Sermon Title: "Vineyards, Mothers, and Pruning Children"
Date: May 10, 2009
Minister: Rev. Charles Ensley

Lesson:  John 15:1-8

Some of you know our younger daughter Amy moved to Sonoma last summer, where she drives twelve miles each day through vineyards to the Kenwood School where she teaches.  Not a bad commute, she says!

When we were up to visit her in January, across hillside and valley all the grape vines looked stark and barren.  It was much the same around Santa Maria and Paso Robles when Peggy and I were up there last month.  All that remains through the winter and early spring are the roots, the trunk, and the short, burly limbs that are trained outward along the wires.  From these will soon burst dozens of fingers of new growth.  When we visit in Sonoma again in late July, we expect to see lush entanglements of grape vines reaching long distances along the wire stringers that guide the direction of growth.  Later in the season, from these long, green, vibrant vines will hang clusters of burgeoning fruit.

Like us in California, those who have lived in vine growing regions, as Jesus and his disciples did, will be familiar with these agrarian rhythms that relate to the production of grapes and, thus, the production of wine for which the central coastal valley of our state is famous.  There is no mystery in the timely and tender care of the grape vines, including the removal of unfruitful branches.  They only take up valuable space in the vineyard and must give way to those that produce.  Even fruit-bearing branches must be pruned in order to bear more fruit.

In today’s lesson, found only in John’s Gospel, Jesus uses the vine and the branches that grow from it, the ones that produce the luscious fruit, as a metaphor for the relationship between God as the master vinegrower, Jesus as the vine, and we, his followers, as the branches.  The branches, apart from their connection to the vine itself, cannot grow, cannot flourish, cannot produce grapes.  “Abide in me as I abide in you,” he says.  “Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me.” (15:4)  And, like any fruit tree or flowering bush, a branch needs pruning to produce better.  And branches that produce nothing, like suckers on a rose bush, need to be pruned away.

I learned early in my career that while Mother’s Day is not a religious holiday, you don’t want to overlook mention of it.  So when I read today’s passage, I began to see an analogy between the vinegrower—who prunes the branches so they will produce better—and mothers.

Now I would like to think that I, as a father, had some influence on the upbringing of our daughters, but in most cases, it is the mother who deals more with a child and is frequently the one who corrects or guides in decisions.  In a Hallmark channel movie last week, a family was reeling with the mother’s diagnosis of breast cancer.  The father, often away from home on business as he vied for vice-presidency of his company, was totally unprepared to take over child-rearing when his wife was sick from chemotherapy.  In one instance, when the middle school daughter asked about something, he had no idea.  Looking at her father with disgust and exasperation, she said, “I’ll ask Mom.  She knows.”

Quite often, it falls to mothers to have the major job of “pruning” their children:  guiding, influencing, correcting them when necessary.  Although I’m pleased to say that in the movie, the father negotiated an early curfew with his daughter for the prom, and intervened with her mother as to the conditions under which she could attend.

Sometimes branches—and children—need special attention to modify the path in which they seem intended to go.  In Secrets of the Vine (Sisters, Ore:  Multnomah Publishers, 2001, pp. 33-36), Bruce Wilkinson, in his book exploring the meaning behind John 15, shares an insight that he learned from a vineyard owner here in Southern California:  “New branches have a natural tendency to trail down and grow along the ground, but they don’t bear fruit down there.  When branches grow along the ground, the leaves get coated in dust.  Then when it rains, they get muddy and mildewed, and the branch becomes sick and useless.”

“What do you do?” asked Wilkinson, “Cut it off and throw it away?”

“Oh, no!” the vinegrower exclaimed.  “The branch is much too valuable for that.  We go through the vineyard with a bucket of water, looking for those branches.  We lift them up and wash them off.  Then we wrap them around the trellis or tie them up.  Pretty soon they’re thriving.”

“… For the Christian,” Wilkinson declares, “sin is like dirt covering the grape leaves.  Air and light can’t get in.  The branch languishes, and no fruit develops … When the branches fall into the dirt, God doesn’t throw them away or abandon them.  He lifts them up, cleans them off, and helps them flourish again.”

Doesn’t God as a parent sound like what we as parents do with our children?  When they fall, when they falter, when they fail, we attempt to ‘lift them up, clean them off, and help them flourish again.’  It’s not always easy.  Sometimes we have to resort to “tough love,” setting limits and conditions which they will want to—and often do—rebel against.  But isn’t that the way God is with us?  God keeps forgiving us in the hope that we will find the right path to follow, a path that abides in Christ, and have the opportunity to flourish.

If you abide in Jesus like a branch on the vine, you are productive because you are rooted in Jesus.  Just as the trees planted along Livingston Drive yesterday will not thrive without a root system that extends deep into the soil, none of us can reach our potential without a strong connection to the Son of God.

•  Jesus is the one who keeps us from being blown away by the storms of job loss and personal failure and family conflict.

•  Jesus is the one who offers us “living water” when we are feeling dried out and lifeless (John 4:10), and who nourishes us with his teachings when we are wandering aimlessly along a dangerous path.

•  Jesus is the one who supports us when we fall, forgives us when we sin, and even breathes new life into us when we are feeling dead inside.

Our rootedness in Jesus is what gives us the ability to be truly productive, because no good can come from a branch that is broken, dried out, fallen or dead—in other words, separated from that which sustains it.  We are blessed to be growing together here in the vineyard of Christ.  The more rooted in him we are, the more we flourish on the vine, the better we are equipped to serve the One who came to Earth to live out his connection to God.