Podcast of "Making Choices" (MP3)
Acts 8:24-40
Psalm 22:25-31
1 John 4:7-21
John 15:1-8
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable to you, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer. Amen
Last week’s sermon was called, “What It Means to Be Who I Am.” I used that title because I wanted to share who Jesus is and what that means when he says “I am the Good Shepherd.” It was also about who we are and what it means to be who we are as followers of the Good Shepherd. There was one piece that I left out of the sermon because it just would have made the thing too long, but that’s okay because it is still good today.
Last week Jesus said “I am the Good Shepherd.” Today we read Jesus saying “I am the true vine.” What doesn’t get lost in the translation gets lost in common language; what Jesus meant when he said “I am.” It gets lost for us because we’re all used to being something or other.
Those of us with a social media presence are asked to describe ourselves, sometimes very briefly. On my sermon blog, I joyfully tell the world, “I am the Reverend Paul A. Andresen of the First Presbyterian Church in Marshall , Texas
When Jesus says “I am,” it means more than when we say it. Ancient Jews were very stingy with the words “I am.” When they used the Hebrew word we translate “I am” it was only used for the name of the Lord. When they said “I am,” they meant “The Great I AM.” They meant “I AM who I AM.” So when Jesus says “I am,” he invokes the name of the Lord for himself. When he says “I am the Good Shepherd” or “I am the true vine,” he uses these images to describe what it means for him to be fully God in the flesh and in the world.
This linguistic twist is lost on us because we don’t know to look for it. It’s not a part of our culture. It wasn’t lost on his audience. So what does this mean? Let’s answer that using what we are given in John’s gospel. Jesus declares himself the true vine while invoking the name of the Lord. He then says his Father the gardener.
Jesus says “[The gardener] cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful.” Honestly, except for those who have gardened vines, we don’t really know what it means. So here’s a quick primer: When looking at a grape trellis, the vine is a trunk that comes out of the ground. That’s all there is to the vine, relatively speaking it doesn’t take up much space in the field at all. The branches sprout from the vines. Most of what we see growing are the branches, fruit, and leaves. The fruit of the vine is borne on the branches, not the vine. Like with the “I AM,” this wouldn’t have been lost on Jesus’ first century audience either.
From what Jesus says we know that the father does two things with the branches, he cuts off the dead wood and he prunes the live growth. This does two things to the plant. The first, cutting off the dead wood prevents any fungus or what not in the dead branches from making its way to the healthy ones. It’s like amputating a finger before gangrene infects the whole hand. On a lighter note, cutting off the dead wood prevents the strain that the weight of the dead branch puts on the vine. It also provides valuable space for good growth to spread.
The benefits of cutting off the dead wood are obvious, and there is one more thing to remember about cutting off the dead, it’s painless to the plant. To us, it would be like clipping a toe nail. It doesn’t really hurt and as for me, my shoes fit better. It’s a win-win.
The second thing pruning does is focus the growth of a plant. Left to their own devices, a vine branch will tend to grow outward producing lots of branch length, lots of leaves, and little fruit. Proper pruning will reduce the length of growth and increase the amount of fruit. It is true after all that the closer the fruit is to the vine the more nutrients it will receive. The closer to the vine, the better the fruit.
Jesus is the vine and the Father is the gardener; as for the branch, that’s us. The fruit, well, that’s a wildcard isn’t it. John’s gospel doesn’t say what the fruit is. Let’s just say that whatever the fruit is, it’s valuable and desirable.
Jesus says “Remain in me and I will remain in you.” This is an adequate translation, it sure isn’t wrong. But in my opinion there is a better way to say it. The New Revised Standard Version has Jesus saying, “Abide in me as I abide in you.” When I hear “remain” I think of a waiting room. It’s not bad, it’s better than being on the outside looking in, but to remain has no sense of action, no real sense of relationship.
When I hear the word abide, I hear the word rest, I hear the word stay, and I also hear that I will be nourished. To abide in one another is to deal in relationship. To abide requires more than just waiting. We were never meant to stay in the waiting room of the Lord, we are meant to be together in word and deed, that is how abiding in Christ we bear God’s desirable fruit.
There is something else I want to share with you. If there is one thing people who come to faith wonder about, it’s how is faith in the Lord Jesus Christ going to change their life. I say this from personal experience. While I went to church as a boy, I wouldn’t say I was raised in the church. Neither would any of the pastors who knew me as a boy. I finally came to faith in my late twenties, certainly old enough to be set in my ways. As you might hear someone say, “I was a grown man.”[2]
Frankly, there were some things I didn’t want to change. I like making myself and others laugh. I love sports. I love trivial garbage knowledge and facts. I love jokes. I love wit. I love making others think. I really love good stories. There are days that I would love to sit around with a beer and a cigar and talk about the good-old-days that frankly from the perspective of 20/20 hindsight weren’t all that good. So yes, being a disciple of Christ has changed me. The dead branches get cut away and pruning happens regularly. But has this changed who I am?
At my core, I am the man God made me, but I am a better man because God shapes me. I’m a better man because God cuts away what is useless and ultimately harmful. My branches don’t grow so wild anymore. I am a better man because cutting away early buds produces more and better fruit later. Yes, I am changed, but at the heart I am who God made me.
To me, this is what it means to abide in Christ. To me, this is what it means when scripture says Christ abides in me.
One of the ways I can confirm that is by the folks who told me that they weren’t surprised I became a minister. I was flabbergasted, I never imagined ministry as a vocation. People saw things in me I never saw, and as I often say, I am glad God was looking out for me long before I was looking out for God.
I have had an internal debate about this next paragraph, but have finally decided to share this. More proof that some things don’t change is that I do still enjoy a Churchill and a Shiner Bock from time to time, just not every night.
Now, excessive pruning and pruning out of season can be harmful. You can’t prune too quickly, if you do you can kill the plant. Using fruit trees as a good example for this, if a tree is pruned too much too quickly, it can fall into shock and die. Too much pruning too quickly is harmful. Being rid of an addiction is a fine example of pruning, but if it’s not done properly the patient can become seriously ill maybe unto death during detox.
Another worry about pruning happens often in the church. It has happened with Christians since the year 35 and it still happens today. People try to do the work of the gardener. People try to do the pruning on their own. The Jerusalem Council from Acts 15 decided whether gentiles had to become Jews before they became Christians. To the old school disciples this made perfect sense. To newer gentile Christians, this was a stumbling block. Looking at our reading today, the Jerusalem Council’s work looks like two sides of a church argument trying to do the pruning and training of the vine that is God’s prevue alone.
Our reading from 1John teaches us that the pruning the Father does is done in love; not in anger or hate or fear. Fear has to do with punishment, but pruning is not punishment, it is shaping us to bear much good fruit. God does this in love. So it is up to us to remember, that Jesus is the vine, God is the vinedresser, and we’re the branches. We’re in the system, but we’re not in charge of it.
Last week’s sermon was called, “What It Means to Be Who I Am.” This week’s sermon is called “Making Choices.” I hoped to share that it’s about the choices the vine and the gardener make, the choices they make because they are who they are, two-thirds of the Holy Trinity of God. It is also about the choices we make because God sometimes lets a branch run wild because that’s what it needs to do before the pruning takes. Finally, it is about also knowing that being pruned, like discipleship, is a continuing process. What lives on the vine today may be tomorrow’s dead wood.
Only by the Lord’s careful tending will we ever live the lives that bear good fruit. Jesus wants us to do nothing less than bear good fruit, because this is to God’s glory.
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