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Sermon - The Fifth Sunday in Easter (B) - 10th May 2009
St Alban's Anglican Church Epping
Readings: John 15.1-8
The Western world is hungry for meaning. It’s hungry for spirituality. For too long we have put up with secularism. Many people boast that Australia is a secular society.But all that gives us is a flat and barren landscape. In that world, the only thing that exists, the only thing that matters, is the world we can touch and see. We can try to live like that. But it leaves us with a very empty life. We know that’s not a true life. But often we’re not sure what is true; we know there is more to life, but finding that ”more”and plugging into it can be difficult. Go to the New Age section in any bookshop shop, and you find a wonderful range of mysticism, reincarnation, discovering your personal goddess, getting in touch with hidden parts of your personality, and much more. It’s easy to become bewildered, confused and wondering where to turn. Sometimes people try coming to church - though amazingly they assume that the last place you’d find spirituality is in mainstream Christianity.
And then, this morning, we hear those words of Jesus which we could listen to over and over without ever plumbing its depths. ”I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser. Abide in me, and I in you. If you abide in me, and my words in you, ask whatever you want. Apart from me, you can do nothing.”And we may have a sense, that there is a whole world of truth, of spiritual insight, if only we could get inside it and make it our own.
This passage is one of the great statements of Christian spirituality. There are three parts to it First, the picture of the vine is a natural one for anyone in the Middle East, where many poor families possess a vine, a fig tree, an olive or two. But the vine was much more than that. It was one of the regular images for Israel, God’s people. God brought a vine out of Egypt, declared the Psalmist, and planted it in a good land.
The prophet Isaiah made up a song about God’s vineyard. But in each case something went badly wrong. In the Psalm, foreigners ravage God’s vineyard and wild beasts uprooted it. In Isaiah, the vine that should have produced good grapes bore wild grapes instead. And so on. And now, at the heart of the gospel story, we find a young man, on whose shoulders the hope of Israel had come to rest, the one whose followers believed he was the Messiah, the one who had recently entered Jerusalem to shouts of Hosanna, saying to his followers that he was the true vine, the real vine, and that they were the branches, whose task was to bear fruit by sharing his life. He was the true Israel, summing up in himself God’s age-old purpose for the chosen nation and bringing that purpose at last to fulfilment; and he is calling his followers, then and now, to be joined to him and become God’s true people, the people through whom God’s plan for the world will be fulfilled.
What does this say to us? Our quest for spirituality can often appear very self-centred, with me and my religious awareness me and my spiritual journey, taking centre stage. The image of the vine, while inviting us to a depth of spirituality, sets that personal quest within the bigger story of the family of God, stretching through time from Abraham to the present day and beyond, and through space from the Middle East in the first century to the four corners of the earth today, and not merely to enjoy intimacy with the living God but working out that intimacy by bearing fruit for him in his world.
What does it mean to abide in the vine? If Jesus is the vine, we are summoned to abide, to live, to make our home in him. We can understand this in an individual sense. But we mustn’t forget the corporate life of the church as the place where we are to find our home. Sadly, modern spirituality often forgets community. And that is precisely the point of the vine - this true Israel, this people of God, are those in whom God’s purpose of love, of rescuing the world, is to be worked out in costly companionship. Abiding in Jesus includes being part of the life of the church, committed to the daily and weekly fellowship of his people, in mutual support, prayer, shared worship, sacraments, study and not least work for the gospel in the world and even in our own suburb. One of the things that happens with every Eucharist is that we are drawn into that intimate fellowship with Jesus himself and with one another at his table.
Secondly, Jesus has introduced the theme of the vine and the branches where he speaks of his Father, the vinedresser, doing two things which require a knife. “Every branch in me that doesn’t bear fruit,” declares Jesus, “the Father removes, cuts away; and every branch that does bear fruit he prunes, so that it may bear more fruit.”
In other words, you get the knife either way. We may feel uncomfortable with that. We want to discover who we really are. We want to develop our full potential, to be more fully, more truly ourselves. And we want this for ourselves, for our own enjoyment, so that we can be fulfilled and happy in ourselves.
But now we’re told it’s not like that. True spirituality is not like a lake that collects more and more water and keeps it for itself. There are some lakes like that, and the most famous one is called the Dead Sea. True spirituality is the kind of lake that is constantly replenished by fresh water coming down from the hills, and constantly giving out in turn to rivers and streams that flow to the land lower down the valley. We are called to be fruitbearing branches in the vine. And bearing fruit, living for God in the world in the power of the risen Christ, isn’t an optional extra tacked on to a central core; it is the centre. If you don’t bear fruit, you run the risk that your very place as a branch in the vine will be called into question.
But if you do, there are still surprises. “Every branch that does bear fruit,” says Jesus, “the father prunes, so that it may bear more fruit.”As any true gardener knows, you have to keep pruning the bush, the rose, the vine, to keep it healthy. You sacrifice twenty potential buds and new shoots in order that the two or three that remain may grow strong and produce much better flowers and fruit. Genuine spirituality is not about personal development, fulfilling the potential within ourselves. Rather, as we follow Jesus and come to know him personally we find him calling us to submit to the pruning-knife, to cut out some things from our lives which are good in themselves in order that other things may flourish. Pruning is always painful. It’s a kind of bereavement.
But the vinedresser is never closer to the vine, never more intimately concerned with it, than when wielding the pruning-knife. A genuine Christian spirituality is never self-indulgent. It is always a matter of following the Jesus who gave up everything, his very life, on our behalf. The call to abide in the vine then, is a call to a spirituality which takes its place within the purposes of God for his people; it’s a call to a spirituality not of self-indulgence but of obedient fruit-bearing, and of submitting to the pruner’s knife.
And, thirdly it’s a call, to a personal and intimate knowledge of Jesus himself. Jesus is the vine; he is the true, living Lord who walked and talked in first-century Palestine, who wept and hungered and loved and laughed and suffered and died and rose again, and who offers himself and his life to us today as he offered himself and his life to his first followers in the upper room.
It is Jesus himself who says to us –abide in me, and I in you; you can’t bear fruit unless you abide in me;those who abide in me bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing; anyone who doesn’t abide in me is cast off like a branch and withers; if you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask whatever you want, and it will be done for you.” Abide in Jesus. Christianity isn’t a religion that happens to have been taught by Jesus. Christian spirituality isn’t simply a pattern of spiritual development that Jesus happens to have taught or modelled.
Christian spirituality, the heart of what this faith is all about, is the personal knowledge of another person, the person who died and rose again, the good shepherd who knows his sheep by name and is known by them, the on whose own life, his breath and his blood, are given to us, as the vine gives its sap to the branches, so that we can be extensions of his work, his love, his fruit-bearing, his glorifying of the Father. That is what the Eucharist, this service in which we share here and now, is all about.
So John leaves us with a challenge. Are we ready to have our own way of putting things, our own spiritual aspirations, transformed by Jesus’ question to us, his searching, haunting offer of a new life as a cleansed, pruned, fruit-bearing branch in the vine? We may find this challenge a bit daunting. We may be put off by the reshaping of priorities which seems to be called for. But listen to what Jesus says just three verses later. ”I have said these things to you,” he insisted, “so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.” Life in the vine may not be what we were expecting. But we might just find that it’s what we really wanted all along.