"Sticks or Branches"
Sermon Transcript for June 26, 2004
Scripture Reading: John 15:1-16
By Dr.. Ron Crandall
Dr. Crandall: Associate Dean: E.S.J. School of World Mission and Evangelism Professor. Dr. Crandall is the author of several books on the subject of evangelism with a special concern for small churches, including Turn-Around Strategies for Small Churches (Abingdon, 1995), There’s New Life in the Small Church (Discipleship Resources, 1983) and The Small Membership Church: Growing, Caring, Serving (Discipleship Resources, 1982). His newest book, The Contagious Witness: Exploring Christian Conversion (Abingdon, 1999), examines 10,000 interviews undertaken by Asbury Seminary students to clarify how the triune God encounters persons today. He is also author of the new 25 week small group resource, Witness: Exploring and Sharing Your Christian Faith (Discipleship Resources, 2001). Source: Asbury Seminary Web Site
Well, good morning again! It’s delightful to be with you in worship. I drive 160 miles to come here and worship with you on Sunday; but I don’t know how far the rest of you are coming. But this is a great Christian fellowship and a wonderful place to experience what it means to come into the presence of God. And what we want to talk about especially today is also what it means for the presence of God to come into us. Now last week I thought that it was important for me, especially after Mike Beck’s instructions to me, that the goal of his own journey away from here and the goal of this congregation in the days past and the days to come is to rekindle what it was that this early movement of Christianity, called Methodism, founded by John Wesley, looked like. And what it would mean for us to truly live that way in a profoundly powerful way again through this congregation and other places as well. So last week I preached on John Wesley’s favorite text to preach on, which was Mark, Chapter 1, Verse 15. When Jesus first began His ministry, He declared openly these words, “The Kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe this Gospel.”
I want to share with you from my favorite verse today, which is out of John 15. Let me go back and pick up a little bit about John Wesley, however, first of all. One of the things that he saw when he looked around him was that there was a great sense that many people did not have any deep understanding of what it really was that God had in store for them. They had some kind of religion, some minimal kind of religion perhaps. They may have attended or even not attended church; but they’d been baptized. And John Wesley had discovered that there truly was a much more profound gift that God had in mind for every human soul. And that was for the love of God to permeate every soul that God had created in His own likeness. As children of God we were meant to be filled with the nature of God. So this love of God he called the “medicine of life”. And later on in his own ministry, he looked around him and he said, “You know, any great movement of the recovery of this profound gift that God has given to the world has a danger.” And the danger is that over the course of time, even as my wife, Bonnie, mentioned, maybe over a generation or two, the tendency is for people to settle back in to traditional ways of thinking and to religious activities, but not the profound nature of this Gospel. And so he said, close to his dying days, he said, “I’m not afraid that the people called Methodist should ever cease to exist either in Europe or in America. But I am afraid lest they should only exist as a dead sect having the form of religion without the power. And this most undoubtedly will be the case unless they hold fast to both the doctrine, the spirit, and the discipline with which they first set out.” Well in these recent years, John Wesley has almost proven to be a prophet at least in Europe and America. Over fifty percent of the United Methodist churches last year did not receive one new person on profession of new faith in Christ.
What happened to the great movement? What happened to the power of lives that were being changed and transformed and were helping other people be invited into the “tasting” of this Kingdom? Well, I think Jesus answers this question for us. And it raises the question for me then: What is it going to be for us? Are we going to be “Sticks—not good for much but firewood, or branches that are fruitful? And the way that Jesus answers this is with our text this morning; and, therefore, my favorite text. Jesus begins to talk to His disciples. He says, “I am the true vine.” Now if you look at this visual here before us, you can imagine that all around the land of Palestine where the Jews lived, for centuries they had seen these vineyards growing on every hillside. Oftentimes when Jesus would talk and illustrate what it was that He was trying to communicate, he would take a very nearby object and remind them of what a great truth would be. But there is more to this than simply looking around on the hillsides and Jesus picking up an image and saying, “Okay, I’m going to compare myself to vineyards and to a vine.” although, He often did that. There’s much more to this actually because in the Old Testament this was one of the images that God had used again and again to describe who the people of God were. He said, “You are my vine.” And so in Jeremiah, for example, he says, “I planted you as a choice vine from the purest stock. How then did you turn and degenerate and become a wild vine?” Isaiah speaking for God says, “What more was there to do for my vineyard that I have done? When I expected it to yield grapes, why did it yield wild grapes?” And the translation goes on to describe these as little tiny things hardly worth looking at. And you call these grapes? So one of the images that was very constantly, throughout the Old Testament and Jesus picks up as part of His announcement is, “Yes, the people of God, the children of God are suppose to be the true vine of God spreading life, spreading refreshment across the face of the earth.” But what happened? God said, “I planted you, I cultivated you, you were of the purest stock, and what did you turn out to be—a bunch of wild grapes gone mad! Little tiny things not much more than little raisins. Where is that great fruit that I was looking for?” And so Jesus comes and He says, “Now this is the Word, ‘I am the true vine; my Father is the vine grower. And He removes every branch in me that bears no fruit, every branch that bears fruit He prunes to make it bear more fruit.”
Sixty-three percent of the unchurched people in the United States say no one has ever asked them to church. Fewer than twenty percent of people in most of our mainline denominations have had a conversation this year with anyone outside the church about matters of faith. Sticks or branches? The answer that Jesus has is that God is interested in results. He removes branches that don’t bear fruit. He wants branches that do bear fruit and He’s going to shape them to be more and more and more fruitful if they are going to truly be His branches. In other words, the message of the Old Testament as well as the New Testament is God’s design for our lives is not just so that we can soak up the sunshine of God’s love, but that we will be instruments of passing this on. We will be channels of God’s glory and grace. We will be branches of the living vine of God spreading this possibility for others.
I was boarding an airplane in Alabama a number of years ago, about three years ago actually. I’d been doing a workshop on Christian witnessing down in Birmingham. As I got on board the plane, there was a flight attendant waiting, of course, at the entrance of the plane. And when I came close to her she said, “Good evening, sir. How are you this evening?” Now what do you suppose I said to her? It’s difficult to be in a church like this. I want you to talk to me and you’re just not sure you are supposed to do that. She said, “How are you this evening?” And what do you suppose I said? Ah, thank you very much. Actually, in reality I did the whole saying. You know, we have the short versions and the longer versions. So I did the longer version. I said, “Fine, how are you?” Thank you very much. Yes, you are getting better at this. And here’s what she said to me, “I’m blessed”. I said, “What did you say?” She said, “I said, I’m blessed”. I said, “I bet you are.” She said, “Oh, I am.” I said, “You know what, I am to.” She said, “Well, if you are you are suppose to let people know about it and pass it on, don’t you know?” I said, “Well, you know, I’ve been trying to do that. But I have a hunch that you try to do that.” She said, “Every chance I get.” And this is a flight attendant. She’s not supposed to be doing to be doing this. She can’t help but do it. She’s a branch that is full of this flow of the love of God. And she can’t help but want to let it go, let it produce something, let it be fruitful.
Now how does this happen? Well, Jesus makes it clear by saying, “Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch can not bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me.” Now oftentimes we’ve had the image that what it meant for us to be about this Christian witness stuff, which most of us just feel that it’s not my thing. I’m happy for those who like that sort of thing but it’s not my thing. I want you to know there is no other alternative. How many of you are Christian witnesses? Here’s the answer: one hundred percent. The only question is: What kind? Anyone who declares that they go to church or think of themselves as a Christian even if they don’t go to church but they say, “Well, I think I’m a Christian”, they are some kind of witness. The question is, what kind? What kind of fruitfulness? In the past sometimes we’ve thought this was some sort of mandate or commandment. And it truly is, Jesus wants us to do this. God has declared to the people in the Old Testament and Jesus declares it to us as His disciples. This is the reason you exist.
You shall be my witnesses. You shall be light and darkness. You are salt, you are light—let it shine!But there is something here that is more than just a mandate. Jesus is saying, “What this is really about at the bottom level is you must abide in me. This is not about you doing something on your own. This is about my life being in your life, my life flowing through your life. In fact there’s one commandment more important than anything else, perhaps, for every Christian and that is, “Unless you abide in me, you can do nothing.” Abide in me is what Jesus is saying. He in fact goes on to say this, “My Father is glorified by this—that you bear much fruit” Much fruit, not just a little. “My Father is glorified when you bear much fruit and become or demonstrate or prove to be my disciples. My disciples are fruitful.” This is what glorifies God—much fruit. And how does it work? It works this way, the way that Jesus goes on to describe in the very next verse. He says, “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my life.”
And so here it is, the real heart of the matter is, are we saturated, are we permeated, are we marinated, are we flowing with the love of God? Now this was the message John Wesley wanted the world to know. He said it was the medicine of life, the medicine of life for every ill, the love of God flowing into every human being. Open the gates and let it come. How did it happen? Now there are a couple of profound images here that I want to look at. One is there is something here about fruitfulness and the love of God that helps us understand the very nature of God in a profound way. And there is something here that also helps us understand our purpose, our design, our nature. Now first of all, God’s nature is Holy Trinity. We say, “Oh yeah, okay.” Now I can’t even remember when this ever began to make any more sense to me than something that we used at the benediction of our worship services. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit or something like that. What in the world did that mean? Well, Thomas Jefferson said it didn’t mean much at all. In fact we think that Thomas Jefferson may have been one of our great giants in the faith when he was trying to establish this nation. Well certainly he wasn’t. He wasn’t a Christian. He said that this whole nonsense about the Trinity—that one is three and three is one—doesn’t make any sense and anyone who thinks it does is ridiculously stupid. We’ll be much better off when we get rid of all that nonsense and just try and do our best and follow the things that Jesus is trying to teach us. There are a lot of people in the church today that probably still think this way. But there is a profound gift that has been given to us to understand the nature of God.
Let me step back a few centuries, quite a few centuries. The very first person that ever used the word “Trinity” to describe the nature of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit as one God and yet somehow three persons, was a man named Tertullian. Tertullian lived in North Africa in the 3rd Century. He was a thinker and a writer and he was trying to help people to understand what it meant to understand this Christian Gospel. And so one of the very first ways that he explained what the nature of God was like as Holy Trinity was this. He said, “It’s something like, the root, the shoot, and the fruit.” Well, imagine that. Here we are looking at Jesus say, “I am the vine”. But there is more to this picture then that Tertullian was picking up. He says, “This is one way for us to understand the very nature of what God is like.” Now he’s showing us that indeed, God is like this: God is like the invisible that no one has ever seen, that Jesus calls our Father--His Father and our Father—the root system. The root system—invisible. He said, “No one has ever seen God but I am the Father in one. If you’ve seen me, you’ve seen the Father.” I’m going to get out here just a little bit so you can see. The root system is down here where no one can see it. But we know that the root system is made of the very same stuff as that which grows up out of it. And so Jesus said, “If you’ve seen me, what is grown up out of the invisible in to the visible manifestation of God, you have seen the root, you have seen my Father the source of all life. And I am the true manifestation of that, the vine.” And He goes on to describe, “Do you know what? You are branches meant to be connected to this.” I want to ask you this question, “How does the fruit get out on the branches?” And look at our decorative paraments here. We have a root system; we have a trunk or a true vine that grows up in branches. Now this one is showing leaves but suppose we move it now to the image that Jesus had of the vineyard and the fruitfulness of the vineyard and the vine and the grape. How do those grapes end up out there on the branch? Here’s how it works. There is a lot I don’t know, but here is one thing I do know. Those grapes are not produced by the branches; the branches bear them. They simply hold them. They come out on the branches. But they move out of the invisible root system up through that trunk that vine, through those branches that are letting the flow take place, and indeed the fruit is designed to come out. And that flow of life that comes from the invisible through the vine up into the branches, I would like to suggest, is what Tertullian was really trying to help us understand as the nature of God as Holy Spirit. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—the flow of God into our lives if we abide in the vine, the Spirit flows into us as branches out of that which is the nature of God. And so it produces what? Would you look on the front of your bulletin? What does the fruit look like that the Spirit produces in a persons life? It looks like love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Those aren’t things we produce, that’s what the Spirit produces in the branch that’s attached and letting the flow take place into our lives. There is one more way to think about this. “We are rooted and grounded in love,” Paul says in Ephesians 3:17. Jesus says, “I am the true vine. Abide in me.” What does that mean? “Abide in my love”, he tells us. What is the fruit of the spirit? It’s love—I’m the vine, you are the branches. We are grafted into Christ. Christ is meant to be in us not just in history, not just in heaven, but in us, flowing through us in this amazing, amazing image.
A couple of more pictures of what it means to talk about this nature of God as Holy Trinity. There were a couple of other folks that followed Tertullian trying to help us understand this. One of them was Augustine. He made a tremendous impact on the church for centuries, for probably a millennium. He helped define the nature of what it meant to live out the Christian faith especially in a secular context. He himself had grown up in a Christian family with a Christian mother. But he had abandoned it. He decided to have fun for most of the years of his life. He once prayed, “Oh God, make me holy but not just yet.” And then one day his life was transformed. He was profoundly converted by this love of God in his life and became a significant leader in the church. Augustine described this nature of God as love. “God is love”, he reminded us. That’s what the Scripture teaches us. And every love has to have a dynamic interaction of persons. And in the love between the Father and the Son there is this Spirit that’s produced who is also person. And so he described the nature of God as Holy Trinity in terms of this profound movement of love.
There was another man in that same section of history in the 4th century whose name was Gregory Nanziansus. And he used a Greek word. He said, “You know what?” He said, “This is like the nature of God, it’s “perichoresis”. That’s a Greek word. I know you all know what this means. You’ve probably used them in your morning devotions. Perichoresis! “Peri”—think of a periscope. What does a periscope do? A periscope is something that you can look around with. Peri means around. ‘Peri’—around; ‘choresis’—it’s the same word that we have for choreographer or choreography. It’s about dancing. What Gregory Nanziansus says, “The nature of God is like an enormously wonderful dance of loving joy that has been going on all through the history of creation, far before creation. It’s the nature of God. It’s a profound, creative dance of love.” C.S. Lewis picked this image up and invited us to the dance. And it’s a word that’s come back in these recent years actually for more and more of us to discover. God is not simply someone sitting somewhere on a throne out in the middle of nowhere. God desires to let this creative movement of love permeate all of creation. And in fact it does, it does. And or chance is to be part of it.
And so now the question again--Sticks or branches? What’s it going to be? Jesus said, “Those who abide in me and I am then bear much fruit because apart from me you can be nothing. But whoever does not abide in me is thrown away like a branch withers. Such branches are gathered, thrown in the fire and burned. They are nothing more than sticks.” There is an alternative; there is a choice. So how does this happen? Well, this is our nature; it’s our life purpose to be fruitful branches for the glory of God and to help this spread to others. How? Jesus tells us. First of all he says to these disciples, he says, “You have been cleansed by the word that I have spoken to you.” Now, I don’t know a lot about growing grapevines actually. Some of you may have this experience. If you do, you can continue to inform me. My one experience was to plant some in my backyard one time when I mistakenly ran over them with my lawnmower. So this is not my gift. I don’t think I have a green thumb. But what the description was here and that everyone understood, even the fishermen that Jesus was talking with, they understood this. The primary nature of vines is that in the beginning of the growing season, or before they start, they have to be cleaned. The vines have to be cleaned; the branches have to be cleaned. They are cut back all the way to starting over again. Jesus says to us and to those disciples, “I have cleaned you like a vine. You have been cleaned as my branches by being cut all the way back by my word.” When we here Jesus speak to us it eliminates all the stuff, sin, that keeps us from being freshly alive in the flow of God’s love. So he said, first of all, “you have been cleansed by the word that I have spoken to you.” We need to listen to Jesus and let Him speak to us and cut back all that would keep us from having a fresh life.
Secondly, he said, “Every branch that bears fruit he prunes, my Father prunes, in order to make it bear more fruit.” Pruning is not cutting all the way back. It’s cutting off the things that really won’t help fruitfulness take place. Now the quality of fruit is determined by what it is rooted in. Our quality is what meant to look exactly like the fruit of the Spirit, the fruit of God in our lives. We don’t get patience by doing religious push ups. We get patience by abiding in the flow of God and the Holy sap of God, the Holy Spirit of God flowing through Jesus Christ into our lives. But the pruning is designed to make the fruit abundant. This is a word for congregations as well as for individuals. Sometimes we become so cluttered with all kinds of things to do that we lose track of our primary purpose which is to be fruitful for God, which is to help others have the experience to be part of the taste test for other people lives so that they can sense what a profound possibility might be present for them in this world. We take that for granted those of us who have been in the church too long. We’ve forgotten about it, we’ve neglected.
I was talking to a man one time in Oklahoma who told me that his father taught him a lesson by taking him out one summer behind their little shed where there was a grapevine growing in an arbor out there. And that summer he said to this young boy at that time, he said, “Watch son, this summer we aren’t going to do anything to this vine. I want you to learn a lesson.” Now this is a patient father friends. For the whole summer the father didn’t trim the vine at all, didn’t prune it. The boy, now a man, tells me, “That summer we got thirty little bunches of grapes. It went wild. The next summer my father told me,” he said, “watch what happens when you prune it correctly.” He said, “That summer we had more than three hundred rich, full bunches of grapes.” Jesus is saying, “Let God prune your life, shape your life. Don’t let it go in any direction whatsoever. You have a design and a purpose to bear fruit for the glory of God. Accept pruning.”
And finally and most important, Jesus says, “It’s those who abide in me that bear much fruit because apart from me you can do nothing.” This is about relationships. It is about absolute intimacy with Jesus. It’s about thinking all day long, “Lord, how are we doing? Lord, what should I be saying, how should I be acting in this situation? What might I be able to do to glorify you?” Whether you are walking into a restaurant or you are at Wal-Mart, or you see someone on the side of the road or you have an opportunity for someone who says to you, “Uh, do you go to that church down the road there, that Grace Church?” And you say, “Oh, this is going to be fun. I’m going to have a wonderful time. Thank you, Lord. Help me with this.” Henry Naling, Roman Catholic, said this, “When we no longer walk in the presence of the Lord, we can not be living reminders of His presence to others. We become strangers in an alien land forgetting from which we have come and where we are going. We are no longer the way to the presence of God, we are in the way.” It’s abiding in the presence. It’s letting the love continue to permeate your being. It’s about a priority of Jesus-relationship.
So here, our purpose--to be a witness to this love connection in every way that we can and every day that we can. But there’s so few of us. Understand the nature of what it means for us to live this life out boldly, profoundly, in ways that are developing. Actually the Board of Discipleship in the United Methodist Church asked me just a few years ago to write a resource, and there’s a few materials that Mike’s put on the back table back there. The resource is simply called, “Witness”. It’s like a Disciple Bible Study. It’s a small group resource. John Wesley believed that no one could really be this kind of fruitful Christian apart from being in a small group. So my purpose has been to try and help people become saturated with what it feels like not to be like somebody else but to be the very best that they can be as a fruitful witness for the glory of God and for Christ. And I would hope that some of you might have the chance to participate in this witness experience.
Here’s what we are today—partners with God. Again, John Wesley used a word here that had been used long ago actually by Augustine that fellow I mentioned earlier. The word was “prevenient grace”. Prevenient grace means the grace of God or the work of God’s Spirit that is out ahead of us, going before us. This happens all the time; we just don’t always pay much attention to it. Long before we are in any context, God has already been there providing opportunities that we may need to be looking for. I was very discouraged because I made a mistake on an airline ticket I had. It cost me $179 extra to fly back from Kansas City to Lexington because I had booked myself out on April 15th and back on August 16th. I was not feeling real perky as I sat in a crowded airplane where the only seat left between two people, one on each side. The man sitting next to me turned out to be an attorney. And for two solid hours we talked because he had, he was President of his congregation, another denomination, President of his congregation, had been that for five years. And he said, “Well, here’s my problem.” He said, “It makes absolutely no sense to me as an attorney that someone should die for anyone else’s crime.” And here was his barrier. How could he be a fruitful witness for Christ? And for two hours we talked about the meaning of Christ death for us. And the difference between having a life that is gift-oriented as something that God gives to you to enjoy as opposed to you performing as best you can and hoping it all turns out right in the end. As I was sharing the story of my dad’s conversion when he was in his 50’s, I was moved again to hear and to remember the wonderful way that God’s love had permeated my Dad’s life that had known very little about love. And I was telling the story and I remembered that one of the very important little clues to my Dad about the gift that God had for him was a little tiny aluminum cross that said, “God is love”, that a woman gave him. And as I told this story to my seatmate, Sam, he reached in his pocket and he pulled out a little aluminum cross and he said, “You mean like this?” God is ahead of us, friends, in places that we would never expect Him to be. Fruitful branches—partners with God.
Let me close with this story. I was doing a Children’s Sermon. And as the children were coming up, they were going to sit on the steps like this. And I had my black robe on and I reached in my pocket and I pulled out a pear and I began to munch on the pear. I needed a sip of water to do this. Like this. The children came up and sat down very quiet looking at me aghast. And one of them finally raised his hand and he said, “You are not suppose to do that.” I said, “What?” He said, “You are not suppose to eat in front of people unless you are going to share.” I said, “Do you like pears?” He said, “Yes I do.” I said, “Would you like a bite.” He said, “Yes, I would.” So I offered him a bite of pear. I said, “Anybody else want a bite?” And a lot of hands went up. So I started going down the row. Now by the time I get a little farther down the row, there’s a little fellow down here who had his hand up high as it was coming he took his hand down. I said, “Do you like pears?” He said, “Yes”. I said, “Well, would you like one if I gave you one of your own?” He said, “Yes”. So I reached in my pocket and I pulled out another pear. I gave him his own pear. Now his eyes are bright and shiny. He’s the most excited he’s been all day long. In fact he’s looking down the row at all these other people that had to bite where somebody else had already been. He’s got his own and he’s getting ready to chomp on it. And he tries to but he can’t for some reason. And he looks at me and he looks back at the pear. And then he gives it to me and he says, “It’s plastic.” Now I know you wouldn’t let me be your pastor. I had another pear. I solved that problem for him. But before I did I said, “No it’s not.” He said, “Yes, it is.” I said, “Why did you try to eat a plastic pear?” This was his answer. Listen this is profound. He said, “Because you gave it to me and it looked real.”
You see, John Wesley was afraid that if we weren’t careful churches could simply become artificial fruit manufacturing plants looking real but having no juice to feed a hungry world for the love of God. So what does Jesus say when He finishes this message to His friends? He says, “I’m telling you these things so that my joy will be in you and that your joy will be full.” There are parts of your life that maybe need cut back today or pruned for the flow of God’s holy sap in life as you abide in Jesus to make you more fruitful, joyful witness for God. I pray this will be an important day and that you will, with me, celebrate this as a wonderful passage from Scripture. To God be the glory, Amen.
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