What is your fruit?

Sermon for Easter V, 2024, delivered at the Church of the Transfiguration, New York, New York.

Text:  John 15:1-8

 

When I read this morning’s Gospel for the first time in preparing this sermon, I appreciated the wonderful examples that Jesus gave of the vine and the branches, and the fruit that is produced from them to describe relationships. The examples worked and made a lot of sense as I read along, and then I got to the line “Whoever does not abide in me is thrown away like a branch and withers; such branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned.” And the loveliness vanished. It is not unlike the passage earlier in John 14 where he says that no one can come to the Father except through him. These passages have been read specifically to enclose, exclude, rarify, and separate those in the group from those who the group doesn’t want to be around. That reading leaves me uncomfortable and unsure, because I also read in John 4 about Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well. Wasn’t he including Samaritans who were rejected by Israel as unbelievers? My short answer is that John’s Gospel is a difficult read in places because he often writes in metaphors, rather than the more explanatory, witness-like accounts in the other three gospels. But there is more to this reading than just understanding the metaphor.

In our Gospel passage, the word abide appears eight times, and reading it with the modern definition of accepting or tolerating doesn’t make sense. Here, abide is used more like “The Dude abides” from the movie The Big Lebowski, meaning to live or to dwell. So, The Dude lives. Jesus is saying to us to live or dwell in him, as he lives in us, so that we build a mutual spiritual life together. This metaphor extends to the branches of the vine that must live in the vine, attached to it, in order to bear fruit. This makes sense, that a branch separated from the vine will wither and die, just as we wither and die spiritually when we are separated from Jesus. This separation is part of what we focused on during Lent, separation being one way of understanding sin, and resurrection, our resurrection is returning to God through Jesus, abiding in him again. So, discarding withered branches is not a rejection because of a loss of faith in Jesus as it could mean, but instead it describes removing what separates us from God. We are the branches, connected and living with the vine that is Jesus, but then he goes on to say that God prunes the branches. Taken literally, this sounds painful, and not what we expect God to do.

If we look closer at the word prune in the reading, it is translated from the Greek word καθαίρω (kathairo) which means to cut away. Καθαίρω can also mean to cleanse, and in fact that word is used twice in the reading to mean both pruning and cleansing. In the metaphor that Jesus is building, pruning a vine is cleansing it, removing all of the things that get in the way of producing fruit. Again, this could be part of a Lenten experience, but it is also something to be done all year long. Cleansing is painful, not in the sense of physical pain, but emotional pain because we let go of the things that are familiar, or convenient, or things that hurt us and the people around us. Bad habits, obsessions, addictions, self-centeredness, are all things that prevent us from experiencing God’s unconditional love and loving ourselves in the same way. Those are the things to be thrown away and burned, not us as children of God. The fruit that we bear when we are cleansed and a living part of the vine is sweeter, more nourishing, and far more satisfying as food than the bitter fruit produced by a dying branch. 

Jesus goes on to say that we will bear fruit, but without him we can do nothing. And that stops me cold again. That seems to say that we are completely dependent on Jesus for bearing fruit, that we are not able to produce fruit on our own. Part of our spiritual awareness is knowledge of our gifts, the things that we do in Jesus’ name to continue his ministry on earth, the things we do to continue to build the kingdom of God here and now. These gifts are fruits that we grow, and we give that fruit to others, whether or not we are aware that we produce it. Giving those gifts comes from the Holy Spirit moving in us to be the eyes of Jesus and respond with his heart, his hands, and his feet. We can bear fruit on our own, but as a branch of the vine, we are fed and nourished by Jesus and it is through that nourishment that we bear God’s fruit for the world. In that sense, we cannot bear God’s fruit without Jesus because it is distinct from all other fruit we could bear. And it is God’s fruit of love, justice, dignity, and respect that is needed in the world. 

My family and I visited the City in October of last year, staying at a hotel on the edge of Soho and Tribeca. We would walk to the Canal Street subway stop to take trains around Manhattan to see the sights. On one of the last days of our stay, my wife and I noticed a tomato vine growing against a fence that enclosed a construction site. There were a couple of small tomatoes on the vine that looked delicious. We grow tomato vines at home in a raised bed full of dirt, but seeing this vine was striking because there was nothing but concrete around it, yet it had found enough dirt, somewhere, to grow. We both agreed that it had grown from a seed left behind as someone ate a tomato in some form on that spot. Seeds fell, and some withered, while others grew. As I read this morning’s Gospel, I was reminded of that vine, and how it fit into Jesus’ words about abiding in the vine as branches, being readied to bear fruit. From God the vinedresser, to Jesus the vine, to us as branches, our fruit grows from an unbroken line and nourishes those who are in need. When you have left this sanctuary this morning, think about where God has planted you, where the vine you grow from is located. If a tomato vine can grow and produce fruit on a sidewalk in the City, think of all the unexpected places where you could produce fruit, and think about who would be nourished by it. Think about where the seeds sown from your fruit might land, and who would discover your new vine.