John 15:1-17 "Remain in Me" Scott Hoezee

"Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio, a nation turns its lonely eyes to you. What's that you say, Mrs. Robinson? Joltin' Joe has left and gone away." Some of you will recognize those words as the lyrics to the Simon & Garfunkel hit song "Mrs. Robinson." And just in case you're too young to remember, Joe DiMaggio was one of baseball's biggest stars back in the 1940s and 50s. The glamour surrounding DiMaggio only magnified when he married movie star Marilyn Monroe in 1954. The Simon & Garfunkel song that referred to DiMaggio was originally part of the soundtrack for the film The Graduate and went on to become one of the 1960s' best-known, iconic ballads.

But as I told you in another sermon some years back, in a 60 Minutes interview the songwriter, Paul Simon, talked a bit about that song. At one point he said that sometime after the song was released, he received a letter from Joe DiMaggio in which DiMaggio expressed his befuddlement at what in the world that song could mean. DiMaggio wrote, "What do you mean 'Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?' I haven't gone anywhere! I'm still around — I'm selling Mr. Coffee machines." Then Mr. Simon smiled wryly at Mike Wallace and remarked, "Obviously Mr. DiMaggio is not accustomed to thinking of himself as a metaphor!"

But then, who is? Most, if not all, of us see ourselves as real people with literal, descriptive identities. For instance, I am a pastor, a husband, a father, a committee member, a volunteer, a son — these are all straightforward descriptions of who I am in relation to the people around me. Like most of you, I cannot readily conceive of myself as a symbol for something, as a kind of metaphor that represents something beyond myself.

Indeed, if someone came up to you at a party and said, "You are my shelter from the storms of life," well, you'd be taken aback. Then again, if you met someone who constantly spouted self-referential metaphors, you'd deem that individual to be a lamb chop short of a mixed grill platter. We expect people to denote themselves by saying things like, "I am a plumber" or "I teach school" or "I'm a stay-at-home Dad." But our eyes would widen some if someone said, "I am the oil that lubes my company's machine" or "I am the antibody that shields my family from the viruses of secularism."

This is not a terribly typical mode of discourse — not now and really not in Jesus' day, either. Yet Jesus, according to John's gospel, often referred to himself in a metaphorical mode. Not surprisingly, he got into trouble and arched many eyebrows each time he did this. Over the course of church history Jesus' famous "I AM" sayings have become the much-loved subject of many beautiful hymns, songs, poems, and stained glass windows. We find these sayings rich in meaning and pastorally comforting. But it was not necessarily that way for the folks who first heard these words.

In fact, if you look at the wider context of the "I AM" sayings in John, you will find that in most cases Jesus' original uttering of these words landed him in swift trouble. After saying, "I am the bread of life," Jesus left most of his disciples scratching their heads, complaining that it was a "hard teaching" that no one could figure out. As a result, that first "I AM" saying caused a number of Jesus' followers to give up on him.

After saying, "I am the light of the world who illumines all," the Pharisees derided Jesus. They said that Jesus could not illumine anything or anyone and he surely was shedding no light on his own identity. After claiming "I am the good shepherd," the crowds denounced Jesus as a lunatic, saying he was full of a demon and so was "raving mad." And after the most lovely of all the sayings, "I am the resurrection and the life," the case against Jesus was cinched and so Jesus was soon arrested and then executed.

Make your choice, C.S. Lewis once said: embrace Jesus as the God and Lord of your life or squirrel him away with the rest of history's weirdoes. But please don't bore the world with all this blather that although not divine or special, Jesus was a very fine ethical teacher who had a striking way with words. Either Jesus really was God in the flesh or he was as loony as a man who walked around claiming to be a poached egg.

Naturally, these days a lot of people do want to say that Jesus was no more than a wandering Galilean cynic sage. He is not who the Apostles' Creed says he is, he's no god. Still, he can be appreciated and studied and to a certain extent even followed simply because now and again he said some really clever things.

But if Jesus said these things without also being God, then he was not a good man: he was either a devious deceiver or a nut. But down along the ages Christians have believed that Jesus did say these things but that he was neither devious nor insane. Instead, what these sayings teach us is not just that Jesus is God, they also tell us more about who God is. So many of these metaphors have rich Old Testament echoes: manna in the desert, the original light of creation, God the Shepherd of his sheep Israel. Taken together the "I AM" sayings tell us that everything anyone could have ever wanted, every good thing that God has ever promised, is coming to its fullness in Jesus.

This morning from John 15, we encounter the lyric saying "I am the true vine." Throughout the Old Testament, God's chosen people, Israel, was regularly referred to as being like God's vineyard. Israel was to be a verdant source of excellent fruit that could then be distilled into wonderful wine. God had done everything he could to cultivate the fruit, to ensure a rich harvest. But the vineyard of Israel proved to be a terrible disappointment to God.

No passage made that more clear than Isaiah 5. There the prophet depicts God as the farmer who had planted the best-looking, best-watered, best-tended vineyard in the entire Mediterranean Basin. The grapes that grew were plump, heavy with the juices that would lead to a bumper harvest. But when the day of harvest came and the farmer pulled off some grapes to sample them, he discovered bitter grapes — terrible, sour, useless grapes. Something had gone terribly wrong and so, in a disappointed and heartbreaking fury, the farmer dismantles the vineyard and plows the whole thing under.

That prophetic imagery in Isaiah 5 referred, of course, to the destruction of Israel as a nation and was a sign of the Babylonian Captivity that came. But still the promise of a Messiah persisted. And, of course, we believe that in Jesus God's Christ advented into this world. Jesus, as all four of the gospels make clear, was the New Israel, the new beginning through whom all the promises of old would yet be fulfilled. There would yet be the kind of vineyard God had desired all along.

And so in that upper room on the night when Jesus was betrayed, arrested, and so hurtled headlong toward the cross that awaited him, on that very night, Jesus tells the disciples, "I am the true vine." He throws in the word "true" to remind them of the false vines in ancient Israel that had come before and that had produced only sour grapes. But Jesus is the authentic vine, the genuine article. Hence, the rest of us are branches, extensions of the one vine. We have to remain, abide, stick with Jesus so that his spiritual sap or energy can flow through us. And what is that divine juice? It is love.

In the course of our Christian lives there is lots of fruit we can bear for God and for God's kingdom. We all have different abilities — we are all, if you will, different varietals of grapes. In the real world of wine-making, there are cabernet sauvignon grapes and cabernet franc grapes, there are pinot noir grapes and chenin blanc grapes, there are chardonnay grapes and riesling grapes. They are all grapes and some are heartier than others. Each requires slightly different climates to grow and each requires slightly different farming techniques to raise them properly. And so also in the kingdom of God: some of us who grow on the one vine of Christ are preachers and teachers and so we bear a certain kind of spiritual fruit. Others of us are skilled hosts or musicians, still others have yet different talents and gifts.

But what is common to each kind of grape that grows on the history-long, worldwide vine of Christ is that the juice of each berry is the elixir of love. If we abide in the vine of Christ Jesus our Lord, then we cannot produce sour grapes, we cannot produce a berry that will cause division and discord, hurt feelings and fractured relationships. That kind of fruit cannot grow from the vine trunk of Jesus. And so if we find that we are doing things that cause hurt, that enflame hatred, things that are just generally vandalistic of shalom, then we need to wonder where that is coming from and how well we are doing what Jesus here asks: namely, to remain in him alone.

In the Lord's Prayer, the first thing we ask after addressing God as "Our Father in heaven" is that this same God's Name be hallowed. But that request is not first of all about how well the rest of the world does in honoring God's Name and in keeping it from being besmirched. We can't recite that opening petition from the Lord's Prayer as though we were saying "May your name be hallowed," as if this is something that only others can do. What we must mean is "Let me hallow your name." As the Catechism points out, you can't hope to have the character and Name of God honored without recognizing the obvious fact that the worst damage that has ever happened to the Name and reputation of God has come not from the actions of people outside the Church but on account of the behavior of those on the inside.

Make no mistake, history is full of evil, blasphemous people. The twentieth century alone is silted full with the corpses of the innocent who died in holocausts, pogroms, purges, and genocides of all kinds. But many of those tragedies were performed by people who claimed to be atheists in the first place: Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, and other such ruthless dictators never claimed the mantle of the Almighty for themselves. They were evil, wicked people but precisely because they claimed no allegiance to God, God's character was not sullied by them. But when Christians became involved in genocides or other deeds of great and tawdry evil, that is when the hallowed nature of our God's great Name suffered.

When Christian churches in Rwanda joined in to help the Hutu massacre of nearly 1 million Tutsis, that is when God's reputation was brought low. When the German Christians baptized Hitler's policies against the Jews, that is when God's Name was blasphemed. When in more recent years Catholic priests, with the complicity of their conniving bishops, perpetuated sexual molestation of young children, that is when God's Name was turned into a byword among the peoples.

We cannot ask that God's Name be hallowed and then wonder how well the rest of the world is doing in that regard. We have to pray that by abiding in Christ and by letting the spiritual juices of his divine love flow into us that God will be praised and honored and glorified. So we look at everything we do as a congregation, everything we do as individual members of the congregation, and we ask, "Is this an extension of our Lord's love? Is that the sap flowing into me?" We monitor what we say, we scrutinize each thing we want to say at a committee meeting or in the narthex after a service and we inquire of ourselves again and again, "Does this make for shalom or tear at the fabric of it? Am I being the kind of grape you'd expect to see growing off the trunk of Christ or does the sourness of my mind prove that I'm drawing off some other source?"

Remaining or abiding in Christ is never a passive matter. It requires active vigilance every day. As Jesus says in verse 2, that is also where the role of pruning comes in. The Greek verb there is kathairo, from which we get the words "catharsis" and "catheter." Those are words that refer to a kind of cleansing. And we all now and again need some spiritual cleaning-up, some confession of our sins, some pruning and snipping at those twigs that are growing off the main branch of our lives that seem to be producing sour grapes. We dare not pray the prayer our Lord taught us if we aren't willing to do the sometimes-hard work of remaining a true branch drawing ever and only off the true vine.

When we began this morning, we reflected on the oddity of someone's forever speaking of himself in metaphoric terms. But, for Jesus, this was more than just a striking rhetorical device. All these "I Am" sayings in John are clear echoes of God's personal name as he first disclosed it to Moses at the burning bush. "You tell Israel that I AM sent you." Jesus is the true vine, but as such, he is also a direct extension of the one true God whose Name we seek to hallow in all our living.

It's not easy, though. Have you ever noticed something about John 15? Verse 17 concludes with that famous line "This is my command: Love each other." But then, immediately, Jesus mentions hatred. Jesus asks us to love each other and then, without missing a beat (ignore the subheading that breaks up the text in your English translation) he goes on to predict that the very people who love each other in the church will likely be hated by the rest of the world. Strange, isn't it? The world hates us because of our connection with the One who was love incarnate.

It's not easy being hated, however. In fact, as often as not, when we are confronted with another person's hateful attitude toward us, we respond in some way that ends up perpetuating the cycle of hate. We instinctively hate those who hate us. Somehow we think that doing so makes it easier to handle. When someone says to you, "You know, Harold hates your guts," how easy it is to snap back, "Yeah well, I'm not crazy about him, either!" How difficult to love in the midst of a spiteful, hateful world. How easy it is to use the hatred of others as an excuse to leave behind the compassion and grace of Jesus.

Yet for all who pray "Hallowed be your Name," loving the unlovable and maintaining love even in the teeth of hatred — this remains our calling as we abide in Christ. That's why in verse 18 Jesus goes on to remind the disciples that the world hated him first. Within just a few hours of his having said that, this same Jesus gazed down from a cross into the hate-filled eyes of his crucifiers and yet said, "Father, forgive them, they know not what they do." Never before in history was the Name of God more hallowed than in that moment of grace and love. "See, I have left you an example," Jesus said earlier in John. He sure did. Amen.