5 Easter B John 15:1-8 18 May 2003
Rev. Roger Haugen
I don’t know a lot about vines and grapes. I have a brother who helps out in a vineyard near Victoria where he is learning about the wine business. He tells me that in the fall they prune the vine aggressively, down to just a main vine and a few strong buds. An awful lot of material goes onto the burning pile. I have planted a couple of grapes vines in my backyard and I know if I want to have grapes, I will need to learn how to prune them.
I do know about tomatoes. When they are transplanted you need to nip off the lowest leaves and plant them in deep. As they grow, the little suckers that grow at the junction of the main branches and the stem need to be taken off. A tomato plant really likes to grow branches and leaves. I am sure they would never get around to setting fruit if they had a chance. Bushy leaves look good, but there would be few tomatoes. I grew tomatoes with a friend of mine this past year. I did my regular pruning all year long, which wasn’t too noticeable, but as the summer came to an end and the frost came near, I pruned them for harvest. There were a lot of tomatoes but a long way from the size we wanted. There were still blossoms, but they had no hope of forming fruit before the frost. I pruned of almost all the green leaving a bare stem with tomatoes hanging from them. I took a certain amount of ribbing from my garden partner, he thought I had surely killed them all. I told him to wait and see. Sure enough, when the boxes of tomatoes were gathered at the end, my boxes held a lot more tomatoes.
Someone once said that the secret of pruning is to trick the plant into thinking that it is dying so it will produce great amounts of fruit. This is language that we know, it is the language of faith. We are to “die to self”, “those who love their life will lose it”. This is the language of baptism. “Our Father liberates us from sin and death by joining us to the death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.” It is the language of funerals, “When we were baptized in Christ Jesus, we were baptized into his death. We were buried, therefore with him by baptism into death . . .” Like a plant, we are reminded over and over again in worship that we are dying, that the time of pruning, the time to bear fruit is now. We know the language.
Sometime we are like the tomato plant, we want to send out a lot of branches that make us look good but do little to achieve the purpose for which we are created, to bear fruit. The main stock gets over-burdened with foliage and the fruit loses out. Over and over again, thirteen times, in our lessons today we hear the word “abide”. Our life comes as we are connected to the vine, Jesus Christ. All the rest is show if it does not connect us to the vine and help to bear fruit. This fruit is love. 26 times in 1 John we read the word ‘love’. This is how we know we are connected to the true vine, as God abides in us and we in God. Love flows to all those around. For love we are created, in love we find our purpose and joy.
If we were to be pruned today, what would be cut off? What looks good in our lives but does nothing to contribute to our ability or willingness to love? What are the basic essentials of our lives that help us to love and what gets in the way? Our basic needs are food, shelter, clothing and transportation. Once those are achieved, we have all we need. The rest is foliage that either contributes to our ability to love or is fair game for the pruner’s knife. If we were pruned today, what would go and what would stay? Jesus makes it clear that the measure is love. Anything that helps us love God and others will stay, and all that detracts from our love for others can go.
The old favourite hymn, “Abide with Me” speaks of some of the pruning that happens in our lives. It uses the word, ‘abide’ drawing us to the centre of our being, drawing us to the main vine, pulling the life energy away from the extremities and concentrating it in the main vine. “Abide with me fast falls the eventide”. As life draws to a close, darkness closing in around us we need Jesus to abide with us, so much that means so little falls away. “When other helpers fail and comforts flee”. When the other things we have looked to that we think give life meaning show for what they truly are, we need Jesus to abide with us. “Swift to its close ebbs out life’s little day; Earth’s joys grow dim, its glories pass away.” What seemed so important but isn’t comes clear at the end of life. Oh, if we could only see it when we are young? The hope in the hymn comes with a question and an answer. “Where is death’s sting? Where, grave, thy victory? I triumph still, if thou abide with me.”
One thing we can be sure of, Jesus abides with us. God’s love is assured for all of us if only we are open to it. If we seek to abide in Jesus, to seek to be connected to the main vine, to allow pruning, to aid in the pruning, cutting out all that does not help us bear fruit, we know of what the hymn speaks. We know that death has no victory, life has purpose and meaning. The victory and meaning is reflected in God’s love for us and our love for God and one another.
We live in a spiritual world with people asking all sorts of spiritual questions. Henry Wieman has said,
“Across culture this is the religious question, “What transforms us as we cannot transform ourselves, to save us from self-destructive tendencies and to bring us to the highest good of which we are capable? The answer is God.”
There is much in this world that would have us grow all sorts of foliage, all sorts of places to soak up our energies, in the false assumption that here is the answer to that great religious question. Reports from the recent census regarding religion came out this week. Yes, we may be a religious nation, but where is the energy going. Some 20,000 declared themselves to be followers of the religion of the Jedi, worshiping Yodi, the guardian of peace and justice in the Star Wars movies.
Connection to the vine is essential. A writer, Elton Trueblood, once said that we are a “cut-flower civilization”, we look good for a while but without roots, we soon wither and die. To abide in Jesus is to have roots. To abide in Jesus is to allow the life to flow from the roots to our lives. To abide in Jesus is to tend the connection, to weed and remove all that would hinder that connection. First we know that the connection has been created by God, there is nothing we can do to make God love us or to give us life. The connection is part of who we are, the connection is for us to nurture. We do this as we worship, as we baptize our children, as we nurture their faith and life in their baptism, as we seek to discover what our baptism means to us every day.
Our life as Zion congregation is part of our connection to the vine. We gather to worship to taste and see the vine. We gather to make confession of ways in which we have lived contrary to the life in the vine and we hear words of forgiveness. We gather to open ourselves to the pruning that God would do in our lives. We organize ourselves so that we can live out the fruit of love to those within and outside of these walls. We commit ourselves to the life of this congregation because without it, a lot of foliage can develop which has nothing to do with the fruit we are created to produce. We hear the word of God in scripture, hymns and preaching and we discern the parts of our lives that need to change.
Church Council met this past week with Tom Brook, the Synod Stewardship consultant. His task is to help us nurture our connection with the true vine. Stewardship is the pruning that we do to recognize that all we have is a gift from God, to remind us of all that would confuse us of that fact. We need to be reminded because the fact is, much gets in the way and we struggle to find the money to make our congregation effective. Such problems reflect a problem of foliage that gets in the way of fruit.
I remember a woman speaking some years ago at the celebration of 50 years of work through the Salvation Army. She spoke of working in the food band and thrift store, of lives she had been allowed to help along the way and she felt truly blessed. She had little material wealth to show for it, but that mattered little to her. She had been used by Jesus to love others. She was connected to the vine and she knew it. She had made decisions all her life that were in keeping with a connection to the vine and she was blessed.
I will do some research on how to prune my grape vine, I know it will require faith to cut so drastically, but those with experience will tell me it is necessary. As I learn to prune my grape vine, I hope to learn about life as well. It is true that to produce love requires drastic pruning, may we have the courage to allow it to happen in our lives as part of the true vine.
