A Sermon for the 2021 VBWIM Annual Feast preached by Rev. Dr. Kristin Adkins Whitesides
John 15:1-5
I.
We have a beauty berry bush near our house. It has beautiful bright green leaves in the spring that give way to bunches of tiny purple berries in the late summer. Those berries then feed the birds through the fall and winter. We absolutely love the bush for its beauty and its generosity.
However, after a few years of living here and enjoying it, we noticed that it had grown very large and then began to get, well, straggly. The branches were sticking out in odd directions and not all of them had leaves or fruit. And because it had grown so big, when I backed my car down the driveway the woody branches had begun to scrape loudly against the side of the van. We knew something would have to change.
I consulted a few experts on what to do. And they all agreed. Cut it back. Not a gentle trimming. Cut it all the way back down to the root. And so we did, removing all the branches and cutting even the trunk of the bush to the ground. And then, well, we waited.
II.
When we meet Jesus in our Scripture for today, he has already gathered with his disciples in an upper room and shared a meal with them. He has told them he is leaving. And he has also told them that as things get dangerous and scary, they will turn away from him, deny him…even betray him. They must have been uncomfortable, perplexed, and maybe a little bit insulted. But after the meal was over, the conversation does not end with distress. Jesus seems to change the subject, beginning to talk about vines and branches, pruning and fruit.
The metaphor of the vine and branches and fruit was a familiar one for his disciples. It had often been used by prophets before Jesus to describe Israel’s relationship with God. And, normally, it had been used as a reminder of how bad God’s people were at bearing good fruit. The disciples, Jesus seems to infer, may also run into trouble themselves.
But the key to surviving and flourishing, according to Jesus, is to recognize that they are the branches on a vine they do not control. They aren’t the vine itself… or the root… or the vine grower… or the soil. No, they are branches. And they are going to need to begin to act like it. Which means, they are going to need to hang on to the vine. Or, as Jesus puts it, abide.
Using a word like abide, which means sticking around, holding on, persevering, resting in one place, seems like an odd choice for this final discourse. After all, Jesus is leaving. And the disciples don’t sound as though they are a safe bet. As it turns out, most of them will indeed turn away or fall off the vine—at least for a little while—until only a handful of disciples, mostly women, will abide or remain at the foot of the cross. “Things are going to get hard,” Jesus tells his friends in that upper room. “You’re going to need to stick with me. You’re going to need to abide in me. It’s the only way you will survive.”
III.
During the past year plus, I have had to learn in new ways what it means to abide. To persevere. To hold on. When the pandemic began, so much of the momentum I felt our church had been building came to a screeching halt. We had to learn how to change gears and pivot into new avenues of online connection, learning new technologies while trying not to leave anyone behind. Goals changed. Success was redefined. And, for a while, we really did all hang in there.
But, as the pandemic wore on, I have watched as branches have torn themselves off of our vine, upset because we wear masks when we gather, because we don’t yet sing hymns inside, because we aren’t doing what they want us to do. It has been painful. It has been hard. And, against my own better judgment, I have often taken it personally.
It turns out that before the pandemic I had sometimes fooled myself into thinking that our church’s successes and growth had somehow been connected to my own work and effort. If I did enough, we would flourish. I had forgotten that I too was a branch. I had been trying to be the vine. The one that held all the branches together. The one through whom all the energy would flow.
But like all good apocalyptic moments, the pandemic unveiled true things that I had begun to forget or ignore. And after all the months of endless childcare, and home schooling, and full-time pastoring, and cleaning a house no one ever left, and wondering what the future would hold, and worrying over what had been lost, and canceling vacations and trips, and pivoting, and learning, and growing, and grieving…well, I got pruned. Pruned right down to the ground. Exhausted. Used up. And pretty sure I might not be good for much of anything anymore.
Maybe at times you have felt like that too.
IV.
Pruning can be scary. It feels painful. It feels like loss and sometimes looks a lot like death. But there is also a freedom that it brings. An opportunity to begin to grow in a new direction. The dead weight of exhausting demands and expectations begins to fall away. And the tangled mess of being pulled in too many directions at once begins to clear until we can see the sky and figure out which way is up again.
All of a sudden, we realize that we while we have been trying to carry the weight of all the branches on our own, that was never our job. And now we simply can’t do it anymore. All our offshoots have been sheered away and we have to hang, solid and close to the vine, unable to do anything but be there. Close to the source of our nourishment… our sustenance… our life. As we rest there, a branch on the vine, we come to realize that abiding actually feels a lot less like hanging on for dear life and a lot more like being held.
V.
As Jesus faced his betrayal, crucifixion, and death, he told his closest friends: “I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit. Apart from me you can do nothing…So, abide in my love. I have said these things so that my joy may be in you and your joy may be complete.”
They are odd words for a farewell, especially from one who was facing this betrayal, torture, and execution. They are words that will only make sense in retrospect, when his followers come to realize that what felt like the heartbreaking, earth-shattering end of all that was good was actually just the beginning of something new. Something better than they were able to grow or create or even imagine on their own.
After we cut our beauty berry bush down to the ground at the end of that fall, we were terrified. We were pretty sure we had killed it and that it would never grow again. But as the winter snow melted off of that pitiful stump, we began to see small shoots appear. Slowly, it began to grow again. That spring, the branches were beautiful and delicate. Leaves began to unfurl across their limbs. Each one felt like a miracle. And in the fall, the berries were plentiful. Bright purple, they hung heavy on each branch. And with delight and wonder we watched as the birds came once again to feast.
