April 28, 2024

John 15:1-8

I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinegrower. He removes every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit.

I am not much of a gardener. So, when Jesus slips into agricultural metaphors, I have to look them up. I searched the interwebs about pruning and vines and, lo and behold, I found something. If you heavily prune grape vines, you will get the largest yield of the best fruit. If you only prune a little, you get large amounts of fruit of low quality. So, what does this mean?

First, the metaphor offered by Jesus relies upon real world information about how to tend your grape vines. And second, you need to pay close attention to those vines if you wish to achieve the best result, the best harvest. But again, what does that mean for us?

Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me /and I in them/ bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing.

God is the vinegrower, Jesus is the vine. Now Jesus was speaking to the disciples who would go out and spread the Gospels. They are in a sense the branches who were pruned through the teachings of Jesus only to go forth and bear fruit. Maybe we are also the product of the vine, but in the larger sense of one branch representing a church or a denomination or a general tradition. The fruitfulness of a religious tradition is therefore a measure of success in this sense. Perhaps we are each individually the branches that are to be assessed for their ability to bear fruit. Our lives are therefore to be fruitful: be fruitful and multiple, as God said to Adam and Eve in the Book of Genesis.

What are we to do with these various ideas about vines and branches? Well, the answer is no one really knows. There is no answer key in the back of the Bible telling us what the correct answer is. Many people, many traditions, are more than willing to step in and provide you with an answer, provide you with their interpretation so that you might be fruitful in their sense of the term. But that is not the same as having the real answer. Because there is no real answer. There are the lessons of Jesus and then there are the ways in which we seek to apply them in our lives or the manner in which we choose to ignore them in our lives.

It is important from the outset that I explain something. I also do not have the absolute final answers for any of these big questions. I do not know the fundamental nature of God. I do not know the official checklist for attaining salvation. I do not know the meaning of life with any greater certainty than any one of you. Now you may well ask, why then are you standing up there in a black robe pontificating every Sunday at 10:30 a.m. That is a good question.

I understand my role, at least in part, as being like a therapist, someone who people seek out when they are experiencing problems or have deep questions about important matters. Someone calls me, someone sits down with me, and we discuss something they read or something that happened or something that has been bothering them. I listen and maybe ask a few questions. I try to find out where this person is coming from with their concerns and what is really at the root of it all.

Sometimes that is straight forward but often it is complicated. It is complicated by many compounding factors that might intensify the worry or confusion of the person. How they grew up. What their family held to be true. What their culture or their circle of friends have to say. There is a lot of latitude here.

Interestingly, I do not often get the question, “Am I going to hell?” That has not been the primary preoccupation of people within my years of ministry. That is comforting to me. Why? Because I would never have wanted to instill in people such existential dread when it comes to living their lives. And this might seem strange to some because modern religion is primarily about what happens when we die. Do we go to heaven or to hell? Are we to be counted with the sheep or the goats? News flash, you do not want to be a goat.

But I think that is wrongheaded thinking, again emphasizing that I do not claim to have the final and absolute answer to any of these questions. Nonetheless, I think this is the incorrect approach because it assumes that we in this life should be focused solely on the next life. And that worldview leads to a sense of worry and concern that has plagued Christians and Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus for centuries.

Interestingly, Judaism does not always have this as a focus, historically or currently. It is about how to live a good and righteous life without the preoccupation with what would happen in the next. There isn’t much in the Hebrew scriptures on an afterlife. In the time of Jesus, there was one group worried about following the Law, following the Torah, as the primary concern for living. Those were the Sadducees. Another group added onto that life-oriented perspective the notion that there was an afterlife. Those were the Pharisees. This notion of the afterlife seems to have been absorbed from surrounding cultures, like Greece and Persia. Call it an idea tried on for size and found to be a fit.

We might look at a concern about death as an addition to an alternate outlook of religion—how to live. How to live a good and righteous life. That perspective can become burdensome, as when the Temple authorities in the time of Jesus made cleansing people of their sins into a bit of a racket, a bit of a multi-level marketing scheme. That is not meant to be a criticism of Judaism but the practices of the religious authorities in one particular place and time. And, by the way, Jesus was criticizing the Temple practices even as he repeatedly echoed the teachings of the Hebrew scriptures.

You can question the direction someone is going without criticizing who they are fundamentally. And yet we are in an age when any criticism can be perceived as existential rather than constructive. Of course, it helps if you are criticizing a group that you happen to be a part of, so I will take this opportunity to switch gears.

Christianity has traditionally focused on helping its members to attain eternal salvation. That has been entry level Christian doctrine. To use a marketing term, that is the value proposition. It is like the McDonalds sign—billions and billions served, or in this case, saved.

If we go back to the parable of the vine and the branches, we have to sort out who those branches represent. If it is the disciples, it might be referring to the different ways the disciples tried to convey their understanding of the teachings of Jesus or, in many cases, the meaning of Jesus. For some, like Peter and James, Jesus was a teacher, Jesus was a prophet, Jesus was a role model. That has not generally been the narrative of modern Christian thinking.

Then there is Paul and Barnabus and Timothy. For them, Jesus was the messiah. Jesus was the Christ, which just means “messiah” in Greek. Messiah meaning the one sent to save the people. Originally this was literal salvation in the form of casting out oppressive rulers, like the Babylonian or Greek Empires.

Messiah in the Christian sense shifted away from being saved in this life to being saved in the next life. Jesus was sent as a sacrifice to atone for the sins of humanity and thereby reconcile humanity with God. And not only was Jesus the messiah, not only was Jesus the sacrifice necessary to bridge the gap between the people and God, he was in fact God. He is God and always was God.

I am going to call these two different ways of understanding the meaning of Jesus as branches. Branches along the vine that we have come to know as Christianity. There will be many moments of branching along the way, but this is a significant moment differentiating between two fundamentally different ways of understanding the meaning and message of the life of Jesus: Jesus as prophet and Jesus as messiah.

The famous 20th century Catholic writer Dorothy Day was once asked about being considered a living saint. And she responded, “Don’t call me a saint, I don’t want to be dismissed that easily.” I love this quote because it encapsulates the Christian tendency of kicking uncomfortable problems upstairs.

Someone is being too pious and preachy? Make them a saint. Someone is asking you to sell all you have and give the money to the poor? Make them a saint. Someone is asking uncomfortable question about how we are living our lives in this world? Make them a saint.

Make them a saint because then they are so far beyond the realm of normal humanity that no one will blame you if you ignore what they have to say. Because no one can live up to the example of someone who has been declared a saint. You can round off what they have to say as impossibly remote and unattainable and feel greatly relieved from the burdensome nature of all that saintliness. Whew, now back to all that fun sinning.

Well then, what about Jesus? Do we get to ignore what he had to say? Because that has generally been the message of Christianity for the past few centuries. We get to ignore what Jesus had to say because it is too hard, too unrealistic, too inconsistent with European culture and good old American capitalism.

Instead, let us focus on getting people to accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior and then they are done. They are saved. No fuss, no muss. The Kingdom of Heaven has been achieved, or at least that is the promise.

But what about the Kingdom of God? Those are not the same ideas. In my reading of those terms, Kingdom of Heaven and Kingdom of God, the two kingdoms are distinctly different ways of approaching life.

The Kingdom of Heaven is to be sought after as the ultimate goal of personal salvation. The Kingdom of God is the reign of God in the universe, yes, but specifically in this world. Christian traditions as branches along the vine that is Jesus tend to raise one of these images of the kingdom over the other. The Kingdom of Heaven is the focus of the next life while the Kingdom of God is about this life, at least in my usage and understanding of these terms.

And, to lay my cards on the table, I think that we should be concerned about the Kingdom of God more so than the Kingdom of Heaven. Why? Because God has given us this one precious life to live. It is a gift. Why not use it?

And in that one precious life we will encounter many other people trying in their own ways to live well as well. And when I read what Jesus had to say and to teach, and certainly what he had to show from his own life, it was about trying to bring that Kingdom of God into being within our lives. Certainly more so than it was about this life being simply the waiting room for heaven.

I do not mean to suggest that church leaders shifted our thinking toward Jesus as having to be worshipped so that Christians might avoid the uncomfortable prospect of following his teachings. I do not mean to suggest it at all—I mean to say it outright and plainly. Again, others might resoundingly disagree.

But in my estimation, we are oddly able to ignore Jesus because he is far more than a saint. We ignore what he had to say because over the centuries people have placed aside those lessons as too hard or too complicated or too much of a distraction from the only true goal in their minds: attaining eternal salvation.

I am not saying this is not an aspect of what Jesus spoke of in his teachings. It clearly is. But worries about the afterlife have almost completely eclipsed the teachings of Jesus. Teachings about caring for each other, about caring for all of creation.

It may be easy for me to say stop worrying so much about the afterlife but I mean it—stop worrying about the afterlife. Honestly, stop worrying so much altogether. Instead, just live. Try to live a good life. Maybe even on occasion a righteous life, but that outlook can lead back to churchly fussiness like during the time of Jesus. Instead, focus on a life filled with people you care about, filled with doing what you think matters. Of course, I do not know what those are particularly because they matter to you. And what matters to you matters.

Jesus did not tell us exactly what to do because that had become the all-consuming outlook of the Temple. It made living life difficult, and it was becoming basically a Ponzi scheme. Jesus did not want life to be any more difficult but instead sought to tell us what parts of life were meaningful. Caring for others. Loving each other. Being there for one another.

When you want your grape vines to produce more and better grapes, you have to prune them a lot. You need to do a lot. And when you think about the lives of Jesus and the disciples, they did a lot. They taught and traveled. They helped people and cared for one another.

And we need to worship those stories a lot less and try to follow those stories much more. The fruit of our lives is the love of our days. We do not need to love every single person on the planet, though it would be nice if we did. Instead, that care and concern for others needs to inform what we do. When we are in church, yes, but also when we are in the line at the grocery store. Sitting in traffic. Even when we are on hold waiting for customer service—which is probably the biggest ask of this entire sermon.

Love in this sense is not grand sentimentality but simply a sense of decency toward the people we come across in this life. I am not asking you to dismantle systems of oppression and inequality—that will be another sermon. For now, do what you can to live with simple goodness and kindness toward those around you.

Now plenty of people along that branching vine of Christianity would disagree with me, without question. I am leading you down the path of works righteous rather than salvation through faith and faith alone. That is a valid theological criticism, one that I do not agree with but that I acknowledge as existing. And unlike many of them, I will not stand here and proclaim that I am presenting the only possible interpretation of what Jesus said. I will simply say that this is what makes sense to me after many years of study and writing on these very topics. You all can disagree, of course.

But I am also not going to stand up here with my pruning shears waiting to cut you off from this particular branch of the followers of Jesus. The other essential part of being within a religious community is the ability to stay in conversation with one another even across differences. And that, my friends, is a quality of life you will not find in ready supply in the world today. So, please feel free to disagree with me. Disagree with me even as I hope and pray that we are not overly disagreeable to one another as we do so. Church should not be about standing around agreeing with everything I say or what anyone says now or said centuries ago.

It is about being together. About living with one another. It is about puzzling through what Jesus asked us to do so many years ago. Our job is not to find the right answer by a date certain. It is to consider all these questions and to love one another through it all. If we can manage that, I think the next life will take care of itself. Amen.