Preached by Michael Cheuk
May 10, 2009, Fifth Sunday of Easter, Year B
John 15:1-8
On this Mother’s Day Sunday, we come this morning partly to honor our mothers and to recognize their role in bringing us into the world. Mothers have an intimate connection with their children, since they nourished and nurtured them in their own bodies during pregnancy. Mothers play an important role in setting up the kind of household that provides a loving and caring home for their children. Now, I know that not everyone is fortunate enough to grow up with a loving, caring mother, but I think motherhood is a useful metaphor to help us to understand what Jesus is teaching his disciples when he told them: “Remain in me, and I will remain in you.” The word “remain” has been translated elsewhere by the more archaic term, “abide,” and in this context, it means “to dwell” or “to live closely.” In his translation of the Bible called The Message, Eugene Peterson translates Jesus’ words in verse four this way: “Live in me. Make your home in me just as I do in you.”
“Live in me. Make your home in me. Remain in me. Abide in me. And I will abide and make my home in you.” In our increasingly mobile society, we are constantly on the move and our schedules are jammed packed. In our increasingly restless society, we are constantly looking for the next best thing, the next American Idol, the next promotion, the next opportunity. In one of the most famous prayers of all time, St. Augustine prayed: “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they find rest in You.” I think Augustine is right; we all have restless hearts, constantly searching for purpose, meaning, significance, love and acceptance. But Waylon Jennings is also right when he sang “Looking for love in all the wrong places.” We often to look for love, acceptance, meaning and significance in all the wrong places. Our hearts are restless until they find rest, until they find a home in the abiding love of Christ.
In explaining what it means to remain in His abiding love, Jesus used an image that would have been very familiar to his disciples: a grape vine. “I am the vine,” said Jesus. Like a vine that brings life-giving sap to the branches, Christ feeds us the life-giving spiritual nourishment that we need. To use another image, Jesus the true vine is the spiritual umbilical cord for our lives. Apart from the vine, we can do nothing. Apart from our mothers who nurtured us for nine months in their wombs while we were fetuses, we would not be alive today. Apart from the abiding love of Christ, we can do nothing.
But while we eventually grow out of our need for our mother’s umbilical cord, and while we eventually move out of our parents’ home, Jesus is teaching us that we will never outgrow our need for the true vine, and that our true home is always in the presence of our loving Lord. According to New Testament scholar N. T. Wright, one of the ways that we remain in Christ’s love is to remain in the community that knows and loves Christ and celebrates Him as its Lord. In the original Greek language, Jesus was addressing his disciples in the plural. To put it into good Southern vernacular, Jesus was actually saying: “Remain in me, and I’ll remain in y’all. I am the vine, y’all are the branches, and apart from me, y’all cain’t do nuthing!” From the perspective of John the Gospel writer, there are no Lone Ranger, solitary Christians. We remain in Christ by becoming deeply rooted in the Christian community, participating in its practices of Bible study and prayer and allowing others in the community to speak into our lives to help us live in a more faithful and Christ-like manner. The prayer triplets that we are forming as part of our Spiritual Transformation Journey is one way to remain in the abiding love of Christ as we spend time with God in prayer and reflecting on the Bible and as we share our lives in a deeper way with our prayer partners.
We are called to remain in Christ, to abide by the vine, but that is only the first part of the equation. The reason for remaining in Christ’s abiding love is so that we may bear fruit. Because if all we do is consume the sustenance that Jesus gives us without bearing fruit, then we’re nothing more than spiritual parasites! A grape branch receives nourishment from the vine so that grapes may be produced. That is the whole purpose of the branch. But the branch doesn’t “do” anything to manufacture the grapes. The branch does not say to itself: “I’m going to work harder and smarter, and by sheer force of will power and frenetic activity, I’m going to bear fruit.” Likewise, a pregnant mother does not say, “I’m going to work harder and smarter, and by sheer force of will power and frenetic activity, I’m going to bear a child.” Instead, expectant mothers just make sure that they eat well and exercise so that their babies within them receive proper nutrition to grow. Similarly, Jesus the true vine teaches us that we bear fruit, not by trying to manufacture it, but by remaining in His abiding love, and taking our nourishment from him. The “fruit” is the natural outcome of abiding or remaining in Jesus Christ. And for John, the “fruit” that followers of Jesus will bear is a love for one another. In chapter 13, John records the words of Jesus to his disciples at the Last Supper: “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”
We remain in the abiding love of Christ so that we will produce an abiding love for others. Bearing the fruit of love is so important that Jesus utters these hard words in verses 1 and 2: “My Father is the gardener. He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful.” Now, I’m not a gardener, but I understand that it is important to prune away dead branches that are no longer receiving the life-giving sustenance of the vine. But Jesus was also saying that even the branches that bear fruit, His Father prunes so that they may bear more fruit. Left to itself, a grape branch will produce a lot of growth, tangling itself in an unwieldy manner. Left to ourselves, our lives will get cluttered by a lot of activity, some fruitful while others not so fruitful. As P.T. Forsyth once said: “It is possible to be so active in the service of Christ as to forget to love him. . . Christ can do without your works; what he wants is you. Yet if he really has you, he will have all your works.”[1] In order to really have us, our Divine Gardener lovingly and carefully prunes away our need to succeed, our need to rush things, our need to get somewhere faster than the next guy. Such pruning leaves us with a cleaner, undivided heart that seeks to remain in the abiding love of Christ. And according to Nancy Blakely, “When we remain that close to Jesus, we attuned to him and he to us, the remarkable result is that what we want will be what God wants, and it will surely come to pass.” Perhaps that’s what Jesus meant when he said in verse seven: “If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be given you.”
The point is to abide or to remain in Christ. When that happens, we will want what God wants and we will do what God wants us to do. To abide in Christ is a matter of focus, a matter of priority. And when we lose our focus, we will lose our way. Gary Shockley writes: “Sometimes, without our prompting, life will alter our pace for us. The birth of a child, a promotion at work, sickness, marriage, divorce, the death of someone we love—these things make us stop in our tracks. All forward motion ceases for a time. We would be wise in these moments to rest for a while and simply survey the landscape, find the horizon again, get a sense of where we are, and seek God’s presence.” Shockley continues: “I am trying to learn something at once both simple and incredibly difficult: the destination is not a place but a person—a person who loves me very much and more than anything wants to be with me along the journey of life. I am much more open these days to the idea that God isn’t all that interested in getting me somewhere. God is just interested in getting me!”[2]
I heard a story of a mother who wanted to teach her five-year-old son the way around the neighborhood so that the son wouldn’t get lost when he was out playing with friends. The mother wanted his son to know his way back home. So one day, she took his son on a walk around the neighborhood. After walking some ways and making several turns at intersections, she asked his give-year-old, “Son, do you know where you are?”
Her son replied, “No.”
The mother said, “Do you know your way home?”
Her son answered, “Not really.”
The mother asked one more time, “So, are you lost?”
The son then looked up at his mother’s face, and as he reached out for his mother’s hand, he said with a smile, “No, I’m not lost. I’m with you, Mommy!”
And with that, the mother took her son’s hand, and together they walked back home.
As so, as we come to the Lord’s Table this morning, we are reminded of the importance of dwelling in Jesus Christ who is the way back home to our heavenly Father. At the Last Supper, Christ the living vine poured out the fruit of the vine that symbolized the fruit of His love. As we eat the bread and drink the fruit of the cup, we are drawn closer to the presence of Christ and to each other. As we serve one another these elements, we practice the skills needed to become more fruitful in our service to others. Today, Christ the true vine calls the church to dwell in Christ’s presence and take in God’s abiding love that is the source of our faith, hope, and love. Amen.
