Oak Chapel United Methodist Church

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    Last week  we heard Jesus say, "I am the Good Shepherd," and the emphasis was on his loving and caring, and (quite specifically) on his willingness to give up his life for his sheep.  Today Jesus says, "I am the vine."  Think of him saying this not to an individual but to his whole church, to all of us together, as if he were standing here this morning.  "I am the vine, you are the branches."  "Just as a branch can't bear grapes by itself, but only by being joined to the vine, you can't bear fruit unless you are joined to me."  The two metaphors (Good Shepherd and vine) have this in common: they both stress the closeness, the tightness of the relationship between God and Jesus and the people of Jesus.  Last week, you remember, Jesus claimed to love his sheep with the same love God has for him, and he for God.  Now he draws another picture of tightness, and love is not the binding element this time but dependency: the gardener, the vine, the branch.  Utterly interdependent.  Good grapes simply can't be produced without all three.
 In one sense, the Good Shepherd is a rescuer.  He goes out onto the cold, dark mountain and finds his lost sheep.  (And thank God he does, for I am that sheep.  He found me once, and he continues to find me, and bring me back, when go astray.)  But, a shepherd's love for his sheep is not a one-time thing.  It happens every day, every hour.  It's not only when we're lost that he loves us.  There is a less exciting, but more important, aspect of  his love.  Day after day he leads us to green pastures and still waters, and restores our souls.  When we are lost, and he finds us, it is proof positive of how he loves us all the time.

    When Jesus calls himself "the vine," we don't have that one-time-all-the-time confusion, because the vine never claims to rescue the lost branches.  The vine nourishes the branches, every day, over a long period of time, so that they bear good fruit.  These two word-pictures (shepherd and vine), together, reflect the spiritual life.  Sometimes, in our pilgrimages, we are utterly lost and desperately need a rescuer, a shepherd who loves us enough to come looking.  And the good news is that we have one.  Other times, we are with the flock (not lost), but we still need to be fed and protected.  These times are less dramatic, but even more important.

    America seems to be having a love affair with hospital emergency rooms.  Not the real thing, you understand, but television's version of the real thing.  Programs like E.R., and those so-called "real T.V." programs that show actual accident victims being rushed into emergency rooms and treated there by doctors and nurses.  And it is fascinating, and I marvel at those health care professionals who do such amazing things under such pressure.  When we're in trouble these are just the people we need.  They are good shepherds who rescue us when we are in trouble.  But, as I watch these shows and think about the victims, a voice in me asks, "Why do people get into such trouble in the first place?  Why don't they drink less, stay away from guns, drive more carefully?"  But that wouldn't make good TV.  Staying well isn't as dramatic as getting well.  Preventive medicine isn't as exciting as emergency room care.  Health and wholeness all the time isn't as interesting as miraculous healing.  And the same is true in spiritual health.
When Jesus says, "I am the vine," he is calling our attention to the less exciting side of spiritual health, to the preventive medicine of the soul.  He is saying (and would say to us today, if he were standing here) that we need to be tied into him all the time, and not just rescued once in a while, and that that closeness with him, that dependency upon him, will enable us to produce good fruit, to be the people we want to be, the people God wants us to be.  James Cardinal Hickey, of the Washington Archdiocese, wrote his people an Easter letter last month.  In it he addresses himself to Catholics who do not participate regularly in the life of the church (but who might happen to be there on Easter).  He reminds them of the fruits of the spirit -- not the gifts of the spirit, this time, but the fruits of the Spirit.  When the Holy Spirit descended upon the disciples, he says, it produced "a huge harvest of sanctity."  The words intrigued me.  I thought of the huge harvest of sanctity that came upon the world when the Holy Spirit entered John and Charles Wesley, and their followers, in England -- how (in a dismal and faithless time) it once again became commonplace to see people praying in public, and to hear them asking God how they should live to please him.  And more tangible fruits were produced:  The end of the slave trade, new child labor laws, control of the liquor industry.  But the greatest fruits were borne in America, where Wesley's followers were migrating.  Calvin Coolege said America was "born in revival."   He was right, and he was referring to the Wesleyan revival which had spilled over onto these shores.  We can look at that Wesleyan harvest of sanctity and explain it in political sociological terms, but we'll never understand it until we take into account those little classes Wesley established in every church and community.  Devout Christians meeting quietly each week to pray, and read scripture, and talk honestly with each other about their sins.  Before they were great on the outside, they were great on the inside.  They stayed connected to the vine, through prayer and scripture and Christian fellowship, and they bore good grapes.

    Some of the reasons we used to give for not staying close to the vine, for not maintaining an ongoing relationship with God -- some of those old reasons have disappeared.  People used to say, for example, "I can't understand the Bible, so I don't read it."  But now we have a hundred translations, and paraphrases.  We have it in modern English and old English.  We have it in large print and small print.  We have little Bibles you can carry in your vest pocket and big Bibles you can put on the coffee table.  And every church in creation, these days, is offering Bible studies.  If staying connected to the vine, which is Jesus, means (among other things) reading about him in the Bible, all our excuses are gone.

    And we used to say we didn't go to church because we didn't like the preacher, or the service, or the people.  Or we because liked to sleep in on Sunday mornings.  But now there are, perhaps fifty churches, within easy driving distance from anywhere.  If you can't find one you like, perhaps it's you.  And there are mid-week services, and services on Saturday.  The reasons we don't worship regularly are not practical.  We don't worship because we don't accept the need for worship is.  We've forgotten what worship is, and what the church is.  Cardinal Hickey, in the same Easter letter, says something beautiful about the church: "The first thing I'd like you to know about the Church is that it is not merely a thing.  It's not something, but someone.  It's someone in love.  It's Christ in love with us, and us in love with Christ….Don't think of going to church the same way you think of going to the bank, the supermarket or the polls.  When you come to church, you're coming to be with Someone who loves you very much -- Someone you can fall in love with -- Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today and forever."  We stay close to the vine, close to Christ, in worship, in prayer, in reading scripture.  We can lose our relationship to God, in the same way we can lose our relationship to a husband or a wife, by not nurturing it.

    Beneath all our excuses for not staying connected, lies the real reason:  a close relationship with God will mean changes, and we know it.  Our scripture begins by saying that the Gardener (God) clears away the dead branches and prunes the good ones so they will bear even more fruit.  The word for "to prune" also means "to clean."  God cleans up the plant.  Cuts off the suckers, pulls away the dead leaves, removes the old wood, and prunes it back.  That's the part we don't like.  Even though nothing could be better for us.  We have lots of things that are sucking the energy out of us and are producing little or no fruit, we have lots of dead wood in our lives.  If we get into a close relationship with God, he will take those things away.  And that hurts, briefly.  To know why we should tolerate the pruning and the cleaning, we need to look ahead to that "great harvest of sanctity" which will result.  We are known by our fruits, Jesus said.  Not by our words.  Not by our good intentions.  Not by our sweet feelings.  But by our fruits.