Being a Branch

John 15:1-8

May 10, 2009

Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.

When we lived in Pennsylvania with a quarter of acre of land around our house, we had a vegetable garden. One of the vegetables that grew very well in this section of the country was zucchinis. With a small white seed, some watering, and hot humid days, a zucchini plant will start growing with very large leaves and curly tendrils attaching themselves along the fence and onto other plants. By the end of the summer, after the flowers have blossomed, we get zucchinis. We know that small zucchinis are juicy and edible but if you don’t pick them regularly, they become these humongous zucchinis.

On this Mother’s Day, I can remember that my mother with her old Toishan village mindset likes to have humongous zucchinis. She thought the bigger the better. She would let them grow until they were more than a foot long. It produced a lot of fruit that is only good for making zucchini bread!

When we drive the freeways in many places in California, we pass vineyards. We are used to seeing green hills covered with neat rows of vines growing on trellises—and in the fall, bearing beautiful plump clusters of grapes. Vineyards have now become destination places for wine tasting, vacations, and favorite places for weddings.

The people who surrounded Jesus that day saw something different. As they looked out over the rocky hills, they saw vines growing from terraces dug around the hills. The vines grew on the ground, and the clusters of grapes were lifted up to rest upon a stone or a forked stick as they ripened. Each vineyard had its own tower and wine press.

When Jesus told the people that he was the true vine, the people remembered the stories of the prophets, who used the vine image again and again in speaking of the unfaithful nation Israel. In Isaiah 5:1-7, we see that God carefully attending to the vine, but when it failed to produce useable fruit, it was abandoned.

In the Old Testament, “fruitfulness” was another way of saying, “faithfulness.” A lack of good fruit meant that God’s people had failed to be the true, nourishing vine that would bolster God’s reputation in the world as the ultimate winemaker. That being the case, it was the winemaker’s job to do some pruning and replacing, which is what the prophets saw the exile as being all about. Later, God would replant the vineyard with a new plant and that new vine, “the true vine,” would be Jesus himself who embodied the new Israel.

We are the Branches

In the passage we read today, Jesus is the vine, the true source of growth and fruit bearing in a vineyard that is tended by the “Father.” God is the winemaker, the creator who tends the vineyard and assures it quality.

The focus of this passage is the branches. While the vine is the source for good fruit, there’s vital link between the vine and its fruit. The “branches” are the focus of Jesus’ teaching with his disciples. “I am the vine,” says Jesus to his followers, “you are the branches” (v.5). See that the disciples of Jesus are not the “fruit,” the end product, but the connection for the vine’s nourishment.

The quality of the fruit depends on the branches’ connectedness to the vine itself. What Jesus is describing here is the necessity to stay connected between himself and his disciples—a relationship that is close and mutual and abiding.

What does it mean for the disciples to be fruitful branches? Disciples must “abide” in their Lord. But abiding is not easy to do today. How can I pay attention to Jesus constantly? What does it mean to abide in Christ when the baby is crying, or the pots are boiling over? What does abiding mean in the midst of business in the corporate world, where every minute is accounted for? What does it mean to be immersed in Jesus in the classroom or the factory? Or in the hospital with so many suffering people who must be treated? For that matter, what does it mean to abide in Christ when we are at home on a quiet morning, seemingly focused on whatever task is at hand?

For many of us, we are so busy with what is on our “to do” list that we have little energy to focus on God—to stay connected to the source—the true vine in Jesus. Clearly, very few of us can do the abiding thing on our own. We need God’s help and God’s power just to cling to the Vine.

Even this ability to abide in Jesus is God’s work. Our capacity to abide in Jesus resides in his faithfulness to us, not ours to him. The living, risen Jesus abides in us, and his ever-present love and fellowship activate our capacities to love. We are able to abide in Jesus because he first abided in us. We love because he first loved us.

There are many ways that can help us to abide in Jesus. Let me share three with you today. First, we can read and study the stories of Jesus. Regular reading of the Scriptures in worship, in Sunday school, in Bible studies, on your own, connects us to the Vine so that we can be nourished and given the strength we need to love like Jesus. Over time, as we dwell within these stories, we also come to understand them on a deeper level so that we move away from the things that distract us and distort our thinking. Our lives become more entwined with Jesus and we begin living in love with one another.

Another way to abide in Jesus is to love others. There was a woman who told her pastor that although she grew up in the church, she never heard the words, “God is love.” If love were talked about, she didn’t hear it because she didn’t see anything around her that indicated church members loved each other. What this woman learned instead in the church was a theology of fear and judgment. She says it was not until she was an adult that she wandered into a church one Sunday and began to see something different—people who loved being there, and lived out that love toward one another. As a result, the woman learned in adulthood a message that every child in the congregation should hear while still in his or her mother’s arms, “God loves you and so do we.”

Still another way to abide in Jesus is to trust God with your life. When we trust our very lives in God’s hand, all the things that we ask for, God, according to his plan will grant it. The Missions Committee is encouraging a team from our church to participate in a missions project in Thailand this November. Those who are seriously considering going on this trip are praying and discerning God’s calling to them to serve and witness in this very special way. By the giving of themselves in love, witness, service and hard work, they will help hill tribes in Northern Thailand live a better life and know Christ. Sometimes when we abide in Jesus, he leads us to places we may have never imagined possible.

Being connected and abiding in Jesus is essential to life. As human beings, we have this insatiable longing, this great desire to be connected. The baby demands attention from the world, insists on being noticed and served. The human person cannot survive without making connection first with the mother, then with one human being after another. We must connect to live.

We are only the branches connected to the true vine in Jesus. If we abide in Jesus Christ, we can bear good fruit in teaching others about the Good News in the Bible, sharing the truth that God is love and that if anyone who may come to our church, he or she will always be loved. And when we abide in Jesus, it may very well lead us to new places of mission and ministry.

Bad Things Happen

Sometimes when we read this passage and get to verse 7 when Jesus said, “If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you,” we like to believe that God should deliver whatever we asked.

How many times have we seen a faithful, committed member who prays for a cure but still dies of a terminal illness? Or what about the couple who desperately wants a child but never conceive? We continually pray for world peace, but it still eludes us. How can we trust these words of Jesus in light of the realities around us?

The only way I can reconcile this puzzling statement with the God I know, the God of compassion revealed in Jesus, is to look at it in the broader truth of the gospel. I am reminded of Jesus’ plea to God when he was in the Garden of Gethsemane. Jesus prayed that the cup be removed from him, and then added, “but not my will but yours be done.” Jesus didn’t get what he initially asked for, but can we believe it was God’s will for him to suffer? Equally difficult for us to understand is that God’s will for us may not be freedom from disease, ability to bear children, or live with our neighbors in peace. However, what is promised is that God’s Spirit will be with us and through all our disappointments, failings, illnesses and grief. In John 14:15-27, Jesus declares to his disciples (and to us) that he will not abandon them, but will send the Advocate, God’s Spirit to abide with them.

Jesus says over and over that he abides in God and God abides in him, and anyone who abides in Jesus will also abide in God. This intimate relationship is paramount in our ability to get through each day, especially the tough ones. We may not understand why “bad things happen to good people,” but we have the abiding presence of God’s Spirit supporting and sustaining us—just as Jesus did. Jesus reassures us by saying, “As the Father loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love.”

There are certainly things out there that are out of control, but for those situations in which we have a choice, we can choose to be aligned with the “true vine.” As Jesus abides in God, so can we abide in Jesus. And whenever we honor that special relationship we are better able to do God’s will, bearing much fruit.

Bearing Good Fruit

Now as branches connected and abiding with Jesus, the true vine, how might we bear good fruit? If we look closely at a grapevine, one of the things we would notice is that the branches are very difficult to tell them apart individually. Like the zucchini plants my mother grew, all the branches twist and curl around one another to the point that you can’t tell where one starts and another stops.

Jesus uses the branch imagery to tell us that it’s not the achievement of an individual branch or its status that matters. The quality of branches and fruit depends solely on the quality of their connectedness to the vine. When it comes to discipleship, each “branch” or individual gives up his or her desire for individual achievement in order to become one of many encircling branches—a community that is rooted and nurtured by Christ and points to his reputation and quality, not their own.

To stay effectively and fruitfully connected to Jesus, we have to remember that branches are fruit-bearing, not fruit-making. We cannot be fruitful as a result of only our own efforts. Unless we abide in Jesus Christ, the true vine, we as branches won’t bear any fruit. Many pastors, for example, who have built large churches and famous reputations only find themselves crash and burn as a result of moral failure, which is frequently the result of a failure to stay intimately connected to Jesus. When a branch gets the idea that it can make fruit, make wine, on its own, it dries up, withers, and is no longer useful. The mission of a branch isn’t to look good or to call attention to itself, but to give all the glory to God, the one who is the vinedresser, the source of all life.

Mother’s Day

Since today is Mother’s Day, it occurred to me that the relationship of mother to child is also similar to what Jesus taught about being the Vine and the disciples being the branches. Our lives, for the most part, would not have been possible without the love, care, and discipline like pruning away all the bad habits and behaviors that we have in the life that we received from our mother.

In honor of my mother who loved to grow her zucchinis much too big for them to taste good in a stir-fry, I read that at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst in 1875 made big news. The college president, William Smith Clark designed an experiment that amazed both agricultural specialists and the general public. Clark conducted an experiment in which he applied increasing weight to a squash. The squash kept pushing back at the weights, lifting heavier and heavier amounts as it grew. The experiment ended when the squash lifted 5000 pounds of weight. The story is amazing even 134 years later—who among us looks at the plants in our vegetable gardens and realizes that there is such power exerted by a simple vine or the fruit on it?

Whether we grow luscious bunches of grapes, large squashes or humongous zucchinis, when we are connected and abiding with Jesus Christ who is the true vine, we who are the branches, will do God’s work and give God all the glory.

Let us pray.

Dear Jesus, in ways too numerous to mention, you have drawn us toward yourself. You not only loved us, but you reached out to us, embraced us, and drew us toward your love. In countless moments, we caught glimpses of you, heard some parts of a word, felt some tug at our hearts that let us know that you were drawing us toward you. You connected with us and you found a way to stay connected.

We rest secure with the knowledge of your love, Lord Jesus. We know that though we fail you, your love does not fail us. Thus we gather this day in the confidence that because you abide in us, we will always abide in you and that nothing, not even our failings as disciples, can separate us from your abiding love. Amen.