Fifth Sunday of Easter 5/5/12

Fifth Sunday of Easter 5/6/12 Text: John 15:1-8 Title: The Church on the Corner of Branch and Vine For the last several weeks I have been showing you through God’s Word the way to achieving true peace in your life, for it is in the death of Jesus where all the guilt that keeps you from having peace is taken upon himself, thus giving you freedom from that guilt that is so destructive to our lives. Today we dig a little deeper into how that works and how we can live peaceful lives in an un-peaceful world where there are so many false teachers or as Jesus told us last week hired hands who claim to be shepherds but are only trying to get us to buy into their way of finding peace. They sound loving. They seem to have our best interests at heart. They have a lot to offer. They quote God’s Word, quite often out of context, or, as I showed you two weeks ago in my sermon that Sunday, they add words to God’s Word changing its meaning to suit their needs. But in the end, right when you need them the most, they will desert you, leaving you alone. The epistle reading for today tells us more about those pastors and teachers who Jesus last Sunday in our gospel calls the “hired hands, that we are to run away from. For, they are in fact false shepherds. Saint John our epistle gives us some excellent pointers on how to tell the false shepherds, those who are in it for the money or self-recognition from those who are true shepherds in God’s Church who serve God’s people in love and truth. He tells us, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, that if a person who claims to know what the Word of God is saying, while not publicly confessing that Jesus Christ, is the only Way, the Truth, and the Life through who we are saved, he or she is a false preacher, a hired hand that we are to flee from, for their teachings are not from God. They are speaking the wisdom of the world and not the wisdom of God which is the only way to escape the wrath of God. But, Saint John continues, speaking of the Apostles and those who correctly follow their example by preaching and teaching the writings of the Apostles, “We are from God. Whoever knows God listens to us; whoever is not from God does not listen to us.” That brings use to our Gospel reading for this morning that uses the analogy of the vine and the branches to teach us that the only way to remain a Christian; that is to be at peace with God is to stay united to Jesus through God’s Word and Sacraments, for it is in those things that you are nourished by God. To me this particular gospel reading about the vine and branches describes better than any other reading in God’s Word the life of a Christian. For, as Saint Matthew wrote down for us in chapter 12:33, Jesus’ words to those who given the duty to teach God’s Word to the people, “Either make the tree good, and its fruit good; or make the tree bad, and its fruit bad; for the tree is known by its fruit.” For, not only is a tree, or vine, known by its fruits, but a problem with its fruit; or its lack of fruit, is the sign of a deeper problem. Imagine a vine grower going through the vineyard looking at his plants, as he makes sure they are in good health, when he stops and bends down at one particular plant. He sees a problem. One of the branches is not producing high quality fruit like it should while the others are producing fine delicious fruit. It is small, and withered, not good for much of anything. It looks like it not being fed. What might the problem be? As he looks further down the branch to where it meets the vine he finds that the branch is just barely attached. There is the problem; the branch is not getting what it needs to grow and produce fine fruit. There is nothing left to do but cut it off and throw it away before it becomes diseased and affects the rest of the plant and the whole plant becomes diseased. Jesus wasn’t trying to teach those listening to him that day how to be a good vinedressers. He is telling the story, so that they and we can learn a valuable lesson about our relationship with God. The way we act, especially how we treat one another and the world around us, reveals something deeper about us, for it reveals where we are getting our nourishment. This really shows up in how we love others, for Jesus is love and so the nourishment we receive from him is love that courses through us producing love that feeds others. We all from time to time, sometimes more than less struggle to love people, sometimes we struggle with loving ourselves. Why is that we struggle so much, as Jesus commands us to do, if we are his disciples? There are many reasons, but for some people they are afraid that if they are too generous there might not be enough left for them. Others are afraid that if they are too patient or kind that we will be taken advantage of. Yet others are afraid that if they don’t put their own welfare first who will. All of those fears and many more like them cause, as Martin Luther once said when preaching on this particular Gospel reading, “shrivel us up”; using the vine language of our gospel for today, producing poor fruit. Ultimately the problem with being turned in on ourselves, or shriveled up, as Martin Luther points out, is that it isolates us; not only from others whom our fruits are meant to feed, but also from God who is the source of all those good things we fear being deprived of. In the end, unless God through his Word and Sacraments changes us, we end up hell, not where we would want to be, that is for sure. We, all of us, are in a terrible fix, but God who loves his creation more than we could ever understand sent Jesus the perfect vine to be a branch who even though he was a perfect branch bearing perfect fruit was cut off of the vine and thrown away into the grave. He was thrown into the grave dead and apparently useless; that is until God raised him from the dead, proof that he had grafted him back into the vine where he continues to flourish. For the sake of Jesus the vine who became a branch God grafted us through our baptism into the vine where we can grow, flourish and bear much fruit. The good news is that God will graft us back into the vine, Jesus, as many times as needed when we pulled loose by the things of the world. There, once more firmly attached to the vine, Jesus, we find the nutrients; that is forgiveness and life in the Word and Sacraments to revive our sorry, shriveled selves. “Receive the Holy Spirit,” we heard Jesus tell the disciples on the Second Sunday of Easter. He tells us the same thing. Whatever we need to make the fruit; that is the good fruit that God wants us to do, Jesus is more than happy to provide. For you see when withered branches are grafted back into the vine and the sap begins to flow, it’s only a matter of time before the fruit begins to appear and grow in quantity. They can’t help it, those formerly-withered branches are changed, not by anything they did, but by the flow of nutrients from the branch. So it is with us, when by the grace of God we are baptized into Christ and the Holy Spirit begins to flow through our bodies, we in turn start to cling in faith to our Lord and his promises and can’t help loving others as God has loved us. We are to be, in the words of this sermon’s title, “The Church on the Corner of Branch and Vine.” Amen.