Lord's Day 7, John 15:1-17 "The Person of Faith" Scott Hoezee

What does the person of faith look like, I wonder? Is the faith-filled person someone who exudes a serene confidence, a calmed and hushed and unperturbed spirit? Or is the faith-filled one the active and always-in-motion kingdom worker who is mostly a kind of holy blur of volunteerism? Is faith a set of convictions that could be counted-cross-stitched and hung on a wall or is faith seen best only when it is put into practice out on the nitty-gritty streets of the real world?

In the Bible Abraham is the father of all faith, and his life was mostly a series of journeys that involved trust. By faith Abraham packed up everything he owned one day and set off on a long trip toward an as-yet unspecified far country. God said "Go" and Abraham went. God said "Go to a place I will show you later" but Abraham did not reply, "Well, if I'm going to go, could you at least give me a hint, a general direction, a region on the map?" No, Abraham just went--no map, no end destination. Just a wing and a prayer, a dream of starry skies and sandy seashores and a home country out there . . . somewhere.

And that's faith, we say. It was a leap of faith, and most of us believe at some level that sooner or later faith will involve a leap, a jump into the unknown. Abraham's own journey of faith had its ups and downs and setbacks, but his story climaxes with one final excursion into the unknown when God told him one terrible day to take his son, his only son, Isaac whom he loved, and kill him on yet another unspecified mountain locale that God would show Abraham later on, only after he had set out. And it was only when the dagger, glinting in the morning sunshine on Mount Moriah, was raised up over Isaac's rapidly heaving chest that God said, "Now I know!" The journey of faith was complete. Abraham had once more leapt into the unknown, proving his faith.

Frederick Buechner has written that faith should be seen as a verb and not a noun because faith is always about the sacred journey along life's varied pathways. Others point out that in the Greek of the New Testament people are not said to believe in something but rather they believe into something, again hinting at movement, the risky stepping out onto thin air. To people like this, faith is never a creed because that is too static, too settled. Creeds make faith look like a big overstuffed easy chair that you settle into in your living room in a kind of cozy spiritual serenity. But real faith, some say, is about hitting the road, trusting God to lead you along. Faith is active and moving, not static and dry.

It's an old debate, of course. Martin Luther's world changed (and he then changed the rest of the world) after he read Paul's hope-laden rhetoric that we are justified by faith alone! Faith is a gift given to us by grace. We don't have to do anything to get faith. But then Luther discovered the letter of James. James was one of those who didn't want faith to be the overstuffed easy chair and so said over and over that faith without works is dead. If you've got faith, you'd better be out there living and working and journeying along in very active ways, James said. Well, Luther didn't like that at all. "James makes me so angry," Luther said one day, "that I feel like throwing Jimmy into the kitchen stove!"

Luther wanted faith to be like a precious jewel hidden in our hearts. Others claim that the best image for faith is walking. Some say faith is a matter of the head and the heart--what you know and how you feel. Others say it's a matter of the hands and feet--what you do and where you go.

What does the person of faith look like, I wonder? The Catechism tells us that faith is knowledge and conviction. Although we didn't go all the way to the end of Lord's Day 7 this morning, you probably know that before this Lord's Day is finished, it presents the Apostles' Creed. That is what faith encompasses. Luther would like our Catechism. It seems, at first blush anyway, to give us the easy chair of faith, the already-established, pre-set list of items to agree with in our heads and feel warm about in our hearts.

Of course, the Catechism is right, and John 15 seems to back up this view of faith, too. After all, Jesus' words to his disciples do not at first appear to tie in with faith as an active journey. The driving image here is of a vine and branches, and vineyards as a general rule tend to stay put. Vines grow, they produce fruit, and they are very definitely alive, but you don't see vines walking down the road. There is a settledness, a sense of repose in John 15. In fact, the one word Jesus repeats over and over is "remain." We have to stay put. The only motion hinted at in John 15 is negative motion. Some branches do end up taking a journey but it is a trip away from the main vine and the end destination of these wandering branches is a fire in which they are consumed. If you don't stay put and remain still, that's where you'll end up, Jesus says.

Now I think there is more to it than that, even in John 15, and we will get to that in just a few minutes. But first let's stick with verses 1-8 to investigate what all this abiding and remaining business is about. As images go, the vine and the branches that Jesus talks about is easy to understand. Obviously if any given branch is going to have grapes grow on it, it will need a connection to the vine. A disconnected branch cannot produce fruit for the same reason my computer doesn't work if it's not plugged into an electrical outlet. But a branch, like a computer's power cord, also needs a tight connection. You can't merely lay a branch on top of a vine and expect it will make the branch bear fruit. Again, that would be like duct-taping my computers's plug next to the wall outlet--this is one of those situations where close is very definitely not good enough.

So that much is obvious--so obvious that Jesus' talk about branches trying to make a go of it on their own is silly. Jesus is intentionally ridiculous here so as to reveal the utter folly of anyone who tries to live life without an organic and living connection to him.

With real vines, what flows between the vine and a branch is sap. So in John 15 what is the spiritual equivalent of sap? It is Jesus' word. In John 15:1-7 there are different Greek expressions used. In verse 3 there is the singular form of logos which Jesus is said to have spoken to the disciples. There is a word that he has planted into them. But then a little later in verse 7 the plural form of a different word is used when Jesus ranges more broadly to refer to all the many words that he had spoken. But whether it is the one word of verse 3 or the many words of verse 7, both need to be inside of us. If we remain with Jesus, his word and his words remain in us. That's the deal, it seems: when we are a branch connected in a living way with Jesus the vine, what flows from vine to branch is the sap of the word.

But what is that exactly? Is there a difference between the one word referred to in verse 3 and the many words mentioned in verse 7? Obviously the two are similar and yet I like it that Jesus uses both ways of putting this. As you know, John's gospel began by saying that Jesus himself is "the Word of God" who was with God in the beginning and through whom all things were made. Jesus is the ultimate Logos of God who bears within his very self the power of creation, of the cosmos that sprang into being when God spoke. But as God's Logos, God's Word, Jesus is also the Son who is his Father all over again. Jesus is the express image of God par excellence, the ultimate Word of revelation to show us who God is and what God is like.

So there is a singular aspect to the Word of Jesus as mentioned in verse 3. All of the words Jesus spoke add up to just one Word in the end. The Sermon on the Mount, the parables, the I Am sayings, Jesus' warnings as well as Jesus' encouragements: all of it and each word of it is vital. There is a reason why we've had Bible studies and biblically based sermons in the church for over two millennia now. We need each and every word.

But weaving in and through it all is a single golden thread, a singular and unique truth, a first and last Word from him who is the Word of God made flesh, and that Word is this: grace. In recent years the many words of Jesus have been scrutinized and studied. The Jesus Seminar strained at every pen stroke in the New Testament, trying to determine which words attributed to Jesus really came from Jesus and which words were supposedly made up by John and Matthew, Luke and Mark. But in the end all that attention to those many words didn't help a soul. But that's because most of the people who did that work never embraced the one Word in the first place. Without an up-front acceptance of the one Word of God's grace and truth as revealed supremely in Jesus, then all the other words are just that: mere words that cannot touch the heart.

The one Word of Jesus that must remain in us is the Word of grace. It is the Word of the Father that reveals to us once and for all that the heart of God, the very glory of God, is his lovingkindness. When you add up everything Jesus ever said, take the sum total of every syllable of every word, what you get is the truth that this man Jesus was on this earth for one reason: to tell us God loves us. He does not love our sin or our evil, and the cross is God's gargantuan, galactic "No!" to anyone who would claim that God loves us just the way we are in all our tawdry and sinful disarray. God does not love that because he cannot love that, but he does love us and if Jesus has a single Word that needs to burn in our hearts with an intensity we can scarcely abide it is the gospel Word of grace.

That's why after verse 8 Jesus has no difficulty shifting his imagery from a vineyard to a community of love. In verses 9-17 Jesus doesn't talk about his words anymore but now he mentions commandments. But as in verses 1-8, so also here there is a combination of a single commandment and a variety of commandments. But the one command and the many commands add up to the same bottom line: that we love one another.

It's always arresting to hear Jesus talk about "everything I have commanded you" because when you think about it, Jesus didn't utter that many outright commands. Jesus did not strut around Palestine like a moral drill sergeant who was forever barking out rules and commands. That role was already filled by the Pharisees. They were the ones who kept going on about commandments, and mostly when they did so it was because by their lights Jesus was breaking the commandments! Jesus was an apparent commandment-breaker far more often than he looked even remotely like a commandment-dispenser.

So what is Jesus talking about when he says things like "Everything I have commanded you" when, as a matter of fact, he hadn't commanded much at all to begin with!? Again, it's the same phenomenon we just saw in verses 1-8: all of Jesus' commandments are finally just the one commandment to love. And so before Jesus is finished, he comes back to his vineyard image again to say that the one grape, the only grape, we Christians finally grow on the branches of our lives is love. Call it compassion, call it mercy, call it empathy, call it kindness, call it gentleness, call it charity, call it grace but it's still your basic, garden variety (or in this case, vineyard variety) love.

What does the person of faith look like, I wonder? Is he the easy-chair person who ponders all the right creeds in his mind or is she the holy blur of ministry who practices faith through the work of her hands more than she ponders it in her head? The person of faith is, of course, both. The person of faith knows something all right. The person of faith knows the truth of the one Word: Jesus came to this earth because God is love; Jesus came to tell us that and to show us that and even to go to hell and back to convince us of that. The person of faith knows that singular Logos, that one gospel Word, that joyous creed.

But the person of faith knows also the many words of Jesus and is driven forward in life by the command that we love one another. So this person can't only sit still, can't only recline in faith's easy chair to think about a creed. The glorious truths that we ponder through our doctrines force us to get moving, too. Faith is an active journey and it is often a perilous journey at that in a world that is still as mixed-up and confused as this one. We do have to do the Abraham-like thing of stepping out on faith, pressing forward in ministry even though we can't always see the road ahead as clearly as we might like. We even press on knowing that there are potholes and dangers up ahead.

After all, we follow a Savior whose own road led straight to a cross. Now this Savior tells us that part of our faith is bearing that cross every day. That's not a dreary thing to do, however. The cross shows us how much God loves us. True, the cross is God's giant "No!" to sin but the only reason God through Jesus shouted that so loudly is because right behind the "No" is God's far-louder cry of "Yes!" to all the goodness of life that he envisioned when, once upon an eternity, the Word of God said, "Let there be light!"

Right now, the main furor surrounding the movie The Passion has come from various non-Christian, mostly Jewish, groups who have been pleading, "Don't hate us because of the cross." So let us be clear: if the Logos, the Word of Jesus remains in us as the sum total of love contained in all of Jesus' other and many words, then we will hate no one. The cross makes us hate no one. The cross makes us love everyone. Why in the world do you think Jesus came here in the first place? Jesus, the Word of Father, came to speak one Word over and above, in and through, under and beneath, every other word he ever uttered, and that word was grace, was love, was a mercy that knows no boundaries now or in eternity.

What does the person of faith look like, I wonder? He, she, looks like the One whose Word, whose words, whose command, whose revelation of love is calling all the shots. Having faith means that there are times like right now when we sit quietly in church, speak a creed, sing some songs, listen to a preacher pile up a couple thousand words. We do all this because we love the one Word, we love the old, old story so much, that we cannot but help enjoy the easy chair experience of savoring that Word, of tasting it, of holding it on our tongues like the finest wine you could ever imagine.

But the person of faith leaves the pew eventually, too. Faith is a journey out into society, and into its greasiest corners sometimes, too. Faith is the production of juicy spiritual fruit that gets decanted into a life-giving ambrosia that people all over this world are thirsty to drink even though sometimes they don't know it. Many people are literally dying of thirst, dying to imbibe the gospel drink we can give if only our faith can impel us to love one another; to love everybody.

What does the person of faith look like, I wonder? He, she looks like Jesus, the One who so often sat down to teach but then always got up again to perform loving deeds. The person of faith looks like Jesus, the still-center of all comfort and joy and the ever-moving Son of God who knew better than anyone how much work there is to be done. The person of faith looks like Jesus who, even after his resurrection, did not sit around but said "Behold, I am going ahead of you into Galilee." He's always going on ahead of us. The person of faith who remains in the Word is always eager to follow. Amen.