Easter 5, 2015 - Pruning

Acts 8:26-40; 1 John 4:7-21; John 15:1-8

Jesus is calling us. The good shepherd is calling is his sheep. We want to follow his voice, and we want to walk on the path he has laid out for us. We want to live in Jesus as he lives in us. We want to love others with the perfect love that casts our fear, we want to love those sisters and brothers in need, we want to bear fruit. We want to be the Christian disciples that we know God means us to be. We want to do these things, and God wants us to do these things, and everyone wants us to do these things. But how? 

We know that God tells us to love one another, and when we do, God lives in us, and God’s love is perfected in us. That’s in the First Letter from John, one that we’ve been hearing for a few weeks now. We know that the new life we are promised comes in the resurrection of Easter Sunday, a resurrection that we receive when we die to ourselves and live for others, as Jesus did. We know all these things, and yet somehow, we don’t quite manage to live them out as we’d like. We have this deep desire to be true Christian disciples and witnesses, to live lives that point people to the love of God, and yet when we look at our lives, we’re not. Not quite. We’re always falling short of God tells us we can be. We’re stuck halfway between Easter and Pentecost - we’ve witnessed the resurrection, we believe the Good News, but we’re not quite living as that early group of Christians - we’re not healing everyone who comes to us, we’re not seeing the joy of new life in everyone around us, we haven’t given up everything we owned and shared it with the poor. Why?

In our Gospel reading today, Jesus says, “I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinegrower. He removes every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit.” The uncomfortable truth about the Christian life is that living as Christ calls us to requires sacrifices. Living lives of Christian love and service to the world requires giving certain things up. We can’t have our cake and eat it, too. We can’t serve two masters. These cliches are used so often because they have truth in them. As Christians, we can’t commit ourselves fully to following Christ and to living with perfect loves towards those around us as long as we are busy spending our time and energy on other things. Just like plants that need to be pruned to produce fruit, we also need to be pruned. Certain blossoms need to be plucked off in order for others to grow into fruit. Certain seedlings need to be uprooted in order for others to grow bigger and become full-fledged plants. Certain branches need to be cut back in order for the main stem to get bigger. (I’ve already started my gardening for the year, so there’s a lot of plant metaphors.)

But it’s hard for us to do this ourselves. It takes a gardener to decide which blossom or seedling or branch shows the most promise. And it takes a gardener to do the actual pruning. Our heavenly Father, our God in heaven, is our gardener. God can see what in our lives needs to be cut back or removed entirely, and, if we let God take these things from us, we will bear more and better fruit than we can imagine. 

But what is it that God wants to prune from us specifically? What are the things that are getting in the way of us following Jesus and loving others?

There are two things in particular that I think maybe God wants to prune from us - two things that might be sapping our time and energy in unproductive ways. The first is the tendency we have of making the past our primary reference point. To put it probably too simply, we think too much about the past. Now thinking about the past and indulging in some fond memories of times gone by is not itself a bad thing. We need these memories and we need to remember this past in order to know where we come from. As Christians, we are constantly looking to our history as a people of God and to the Easter Sunday that happened two thousand years ago in order to move forward. The danger comes, though, when we spend so much time looking backwards that we never move forwards; when we spend so much time tending and watering the memories of the past that we end up starving the branches of the present and the future. We never want to forget the past, but we don’t want to become preoccupied with it either. If we do, we run the risk of becoming a vine whose branches of history are full and flourishing but whose branches of today and tomorrow are withering and dying off. When we cling to life in the past, we are taking life from others in the present. When all of our energies are spent reflecting on all of the wonderful relationships we used to have, we have no more energy to develop new relationships with the people who are in need now - today. Jesus’ first disciples would never have created the church if they had spent all their time hanging about Jerusalem and thinking about the good memories of Palm Sunday. They wouldn’t have moved forward and healed others and proclaimed the good news and started the church. They had to live in the present and think towards the future in order to truly love people as Christ called them to do. Spending too much of our energy thinking about the past gets in the way of us following Jesus today and loving those in need today and tomorrow.

The other thing that I think God wants to prune from us is our tendency to prioritize things over people. As much as we deny it, the truth is that we - and by we I mean our culture, not just this congregation - value property over people. Take the protests that have been going on in the past year in Ferguson and now in Baltimore. These protests are occurring because people are dying at the hands of the police. People are dying. But what do we hear about in the news? What do people get upset about? The property damage. We see pictures of looted stores, but we don’t see pictures of Freddie Gray’s body in the morgue. We get outraged by the property damage, but we get far less outraged by the bodily damage being inflicted on people. We watch the news and are more judgmental of those who break pharmacy windows than of those who break a young man’s spine. If there is anything that God would love to prune more than anything else, it has to be this - our attachment to property over people, the time and energy and money we pour in to physical buildings rather than into God’s own children. Christ calls us to love people, not property.

Yet, on the other hand, buildings can be extensions of God’s love. We need shelter. We need a place to gather and to receive God’s love so that we can go out and share it. We need pharmacies. We need our history and we need our past. So how do we know when God is trying to prune something from us, or when God is telling us to use it to follow Christ? There is a simple question that helps us figure this out, although the answer isn’t always simple. The question is:

Is this thing, or behaviour, or preoccupation, helping us to love and heal others today?

Are our memories helping us to love and heal others today? Are our buildings or houses or churches helping us to love and heal others today? I know that some of you have been talking about how the building of St. John is sucking up a lot of time and energy and money, while at the same time it has been such a comfort and joy in the past. The question is, does the building of St. John help us to love others, or get in our way? Sometimes it’s one, but sometimes it’s the other. So, the question becomes, if we hold onto the building, who could we love more? If we get rid of it, who could we love more? Is God asking us to prune our building? Prune our looking back at the past? Which branches need cultivating and which need cutting back?

What I am suggesting it not an easy thing to hear. I understand that. We are often afraid of God’s pruning, and that’s understandable. We don’t want to lose our connections to the past, or lose our memories of so many special times. We don’t want to lose the relationships that come from this shared past. We don’t want the sacrifices we made in the past to become meaningless, and we don’t want to lose our connections to that which has made us who we are today. Our past got us here today, and this building has been a home - where generations have been spiritually nurtured and have received God’s love themselves. Even now, things aren’t so bad. We may have a tendency to look back a lot, and we may have a tendency to spend too much time and energy and money on the building, but that’s not all we are doing. We’re doing other things as well - sharing the building with others, finding meaning in worship today. So I understand if it is hard to hear that maybe God wants to prune these things from us, and to let God do it. Unlike plants, we are given agency and control over our own lives - to a certain extent - and God allows us to say yes or no to God’s plan for us. We can stop God from pruning - we can hold on to the branches and the flowers that prevent us from growing. We can live in fear. But if we do, we will find it impossible to grow in love and service to those around us. We will find it impossible to follow Christ as the disciples we want to be and that Jesus calls us to be.

You probably noticed when you came in this morning that the tree in the corner of the plaza is gone. It was a beautiful tree, and I’m sure a lot of you remember springs when it was in full bloom, with a really lovely scent. But this spring, it was only half in bloom. Half of the branches were full of tiny white flowers but the other half was dead. Done in by the storm in September. There’s no way it was going to survive, even though half of the tree was blooming away. If we focused on only the flowering half of the tree, we would say there’s no need to cut it down. But when we look at the whole tree, it’s clear that it had to go. So, George Binder got his saw and his axe and took it down. And it was sad, you know. I’m a prairie girl and I hate seeing trees cut down. But, lo and behold, when it was down, we found two tulips growing at the base, tulips that could finally get some sunshine and be seen and bloom away. Tulips that we would never have noticed and that probably would have faded and then died without the proper sunlight.

God prunes us, even if we’re showing signs of life, in order for new life to bloom. There are tulips in our lives that God wants to see grow, but the tree has to be cut down to see them. Yet here is the good news - life after pruning is so much better than life before. This is the promise of Easter, and we are still in Easter after all. You see, when we are pruned, and freed to love others more, we build new memories and new relationships in the present, new moments that add depth to our old memories and relationships. When God frees us to love others more today, when we are finally able to spend all of our time and energy and money on loving and healing others today, on following Jesus today, we become more who God created us to be as Christians. We create meaning for today and not from yesterday’s sacrifices - we find new things that make us who we are, new ways to love and offer Christ’s healing to others. We are freed to follow our shepherd, and to walk the path that Christ has laid out for us. We live in Christ, and he in us, and God’s love is made perfect in us. Thanks be to God. Amen.