John 15:1-17 "Staying on the Vine" Scott Hoezee

In her book Nature, God, and Pulpit Elizabeth Achtemeier pointed out a fundamental difference between the biblical world of Jesus and our contemporary world. The difference is that whereas Jesus regularly reached for illustrations drawn from nature, many of us no longer live very close to the natural world. Mostly we live in urban and suburban environments. We travel on asphalt streets through the concrete jungles of big cities. We are sheltered inside homes which keep the temperatures cool if it is hot outside and warm when it is cold. Most people seem to prefer a stroll through the shopping mall over a walk in the woods and very few people in a church like Calvin have much formally to do anymore with agriculture. We buy food from stores and so get no dirt under our fingernails.

But as with tonight's passage, so also many of the Bible's finest images for who we are supposed to be in Christ shine with the light of the physical creation. Tonight Jesus takes us to a vineyard. But when was the last time you were in a vineyard? To be honest, I'm not sure I have ever been in a real vineyard such as the ones you can see in the Napa Valley of California. Like most of you, I've seen grapevines here and there but mostly, though I enjoy a good glass of wine or a nice smear of grape jelly on my PB&J sandwich, I do not often ponder the vineyards from which grape products come.

Yet tonight we are faced with a famous "I Am" sayings of Jesus which directs to think about something we frankly don't know much about. But perhaps by admitting that, we can take a fresh approach to a passage we maybe think we know well already. So let's look at this passage, starting with its wider context.

Last week I told you that commentator Dale Bruner calls John 14 Jesus' great "Father Sermon" since nowhere else does Jesus talk so much about his Father--we noted that in 42 verses Jesus uses the word "Father" twenty-one times, about once every other verse. Tonight we come to John 15 which Bruner calls the "Son Sermon" because here Jesus talks a great deal about himself. In the span of just 31 verses Jesus uses the first-person pronoun "I" a whopping seventy-one times, nearly twice per verse on average! Not surprisingly, John will present Jesus' "Spirit Sermon" in chapter 16, which is the longest single section in the gospels where Jesus talks about the Holy Spirit and the Spirit's work.

In John 14 it is clear that the Father is the source of all good things, of all good blessings, of all truth, and is the power source behind all of Jesus' work and miracles. But last week we also saw that the Father is the one who gives Jesus words to say. Now in John 15 Jesus makes clear that those words are the key to our abiding in him.

It all comes down to remaining in Jesus and in his Word. In order to make that clear Jesus uses the image of the vine and branches. It was a sensible image for Jesus to invoke since everyone knows that branches are completely dependent on the vine out of which they grow. You would not even have a branch if there were not a vine in the first place! Further, once the branch grows from the vine stem, it will never outgrow its need for that same stem! When a child is conceived, she is totally dependent on the nourishment of her mother's womb for nine months. For some time after that she may well be dependent on breast milk, too. But children get weaned eventually. They get independent. Their physical well-being and ability to flourish will not depend on mother any longer--they can and do get along fine without the umbilical tethers that once represented their very source of life.

But not so with branches--a cane or branch off a vine stem will be as completely dependent on the nutrients coming through the vine when that branch is 50 years-old as when it was one-year-old. There is no such thing as a weaned branch or an independently minded section of a vine which shuts itself off from the main stem! The stem is the only part that has roots in the ground and so it is every branch's connection to water. If you are a branch, therefore, it pays to stay really tight with your main vine stem!.

Of course, what we are finally dealing with here are not actual branches but people, and among people there have been and still are folks in the church who end up being rather independently minded after all. There are folks who stand in the wider Christian tradition but who seem to think that the spiritual "sap" which flows through the vine of Christ's Word is of only partial significance to their own flourishing. On my reading of John 15 the key way by which we are to remain in Christ is by having Christ and especially Christ's words remain in us. Yet the way some people today treat the Bible, you could almost conclude that these are branches which are trying to make a go of it without the main vine.

Like some of you I have read articles by authors and have met up with individuals who say quite remarkable things about the gospels. Most of us are familiar with the Jesus Seminar and its blithe dismissal of 82% of the words of Jesus found in the four gospels. There are others who do not go that far but who nevertheless claim that Scripture is just a jumping off point for theology and the Christian life. The Bible, as one author put it, is not the final word on things but is more like a friend with whom we have conversations and with whom we may now and again simply have to disagree and then part amicably.

A pastor friend of mine, whom I care for but whose views pain me, said recently that we need to give individual human experiences far more play in our theology and that we should not let traditional doctrines squash how some people experience God. Among the things we should not insist on, my friend says, are things like Jesus' being a unique person in that he was not just human but divine, the bodily resurrection of this same Jesus, the Trinity, the virgin birth, and a self-conscious afterlife with God. These items should be negotiable for people whose life experiences have made it unnecessary or impossible for them to believe such things.

In John 15 Jesus says that his Father is the gardener who takes care of tending and pruning the larger vine and all its branches. But some today don't want to leave that task to God alone and so seize the gardening shears for themselves to prune and trim the very Word of God whose abiding presence in our hearts is what keeps us in the Christ who gave that Word on his Father's behalf. But in so doing what they effectively do is cut themselves off from the vine.

This is a painful reality. Has it ever struck you how deeply involved Jesus is with his people? Jesus' relationship with us is not casual nor is it something Jesus holds at arm's length. Jesus is not like some CEO overseeing a large conglomerate and so supervising the affairs from some plush office, which most employees never even get to visit. He is not like a manager of a large firm who downsizes the operation by pink-slipping a slew of employees whom he doesn't really know personally in any event and so whose job-loss is casually chalked up to "just business." No, the New Testament uses more radical imagery than that. The Church is the Body of Christ, which is a pretty intimate depiction of how close we are to Jesus. In John 15 we are branches on the very vine of Jesus. We grow right out of his very self and if something goes wrong and we need to be removed, we are cut off the vine. That touches, diminishes, wounds the vine. It leaves a scar.

Like most pastors I feel a sense of personal hurt whenever members transfer to other congregations, particularly when such transfers have nothing to do with a job relocation or a geographic move, as is sometimes the case. It is made worse by the fact that lots of people never say good-bye, never drop a note, never explain. You maybe baptized their children, presided over their marriage, did a funeral for a loved one, but then they disappear one day and that is that. It hurts. But even at its most painful that is nothing compared to how Jesus feels when he loses a branch--because in that case it means not that the branch is serving God elsewhere on the vine but that the branch is little more than kindling wood.

You may have noticed in verse 2 that the branches the Father cuts off are described as having been "in me." This soon-to-be dead wood once had every bit as intimate a relationship with Jesus the Vine as every other branch has. It is not as though these branches had once floated freely above the vine or had had at best only a small connection to the larger vine stem. A branch is a branch and it is organically united with the vine. To lose such a branch is to lose part of your very self. The act of cutting that branch is a wounding, scar-making affair. Small wonder Jesus expresses such fervency in John 15 that disciples not let this happen! Jesus is desperate to keep everyone, desperate that they remain in his love even as Jesus himself and his words remain in the hearts of all branches.

It is in this context that Jesus, somewhat surprisingly, begins in verse 9 to speak of a command: that we love one another. Jesus has not totally left the image of the vine behind yet, but that is precisely why the language of command is so striking. Ordinarily you would not imagine a vine ordering a branch to produce grapes. What else could it produce? Apples? The branches will either bear grapes or they will bear nothing due to sickness or disease or something. So why does Jesus have to order even his healthy branches to produce that primary fruit of love? How can love be both a fruit which grows naturally and also something we have to pursue as a task?

Unlike real vine branches which have no choice but to receive the sap flowing from the larger vine, when it comes to disciples, it is possible to in some way be in Christ and yet be unproductive. A full and proper reception of the nutrients Jesus has to offer is not inevitable. Some branches produce only meager amounts of fruit or maybe even sour grapes--fruit that just didn't get enough sugar into them (or in this case love).

The good news is that the more and better fruit you produce in Christ's love, the more God will prune your part of the vine so that you can make even more fruit. It is a horticultural way of depicting what could be called "good momentum" I checked a website about pruning last week and discovered that the art of proper pruning is, like so many other things, a remarkably complex and specialized skill. Apparently the average grape branch can put out as many as 300 buds. If all of those were allowed to mature, they would all be sour. So farmers need to cut back a fairly large percentage of those buds so that the remaining ones will have more sap to go around, increasing both the size and flavor of the mature grapes.

Something like that happens spiritually, too--the better things go on your particular branch, the better they will get because the Father will tend you even more. Actually, in verse 2 the Greek word used is katharei, from which we get the word "catharsis." It does not really mean "to prune" but to cleanse (which is why in verse 3 Jesus tells the disciples they are already "clean"). There is more than a hint of purifying here, of an almost baptism-like cleansing of our lives.

But what does that mean? We have all heard someone refer to some tragedy in her life as God's "pruning" of her, as God's way of trimming her back and building character. But there is no hint in John 15 that hardship and harm and diminishment would necessarily be involved in the cleansing process to which Jesus refers. If anything the image of being cleansed summons up notions of forgiveness, of grace, of the Spirit's giving us the strength to resist temptation so that we can express the love which is the hallmark Christian fruit.

"This is my command: Love each other." That's what Jesus said and it is perhaps as clear and easy-to-understand a verse as you will find in the Bible. If only it were as easy to do! You've got to hand it to Jesus: when he issued a command, it was a whopper! Actually, Jesus was not real big on giving commands. Jesus was more of a dispenser of beatitudes, of truths couched in homey parables, and of warm invitations to come unto him for rest and forgiveness. As a matter of fact, except for a couple of times when Jesus commanded an evil spirit to come out of someone, this is the only time in the gospels when Jesus issues any kind of a command. He generally didn't even use the word! Even when a lawyer tried to pin Jesus down on what was the greatest of all commandments, Jesus skirted obvious things like the Ten Commandments and reached for love: love for God and love for neighbors.

Of course, if you study the life and words and parables and sermons and actions of Jesus, you will find an eternity's worth of things you should do. But there was precisely just one thing which was so vital that Jesus actually went so far as to phrase it as a command, and that was to love each other. We are to love one another, cherish one another, even lay down our lives for one another if need be, and it is all an extension of being a branch on Jesus the true vine. Apparently Jesus knew that if we could do just this one commandment, everything else would follow. If you bring a child to an ice cream parlor, you won't need to start issuing rules which insist that the child order a cone, eat it, enjoy it, find it delicious, and so just generally have fun! Once the child gets to the parlor, the rest follows. So also with love: if we can't do this, nothing else will work, either. If we can, the rest follows.

Still, this matter of loving each other is not so natural a result of being in Christ that it scarcely needs mentioning--Jesus did have to command it after all. Apparently we human branches in Christ, unlike real grape vine branches, need to do some self-cultivation through the Holy Spirit. We need to hone skills like forgiveness (without which we sooner or later will find reasons not to love most everybody). We need to nurture kindness and gentleness, without which the hard knocks of life will eventually make us hard-edged and bitter like a sour grape. We need to grow compassion in our hearts so that we can reach out to those in need even as we see people we don't particularly like in ways that remind us that they, too, are flawed folks like ourselves and that they struggle and hurt the same as do we all.

Above all we need to be students of God's Word so that the words of Jesus can abide in us. We need to rehearse and enact the great stories of Jesus, recognizing how the parable of the prodigal son repeats itself a thousand times a day all over the place, including some days in our own lives when we are alternately the waiting father who is hoping for the best or the prodigal loping back home and expecting the worst. We need to rehearse the drama of the shepherd looking for that one lost sheep and so see again our own need to stick with even wandering folks over the long haul. We need to hear the beatitudes echoing in our minds and pray the prayer our Lord taught us. The words of Jesus must abide in us but that cannot happen if we neither know those words nor rehearse them often.

Because if we do, the result, as Jesus says in verse 11, is nothing short of pure joy. Capturing the spirit of that joy, and wanting it to hyper-abound to all people, is the goal of being a branch in Jesus' vineyard. In Jesus' time I don't think there was any such thing as grape jelly. Throughout the Bible the principal thing you did with grapes was make wine, which is described throughout the Old Testament as one of God's great gifts to humanity to gladden the heart and bring joy. Christ is indeed our true vine but a vine without branches produces no grapes. It is our holy calling to produce fruit for God--fruit which can be turned into the sweet ambrosia of a love distilled, decanted, and delighted over to the complete joy of all God's people. Amen.