Vines and Branches
Text: John 15:1-8
With all the good weather we’ve been having lately, I expect most people are going about the routines of spring… getting the gardens ready. Blooms and bedding plants are already making appearances in flower beds, hailing the approach of the summer months. After all, next week is the May long weekend, the “unofficial” start of cottage season for many. Sarah and I have tulips growing in our front garden… something we didn’t know was there when we moved in last October… it was a nice touch actually. In spite of some bouts of rain, Spring is upon us.
I am the true vine, and my Father is the vine grower.
The Easter season parallels spring, images of resurrection and new life are all around us. Especially as we see it flowing back into the flora and fauna around us. Growth and growing is on our minds. Life returns, restored and healed from the deathly grip of winter. We don’t just see it in the buds and leaves on the trees, or in the flowers, but our own houses undergo the rites of spring… Annual cleanings, and the inevitable work in the garden.
I must start with a confession. I hate garden work… although not as much as I used to. Spring was not a pleasant experience in the Crowdis household… or at least for my brother and me. We lived on a corner lot with not one, but two large sized gardens, plus several more smaller flower beds. Needless to say, they needed a fair amount of upkeep. As enthusiastic as my mother was about having gardens and growing our own vegetables, her enthusiasm did not rub off on her children. Then again, it felt like we were considered a free source of labour, tending the garden was made to be a chore for us…
Usually my tasks were pretty menial… or at least they felt that way. Most of the time, my task was to dig up the garden for the spring plant. If I was lucky, I get to mix in peat moss. If I wasn’t, I was assigned to the impossible task of making the garden weed-free. Keep in mind, my attitude toward gardening has long since changed, but at the time to a pre-teen boy, fifteen minutes in the garden felt like a life-sentence! The best I could hope for was to play with the hose in watering stuff, or be able to unleash some pent-up aggression on plants or trees that needed pruning.
Now pruning… that I could handle! Cutting away at branches on a plant or tree in order to help it grow… Clip a little here, cut away a dead branch there… Although I had to be rather careful, or else my enthusiasm with the shears would hack the life out of an otherwise healthy plant. It forced me to pay closer attention to the shrub itself, and all of its individual characteristics. I had to learn where it was growing and where it wasn’t. Since then, while I have not gained a true love for gardening, I have learned to appreciate it. It also helped me to value the depth of John’s metaphor in the gospel.
I am the true vine, and my Father is the vine grower.
These are powerful images: God as the vine grower, Christ as the true vine… These metaphors are among the most vivid and layered of all the ones that appear in John’s gospel. In using the image of the vine, John draws upon one of the most treasured images in Israel. John’s Jewish-Christian Community would have grown up with this image firmly planted in their hearts and minds. While he sows a new seed by naming Jesus as the true vine, he is already cultivating a well-groomed faith within that community… helping them experience their relationship with God in a fresh way.
The vine image that John uses most often brings to mind, of course, the grape vine. Being not that far from wine country here, we know how this works. Vineyards are the backbone of the wine industry. When we hear “I am the vine, you are the branches” we most often think of ourselves as the branches of the vine, physically linked to the stem… It’s the most common image, and certainly not a wrong one.
But there is something more here: a brief lesson in biology tells us that a vine is a special variety of plant. As a vine, it has no hard structure of its own. A vine requires something else to grow on. Many vines don’t have true branches, but instead grow long creepers that spread out in search of water, light, and other nutrients. In the wild, of course, vines wrap themselves around the trunks and branches of trees. In domestic gardens and vineyards, we put up wooden trellises or ladders for the vines to cling to. So here’s some food for thought: does it make any sense for Jesus to say “I am the vine, you are the trellis?” Think of it as God in Christ growing around us…
Lest we become too entangled playing amidst the wild vines, there’s another metaphor that John highlights: God as vine grower. I can’t help but think of the image of a tiny little vine-dresser, flitting from plant to plant, carefully examining the grapes, spraying and pruning each plant, stripping back parts of the plant to give it a new chance to grow.
Like the vine, the vine grower image is nothing new for John’s audience… but the pruning image was new. The gospel pushes at the walls of what everybody knew, in lifting up this image of God carefully cutting away, there’s something that doesn’t sit right. It is far too easy to read this as God keeps the good and cuts away the bad… after all it does read like this:
He removes every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit.
Pruning and cutting away are the same process… to be pruned is to have part of the plant cut away. Sometimes it can be an otherwise good which is removed. So are we being pruned?
In John’s time, the threat persecution was very real. The Romans were beginning to notice these early Christians, and John’s community had already been excluded from the traditional Jewish communities. Their faith was being challenged at every turn. The life that they had come to know was slowly being stripped away. In the midst of this, they felt like everything was being ripped out from underneath them… and it was likely that they were wondering where God was in the midst of all this; circumstances that all of us might actually relate to.
The fact is life is harsh. Our faith is constantly challenged by what we face in life. That is a part of being human. No matter how hard we may try to hold on, there will be tomes when everything that we hold dear will be stripped away from us. I think these past few weeks have in this congregation have really brought that home.
Experiences like this prune away at our expectations of faith. They challenge what we believe, and call us to sit down and ask the hard questions… what we believe… what we understand God to be. It’s not a pleasant experience, it never is, but these experiences can help us to grow into a better understanding of God’s presence and movement in life.
Ultimately, our faith is a gift from God. It is not something that we personally own. It is dangerous to assume that once we have Christ in our lives, we don’t have to do anything else. If we are not pruned, or do not allow ourselves to be pruned, we stop bearing fruit. If we don’t allow ourselves the opportunity to ask questions and explore what we believe, we could wake up one morning and find our faith to be a dead bush. Like it or not, we are continuously growing in our faith. The vine of Christ that enwraps us and grows within us, and sometimes it needs pruning in order to let it flourish. God encourages us to grow in faith when we are challenged by what we experience in life. Old, fruitless branches are pruned away, while newer healthier ones are given the chance to flourish and grow.
When we think of our own recent experiences. Instead of fumbling for some platitude, or words to fill the air… we need to consider something. Clichés often do more harm than good… so we need to ask the same question that John’s community did: where is God in the midst of all this? We find ourselves clearing through dead branches, and bringing ourselves down to the core of what we believe.
What came back looked something like this: I believe that God is loving and caring. I believe that through the experience of Jesus Christ, God lives with us in the midst of our suffering. I believe that in the resurrection at Easter, ultimately there is an end to suffering.
So where is God in the midst of this? I will make it clear, not all of my questions were answered… yet I believe, I feel, that God does not abandon us, but was cries with us in our sorrow. God is there even when we can not feel it. In those times when we feel completely alone, God is still there lifting us up. Pruned away was this idea that God was uncaring or somehow mechanical, and through this experience, our faith can find a new place to grow… It just make take some time.
Ultimately when parts of the plant are cut back, the end result is that the vine becomes more vital and productive. Still, having parts of ourselves cut away, even metaphorically, can be painful. Yet John’s metaphor of God as the one who trims is one of encouragement, not of judgement. John is seeking to support his own community who were facing challenges in faith. In this image of the vine grower, God call us to grow, even as parts of our life and experience seem to be pruned away.
It is a strong image for us to remember… very powerful as we continue to celebrate Easter and the joy of resurrection. Maybe as we head out into our gardens in the coming weeks, we can remember that a healthy, growing faith is one that seeks greater understanding. The pruning that we experience helps us to grow… God gives us new opportunities to grow and find that our faith becomes stronger than we thought possible.
Amen.
With all the good weather we’ve been having lately, I expect most people are going about the routines of spring… getting the gardens ready. Blooms and bedding plants are already making appearances in flower beds, hailing the approach of the summer months. After all, next week is the May long weekend, the “unofficial” start of cottage season for many. Sarah and I have tulips growing in our front garden… something we didn’t know was there when we moved in last October… it was a nice touch actually. In spite of some bouts of rain, Spring is upon us.
I am the true vine, and my Father is the vine grower.
The Easter season parallels spring, images of resurrection and new life are all around us. Especially as we see it flowing back into the flora and fauna around us. Growth and growing is on our minds. Life returns, restored and healed from the deathly grip of winter. We don’t just see it in the buds and leaves on the trees, or in the flowers, but our own houses undergo the rites of spring… Annual cleanings, and the inevitable work in the garden.
I must start with a confession. I hate garden work… although not as much as I used to. Spring was not a pleasant experience in the Crowdis household… or at least for my brother and me. We lived on a corner lot with not one, but two large sized gardens, plus several more smaller flower beds. Needless to say, they needed a fair amount of upkeep. As enthusiastic as my mother was about having gardens and growing our own vegetables, her enthusiasm did not rub off on her children. Then again, it felt like we were considered a free source of labour, tending the garden was made to be a chore for us…
Usually my tasks were pretty menial… or at least they felt that way. Most of the time, my task was to dig up the garden for the spring plant. If I was lucky, I get to mix in peat moss. If I wasn’t, I was assigned to the impossible task of making the garden weed-free. Keep in mind, my attitude toward gardening has long since changed, but at the time to a pre-teen boy, fifteen minutes in the garden felt like a life-sentence! The best I could hope for was to play with the hose in watering stuff, or be able to unleash some pent-up aggression on plants or trees that needed pruning.
Now pruning… that I could handle! Cutting away at branches on a plant or tree in order to help it grow… Clip a little here, cut away a dead branch there… Although I had to be rather careful, or else my enthusiasm with the shears would hack the life out of an otherwise healthy plant. It forced me to pay closer attention to the shrub itself, and all of its individual characteristics. I had to learn where it was growing and where it wasn’t. Since then, while I have not gained a true love for gardening, I have learned to appreciate it. It also helped me to value the depth of John’s metaphor in the gospel.
I am the true vine, and my Father is the vine grower.
These are powerful images: God as the vine grower, Christ as the true vine… These metaphors are among the most vivid and layered of all the ones that appear in John’s gospel. In using the image of the vine, John draws upon one of the most treasured images in Israel. John’s Jewish-Christian Community would have grown up with this image firmly planted in their hearts and minds. While he sows a new seed by naming Jesus as the true vine, he is already cultivating a well-groomed faith within that community… helping them experience their relationship with God in a fresh way.
The vine image that John uses most often brings to mind, of course, the grape vine. Being not that far from wine country here, we know how this works. Vineyards are the backbone of the wine industry. When we hear “I am the vine, you are the branches” we most often think of ourselves as the branches of the vine, physically linked to the stem… It’s the most common image, and certainly not a wrong one.
But there is something more here: a brief lesson in biology tells us that a vine is a special variety of plant. As a vine, it has no hard structure of its own. A vine requires something else to grow on. Many vines don’t have true branches, but instead grow long creepers that spread out in search of water, light, and other nutrients. In the wild, of course, vines wrap themselves around the trunks and branches of trees. In domestic gardens and vineyards, we put up wooden trellises or ladders for the vines to cling to. So here’s some food for thought: does it make any sense for Jesus to say “I am the vine, you are the trellis?” Think of it as God in Christ growing around us…
Lest we become too entangled playing amidst the wild vines, there’s another metaphor that John highlights: God as vine grower. I can’t help but think of the image of a tiny little vine-dresser, flitting from plant to plant, carefully examining the grapes, spraying and pruning each plant, stripping back parts of the plant to give it a new chance to grow.
Like the vine, the vine grower image is nothing new for John’s audience… but the pruning image was new. The gospel pushes at the walls of what everybody knew, in lifting up this image of God carefully cutting away, there’s something that doesn’t sit right. It is far too easy to read this as God keeps the good and cuts away the bad… after all it does read like this:
He removes every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit.
Pruning and cutting away are the same process… to be pruned is to have part of the plant cut away. Sometimes it can be an otherwise good which is removed. So are we being pruned?
In John’s time, the threat persecution was very real. The Romans were beginning to notice these early Christians, and John’s community had already been excluded from the traditional Jewish communities. Their faith was being challenged at every turn. The life that they had come to know was slowly being stripped away. In the midst of this, they felt like everything was being ripped out from underneath them… and it was likely that they were wondering where God was in the midst of all this; circumstances that all of us might actually relate to.
The fact is life is harsh. Our faith is constantly challenged by what we face in life. That is a part of being human. No matter how hard we may try to hold on, there will be tomes when everything that we hold dear will be stripped away from us. I think these past few weeks have in this congregation have really brought that home.
Experiences like this prune away at our expectations of faith. They challenge what we believe, and call us to sit down and ask the hard questions… what we believe… what we understand God to be. It’s not a pleasant experience, it never is, but these experiences can help us to grow into a better understanding of God’s presence and movement in life.
Ultimately, our faith is a gift from God. It is not something that we personally own. It is dangerous to assume that once we have Christ in our lives, we don’t have to do anything else. If we are not pruned, or do not allow ourselves to be pruned, we stop bearing fruit. If we don’t allow ourselves the opportunity to ask questions and explore what we believe, we could wake up one morning and find our faith to be a dead bush. Like it or not, we are continuously growing in our faith. The vine of Christ that enwraps us and grows within us, and sometimes it needs pruning in order to let it flourish. God encourages us to grow in faith when we are challenged by what we experience in life. Old, fruitless branches are pruned away, while newer healthier ones are given the chance to flourish and grow.
When we think of our own recent experiences. Instead of fumbling for some platitude, or words to fill the air… we need to consider something. Clichés often do more harm than good… so we need to ask the same question that John’s community did: where is God in the midst of all this? We find ourselves clearing through dead branches, and bringing ourselves down to the core of what we believe.
What came back looked something like this: I believe that God is loving and caring. I believe that through the experience of Jesus Christ, God lives with us in the midst of our suffering. I believe that in the resurrection at Easter, ultimately there is an end to suffering.
So where is God in the midst of this? I will make it clear, not all of my questions were answered… yet I believe, I feel, that God does not abandon us, but was cries with us in our sorrow. God is there even when we can not feel it. In those times when we feel completely alone, God is still there lifting us up. Pruned away was this idea that God was uncaring or somehow mechanical, and through this experience, our faith can find a new place to grow… It just make take some time.
Ultimately when parts of the plant are cut back, the end result is that the vine becomes more vital and productive. Still, having parts of ourselves cut away, even metaphorically, can be painful. Yet John’s metaphor of God as the one who trims is one of encouragement, not of judgement. John is seeking to support his own community who were facing challenges in faith. In this image of the vine grower, God call us to grow, even as parts of our life and experience seem to be pruned away.
It is a strong image for us to remember… very powerful as we continue to celebrate Easter and the joy of resurrection. Maybe as we head out into our gardens in the coming weeks, we can remember that a healthy, growing faith is one that seeks greater understanding. The pruning that we experience helps us to grow… God gives us new opportunities to grow and find that our faith becomes stronger than we thought possible.
Amen.
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