The tall and aging spruce tree in our backyard had begun to lean precipitously. As I stood next to it, aligning myself with the angle of the trunk, I could see that when it fell it would come down squarely on the house. On the bedroom, in fact. Sometimes awakened in the middle of the night by the howling winds of late fall, designed, I’m sure, to rid the trees that lose their leaves of even the last, stubborn ones holding on for dear life, I felt an anxious dread. I didn’t want to be joined rudely and unexpectedly some night by a giant spruce bedmate crashing through the ceiling, even if, as the tree guy said later, spruce trees fall more gently than oaks do. Oaks just crack off and plummet down, he said, smashing everything in their path.
Clearly the tree had to come down. And when it did, the tree guy said it was not any too soon. The trunk not only was leaning; it had a big crack in it. He gave me the feeling we had removed the tree in the nick of time. Who knows but that he was absolutely right. By then we were in the winds of March. They can be vicious, too. Nature has a way of removing things that have had their day to make room for new life. I guess we could think of God through nature as the master pruner.
At least that’s a way Jesus points us to God in describing the entwined relationship between God, himself, and us. Today’s reading from John is usually divided into two parts, but since we didn’t deal with the first part last week because of the children’s cantata, I’ve put the whole passage together this morning. It seems a fine unit to me, all about vines and branches and the master pruner.
Pruning is a sticky business when it comes to humans, it seems to me. Some of us are more aggressive at pruning than others are. My experience with pruning in homes where two people share decision making is that one tends to be a pruner and the other a “preserver,” for lack of a better word. Heated arguments can arise over what should come down or out and what should be left to grow. I tend to be the pruner in my household when it comes to trees. I don’t want them to fall on me. When it comes to other things, however, like the plants we buy in early spring, I have to be convinced to pinch off the first blooms in order to strengthen the plant. The loss of the first pansy blossom ensures many more to come from a larger plant in time. I’m taught to be patient then in matters of pruning. I’m glad I’m not God. It must be awfully difficult sometimes to decide what should stay and what should go.
But pruning for new life and renewed energy and growth seems necessary in the ways of human life and community. And that’s what Jesus is getting at in those words from John about vines and branches and what God the vinegrower does with them to make the strongest plants bear the greatest fruit.
“I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinegrower,” Jesus asserts as he introduces the vineyard metaphor at the beginning of the passage. I’m thinking how Amy-Jill Levine might have told us that Jesus’ listeners would have understood what he was talking about – and also how he was introducing a radical new spin on an old idea.
In the Old Testament the vine was used as a metaphor for the whole people of Israel. In particular, the prophet Jeremiah had used the vine image to illustrate how Israel had failed to fulfill the purposes for which God had planted and nurtured it, how the vine had grown wild and rank. You see, Jeremiah knew that people were acquainted with grape vines: how they couldn’t be allowed to grow wild, without careful pruning. It was the pruning that would produce the best grapes for the finest wines. And when Jesus proclaims, “I am the true vine,” he is pointing to himself as the embodiment of the true purposes for which God had chosen Israel to be a light to others. In Jesus, John tells us, Israel’s destiny is complete. That is, in Jesus we see what human life should be. Jesus is God’s Messiah to reveal God’s purposes to us. Those who came to follow Jesus believed this. We have inherited their legacy and have come to claim it for ourselves.
We will see that faith enacted dramatically this morning in the Sacrament of Baptism. We will see it demonstrated again shortly thereafter as twelve among us – like the twelve who followed Jesus in the beginning – are welcomed as followers of Christ in our community. And in those acts of profession and reaffirmation of faith all of us can feel our own journeys of faith nudged forward.
As the vine, Jesus is the stem from which the spiritual life of all of us is drawn. And as the gardener who tends the vine and all the branches, God carefully trims and prunes us in order to produce the most useful fruit. For the health of the vine, the gardener has to cut away dead wood or anything that would make it less than fully alive. As followers of Christ we are like branches that have no spiritual life apart from the vine. Our life flows into us from the source, Jesus Christ, who exists for the life of the branches attached to him. Mutual indwelling – expressed by that wonderful word abiding – becomes the means of life and productivity for the disciples. To detach from the fellowship of Christ is to withdraw and die, to wither like a dead branch.
“You did not choose me but I chose you,” Jesus said. It all begins for us in Jesus reaching out and choosing us, even if in our limited human vision we think we do all the choosing and that the pruning fork belongs in our hands alone. Our whole existence begins in the love of Jesus Christ, the source of the love of God on earth. In his last words before his own death, Jesus assures his disciples of his love for them in having chosen them from the beginning. And in that choosing lies their very lifeblood.
In her book Grace (Eventually), Anne Lamott demonstrates that love of Christ’s own choosing. She tells about leading in her home church, St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Marin City, California, what we call “time with children” here at SPC. She recalls sitting before the children, looking around, and then asking, “Is anyone here wearing a blue sweatshirt with Pokemon on it?” A four-year-old looks down at his chest, amazed to discover that he himself matches that description. He raises his hand. “Come over here,” Lamott says. “You are so loved and so chosen.” And the child clutches himself as if to hold all the love in.
Then looking around she goes through a succession of choosings: green socks and brown shoes, a San Francisco Giants cap, an argyle vest. Each of the children with those items as well turns out to be loved and chosen! God’s love is amazing! Eventually, through this careful selection process, she demonstrates that, in fact, everyone is loved and chosen. In this way Anne Lamott tells us who are of adult age something very important about the nature of God. In a humbling image she demonstrates what John recounts Jesus telling his disciples: we are all like little children, called of God. It is a lovely image we never quite grow out of. Thank God!
But all little children grow up. And accompanied with the choosing is a commandment related to our response. “You did not choose me but I chose you,” Jesus said. But then he said something else: “And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name. I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.”
When I walked into the room where our new members had gathered last Sunday morning, there was happy mayhem. “Can we have a little order here?” I joked. In truth, during the past several weeks they had already grown to like and appreciate one another. I dare say, they had begun to love one another, as we on the staff and positions of lay leadership in the church had begun to love them, too. Their coming among us signals promises of new life among us. I can hardly wait to get going.
But our love will extend far beyond the reaches of this sanctuary and this community, for in Christ’s love we are commanded to go out into all the world to seek harmony, justice, and love, for those are the real fruits of our metaphorical branches. Fed by the source of love in Jesus the vine, we are called to branch out to all those who feel the oppression of prejudice and the heavy weight of economic and political deprivation.
On this sixth Sunday of Easter, as we receive twelve new members among us, let us all be re-dedicated to the mission to which Jesus calls us. Perhaps these words capture that mission:
Today we all are called to be/Disciples of the Lord,/To help to set the captive free,/Make plowshare out of sword./To feed the hungry, quench their thirst,/Make love and peace our fast./To serve the poor and homeless first,/Our ease and comfort last.
God made the world and at its birth/Ordained our human race/To live as stewards of the earth,/Responding to God’s grace./But we are vain and sadly proud,/We sow not peace but strife./Our discord spreads a deadly cloud/That threatens all of life.
Pray justice may come rolling down/As in a mighty stream,/With righteousness in field and town/To cleanse us and redeem./For God is longing to restore/An earth where conflicts cease,/A world that was created for/A harmony of peace.
May we in service to our God/Act out the living Word,/And walk the road the saints have trod/Till all have seen and heard./As stewards of the earth may we/Give thanks in one accord/To God who calls us all to be/Disciples of the Lord.
Those poetic words are not mine. They were written in 1985 for a hymn that will close our service in few minutes. Keep them in mind and heart as the melody carries us away. Amen.