GO: Abide and Bear Fruit
John 15:1-17
14 April 2024
Focus Statement:
Jesus chose and appointed us to go out into the world to bear fruit but we can only do so if we first abide in him, our Vine, and learn to bear fruit together.
Prayer:
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, God, Earth-maker, Pain-Bearer, Life-Giver, who calls us to abide and bear fruit together with you and one another. Amen.
We are in the season of Easter as we continue to celebrate Christ’s resurrection. As we celebrate, we know this isn’t the end of the story. In fact, the beauty of this is that it’s just the beginning. On Easter Sunday, we saw how Jesus sent Mary Magdalene to be the first apostle to the apostles. Mary Magdalene couldn’t have imagined that Jesus would send her out as the first witness to his resurrection, and as the first apostle. Women were not even considered reliable witnesses then. But Jesus was intentional in choosing Mary Magdalene. He was making a point.
What Jesus was saying in giving Mary Magdalene that charge was: this is exactly why I chose you. I want the world to know that regardless of your gender, whether you’re female, male, or non-gender conforming, you are equally beloved and your voice is equally important. You are worthy not only of love, you are worthy to be called my disciples, no matter what the world says.
Jesus is intentional about choosing you, you, you, you, and me.
“You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last…” (John 15:16)
But before we can go bear fruit, Jesus says there is something very important we need to do first. So let’s read John 15:1-17.
John 15:1-17 (The Message)
“I am the Real Vine and my Father is the Farmer. He cuts off every branch of me that doesn’t bear grapes. And every branch that is grape-bearing he prunes back so it will bear even more. You are already pruned back by the message I have spoken.
4 “Live in me. Make your home in me just as I do in you. In the same way that a branch can’t bear grapes by itself but only by being joined to the vine, you can’t bear fruit unless you are joined with me.
5-8 “I am the Vine, you are the branches. When you’re joined with me and I with you, the relation intimate and organic, the harvest is sure to be abundant. Separated, you can’t produce a thing. Anyone who separates from me is deadwood, gathered up and thrown on the bonfire. But if you make yourselves at home with me and my words are at home in you, you can be sure that whatever you ask will be listened to and acted upon. This is how my Father shows who he is—when you produce grapes, when you mature as my disciples.
9-10 “I’ve loved you the way my Father has loved me. Make yourselves at home in my love. If you keep my commands, you’ll remain intimately at home in my love. That’s what I’ve done—kept my Father’s commands and made myself at home in his love.
11-15 “I’ve told you these things for a purpose: that my joy might be your joy, and your joy wholly mature. This is my command: Love one another the way I loved you.
This is the very best way to love. Put your life on the line for your friends. You are my friends when you do the things I command you. I’m no longer calling you servants because servants don’t understand what their master is thinking and planning. No, I’ve named you friends because I’ve let you in on everything I’ve heard from the Father.
16 “You didn’t choose me, remember; I chose you, and put you in the world to bear fruit, fruit that won’t spoil. As fruit bearers, whatever you ask the Father in relation to me, he gives you.
17 “But remember the root command: Love one another.
In our contemporary culture, we celebrate individuality more than communality, and we often think of the Christian life as a one-one transaction between a single believer and her God: “I accepted Jesus as my Savior and Lord.” We talk about our spiritual journeys by referring to my prayer life, my worship, my relationship with God.
Even if we join a larger Christian community or church, we mostly do so with a consumer mindset, appearing when we feel like it and quitting when it no longer serves our purposes, or when we experience conflicts or challenges. This is understandable as we all cherish our personal space and freedom. So it is no surprise that people come and go, and post-pandemic, it’s even harder because there is always the option of attending a service online. So I must admit it’s becoming harder and harder to grow and nurture a community well.
Given this context, the vision of the Christian life that Jesus offers us in this week’s Scripture reading is a radical and counter-cultural one. “I am the vine, and you are the branches,” Jesus says. “When you’re joined with me and I with you, the relation intimate and organic, the harvest is sure to be abundant. Separated, you can’t produce a thing.” Not only that. He continues, “Anyone who separates from me is deadwood, gathered up and thrown on the bonfire.”
Jesus chose this metaphor intentionally. Through this metaphor, what Jesus is really saying is this: we are completely dependent on Jesus for life and fruit. In verse 4, he says, “Live in me. Make your home in me just as I do in you. In the same way that a branch can’t bear grapes by itself but only by being joined to the vine, you can’t bear fruit unless you are joined with me.”
As Richard Rohr wrote, “The only basis for fruitful Christianity is divine union.”
Question 1 (Word Cloud)
What is the job description of a branch?
The job description of a branch is to absorb all the life-giving nutrients it can from the vine. Nothing more, nothing less. That is how it bears fruit. It has to stay connected to the vine. Without that connection, there is no fruitfulness.
Being is a prerequisite for doing: Good trees bear good fruit.
In Matthew 7:17-18, Jesus says, “A good tree produces good fruit, and a bad tree produces bad fruit. A good tree can’t produce bad fruit, and a bad tree can’t produce good fruit.”
So if we stay connected with our Vine, if we abide in God’s love and make our home in Christ, if we focus on absorbing all the life-giving nutrients that God seeks to give us, we will naturally bear good fruit. Staying connected to the Vine means we are present with God throughout the day. We pay attention to the work of God within us and all around us. We seek God through spiritual practices like silence, solitude, study, self-examination, prayer, and simplicity.
I wonder how you are doing with regards to abiding in God’s love and staying connected to the Vine? I am not going to ask you to answer this in a Menti question. I just wanted to pause for a moment and allow you a few moments to reflect on this: Within our deep and tender inside spaces, there is a bright light to tend and care for.
Especially in this season of Easter, God has shone this bright light of God’s presence and new life in each one of us. How are you tending and caring for your inside spaces? How are you tending and caring for your connection with the Vine? Is there something you’d like to do differently to enhance your absorption ability as a branch?
As you reflect on that, I want to let you know that there is one more very important element we often forget with regards to this metaphor. Not only are we to stay connected with our Vine, we are all entangled with each other as branches, and we are connected to the same Vine.
Jesus says, “I am the vine, you are the branches.” This means that whether we like it or not, our lives are bound up in his and in each other’s. This also means that the only true life we will live in this world is the life we consent to live in relationship, messy and entangled though it might be. And this means that the only fruit worth sharing with the world is the fruit we produce together.
Lutheran pastor Nadia Bolz Weber explains it well: “Christianity is a lousy religion for the “I’ll do it myself” set. We are meant to be tangled up together. We are meant to live lives of profound interdependence, growing into, around, and out of each other. We cause pain and loss when we hold ourselves apart, because the fate of each individual branch affects the vine as a whole. In this metaphor, dependence is not a matter of personal morality or preference; it’s a matter of life and death — branches that refuse to cling to the vine die.”
The Vine and branches are intrinsically entangled in each other. Church is about worship, and it is also about the relational connection. I’ve been speaking with some of you recently, and you’ve shared with me honestly that sometimes when you come to church in person, you’re disappointed because some of the friends you used to hang out with after church don’t come as regularly, or perhaps don’t come anymore. This feels demoralizing and this may cause some of you to attend church in person less regularly. I want to say this is completely understandable, and I feel that sense of loss and sadness with you.
Question 2 (Poll)
Do you miss your friends whom you used to fellowship with at church?
Let’s put our heads together and think about how we can make this situation better. The pastors, leaders and Sunday service volunteer teams can put in our best efforts to maintain a Sunday service every single week, but whether people show up for church and connect with each other is something we can all work at together as a community. This not just an issue for the pastors or the board or the council to solve, much as we want to solve it. It’s an issue that all of us as branches connected to one Vine need to solve together.
Question 3 (Open)
What’s one thing you can do to help our church be a more connective space?
I know people do crave for presence and community. We had more than 100 people attend our church retreat last year (the biggest number we’ve ever had), and some had only been attending church a few times before signing up for the retreat. People do want to connect relationally but maybe it’s easier when it’s a once-off event. It does take more intentional commitment and dedication when it is something regular. But will you consider showing up weekly or monthly, and making an intentional commitment to be here for yourself and others in this faith community?
Showing up consistently gives people a group of familiar faces that they can look forward to seeing and getting to know. I remember when I first started attending FCC more than 10 years ago, there were only a handful of women who attended regularly. Most weeks I would see different faces and I realized that if we wanted more women to find a sense of belonging in FCC and begin to sink their roots here, we need to have a regular group of familiar faces that people can recognize and get to know. So I committed to coming regularly even though I didn’t know many people then.
And we have an opportunity to do the same today, especially post-Covid. When more of us choose to show up, we will have a critical mass of people who will add a sense of stability and familiarity for others who choose to show up.
(Pause to read responses)
Church is as much about worshipping God as it is about connecting with one another. If you miss your friends, why not arrange with your cg friends or ministry friends or old friends to come attend church together and hang out for lunch after?
Show up for yourself and for each other. Whether you’re new or old, go find our lovely lunch kakis if you’d like someone to have lunch with. It might even be a chance for you to connect with our visitors and newer members. And a friendly reminder to our lunch kakis to please welcome anyone who wishes to join for lunch. We need each other.
Bearing fruit is not a solo work. It’s something we do together as a community. Before we can GO, we need to come home to God and each other. Come home so we can abide and go bear fruit together more effectively.
As a church, we have exciting plans coming up this year and I don’t want you to miss this opportunity to go bear fruit together as a community. We have the 1946 film screening in May and Pink Dot in June.
We also have the Cloud Project. This is our renewvation project and our churchwide initiative to discern together who God is calling us to be and what we are called to do in the next 10 years or so. Since the beginning of 2024, we have had a few sessions of inquiring and imagining together. I want to say a big thank you to all of you who showed up even though you didn’t know what to expect. Thank you for participating and sharing a piece of yourself with one another.
I just want to say something about churchwide events and initiatives like the Cloud Project and our AGMS, etc. I have observed that even though we have more than 120 members on paper, the attendance at our AGMs hover at around 30 every year. Many of you have mentioned that you have absolute confidence in the board, and you know they and the members who show up for the AGMs will make the right decisions for the church. Hence you don’t really feel the need to be present to listen to the plans and vote at AGMs.
I think we have a magnificent board and council. Many of them take on not just compliance and fundraising responsibilities as board members but they serve in multiple roles in FCC too, and I am very grateful for them. But some of them have served for 20 years, and some for more than 10 years, and they really need a break from board activities.
So do consider if God may be calling you to serve the community in this capacity. But at the very least, do think about the importance of your presence and input at churchwide events and initiatives. Your voice matters. Your presence matters.
So for those of you who haven’t had a chance to participate in the Cloud Project yet, we wanted to invite you by making it accessible for you. On that wall you will see the layout of our current space and I want to invite you to consider what makes “FCC” who we are? And how can our unique identity be expressed more in our space and culture of worship? And please add your ideas and input to the layout.
I’ve said a lot of things this morning but in summary, this is what I would like you to take with you:
Jesus chose and appointed us to go out into the world to bear fruit but we can only do so if we first abide in him, our Vine, and learn to bear fruit together.
We are sometimes tempted to give up because we often treat Jesus as a role model and realize that we can’t live up to his high standards. But abiding in him is not the same as emulating him.
Debi Thomas says, “In the vine-and-branches metaphor, Jesus’s love is not our example; it’s our source. It’s where our love originates and deepens. Where it replenishes itself. In other words, if we don’t abide, we can’t love. Jesus’s commandment to us is not that we wear ourselves out, trying to conjure love from our own easily depleted resources. Rather, it’s that we abide in the holy place where human love becomes possible. That we make our home in Jesus’s love — the most abundant and inexhaustible love in existence.”
“Go abide in my love and bear fruit that will last.”
If we can stay connected to our Vine and each other, if we can commit to showing up and bear lasting fruit together, we will change the world. Amen.
