Further Along

The Sermon Study Guide is here.

John 15:1-17; Acts 2:42-47

July 14/15, 2012 • Portage First UMC

On one of our first days in the Holy Land, I thought I knew where we were going next, but the bus pulled over to the side of the road before we got there. There was a small parking lot there, but it certainly wasn’t a normal stop on the itinerary. There were no peddlers or souvenir stands outside! So we got off the bus and passed through a ramshackle gate to a wide spot on a dirt path. Across the small stream there were some cattle grazing, and it looked like they wondered why we were there as much as we did. Our guide gathered us under the shade of a tree and told us we were standing on a first-century road, actually more of a path, that follows along a valley with a stream running beside it. Most likely it have been a well-traveled path in the first century, and so we can say with almost absolute certainty that Jesus and his disciples would have walked on this road. It would have been the quickest way to travel between the place Jesus grew up (and where his family still lived, Nazareth) and the place he chose as a home for the years of his ministry (Capernaum). There were, undoubtedly, many paths he could have chosen to walk, but if he was going to get to where he needed to be, this was the path he needed to walk. He would have to make an intentional choice if he was going to end up safely in the right place.

As we walked along that ancient path, I began to think about all the times we choose paths to walk—maybe not a literal path, although we do have to make those choices, of course. But I was thinking more about the paths we choose to walk in our lives, the times when we face a moral or a spiritual crossroads. Which path will we take? Which direction will we go?  We make intentional choices that lead us on a career path. We make intentional choices that lead us on a family path. For that matter, we make intentional choices when we go to the grocery store—this brand or that brand? And yet, when it comes to our spiritual life, to our faith, we often leave it up to chance. For most of us, there is very little intentionality on our part when it comes to developing our faith. We might get involved in a short-term study group, and then when that’s over, we don’t do anything else. Maybe in a couple of years, we sign up for a retreat, or we listen to a podcast once in a while. We tend to approach our faith in “fits and starts,” a little here, a little there, with little to no intentionality or plan for growing, for making progress along the journey of faith. Why is that? We manage to plan for everything else in our lives. We go to the gym, take our children to school, get them to soccer practice or dance class. We plan for our meals, and we manage to get to work on time (cf. Schnase, Five Practices of Fruitful Living, pg. 69). What is it about growing our faith that we assume it will just happen, almost by accident? If we’re serious about our faith, intentionality is critical to getting to where we want to go.

We’re continuing our series of sermons this evening/morning on the five practices of fruitful living, and so far we’ve talked about radical hospitality in terms of being open to God, and passionate worship in terms of responding to God. Those two practices or movements in our lives are absolutely essential, but to move us along the path God has for us we need an additional practice. If we’re going to become more the person God has made us to be, we will want to engage in intentional faith development. As you hopefully can see by now, being intentional means approaching our faith with a plan in mind, a destination in sight. The word “intentional” originally means “aim at, to stretch for.” It’s the sort of image Paul had in mind when he wrote to the Philippians: “One thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 3:13-14). Do you hear the intentionality in that? Paul wasn’t content to just sit around and hope he would grow in his faith. He knew it took work, straining, stretching—intentionality. In just a couple of weeks, we’re going to be again marveling at the skills and abilities of the Olympic athletes as we cheer the best of them on to win at the games in London. But not a single one of those young athletes would be there if they just sat around and hoped they would make it. None of them would have gotten there if they just went to a practice every once in a while, or when they felt like it. No, for them to become the best of the best, it took intentionality, hard work, striving, and showing up even when they didn’t feel like it. If winning a gold medal is that important, how much more important is the goal of eternal life, or as Paul talks about it, “the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus”? Faith development should not be incidental or accidental in our lives. It must be intentional.

On the last night he was with his disciples, Jesus wanted to help them know how to move further along in their faith. He knew he was headed toward arrest in the garden that night, and so after supper, as they walked along the Kidron Valley toward the Garden of Gethsemane, he shared the most important things he could with these closest of friends. I mean, when you know you have limited time, when you know the end is near, you don’t waste time talking about unimportant things. And so, as they walked, Jesus shared his heart. It’s possible that, as these words from John 15 were spoken, they very well could have been in sight of the Temple, and on the front of that magnificent building was a large, golden vine, the national symbol of Israel (Tenney, “The Gospel of John,” Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Vol. 9, pg. 150). The Old Testament had often talked about Israel as a vine, and not always in complementary terms. The psalms called Israel a vine brought out of Egypt and planted by God in this promised land (Psalm 80:8-9), but Isaiah saw them as a vine that bore bad fruit, sour grapes (Isaiah 5). Jeremiah described them as “sour grapes” (Jeremiah 31:29). And so Jesus, perhaps pointing toward that national symbol, tells the disciples he has come to change that, to make everything right between humanity and God. “I am the true vine” (15:1), he says, which means that anything else we might want to attach to or to connect with is, by default, false. All the things we’re tempted to be attached to—our jobs, our money, our possessions, even our traditions or our religion—those things are false. They won’t nourish us. Only Jesus is true. Only he is “the way, the truth and the life,” as he told them before they left the Upper Room (John 14:6). Only he can feed our souls because he is the true vine.

Jesus continues to build that image by calling those who follow him, his disciples and all who follow in their footsteps (like us) as “branches” (15:5). When you’re talking about a grapevine, the branches are the place where the fruit grows. The branches produce what the gardener is looking for—in the case of a vineyard, grapes. But the branches can’t do that on their own. A branch, by its very nature, is only useful when it’s connected to the vine. In fact, in the first century, grapevine branches were considered useless; you couldn’t even use the wood they produced for the burning of the sacrifice (Card, The Parable of Joy, pg. 186). The only thing, according to the law, that branch wood was good for was producing grapes; their sole purpose was bearing fruit. Now, do you think it’s any accident Jesus chooses this image when he’s talking about his followers? Our only purpose, our sole goal, Jesus says, is to produce fruit for him. Any other purpose is too small a calling. But we still can’t produce fruit on our own: “Apart from me you can do nothing,” Jesus says (15:5). On our own energy, we’ll produce nothing. Connected to Jesus, however, we will “bear much fruit” (15:5).

But let’s take a moment here and ask the perhaps obvious question: what fruit? What does Jesus mean by “fruit”? What is it that we, as his followers, are supposed to be producing? The imagery of fruit is used a lot throughout the Gospels and the New Testament. John the Baptist is one of the first to use it when he tells those who come to receive baptism that they should “produce fruit in keeping with repentance” (Matthew 3:8). In other words, he tells them if they are going to say they want forgiveness from their sin, they need to choose to live in such a way that shows they have been forgiven. Forgiven people, for instance, forgive others. Live your life, John says, in such a way that shows you have been changed. Near the end of Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus, who has said earlier that his followers would be recognized by the fruit of their lives (cf. Matthew 7:20), says we show our faith by doing radical things, things that take us beyond our own basic selfishness: feeding the hungry, visiting the sick and those in prison, clothing the naked, inviting in the stranger, caring for those in need (Matthew 25:31-46). The “fruit” of our lives, then, is seen in the way we care for and interact with others. Later on in the New Testament, Paul tells us that the way we know the Spirit of God is living in us is when we see certain things growing in our lives: “The fruit of the Spirit,” he writes, “is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control” (Galatians 5:22-23). Ultimately, you can say it’s all summed up in what Jesus called the greatest command: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments” (Matthew 22:37-40). The “fruit” we are most called to produce is love: loving God, loving others, and offering Jesus. That’s why we emphasize those three things so much in this church— these commands are the essence of the way Jesus calls us to live, the fruit he most desires to see produced in our lives.

So how do we produce that fruit? Because, as I said, we can’t do it on our own. We can’t just will ourselves to love those around us. Look around this room tonight/today. Undoubtedly, there are some gathered here whom you struggle to love, and no amount of decision or willpower on your part will help you love them any better. It gets even worse when you get outside these walls. There are people at our jobs, at our schools, in our city, maybe even in our families who are difficult to show love toward. We can’t produce that fruit on our own. So how does it happen? Is Jesus asking the impossible? Absolutely not, because he has also given us the way to be able to produce that fruit: stay connected to him, because, going back to the vine imagery, love is the “sap” that flows through him and into us. Love is what he gives us so that we can show it to others, and we get that “sap” into us, he says, he doing what he commands us to do, living as he calls us to live. That’s the connection we need. “If you keep my commands,” Jesus says, “you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love” (15:10).

So staying connected to Jesus is more than just showing up at worship once in a while or even every week. It’s more than having warm, fuzzy feelings and singing a song about Jesus. Staying connected to Jesus is far more than having your name on a church membership roll or serving on a church committee. Staying connected, Jesus says, is knowing and keeping his commands. Staying connected is living out the life he intends for us to live—intentionally. That takes a plan, and we can’t know what he commands, really, unless we study the Scriptures, the word he has left behind. We can’t consistently and intentionally grow in our faith without studying his teachings. We can’t “remain in his love” unless we engage in intentional faith development.

Now, here’s something else I want you to notice about this passage: Jesus is speaking this not to one disciple, but to all of them, all eleven of them at this point. He’s calling them to be a community that, together, stays connected to the vine. A solitary branch, hanging out all by itself, might produce a little bit of fruit, but together, the branches produce “much fruit” (15:5). Jesus consistently modeled and called us to community, not solitary faith. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, recognized that. You’ve heard me say before how Wesley organized the early Methodists into small groups, places where the Scriptures could be read and studied and each member could be held accountable for living out what they had learned. Wesley believed in this sort of small group faith development so deeply that he once wrote, “Christianity is essentially a social religion; and…to turn it into a solitary one is to destroy it” (qtd. in Schnase 72). By “social religion” he didn’t mean “social club.” Far from it. He meant that Christianity by its very nature is what we would today call community-centered. We need each other. Together, as the branches on the vine, we will grow. And, as with any living organism, if we’re not growing, we’re dying. It’s just that stark of a choice.

For the last several years, it has been a stated and ongoing goal that every person who considers Portage First or PF Hope their church home would be involved in a small group somewhere, and not just for the short term. We long to see groups that grow together in love so deeply that they hold each other accountable and encourage one another and learn together things they would never have learned alone. And there are a wide variety of small group opportunities, from long-term commitment classes like Disciple, to weekly study groups like Brown Bag, to monthly service and fellowship groups like United Methodist Women and United Methodist Men. The model for small groups really comes from the end of Acts 2, where we’re told that those first believers “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer” (Acts 2:42). Now, there’s a whole sermon just in that verse, but very quickly, let me suggest that small groups that engage in intentional faith development are made up for four things: study of the Scriptures (what Acts calls “the apostles’ teaching”), fellowship (or just enjoying each other’s company), table fellowship (“breaking of the bread,” or food, something we Methodists almost always get right!), and prayer for one another, sharing each other’s concerns. There are many other things that can be a part of a small group, but these four, taken directly from the Scriptures, are ones that specifically help us to grow our faith and produce “much fruit.” And so we’ve tried to continue to build up and lift up small group ministries, but over the last year, we began to realize we didn’t have a clear path for people to follow that would lead a person from starting a relationship with Jesus to a place where they would feel that they could lead others into that kind of a relationship. So I tasked Jeff King last fall with developing that sort of a ministry, and he’s been working on a program called “The Journey.” I’d like to ask Jeff to come up for a few moments as we talk about what “The Journey” is all about.

Interview: Jeff King & “The Journey”

So Jesus is the vine, and we are the branches. But there’s one other piece to this drama, and Jesus puts it this way: “My Father is the gardener. He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful” (15:1-2). Many of you may know that when I arrived seven years ago, Pastor Mary had just planted a grapevine in the back yard of the parsonage. And so I inherited a very tiny vineyard. I was told that it would take three years for the vine to get to the point where it would produce grapes, so I waited patiently for three years. And…no grapes. So I did some research on the internet about growing grapes, and I learned you have to cut them back every so often, otherwise the vine’s energy only goes into growing wood and leaves—not grapes. So I cut the vine back and waited through the next year. And the next. And then I cut it back some more, and still I only got wood and leaves. Once, I found what appeared to be a very tiny grape, but it quickly withered and disappeared. Year after year, I kept looking for grapes and got nothing, and so last fall, I tore the whole thing out. No more vines, no more leaves, no more branches. It’s all gone. And why did I do that? Because the vine was using resources and not doing what it was really made to do. It failed to produce fruit and was doing damage to my fence instead. And I thought of that when I read that verse. God the Father, Jesus says, is constantly watching the vineyard, the church, the Body of Christ, seeking to do two things: remove the dead, unproducing branches and pruning those that are producing so that they can produce even more.

The word translated “cut off” literally means to “lift up or take away” (15:2). That sounds harsh, but in horticultural terms, getting rid of the dead wood, the wood that just does not produce, is a kindness to the rest of the vine. Dead wood can contain disease or decay. Dead wood can do harm to or even kill the rest of the vine. To “take away” the dead wood is, in the long run, a healthy act for the rest of the vine. The second term, “prune,” is a word that means “to cleanse or to purify.” Again, this has to do with the health of the overall plant. For the vine to grow and produce, excess wood and leaves need to be trimmed, cut back (Tenney 151). Now, of course, Jesus isn’t talking about vines here, really. He’s talking about God’s action in our lives. He’s reminding us that if we don’t do what we’re supposed to do, if we’re not producing the fruit we talked about a little bit ago, we can find ourselves cut off from the vine. But he’s also reminding us that, even if we are producing fruit, we might find ourselves going through times that are meant to purify us, make us better disciples. There might be tough times God allows into our lives that help us to become stronger, more loving, more who he wants us to be. Jesus’ point is this: “Fruitfulness is normal for believers. An absolutely fruitless life is…evidence that one is not a believer. Jesus left no place among his followers for fruitless disciples” (Tenney 152).

So the question is this: are you further along in your walk with Jesus than you were a year ago? Is there greater evidence of love, joy, peace, patience and all the rest in your life today than there was a month ago? Are you better able and willing to love God, love others and offer Jesus today than you were last week? Because that’s what he has called us to: intentional faith development, something that happens best in small groups as we sharpen each other and challenge each other. So if you haven’t been involved in a small group, what’s holding you back? What keeps you from connecting with other and growing your faith? Here’s the challenge: find a place where you can grow your faith and produce greater fruit. It might be in a Sunday School class, or a weekday small group, or a Disciple group, or the next Alpha course. It might be gathering a few friends together over lunch once a week, or getting together with someone over breakfast. Find a small group that will help intentionally move you further along in your faith. Jesus is the vine, we are the branches, and we’re all in the fruit-producing business. What’s your plan to be further along in your faith next year than you are today?