“The Fruit of Family”
Scripture Reading: John 15:1-8
Sermon Transcript for May 14, 2006
By Pastor Bob Coleman
In the name of Jesus Christ I greet you this morning. This is a day when we are continuing on a series if you might be family visiting today or a first-time attendee. These baskets represent the theme of fruit, “Fruit of the Spirit”, for six weeks from Easter to Pentecost. The apples represent hospitality, the flowers represent praise. Last week was missions and those are various grains to help feed the world. And that represents the spirit of service and compassion. And today the “fruit of family”, what does come out of family, what is on this day recognition of the role of women in our lives—not just mothers. Indeed we do honor mothers today or grandmothers in that vine and that succession. And to that end we passed out and hopefully everyone received one today, this is a little card that not just the women of the church, but anyone. Although you might wish to give it to someone else who has been special as a woman in your life. Just look at the scripture that is printed there. It starts with Matthew 19, “Jesus said, ‘Let the little children come to me. Do not hinder them for the Kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.” And then he said in Matthew 18, “I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children you will never enter the Kingdom of heaven.” And then finally in Matthew 25, the King will reply, “I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these you did for me.”
Well, if anyone does for the least of us, it is the one who gives us birth. And today we want to look, based upon that, the fruit of family in connection with how God gives us life also and continues to nourish us and give us life by our connection through the vine. The message from the Scripture today is very clear, very direct. In a moment I’ll read it for you and with you. The summary of it is to remember that we are to abide in Christ. That is our connection with God. The true vine is Christ. It is through Him that we will bear much fruit. And even more as sometimes God may prune us and take away that which is not bearing. But then the warning is that if we bear no fruit, then we are not abiding in Christ and we may expect to be cut off and cast away. And a lot of people stop there because it feels like the ultimate condemnation. But it is very clear it raises the importance of why we are to be connected with Christ. But moving on in the Scripture, hear that the Father’s will isn’t for us to be cast away but that we do abide in Christ and bear much fruit.
Well let us hear now from John 15:1-8, “I am the true vine and my Father is the gardener. He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will even be more fruitful. You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you. Remain in me and I will remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man or woman remains in me and I am him, they will bear much fruit. Apart from me you can do nothing. If anyone does not remain in me, he is like a branch that is thrown away and withers. Such branches are picked up and thrown into the fire and burned. If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish and it will be given you. This is to my Father’s glory that you bear much fruit. Join yourselves to be my disciples.”
You noticed how I made it more inclusive. It is not meant to be gender inclusive when it says that “a man remains in me”. It’s man and woman; it is all of God’s creation. Never forget that God starts our Scripture with the declaration that we are created “man and woman, male and female”. We are created n the image of God. We must start with that simple understanding of that equality. We are equal at creation. Now we are given different roles and some are blessed in one form or another to become mothers. But let me also share with you the honest appraisal that not every mother who has walked upon the face of this earth has been a good mother. There are some sad stories about that. And the difficulty for Mother’s Day is that we kind of lump it all together and make it sort of a sweet and syrupy response because it sells a lot of cards. Now, honor your mother’s, yes! Honor your fathers as the commandment says, and your grandmothers and great-grandmothers if they might still be living. But none the less not every woman has been perfect because like men they can become detached from the Father and they do not live with God’s love in their heart.
This last week has been kind of a journey of reminiscence for me because my sister from Colorado came and visited first my mother and then my other sisters. They went together to visit a sister down in Georgia and then coming back Kathy and Mom came and had lunch with us on Tuesday. Kathy had told me that she had a gift for me. It turns out it was three boxes about this big each filled with negatives from our Dad’s photography. Kathy had taken the painstaking approach of cleaning all of the negatives, putting them into proper protective sheets, cataloging them as close to chronological order as she could, put the names or the information that Dad had written on the envelopes so that there would be some accuracy and we would know who was in the picture. It totals somewhere near 1,000 negatives. And then she took and put them in a scanner, put them on a disk so we could see them displayed on our computer. Well it took me back to see Mom and Dad before they were married, in their early married years when my two older sisters were born, and even with my picture in there, and then the break for about a year when one of my older sisters died from encephalitis. But also mingled in there was my grandmother and great grandparents and some great aunts and other woman who had been influential in my life.
What a preparation for Mother’s Day because today I want you to focus on what women have done in your life in whatever capacity. You see the influence of the value of motherhood isn’t relegated to just those who are your actual mother. My first grade teacher, Mrs. Nolte, I still remember her. What a wonderful first-time influence she was for me. Emphasizing the influence of women in our lives raises us to a greater awareness that God has provided, as we are attached to the vine which is Jesus, the power and His love to fulfill whatever role may be given to us in this life. Now the sad news is that history has not done a good job relating to women. We have somehow through time decided to say that those who are in service and compassion oriented kinds of work are doing the menial work. Those who prepare the meals, who take care of families, who give birth to children, who raise children, it’s a lesser experience.
It’s those leaders out front that we give high allegiance to. Just the opposite in God’s viewpoint for Jesus came not to conquer, but to serve. Jesus came not to dominate, but to kneel and in humbleness wash our feet. You see the very message that Jesus comes to us and says, “If you want to be attached to me, which is then being attached to God, you must do as I do.” And women, for the most part throughout history, have taken that role too often degraded and disrespected by the rest of the world. And it is still happening today. The terrible news that I do not need to go into detail that takes place in Sudan. And one of the things that they do is not only disrespect but dishonor women because that dishonorment in their culture is forever. And they are banned from their families. Child pornography in this country and world-wide not only deals with women but children of all ages. And underage girls, as it was shown on one program this last week, where predators will peruse and cruise through the Internet to find young girls and then try to connect with them.
This powerful disrespect of what God has made has always gotten us into trouble not just as the world but also sometimes even as a church. And the reverse is that the church should be at the forefront. And not just protecting women, but respecting who they are and the gifts that they bring to this world and how God can work in and through them. Those who are given the gift and role of motherhood are indeed in one way “specially blessed”. But there are women who never give birth but can become a mother for a guy or a sister or a friend or a witness to us.
In Acts, Chapter 8:26-40, it happens to be filled with God’s Holy Spirit transports down into the dessert and along side the Ethiopian official who is traveling along in a chariot. And he comes up upon him and gets into the chariot with him. And Philip runs to and gets in and says, “You’re reading something. Do you understand what you are reading?” It turns out he was reading Scripture. And the Ethiopian says, “How can I understand unless someone explains it to me?” Well, what better role is it that mothers and women do in our lives than to explain as mothers, as teachers, as grandmothers, as aunts, as sisters. They explain things to us. They are the teachers in our lives for the most part. And not setting aside the importance of men in that role at all, but it is raising the importance of where we have disappointingly disrespected women.
You see, those who are in the role of teaching are in the heart of what God calls us to do. The more we recognize that God has a hold on us by first of all creating us in God’s image, male and female created us, then it’s from there that we should move in honor of that role and that creation—not dishonor. Those we are given the highest authority in our society and in many societies around the world are those who yield the greatest power and authority. But what greater power and responsibility do you have than to shape the life of a small child.
We declared in the Psalm reading this morning that all the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the Lord and all the families of the nations will bow down before God for dominion belongs to the Lord and He rules over all nations. The dominion is God’s role. Our role is to serve in His name and to serve one another. And the seed in the family is the seed in the heart of how we raise our children through birth, through childhood to then become people and adults upon the earth.
The “fruit of family” is captured in the vine connection that we heard this morning. That it is to God, through Christ, that we find life and health. The writer of the Letters of the Epistles of John, in I John, Chapter 4 sums it up in these words that are very important to hear the reinforcement when he says, “Dear friends, let us love one another. For love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God because God is love. This is how God showed His love among us. He sent His one and only Son into the world that we might live through Him. This love is not that we loved God first, but that He loved us and sent His Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us we also ought to love one another.”
This reinforcement of what our role is and what we need to be connected to Christ fully and completely is supported not just in Scripture but in practical reality. So today we honor motherhood in its pure understanding recognizing that sometimes mothers aren’t perfect because they are human just like all the rest. But yet women have a role and position and a purpose to help protect young along with the fathers and men of our life. We as the church must stand strongly to protect all family, every member, and to be a family to those who may have lost those influential people in their lives and need to come here and find family shared in a way as we hope we do here at Grace United Methodist Church. The “Fruit of Family” is our connection with Christ above all. And the church must witness to that and model it and live it out in its daily walk so that each of you who come here or if you attend another church the church will be seen as a place where women and men are honored because God has created them. And every child is protected by every means possible from the evil that is in the world, the evil that even comes through human beings and is perpetrated by those in authority or those who are just a part of the instrument of evil in this world.
A couple of weeks ago, and this is just one of the blessings that you do receive as you sometimes are able to see your children grow up and become adults on their own, our older daughter, Krista, many times we took them on mission camps and work camps. And I recommend to young families if at all possible to go on that kind of experience because it really helps to reinforce, to witness to children how important it is to do things for others and to be in service for others. Well, she grew up and is now in charge of missions at the College Avenue United Methodist Church in Muncie, Indiana. She invited us to come up there for a fundraiser for Habitat for Humanity. It was a jazz performance; and John Emmert was the keyboardist for that group. After listening to some wonderful music, they played a piece called, “A Place for You”. And I was struck by the words as well as the music. And the term, “place for you”, is a little bit different setting because it speaks of John 14 where Jesus says, “I go to prepare a place for you. It’s in a mansion where there are many rooms and I go to prepare that place,” Jesus says. And that’s the setting for the words, but I was so struck by the words I went to John Emmert and said, “Could we use that in church sometime?” And he said, “Well, it’s out of print so here’s my copy. Go ahead and take it and use it with my blessing.” And as we prepare for communion this morning, I want us to hear the words of this beautiful piece as he tells us that like Christ goes to prepare a place for us, we will be preparing communion. And just like the one who fixes the meal at home and lovingly prepares for it, we will be prepared. Dan and I will be washing our hands, which is part of the ritual of communion. Yes, it’s a practical thing because we are going to tear off a piece of bread and serve it to you and as you receive it we want you to know that not only our hands are clean, but it is a spiritual preparation where we wish to cleanse ourselves and get out of the way so that you will see that Christ is serving you. The whole purpose of this song and this service and this message of communion for today was to show you the value of service that so many women take up and honor by their duty and responsibility. So let us listen to the words of “A Place for You”.
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