Fifth Sunday of Easter
Acts 8:26-40 Psalm 22:24-30 1 John 4:7-21 John 15:1-8
“Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing.” In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.” Amen
For most of my life I’ve held in tension the competing strands of thought, the ideals of “rugged individualism” and of being part of a “community.” The events of my life have certainly shaped the way I think and feel about these two ways of understanding in terms of how I live and function within society. I grew up attending a church where sin and its consequences heavily influenced how I understood God, a church that emphasized the need for me to have a personal relationship with God to secure my salvation and entrance into heaven.
The ideal of “self-reliance” became the byword in my home after the death of my father. Me, my mother and little sister had to “pull ourselves up from our bootstraps,” where I was to be the “man of the house,” and where we learned to take care of ourselves if we were going to succeed and blossom as a single-parent family. While we certainly had friends and strong connections to folks within our neighborhood and church, we nonetheless functioned as good, responsible individuals and family that relied on our faith in God and our own resources and determination to forge a life that was safe and fostered a sense of wellbeing. In some respects, we were a “self-made” family.
It wasn’t until my wife and I enrolled our two young sons into parochial school that I began to better understand what it meant to be a part of a “community,” where our individual journeys of faith were woven with others and where we collectively experienced the movement of the Holy Spirit
among us. It was within this new “community” that I began to appreciate the wider Christian story as that of a “people” and not as a bunch of disparate individuals. We were still unique individuals with our own stories, but now the emphasis was on how we lived, learned, and expressed our faith as part of God’s people, a “community” built on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. My need to be self-reliant and a responsible person of society had been grafted into the desire of being a part of something bigger, more powerful, more energizing. Life within the community context afforded opportunities for growth and connectedness.
In today’s reading from John’s Gospel we get a rather straightforward look at what life “in-Christ” looks like. In the very familiar story of the vine and the branches, Jesus details for the disciples the need to be rooted in relationship with him as he is with the Father. Jesus makes it clear that God the Father is the vine-grower, that he is the vine, and that the disciples are the branches; all are interdependent on each other for growth and fruitfulness. Being and staying connected is what produces the desired result. This Old Testament image of being fruitful speaks to the community's faithfulness to God. The Hebrew Scriptures are replete with stories of how Israel (the vine) had been unfaithful and had suffered the consequences for their unfaithfulness. In John, Jesus is the “new vine” into which we must abide in conjunction with God if we are to be fruitful. Being fruitful is the result of being rooted, of being nurtured and pruned as needed in order to maintain a life-giving, fruit-bearing life. As with Israel, if we are not rooted into the life-giving vine of Jesus, if we think we can be a branch “on our own” we become like pieces of dead wood. We cannot bear fruit by squeezing it out of ourselves but by being connected to the vine. Apart from the vine, the branches have no eternal value or ability to produce fruit, thus they are discarded. These are hard words to hear and I read several commentaries that offered less harsh interpretations. While we can debate the disposition of these dead branches, the truth remains that growth and lives of bearing fruit can only happen when we are connected to the vine, the true source of our lives. This vine imagery symbolizes how our lives, shaped within the Christian community, are forged in love and intertwined with the abiding presence of God and Jesus.
This love defines our relationship as a community with one another, with our neighbors, and with God and Jesus.
The primary theme of the whole of chapter 15 has to do with “abiding.” This “abiding” speaks to the relationship between God, Jesus, and the wider community. This sense of “abiding” is grounded in mutuality and presence. When we are abiding with Jesus, we’re not only following his commandment, we’re also bearing fruit. But how do we “abide” with Jesus?
When Jesus says to “abide in me”, I think he’s talking about a personal relationship with him that is grounded in daily acts of discipleship. I’m talking about a life centered in prayer, obedience, and service that is based on trust, intimacy, and connection. These acts of daily discipleship lie at the core of our faith and result in lives where we experience and exhibit love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. When we are grafted into the vine that is Christ, our lives take on a sense of purpose and we find true strength. Who wouldn’t want that, right?
One other aspect of a life rooted in the vine of Christ is that our prayers are answered. Why is that? It’s the result of our lives being transformed by being so intertwined with Jesus. When we’re drawing our strength and purpose from Jesus, when our worship, prayer, and service is offered in glory to God, when how we think and behave is grounded in love, a love that seeks the good of the other, our prayers will reflect this abiding relationship. Our prayers will reflect the work of the vine-grower. When our prayers are aligned with the purposes of God, of course they will be answered.
My friends, today’s gospel offers us two options for living. We can choose to go it alone, to utilize our own strength and resources and to rely on our cultural norms of self-reliance. To be sure, there is much positive to be said about being responsible for ourselves in many facets of our lives. That said, the resources that allow us to abide in Christ already reside within us.
This deep, abiding love of God dwells richly within us and the Holy Spirit awaits to unleash this power. The power of God’s Word studied diligently, the offering of our sacrifices of praise and thanksgiving, our acts of service to one another motivated by God’s indwelling love for us, in other words, the discipled- life of a follower of Jesus, will change everything. It will change our priorities, our relationships, and our ability to produce amazing fruit to God’s glory and for his kingdom. When lived by the power of love generated by the vine of Christ and nurtured by God the vine-grower, the world will truly know that we are Christians and God will bless our faithfulness and fruitfulness. May it be so.