Pruning.

John 15:1-17     (November 22, 2015)

I.

Jesus is delivering his final teachings to his disciples.  After promising them his peace and urging them to love each other, the Lord begins to employ the imagery of a grape-vine.  “I am the true vine and my Father is the vineyard keeper,” he says.

Israel is often portrayed in Scripture as a grape-vine.  In fact, on the facing of the Temple in Jerusalem there was carved a large and elaborate sculpture of a grape-vine, with a full bunch of grapes.  The people hearing this gospel would have immediately made the connection to this famous sculpture, and understood Jesus to be saying in a different way what he demonstrated back in chapter 2, which is that he is the Temple, he is the Way to God, he is the grape-vine, he is the true Israel of God.

Jesus presses on ahead with this language.  “[My Father] removes any of my branches that don’t bear fruit, and he trims any branch that produces fruit so that it will produce even more fruit.”  Last week we considered how the present crisis of shrinkage in the church is a matter God’s pruning away the dead and unproductive branches.  Here he makes a distinction between the dead branches that get lopped off, gathered up, and thrown in the fire, and the living but underproductive branches that are made more fruitful by being trimmed.

A vine-grower cannot afford to be sentimental about the branches; the point is the production of many, good, juicy, healthy grapes, which may then be made into wine.  He does not leave a dead branch on the vine because it was really healthy five years ago.  Neither does he leave a healthy branch if it is draining energy from an even healthier branch.  And sometimes cutting away a branch creates space for an even healthier branch to grow where one was cut away.

The criteria for being kept on the vine or cut off is always the production of fruit.  It would be easy and simple to equate this fruit production with the usual standards for the “successful church,” and say that it is about numbers: members, attendance, budget, square feet of a building, and so forth.

But we know from other parts of the Scriptures that this is not necessarily what “fruit” means.  “Fruit” more often has to do with the good, beneficial, and blessed actions of people.  When Jesus says elsewhere that people are known by their “fruit,” he means by their actions, what they do, the kind of effect they have on others and the world.  Good fruits are love, forgiveness, compassion, healing, acceptance, welcoming, and peace.  These show that the One to whom we are connected and from whom we receive our energy is the good God.  What we do, our “fruit,” matches the vine to whom we claim to belong.

Not to produce those kinds of actions means we are really getting our energy from some other source, or that we are receiving no energy at all and are effectively dead.

II.

This brings us to ask the question of what we are.  Are we — as individual disciples and/or as a gathering of disciples — a dead branch that produces no good fruit?  That is, are we so busy keeping ourselves in existence that we do not express or reflect God’s love into the world at all?  Have we totally dried up in empty habits?  Or are we branches that are healthy… but draining energy away from branches that actually produce fruit?  In other words, are we technically alive and thriving, sprouting leaves and basking in the sun, but not blooming in a way that will actually amount to a bunch of grapes?  Are we content and happy… but not really doing anything for others?  Would the resources we are using be more productive flowing to a different branch, one that does show signs of actually making grapes?

The way to assess the success of a grape-vine is in the quality and quantity of grapes it makes, so that wine can be produced, and many people served.  I have been thinking that instead of the usual numbers game used to evaluate the success of a church or a disciple, we would do better to use a different metric.  What if we measured how many lives we were touching by our own ministry?  What if we stopped worrying about how many people were actually attending and then joining our group, and placed our focus on how many individual lives were being touched and improved by the work we do?

I know churches with 500 members… that are barely having any positive impact in the world beyond themselves.  Their programs are for themselves; their focus is on getting people in; everyone is happy and busy.  But I wonder if churches like this aren’t putting out a lot of pretty leaves, but not actually making many grapes.  I also know churches with like 20 members… that are having an impact in hundreds or even thousands of lives in their community and in the world.  Their members spread the good news of God’s love in tangible and actual ways everywhere they go, and the church itself is known for reaching out in many ways to people.  It seems to me that this kind of church is in the grape production business big time.

The Lord then reminds us of where the energy flowing through the branch comes from.  “A branch can’t produce fruit by itself, but must remain in the vine.  Likewise you can’t produce fruit unless you remain in me.”  Disciples have to maintain in direct contact with Jesus Christ for it is from him that their energy and life flows.  If you try and make it on your own… you die. 

III. 

The question then becomes how do we stay in Christ.  This section has a lot of a term that is characteristic of this gospel.  The word is “remain.”  “Remain in me,” says Jesus, “And I will remain in you.”  Older translations use the word “abide.”  It means stay connected, hold on, keep together; like the way electricity flows through a wire the circuit has to remain complete.  If you unplug a lamp it won’t work.  Remain means stay plugged into Jesus.

Further on he says that this connection is about his words.  We saw this back in chapter 6 where Jesus finally made the connection that his words are Spirit and life.  He is the bread of life through his words.  So to remain in Jesus is to keep his words, his words in a sense are his continued presence.  And of course we remember and keep his words as they are recorded in Scripture.  If we are connected to his words we are connected to him.

We remain in him when his words remain in us.  I don’t think he is advising us to memorize the New Testament, not that that wouldn’t be a good thing.  But keeping his words has to mean obeying them.  It has to mean embodying them.  It has to mean doing them in your life with your hands and mouth and feet and heart and brain.  

If the Word by whom all things were created became flesh and dwelled among us in Jesus, then his words also in a sense become flesh in the lives of people by our actions in his name.  

That’s why our life together as a congregation is so focused on Jesus Christ and what he says and does.  That’s why the sermon is the centerpiece of our worship.  That’s why we offer and encourage attendance at Bible Study.  These are the places where we encounter the Word, which is the energy-source for our whole life.

By the Word and the Spirit, God creates, redeems, and sustains everything.  They are the media of God’s living Presence.  They are the energy, the sap, the juice that flows from the vine into the branches, keeping them alive, producing the fruit of active love.

“As the Father loved me, I too have loved you,” says Jesus.  “Remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and remain in his love.”  The connection must be maintained.  Nothing gets me more cranky than to go to a church function — a presbytery event, a session meeting, even some informal fellowship type things — and Jesus is not mentioned.  On the other hand, I remember hearing complaints about a church that their session didn’t meet often enough.  When I asked them why session only met like 4 times a year, the elders said they had trouble fitting a session meeting in because every night was taken up with so many small group Bible studies.  I let them be.  I’m not messing with that.  Especially when so many session meetings in many churches are more like interminable corporate board meetings all about property management.

IV.

Then the Lord mentions something that we often overlook.  He says, “I have said these things to you so that my joy will be in you and your joy will be complete.”  We forget the joy.  Love is not a morose duty that we grudgingly carry out.  It is something we want to do because it brings joy into people’s lives.  If church isn’t joyful it isn’t real.    

Joy is not the same thing as the empty addiction we often have to “fun.”  The difference between joy and fun is similar to the difference between hope and optimism.  Like hope, joy is in the heart, it wells up from within and infuses your whole being.  It is not a superficial distraction, a strategy to get us through the day.  Joy connects to our deepest knowledge that “all things work together for good,” as Paul says.  Because goodness, blessing, and love are the fundamental principles of creation.  And when we plug into that bedrock, that aquifer, that source code that sustains everything, we may rest in confidence and joy.

We may rest in such confidence and joy that we may love each other just as Christ has loved us, demonstrating the greatest possible love, which is to give up, hand over, lay down, surrender one’s life for one’s friends.  The text does not say “die.”  It says to give one’s life for, over, on behalf of, or because of another.  There is that fascinating Greek preposition hyper, usually translated as “for” but which literally means “over,” giving us an image of one person placing their body over another for protection, absorbing on their behalf whatever the threat was.

This of course is what Jesus does when he demonstrates maximum love by giving his life “for” us.  He places himself in harm’s way and absorbs like a lightning rod the world’s evil and violence, injustice and hatred, neutralizing it, bearing it away, deflecting it, so that we may live.  His blood acts like an inoculation within us or a shield over us, protecting us for life.

We participate in this by being Jesus’ friends and doing what he commands us to do.  Reshaping our lives in conformity to him, his words and actions, is how we become his friends and share in his love.  The Lord goes so far as to say that the disciples are not his servants but now lifted up to be with him as friends, relative equals, partners in his mission.  They can be this now because he is giving to them everything he has received from the Father.  This mission of serving as the mediator of God’s love means that eventually we have what Jesus has, because everything that he has has been communicated to us through him.  He is always the perfect conduit or channel of God’s love; God’s love flows through him without obstruction or diversion, or even a speed-bump.  He is the perfect window to God.  And him him so are we.

V.

This is the fruit he has appointed us to bear in the world.  What emerges from God in Jesus Christ… now emerges from him in us.  Our job is to get ourselves, our egos, our agendas, our philosophies and theologies, our fears and desires, out of the way so that we can also be clear windows through whom God’s love may shine.

We do that together.  That’s why Jesus’ first command is “love each other.”  He is speaking to the disciples as a body, a group.  We are to be a little engine of love for each other that overflows into the larger community.  Like the Trinity, in which God is an eternal dance of love that overflows into the creation.

His commandments give us the shape of the love we have for each other.  The point is not just that we have this closed society of mutual affection, but that we shine into the world with that love.  That in the end is what we have to give: an example and pattern of living together as a branch energized by our integration into the vine of Christ, so that the love God has for the world may flow from him through us and into a needy world.

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