vine that gives us life. It suggests that we are from God and when we are still young, we remember this. But the process of growing up and learning about this world is a process of increasingly forgetting the one from whom we came and in whom we live. Thus we are in need of being reconnected and remaining connected so that we may begin, as Frederick Buechner says, to live our lives from the inside instead of the outside. Discipleship is our return from Exile and pre-occupation with our selves.
  So what are the patterns of discipleship that allow us to stay connected to the vine so that we can live the abundant life; a life that is later portrayed as the joy of Christ himself? I run the risk of being too simplistic, and possibly too idealistic, but Scriptures and tradition teach us that to be Christian is to pray.
  Prayer provides a connectedness to the Vine that has no comparison. The very act of prayer has taken hits throughout recent decades because the culture cannot reason through the imagined obstacles that exist. We’ve heard them before. “If God is all-knowing then what is the use in praying?” Another reason that people do not pray could be the systemic state of violence and inequality that exists in all nations. But prayer has little to do with coercing God or praying for a miracle drug that will cure the human situation. Rather, as one theologian stated, “It’s not that we pray to God and he changes everything. It is about us praying to God, he changes our hearts, and we change things. Staying connected to God through prayer has everything to do with our lives being transformed and our wills bending towards his will.
  Both prayer and also the internalization of Scriptures will lead to spiritual transformation. I’m a bit embarrassed to even bring it up because it causes me to remember what I originally learned in youth Sunday school as a teenager. But just the other day I relearned in a Bible study that Jesus referred to his disciples as friends. And for whatever reason, I needed to internalize that fact once again. I had forgotten that Jesus said, “I no longer call you servants…I call you friends.” Evidently, Jesus forms an intimate relationship with the ones who decide to relationally participate with him. Apparently, I wasn’t feeling much like a friend that day when I read the passage. Maybe I was feeling ONLY like a servant. Maybe I was experiencing ONLY doubt. I needed to be reminded that one of the benefits of being connected to the vine is friendship with the one who saved me. But I would have never had this revelation if I had not been interacting with Scripture in the first place.
  On the first Mother’s Day after our first child was born, guess who forgot to say Happy Mother’s Day to his wife. ME! I phoned my own mother, Tiffiny phoned her mother, and I left on my way to our 8:30 a.m. service in Columbus, GA. I couldn’t figure out why I was getting the silent treatment so early on a Sunday morning. I know in my heart that Tiffiny is the greatest thing that has ever happened to me and, furthermore, she is the ultimate mom. But those realities were so evident, and part of my overall life, that I guess I forgot to honor the obvious that morning.
  Similarly, we often live out our faith in comparable fashion. We know our doctrine fairly well. Many of us grew up in the church. We believe in God the Father maker of heaven and earth and Jesus Christ his holy son, etc, etc. We have learned how to behave in a Christian manner and our ethics are enough to sustain us the Christian community. Doctrine and ethics have become second nature to us.
  As a result, our religious routines have become such a part of our life that we forget the obvious core of religious faith. And here it is. And I believe this explains the language and the tone that Jesus used with his disciples on this night. It has become easy to forget that discipleship consists primarily of one thing: an internal and supernatural experience with Jesus. John 15, as Gary Burge says, reminds us that remaining in Christ, having an interior experience of Jesus (as a branch is nourished and strengthened) is a nonnegotiable feature of following Jesus.” We can describe it with many words: mysticism, holiness, spiritual encounter. But without some dimension of an interior experience of the reality of Jesus, without a spirituality of transformation, without a conscious internal journey, doctrine and ethics seem to lose their value.
  It was the night before his crucifixion and the future was uncertain. Jesus would be leaving them. But he explained to his followers that he would relate to them, and us, in an entirely different way. The sending of the Holy Spirit would provide the way in which Jesus would dwell within us. And this indwelling would cause things to happen in our hearts that no one beforehand thought possible. In fact, the results are quite impossible if not for the life of God in us.   For he says that if you merely remain connected to him daily, he will produce a fruit from you that is both restful like a branch, yet active and fruitful; that your existence will be both joyful about this life yet highly burdened about its current state, it is a life that is both content with your status before a Holy God yet heartbroken for those who refuse to believe; a life both restful like a branch yet fragrant to a world increasingly numb to the beauty of God; abundant with life yet completely and utterly dependent on a good, good God.