This sermon was heard at St Mark Presbyterian Church in Dallas, Texas on Sunday May 3, 2015, the Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time.
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
Who isn’t familiar with this passage from John’s gospel? Who over the age of 50 doesn’t remember Bruce Wilkinson’s “The Secrets of the Vine?” It was his first book after the mega-hit “The Prayer of Jabez.” “The Secrets of the Vine” was about this very passage and had a lot of very good information about grapes and vine dressing and what it means with this passage. Believe it or not, this and a segment of “Ask This Old House” where Roger Cook shows a man how to prune and you will have a basic knowledge of what it means to grow vines to bear fruit.
I’m not going to go into deep detail about how to prune for several reasons; one is that someone from the extension office or that “Ask This Old House” video would do a better job teaching you about it than I can. The better reason is that we have better fruit to harvest today. It begins with the rather disturbing image that “Whoever does not abide in me,” abide in Christ, “is thrown away like a branch and withers; such branches are gathered, thrown into the fire and burned.”
This is a disturbing image because we hear Jesus talking about fire and really unsettling images come to mind, and not without good reason. The thought of being burned alive with all of the requisite screaming and crying is seared into our imaginations. We think of the whole hell-fire-weeping-and-gnashing-of-teeth thing with its obligatory unpleasantness. But what if this isn’t quite right? What if we’ve taken a step too far getting to this image?
Let’s begin with the fact that pruning involves cutting out what is unproductive and leaving what’s fruitful. Jesus is talking about cutting the fingernails of the vine, not the fingers. We also need to know that pruning for productivity means cutting out things that may be pretty, but add nothing to the harvest.
The pieces that sport only vegetative, leafing, buds have to go so the flowering fruit buds will get more nourishment. God’s pruning cuts out things that we have become accustomed to, things we might like, things that are pretty. That’s the hard part. That sort of pruning smarts, don’t let anyone tell you that it doesn’t.
Still, what about the branches that don’t remain in the vine? Branches that don’t remain, branches that aren’t a part of the vine, the true vine; they wither and die. Dead branches don’t feel the pain of the burning. Dead is dead and the dead branches have already felt the searing disconnect of death. The burning fire causes no pain. After the pain of death, the rest is cremation.
We have this image that pruning is going to cut into what is important, important to our life in Christ and this is not so. The first thing pruning does is take what’s dead and takes it away. It then takes what doesn’t produce fruit and cuts that away. Then it cuts away what binds the plant. Pruning doesn’t take what’s important. Burning just disposes of what’s cut away. Now living branches burning, we’d feel that, but that’s not what our scripture says.
Now here’s what’s even better. In Christ we have already been pruned. Our gospel passage tells us that we have been cleansed by the word spoken by Christ. We are cleansed by the Word of God in Christ. We have been pruned and it’s not up to us to prune. It’s not up to us to do that.
We also need to remember our reading from 1John teaches us that the pruning the Father does is done in love. Fear has to do with punishment, but God’s pruning is not punishment, it is shaping us to bear much good fruit. Godly pruning is done in love.
The first thing that means for us is that we need to abide in the vine. As the branches in the tree of life in Jesus, we come off what vintners call the central leader. We are the branches off of the central leader of Christ. Christ is the central leader. When the Church gets into trouble is when the Church leaves the central leader.
We are called to abide in Christ, abide. Rest is another word for abide. The branch doesn’t physically suckle from the vine, it rests, it abides, it remains attached and it is fed by the vine. This is how we are fed, this is how we bear fruit, by resting, abiding in Christ. This is how we are fed. We remain attached. We rest. We abide.
We remain and we are fed by the vine. As we are fed we bear fruit. As for the fruit, well, that’s a wildcard isn’t it. John’s gospel leaves that one alone, not saying what the fruit is. Let’s just say that whatever the fruit is, it’s valuable and desirable.
1John gives us a way into what that valuable and desirable fruit is, love. I believe the Church, the “capital C Church,” the Universal Church, tries too hard and overshoots the easy, obvious answer. Paul teaches one of the fruits of the Spirit is love, John teaches God is love. When we shoot past love to make more complex, more complicated theologies we may be going further than God intends. We may end up jumping right off the vine. At times by our own best intentions the “Capital C” Church quits abiding and resting when we go off on crusades, regardless of the century.
We must remember, it’s not up to us to do the pruning. The pruning is done in Christ, by Christ, and through Christ. It’s up to us to abide. In abiding we ought to love one another—because God loved us first.
About a million years ago Spike Lee made a movie called “School Daze” (Daze spelled D-A-Z-E). It’s about Homecoming Weekend at mythical Mission College, but it’s said to be based at least in part on Lee’s experiences at Atlanta’s Morehouse College, Spellman College, and Clark Atlanta University. Its overriding theme is variations of black-against-black racism. At the end of the movie, at the dawn of a new day, Vaughn “Dap” Dunlap, played by Laurence Fishburne, comes to the main quad of the Mission campus to ring the college bell. As he does, he yells “Wake up!”
As he rings the bell, characters from around campus begin to awaken. He continues, “Wake up!” Characters begin to leave their dorm rooms, fraternity and sorority houses, and homes. Dap runs to the camera and yells “Wake up!” This is when people begin to congregate around Dap and around the bell. Then the two main character’s Fishburne’s Dap and Giancarlo Esposito’s Julian “Dean Big Brother Almighty” Eaves meet at the bell, and it looks like a showdown.
Then Julian appears to have an epiphany. Dap and Julian look into the camera, breaking the illusion that the message is for them, Dap calmly says, “wake up.” The frame freezes and an alarm clock rings.
Friends, the “Capital C” needs to wake up. In this case it’s not so much that we need to wake up and do something as much as it is that we need to wake up and be what it is called to be, the body of Christ; abiding in the vine, taking nourishment in Christ, as we will today celebrating the Lord’s Supper.
Still, over the past ten years I have become distressed reading opinions from people from both sides of the theological aisle arguing and complaining about the state of the church. I say this knowing every time I point my finger, three point back. Or as our scripture warns, “Those who say, ‘I love God,’ and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.”
This is why when I read our passages for today, 1John 4:11 stuck in my head, “Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another.”
I read letters to the editor, I read minutes from sessions and presbytery meetings, I tuned into General Assembly on-line and wonder if we have forgotten to love one another, or even perhaps how to love one another; and let’s keep in mind that “ought” is a pretty low threshold. We have vocations. We have a call on our lives. We take vows at baptisms and ordinations. John tells us we ought to love one another; what a low threshold for such a mighty love.
I say we need to get back to the Gospel of Luckenbach; it’s time we get back to the basics of love.
As Presbyterians we have a long tradition of seeking guidance from our three sources of governance, in order: Holy Scripture, the Book of Confessions, and the Book of Order. Unfortunately too often we tend to move from Grace to Law, from the Living Torah to the Book of Order. Jesus demonstrated love and taught us to love God and neighbor. When others tried to force Jesus into constructs like government and taxes, he shows that the Lord God is not bound that way. As people try to force God to be one way, the Triune God-Father, Son, and Spirit-shows The Way.
The issue of our time is that we must abide, individually and corporately, in the vine of Christ. The Father God, the vine dresser, never acts out of loving character when cutting away what is dead or unproductive. In God’s love, Jesus ministered to everyone, including Zealots and Roman collaborators; lepers and harlots. As the Body of Christ the church ought to abide and feed from the vine of Christ-especially when this direction takes us from our comfortable places. The church must start again. God is love, and it's time we get back to the basics of love. Our hope is in abiding in Christ and love one another, that’s it.
Or at least we ought to since God loves us so much.
