John 15:1-8
May 14, 2006
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
By now anyone who owns a cell phone knows the Verizon man saying, “Can you hear me now?” We want to be connected. And when we are not, what good is it to own a cell phone, pay the monthly charges and not be able to connect with people you want to stay in touch with? Being connected with important people makes us feel important too.
Sometime we want to be connected with wealth thinking that money is the way to success. There was a pastor who gets up early on Sunday mornings to read over his sermon. One morning as he was dressing in the dark bedroom, hoping not to disturb his wife, she lifted her head from the pillow and said, “Honey, don’t forget to buy a lottery ticket on the way to church this morning.”
“Why?” he said. “You know we never bother with lottery tickets.”
“I know,” she said. “But the lottery is up to a hundred million bucks and if God wants us to be rich, I don’t want you standing in the way!” If there was a chance to connect success with money, we like try.
A couple of weeks ago, our daughter Lauren asked why President John F. Kennedy was so important in our American history. It didn’t take very long to realize how old I am! I said that Kennedy was a war hero, though he lost his boat at sea, he led his crew to safety and rescue. When he assumed leadership of the nation as president in 1960, he surrounded himself with what he considered to be the “brightest and best” of American minds. In his inaugural address, he said that the “torch has been passed to a new generation.” He represented hope to a nation. Still, with the brightest and best minds at his side, the American military found itself being pulled toward the vortex of a black hole in the Vietnam War. And he narrowly averted nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The brightest and the best of a new generation: none of these can keep the peace. Even being connected with the brightest and the best of a new generation could not bring about a better world.
Once we thought that people could accomplish anything when they put their minds to it. We called this human potential. We are connected with the potential of self. We put a person on the moon, we learned how to clone plants and animals, we cured many diseases. With a little more effort, and a lot more money we say, we might also be able to cure AIDS, end world hunger, and bring an end to war. But we see today that there is little trust in those ideals anymore. People have awakened to the fairly obvious idea that there are things beyond human control.
We cannot divert a hurricane from a flood-ravaged area and redirect it toward a rampaging forest fire. We can’t keep space shuttles from blowing up in mid-air. War and the threat of more war fill our newspapers and news reports. When we used to have confidence in our institutions of learning and the academies of sciences that once gave us hope, we are now pessimistic and angry how they have destroyed the public trust.
Every improvement seems to cause as much damage as it does good. We can speed about the planet on fossil fuels, but the price in global warming and pollution makes it a questionable value. We can communicate instantaneously around the world but at the same time unexpectedly the internet has opened up new avenues for identity theft, fraud, the dissemination of pornography, and threats of terrorism.
Why is it that we are impotent to change the world in significant ways? The reason is the same as it has always been. We are human and not God.
Connected to God
Yes, we have done some good and notable things. There remains a certain amount of hope in the human capacity to make the world more livable. But, any good thing that has been accomplished has come about because God placed creation in the stewardship of those most gifted to care for it. Ultimately, God is the source of creation; God is the genesis of all goodness. We know that apart from God, no good can come.
In today’s passage from John 15, we read that Jesus said, “I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing” (15:5).
This is both bad news and good news. It’s bad news for those who seek to improve the world on their own. The Psalmist knew this: “Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain” (Ps. 127:1).
But it is good news for those who are connected to the love of God through Christ. Being connected with God’s life source, good fruits will develop.
When we read John 15, we can envision the times when we visited the Napa wine country. There is no mystery that if we want plenty of good fruits, we need to remove unfruitful branches. Unfruitful branches take up valuable space in the vineyard and must give way to those that produce.
In the fall of the year, you will see lush entanglements of grape vines reaching long distances along the wire stringers that guide the direction of growth. If you return early in the spring, you will see a drastically different scene. Nearly all of the grape vines have been pruned away. All that remains at the start of the season are the roots, the trunk, and the short, burly limbs that are trained outward along the wires. From these will burst dozens of fingers of new growth. Later in the season, these fingers will have become the long, green, vibrant vines from which hang clusters of juicy grapes. When the winter pruning is less severe, the summer fruit is less plentiful.
Jesus tells his disciples that, like grape branches, they are pruned because they have heard the word he has spoken to them. All the unfruitful aspects of their lives have been pruned away. At the same time, they are cleansed by the word. In other words, they are prepared for the work ahead, work that will demand they produce much fruit.
The critical point here is that apart from the vine, the branches can accomplish nothing. Those that fail to abide in the vine are not lifeless in the worldly sense. But, when spiritually cut off from the source of divine love, they are spiritually dead and spiritually useless. Whatever they might do, it is not spiritually fruitful. But those who abide in God’s love are capable of great things. “Ask whatever you will,” Jesus says, “and it will be done for you” (15:7).
Bearing fruit is the result of a Christian life firmly attached, connected to the spiritual source. Failure to be connected with Christ results in an inability to produce and the necessity for the branch to be pruned and destroyed.
God is saying to you, “Can you hear me now? Are you connected to me as your spiritual source?”
Christian Family
As we remember Mother’s Day today, we can highlight the variety of households in our church. When we talk about “Christian families,” we could be talking about a family of one person or eight. Families are couples who are childless, college roommates or newly employed singles who share apartments out of financial necessity or a desire for friendship, older folks who live in senior resident communities, families with a Daddy and a Mommy and 2.5 children, empty-nesters whose children have begun their own households, widows or widowers, sisters and brothers, parents with grown up children still living at home; and I am probably leaving out a lot of other possibilities.
Wherever we may be in our life’s journey now, all of us have been a part of some sort of family at one time or another. A “Christian home” is nothing other than a home in which Christ is at home, as fully as he is at home in this church.
On Mother’s Day, we want to say that we are all connected as sisters and brothers in Christ. When we are apart from Christ and apart from each other, it’s not that we are lifeless, but we are spiritually dead, separated from the life source and can’t accomplish anything good.
The image of the vine encourages us not to focus on what we can accomplish by ourselves for the sake of Christ. Instead, the image of the vine invites us to see the interrelatedness that we share as a result of our faith. As we join together as different Christian families, we become more fully able to bear the fruit that Christ intends. An Ethiopian proverb says, “When spider webs unite, they can tie up a lion.”
One of the greatest strengths of our church is its relationships. I don’t mean that it seems that everyone is one way or another related to each other. I mean that when we abide in Christ, when we are connected in Christ, Christ immerses us in a respectful treatment of one another and the warmth of safe companionship even in difficult times. The world out there suggests that happiness and love relationships are like a laugh track backing up shallow and superficial commitments. But when we abide in Christ, we are aware of the joy of Christ’s presence in one another.
Remember in elementary school science class when they taught us that by placing a white carnation with its stem into a vase of water dyed with blue food coloring would result in a blue carnation. And a white carnation with red dye would result in a red carnation. When we abide in Christ through the study of Scripture, worship, prayer, Christian fellowship and Christian social action, then the result is a life based on Christ. The Word of God permeates our being like the carnations with color dyes and is reflected in how we live out our lives.
Doing Great Things
What can be accomplished when God’s people abide in Christ? There is no limit. Jesus promises, “ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.” This does not mean, obviously, that every request made by a faithful disciple of Christ will be granted according to human will. A faithful disciple would not ask for frivolous or meaningless things. But it does promise that the surging power of God’s love will be brought to bear upon the circumstances for which we pray.
When we are connected to Christ, we can do great things. When we look patiently for God’s miracles, we see examples abounding in every place. We have some parents at our church who have become the pillars of the church. But if it wasn’t for the zeal and faithful commitments of their own children, they wouldn’t be here now. Their children literally were the reason why they are now at church. That’s a great thing!
As one of the soon-to-be grandfathers at the church, we are seeing a baby boom that has caused us all to be giddy and excited. We have had at least five births this year already and there are seven more babies to be born! Some of us are thinking that we need a room just for the church nursery. When we are connected to Christ and in this case with each other, wonderful blessings happen.
There was a time in our church not too many years ago when we wondered whether we would survive in Chinatown. Our service attendance was down. We were unsure what God wanted us to do. But today, we see a very different picture. Don’t we? God called us to start a new worship service and what a blessing that has been. God called us to start a Senior Center and what a blessing that has been. God called us to not waver in our historic mission of reaching out to the unchurched in Chinatown when we celebrated our 125th anniversary last year and what a blessing that is to know what we should be about. God called us to trust him that a new servant is being prepared to pick up the mantle of leading our Chinese-speaking ministries and what a blessing it will be when Pastor Joseph Tsang comes to serve Christ with us later this year. These are great things!
Connected, God turns people’s lives around. Connected, God draws blessings out of the most tragic of events. Connected, God brings new vitality to disillusioned churches. Connected, God heals some unexpectedly and brings great faith to others whose pleas for healing are not granted as desired. Let me share a story.
There was a church member who struggled with stomach cancer for many years. He would often get good news that his cancer was in remission; then, soon after, it would return. For a long time it flourished just enough to keep him sick, and then abated enough to give him hope that God was healing him. Over the years, he developed a remarkable resilience and faith.
He once told his pastor, “Pastor, if I had the choice today either to be healed completely or to go back to the level of faith I had before all this started, I would choose to be ill. Through all of this, God has strengthened my faith to the point where I cannot imagine being without it.”
This man died a few years later. His funeral was a great celebration of a man who knew what it meant to be connected in Christ.
Apart from Christ, all the money in the world won’t bring us happiness. Apart from Christ, human attempts at peace and justice are empty schemes. Apart from Christ, we may still be able to accomplish some notable things for the world, but we are still spiritually dead. Apart from Christ, we lose our way and our efforts falter.
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. My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples.”
Let us pray.
Nourishing God, wellspring of life, you give us everything we need to sustain our lives. Graft us into Christ and let into our barren existence the surging power of your Holy Spirit. Make us into green, growing, and loving branches. Cluster the fruits of our labors in Christ and press them into a love that flows into all the world. Thank you for being connected with us and for us to be connected with each other. We pray in Christ’s name. Amen.