Lessons from the Vine

Lessons from the Vine

John 15:1-8

May 18, 2003

St. Paul United Methodist Church

Rev. John Fleming

I want to ask you to take a little trip back in time with me this morning. Some of you will remember the time well. It is just twenty-four years ago. Others of you, I know were not around back then. Some of you were yet to be born and so you will have to use your imaginations this morning. I am sorry to say that our trip back in time is not too an exciting place like Paris, London, or New York. The time is the spring of 1979 and the place is number one Biscayne Circle, Little Rock. Just in case you don’t know it or recognize the address, it is the address of one of the two houses that our church owns. This address is the one for the pastor, our parsonage. I was not around back then. In fact, in 1979 I was eleven years old and living in Tennessee going to Lincoln Elementary School and playing baseball in the summers. Our pastor then was Rev. John Walker. Do you remember Rev. Walker? I can tell by some of the smiles on your faces that you do remember him and this time. What I would like all of us to do is to get on our church’s bus. Well, if you are going to dream, you might as well dream big. We arrive at Biscayne Circle. We are here to see something that is happening at the parsonage. Walk with me around to the side yard. I will open the gate. I invite you to look over the fence. There, on the other side of the fence, is my next door neighbor, Rudy Bischof. Rudy still lives in the house next door to the parsonage. The year is 1979 are there are some condominiums being built behind our street. Rudy wants a little foliage to protect his yard from these condominiums. So there is Rudy, with the smallest of a green plant in one of his hands and a small shovel in his other one. Rudy bends down, digs a small hole, and gently places the green plant into the ground. The plant was bamboo. Never ever plant bamboo!

Fast forward with me twenty-four years. Now the year is 2003 and the Fleming family has just moved into the parsonage. In our side yard, there are bamboo shoots just about everywhere. When we moved in last May, I decided that the bamboo needed thinning out a bit. I removed one third of the stalks. I did that. It was no small endeavor. This year I learned that the city of Little Rock would pick up the stalks if I placed them beside the street, so I cut all of the remaining stalks down. I want you to know that I cut them all down, I poured pure Round Up down the shoots. I did not dilute it at all. I actually have been able to kill one or two stalks. You all were getting the house ready for us last spring. Vicki Alexander and Sally Swindler headed up the project. Vicki asked me if I would like for the landscaping crew to remove the bamboo.

Why didn’t I say yes? Actually, I would have loved to have seen them try it. Last May when I was trying to thin the bamboo, I called my brother-in-law, who is a landscaper by trade. I asked him, “Dean, what do you do to get rid of bamboo?” He looked at me, smiled, and said, “Move.” I said, “I cannot move. I just moved here!” Dean continued smiling. A friend of mine who was over at the house had tried to grow bamboo unsuccessfully. When I asked her what the nursery’s advice to her was and what their instructions to her were, she said this, “They told me to put it in the ground and quickly to get out of the way.” Now two or three days a week, I stroll through my bamboo garden and step on the brown shoots that are making their way through the dirt. I know that you will think that I am exaggerating. I am not. If you leave one of these shoots alone, in a matter of days, it will be a stalk six or seven feet tall. There are roots and vines of bamboo that grow under the ground and above the ground. Some of these vines are one or two inches thick! There is a lesson from the bamboo vines. As long as the shoots are connected to the roots, they grow well.

I do not know if there was bamboo in the days of Jesus. Vines, we know, were all over the place during the days when Jesus walked the dusty streets of Galilee and Jerusalem. Jesus must have been making his way from the Upper Room to the Garden of Gethesemane with his disciples following closely behind when Jesus saw a vine growing over a wall. Jesus reached for the vine, held it up, showed it to the disciples, and gave them the order of the way things should be. He said, “I am the true vine (which means that there are other vines). My Father is the gardener. You are the branches. That is to say, you will never be the gardener and you will never be the vine. You are the branches. Jesus says words that are so important. It is as if Jesus is using the vine as an object lesson. Jesus says, “Look at this. As long as the branches are attached, fruitful living happens. Every once and a while, I have to prune the branches. I cut them off so that they will bear more fruit.” I will tell you that in the days of Jesus there were vines growing everywhere. They could be uncontrollable and unruly. If a good gardener did not trim the branches, they would take over and would be everywhere. You need to know that like the shepherd image of last week, the vine image this week is throughout our Bibles. I did a little research about the appearance of vines. Are you interested in the information? The word vine appears in the Bible forty-nine times. The word vineyard appears another seventy-nine times. I want you to understand this, the vine imagery is supposed to symbolize our relationship with God. We know that throughout time, the relationship between God and His children has not always been wonderful. In the fifth chapter of Isaiah’s prophesy, God compares His children to a choice vineyard. God lavishes his attention on this vineyard. He spends time in it daily, but instead of the vines producing choice grapes, sour and wild grapes appear. So, God proceeds to destroy the vineyard. Listen to the fifth verse, “And now I will tell you what I will do to my vineyard. I will remove its hedge, and it shall be devoured; I will break down its wall, and it shall be trampled down. I will make it a waste; it shall not be pruned or hoed, and it shall be overgrown with briers and thorns; I will also command the clouds that they not rain upon it.” That is a judgment passage that sounds like another verse, one of our verses for this morning, “Whoever does not abide in me is thrown away like a branch and withers; such branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned.” Any questions?

Actually I wanted to share a story with you in connection with that verse. When I was nineteen and twenty years old, I worked at a camp near Camden, Tennessee. Every Wednesday night we fed the entire camp watermelon. In front of the main building was a planter. A bricked box with dirt in it. It was the place where a lot of people gathered. When we fed the camp watermelon, by and large, most of the watermelon seeds ended up in that planter. When half the summer was over, we began noticing watermelon vines growing in that planter. We were looking forward to the end of the summer when we could eat a home grown watermelon. Lou Ann Perkins came up to me on one of these Wednesday nights. I want to say this gently. Lou Ann was blonde in every sense of the word. Do you know what I mean? Lou Ann came up to our camp’s director and said, “I did the camp a favor. I just weeded the planter.” What she did was pull up all the vines. That is part of the lesson here. If you do not abide in Christ, you will be pulled up and thrown into the fire. That is one of the lessons of our text. I do not want you to leave with that message. What I do want you to leave with is that so many times in these verses, you hear the word abide. Abide is an old fashioned word; you do not hear it much anymore. It means to remain and to live with. As long as we live with Christ, we will bear fruit that will last.

I do not mind telling you that I do not know much about vines and vineyards. My only experience is with ivy and bamboo. I try to get rid of both of those plants. But I do know that carefully pruned, good vines produce good fruit.

What are we supposed to do with these words? I will admit this to you, this is not one of my favorite passages. I am the vine, you are the branches. How can this really speak to us? Apart from me you can do nothing. What does this really say to us? Maybe one of the first things that it says is that we need to stay close to the vine. I know that there are times in our lives when we need a little pruning. No body likes to be pruned. No one likes to be cut off. No one likes for our bad habits to disappear. Maybe we think, “I like the way that I am living! I do not need any help!” Snip. Something is happening in your life; the something is not good. You look down and there sitting at your feet is a bad habit of yours. Snip. Maybe it is an old habit or an old sin that seems to linger. The gardener approaches you and snips. You look down and there it is. Maybe what lies at your feet is unforgiveness, perhaps it is doubt. Maybe it is something that you are doing that you do not need to be doing. I am told that a good gardener will sometimes realign a vine. Sometimes vines are pruned, but at other times they are realigned. Have any of you moved a plant in your offices or in your homes so that they can get more sunlight? Sure you have. That is what God does with our lives sometimes; He realigns them. It never feels good. I want you to hear today, the main message is this, stay close to the vine and you will bear fruit.

Here is something else that I want you to hear. You cannot bear fruit, it is not possible. What are the fruits of the Spirit? You will find them in Galatians 5. On the vine with the grapes are things like love and joy and peace and patience and kindness and goodness and gentleness and self-control. Ugh, I hate it when I read that one! These are the kinds of things that I think Jesus longs to see in us, but how does he get these things out of his children. Maybe it is like the softball coach, who looks deep in his players’ eyes, and says, if we are going to be better, it is going to take some work and some practice. Perhaps it is like the piano instructor who is trying to get you ready for the recital. It is going to take some work. The recital is only a few weeks away, here’s your rehearsal schedule. Stick to it. And the pianist sighs when he looks at the hours ahead. How do you bear fruit? I want you to go back and read the verse. No where does it say that you can bear fruit. No where in the passage does it say that you can bear fruit. It says that we are to abide. Do you know that lesson? Have you ever seen a gardener walk up to a vine and say, “Okay. Today you will bear fruit, or else!” If you are that branch, will you bear fruit by resolving to do so. Imagine that you are in the garden. You close you knobby eyes, grit your wooden teeth, and strain until your bark turns red. When you do that, fruit magically appears right? No, that sounds crazy, but we have tried to do that. Perhaps with resolve in our eyes, with our fists clenched we have tried. “Today I will be happy!” you growl. Or maybe you have said this, “I am going to be patient and I am going to be patient right now!” Here is one for the preachers in the room, “Okay, I will be a cheerful giver, give me that offering plate!” I know that none of us, not one of us have ever said this, “I am going to forgive that jerk if it kills me!” No where in our morning’s passage does it say that we can bear fruit. What does it tell us to do? It tells us to abide in the vine.