Beloved Gospel: Vine and Branches First Baptist Richmond, April 29, 2018 The Fifth Sunday of Easter John 15:1-8 It was another church and another passage of Scripture, but like today s reading from John 15 it was all about bearing fruit. I had been a pastor for less than a year when I stepped to the pulpit of the First Baptist Church in New Castle, Kentucky, and read the text from Luke 13:6-9. It s the parable of the fruitless fig tree, and it goes like this: A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none. So he said to the gardener, See here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none. Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil? He replied, Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down. I read that passage to those kindhearted school teachers and dairy farmers and then I said: This is a parable of judgment, and if you have been paying attention you may have felt judged, because the owner has a point: if the tree isn t going to do what it was made to do why should it use up the ground? For those of us who know how fruitless our own lives can be there is in this story a requirement for repentance that is heavy with threat. But today let me ask you to listen not as individuals, but as a body of believers, as a church, because churches can be fruitless too. I had been reading a book called To Dream Again, by Bob Dale, whose research indicated that eighty percent of all churches in America at that time were on plateau. Like the fig tree in the parable they appeared healthy, but they weren t doing what they were made to do. Instead of being involved in active ministry those churches had adopted an attitude of maintenance. I quoted from the book for my congregation, telling 1
them how churches on plateau had often started with a dream of doing great things, but somewhere along the way had lost sight of the dream. Finding themselves in communities that had stopped growing they stopped growing, too. And instead of becoming more evangelistic in their outreach they had become complacent, content to maintain the status quo. The people in these churches were at ease in Zion, Dale wrote, comfortable with the way things were and unwilling to change. I read those descriptions to my congregation thinking that they could not miss the similarities between what Dale was describing and what we were actually experiencing as a church. And then (having been there less than a year, mind you) I took a deep breath and said: If you didn t know it before, I think you know it now: this church is a church on plateau. It is like that fig tree in the parable, content to sit on this choice piece of ground and lift its branches to the sky, soaking up the gifts of sunshine and rain without bearing any fruit! I let that statement sink in for a moment and then I softened my tone and told them it hadn t always been that way. I reminded them how the church had gotten its start back in 1799. A few people got together, some Scripture was read, a sermon was preached, some hymns were sung, and when it was over someone said, Let s do this again! So they did, and maybe not long after that the same someone threw down a bold challenge: Let s start a church, and pray for its success, and invite our neighbors to come, and see if we can t do something wonderful for God in the wilderness of Kentucky. The challenge was taken up, and at the turn of the nineteenth century the First Baptist Church of New Castle was formed. It started with a dream, and enough people were aware of that dream and committed to that dream to make it come true. So great was their dedication, and so great was God s 2
blessing, that in 1847 that church was the largest church in all of Kentucky. But somewhere along the way the dream disappeared. The original dreamers died and their children had a different idea of what the church should be: more comfortable and less committed; more people like us and less like them; more social gatherings and less spiritual growth. That s what happens when you lose sight of a dream, I said, quoting again from Bob Dale s book. The initial excitement fades and the church begins looking for something else to hold its interest. Internal politics and power struggles take the place of outreach and evangelism. Suddenly nothing seems so important as who s in charge and who is not, and church growth grinds to a halt. The plateau has been reached. The dream has died, and you may hear some people start talking about the good old days. If things go beyond this stage, members will begin questioning the church s leadership and their own commitment. From that point polarization will take place; the church will be divided over some otherwise trivial issue; conflict will become the norm rather than the exception and members will begin to drop out. Having lost sight of the original dream they can t imagine why they should invest their time and energy in what seems to be a losing proposition. When a church reaches that point, I said, as this one surely has, there is only one hope for keeping it alive, and that hope is to dream again! After the service one of our younger members told me, You could be here another thirty years and you d never preach another sermon like that one. He loved it, and although some people resisted the idea that our church was on plateau others could see it. They wanted to know what we could do about it. And for once, I was way ahead of them: I suggested that we get together on a Sunday night two weeks from then and 3
begin dreaming a new dream for the church. If you have a dream for the church already, bring it, I said. If you come up with one between now and then, bring that. When you come you will find that we are ready to listen, because the only rule on that night will be this one: No dream is a bad dream. And so, they came. Some because they had dreams for the church s future, others because they didn t want to miss the excitement. It didn t matter. The members of the church brought their dreams of service, outreach, fellowship, stewardship, education, worship, missions, ministry, and making our aging building more beautiful and accessible. The energy in that room was palpable and on the following Sunday we had a new dream a dream of bearing fruit. My sermon that day was a celebration of what had happened in our dreaming session and at the invitation I invited people to come forward and commit themselves to making that dream come true by signing their names to any one of nine different initiatives. I warned them not to come if they weren t serious. Don t do it just because everyone else is watching, I said, but if you are truly committed come and sign your name to the dream. As I recall 54 people came forward at the end of that service, and I couldn t have been happier. It looked as if the First Baptist Church of New Castle, Kentucky, was on its way back. And then something happened. I still don t know exactly what it was, but when I look back at my state-of thechurch address from the following year I can tell that something happened, and it wasn t a good something. I reported it like this: Bearing Fruit was a dream that originated in the dream of a gardener for a fig tree he didn t want to give up on. In our retelling of the story we have pictured our church as the tree and Jesus as the gardener who stubbornly 4
believes in our ability to bear fruit. In that sense it is his dream, not ours, and he has promised to do most of the work: to dig around us and enrich the soil in which we are planted. In plain language, Jesus is giving us every opportunity to do what we were made to do as a church, and beside the dream is the warning that if we don t do it we will be cut down and thrown away. And then I said this: In the past year we haven t done it. I can t remember now why we hadn t done it. I remember there had been some conflict around a staff member, and somehow the whole church had gotten involved. That led to a termination and a lot of hurt feelings but that couldn t be enough to derail an entire dream, could it? Well, maybe. But maybe it was this: when I turn from the Gospel of Luke to the Beloved Gospel, and today s reading from John 15, I find another passage about bearing fruit, but here it is not a fig tree but a grape vine and its branches, and Jesus makes it clear: the branch that stays connected to the vine will bear fruit. There is no question about it. The branches that aren t connected will not bear fruit. They are dead and gone. Might as well gather them up and toss them on the fire. But the fruitful branches are carefully pruned by the vinegrower so they will bear even more fruit. When I was studying this passage last week I began to remember that dream of bearing fruit back in New Castle, and I thought, Maybe that s what we were missing. We were looking at that passage from Luke, which was all about digging and putting on manure, all about the work we could do to make our dreams come true. We didn t look at this passage from John, which is not about what we can do, but about what Jesus can do when we stay connected to him. If we do, then the sap can flow from the vine to the 5
branch and from the branch to the little green buds that will swell and ripen until they are fat, purple grapes. Back in New Castle I believed that the power of a dream could get that church off its plateau, that all we needed was a dream big enough and bold enough to move us off dead center, to get things going again. But it didn t happen, and now I see that part of the problem was our confidence in our own abilities (or maybe my confidence in my own abilities). In this passage from John 15 Jesus says, plainly, Apart from me you can do nothing. And maybe that was the problem: that we were trying to bear fruit apart from Jesus, like a branch that had been cut off from the vine. For whatever reason, it didn t work. So, this is what I ve learned in the thirty years since then: that if a church is going to bear fruit it has to stay connected to Jesus, the true vine. But it s not only the church. I notice in this passage that Jesus says every branch that does not bear fruit is cut off, and every branch that does bear fruit is pruned. He s not talking about churches here: he s talking about people: he s talking about you and me. Each one of us is a branch connected in one way or another to the true vine. I can picture his father, the vinegrower, coming around to have a look at each branch, making decisions about which ones are bearing fruit and which ones are not, cutting off the ones that aren t and pruning the ones that are so they can bear more fruit. And that invites some personal reflection, doesn t it? You might want to ask yourself, Am I bearing fruit, or not? Is the vinegrower going to cut me off, or not? This passage doesn t carry the same threat of judgment that other one does, but it s still there. If you don t want to get cut off you ve got to stay connected to the vine, you ve 6
got to bear some fruit. How do you do that? Well, how do you stay connected to the people you love the most? It s not that hard. You make time for them, you talk, you listen. You can stay connected to Jesus in the same way, by making time for him; by talking to him through your prayers and listening for his voice as you read Scripture; by coming to church and Sunday school faithfully, by worshiping God and singing his praises. It s not that hard. Almost anybody can figure it out. A member of that church in New Castle figured it out. Her name was Betty, and while the rest of us got tangled up in that conflict with the staff member she did what she had signed up to do. She went down to the little government-subsidized housing project in our town, and started knocking on doors. She met a single mother named Vera who had two children in middle school. Betty invited them to church. Vera didn t want to come but Sam and Denise did. Betty would pick them up on Sunday mornings. She would take them to her house for lunch afterward. She would take them home after that. She began to care about those children, and as she did she wondered what she could do to make their lives healthier and happier. When Denise was ready to start high school Betty helped her apply to a private boarding school five counties away so she could live up to her considerable potential. She and her husband John must have made a dozen trips to take her to school and bring her home for the holidays. Betty took Sam to the eye doctor, and discovered that he was legally blind; no wonder he wasn t doing well in school! She helped him enroll in the Kentucky School for the Blind, where he thrived. She put Vera in touch with a financial counselor who helped her make out a budget and stick to it. Eventually, the whole family was lifted out of poverty. Sam and Denise went on to college. I wish I knew what they 7
were doing now. But I remember this about Betty: each time I asked her if maybe she was doing too much, if maybe she wanted to slow down a little or let somebody else shoulder the burden for a while, she would respond by saying, I m just doing what I think Jesus would want me to. That was her motivation and her inspiration. When she looked at that little family she asked herself, What would Jesus do for them? and then she did it. And because she was connected to the true vine, she had a pretty good idea of what that would be. And because she stayed connected, her life began to bear more and more fruit. Betty was one of my success stories from those years in New Castle, but she wasn t the only one. There were a lot of wonderful people in that church who did a lot of wonderful things. We were able to overcome that year of conflict and go on to bear much fruit together, just as we had dreamed. But I wonder what might have happened if each one of us had understood from the beginning that it wasn t the power of a dream that would help us succeed: it was abiding in the vine. It was staying connected to Jesus so that the sap could flow and the fruit could grow in each one of us, And in his church. Jim Somerville 2018 8