Some years ago, when we determined to prettify the old entrance to the chapel, we settled on these verses from John 15 to be etched into the concrete wall: I am the vine, you are the branches. … Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit. … Abide in my love. It was a great improvement, considering what was there before it. The doors that used to lead to the original sanctuary were sealed off from the inside by bricks when we turned the room around in the early ’80s and made the entrance of the old sanctuary into the chancel of the new chapel. For years the doors had on the outside a small sign affixed above the handles that read, No Entry. We didn’t think that was communicating exactly what we wanted to those who would stumble upon the church for the first time.

So we made that spot into a place of meditation. A portico with benches and greenery and a little basin with running water warmed it up. Truth to tell, it hardly feels Baptist to me, even if we should aspire to it. Baptists are inveterate doers. We are the active type, achievers mostly. There’s a reason we flourished on the frontier, what with its rugged individualism and code of personal responsibility. Ours is a confessional faith tradition; we don’t let anyone stand in for the faith of another. Which is why we delay baptism until a person understands and chooses for herself. You have to move. You have to choose. You have to do. Our motto might be: Don’t just sit there; do something. But our little area in front of the chapel, with its abide in me Scripture, is more like a Quaker motto: Don’t just do something; sit there!

It feels a little passive, this text from John’s gospel. But isn’t life like that from the start? Today is Mother’s Day, did you know? Show of hands: How many of you decided for yourself to be born? How many of you chose to climb into your mother’s womb and get about the growing? It was decided for you. You had no say in it at the earliest stages of life. You were connected to the source of life through an umbilical cord the way branches are connected to the source of life through a vine. The juice of life, the stuff that makes your legs plod and your heart pump and your brain pop, is a gift that you do nothing to get; it is just given to you. The only thing you can do about it is to choose whether to be grateful for it and honor the giver. For the mothers among us, we hope you have grateful children who honor you this day. All the rest of us are duty bound and love compelled to do the grateful honoring of you.

Jesus knows he is soon leaving his disciples. The author of life is heading toward his redemptive death of love. So he instructs them to remain attached to him in the most organic way—like a branch is attached to a vine or a fetus to a mother. But with Jesus off the scene, they will have to pay attention to staying connected spiritually. He tells them to abide in his love.

What does that entail? We abide in Christ by acknowledging his life-giving presence and attending to it every day. This is how he forms himself into us, how he shapes our hearts and minds and directs our steps. This abiding is more like listening than talking, more like receiving than giving, more like silence than noise.

In an article on the place of silence in worship, Roger Repohl, the director of music at Our Lady of Victory Church in The Bronx, talks about how this discipline reworks us. It goes against our obsessive need to communicate, socialize, produce, achieve. It reorients the self, realigns us from doing to receiving. Silence allows the word of God to take root in the heart and to transform it. It makes space for hearing things that would not otherwise be audible. It lets us relax our grip—and allows life to grip us instead. [Context (May 2006, Part A): 1-2.]

This is crucially important in the Christian life, because too many of us are controlling personalities that think ours is not just one way of looking at the world but the right way. It never crosses our mind that there may be more than one right way in the eyes of God. But even that is less important than the fact that when we try to control things and people around us and bend them to our will and way, we are working on others exactly the opposite of the way God works on us. God works quietly and persuasively in us the way a vine surges invisibly and inwardly to push life into a branch. Only by attending in the silence of our inner lives to the presence of Christ and relaxing our own grip can the fruit that God wants us to produce through us burst forth.

Apart from me, Jesus says, you can do nothing. Well, of course, that’s not quite true. We can do many things apart from Christ in a worldly sense. Apart from him we can do nothing that he alone wants to have done in and through our lives. And so we pray, we listen, and we wait in silence upon the urging of his Spirit. We trust in him and remain rooted in his love—always a part, never apart.

A missionary in Africa tells of a small generator that allowed power to be supplied to his makeshift church and rectory. Native visitors came calling one day and saw the single light bulb hanging from the ceiling in his house. They marveled wide-eyed as he flipped the switch on the wall and the light came on. One of them asked if he could have a bulb. The priest assumed the man wanted it as a souvenir of sorts to remind him of his visit. On his next visit to the outlying village of his visitors from that day, the priest went to see the man he had given the bulb to. He entered his hut and saw the unilluminated bulb hanging from the ceiling by an ordinary string. He had to explain to the man that there was no magic involved; the bulb had to be connected by wire to a power source. [Homiletics (May 2006): 24-25.]

Too many of us run off on our own in the Christian life, assuming we have all we need to work for Christ and serve him in the world. But we must remain a part of Christ, never apart from him. It is his work through us that matters, not our work for him. He is the Light of the world, and if we are to be lights of the world ourselves, it will only be by staying connected to him—hardwired, don’t you know?!

But the reason for staying connected is not that we are able ourselves to grow spiritually. It is so that we will be able to bear much fruit. Jesus is not much interested in our personal growth as individuals. He does not care whether we become self-actualized persons who climb to the top of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. He couldn’t care less if we draw life from him to become wealthy in business or famous in the arts or comfortable in retirement. Those are not the fruits he wants us to bear by our connection to him.

He wants to produce through us fruit that sweetens and gladdens the world. No one can say for sure what he means by fruit, but more than likely he means that people come to believe in Jesus and find their lives transformed by themselves being connected to his love. So the question for us is whether we see any evidence of that happening in others around us. Is anyone coming to faith in Christ because of your witness? Is anyone becoming a peacemaker instead of a fighter? Is anyone letting go of the need to control others and learning to live without everything needing to be perfect? Is anyone learning to forgive and give up grudges? Is anyone learning the self-discipline of curbing ambition in the interest of the common good? These are marks of Christ’s life-giving presence in a person’s life.

The Da Vinci Code movie comes out this Friday. The book has challenged the church to get clear about where it comes from and what it believes.
Dan Brown gets it wrong historically and theologically most of the time, and while it tells a fun story, the main redeeming fact is that fiction is not fact. The most tragic figure in the book is the dutiful oblate, Silas. The well-meaning albino was orphaned as a youth and became attached to a Spanish priest who eventually came to lead the (unfairly slandered by Brown) Catholic lay group, Opus Dei. Silas thinks he is serving the Lord and protecting the truth of the Word of God, even when committing murder in obedience to his duplicitous superior. He knows that murder is sin, but he takes his orders from one who turns out not to be drawing his own agenda from the Jesus vine.

When we remain connected to the living Christ, we will know the difference between the kind of fruit that comes from his life in ours and the kind that comes from other kinds of ambitions. We cannot have a Christian life by proxy, through another who is responsible to Christ for us. You yourself are able to have a relationship to Christ, and you yourself are responsible for it.

One more reality in this text that we hate to admit: only vines that suffer and struggle and undergo pruning produce good fruit. Grapevines grow best in climates and soils inhospitable to other crops. They thrive on steep hillsides where erosion has stripped the topsoil. Like the steep climes of the one of my favorite places in the world—the five villages on the western coast of northern Italy, called Cinque Terre. Vines like harsh settings. They need hot and dry weather, but also cool nights to keep the sugar sweet inside. A vine has to struggle and suffer some in order to produce the best fruit.

Likewise, Christians who never endure hardship have no chance to prove the value of their faith. Those who are tested by life’s challenges and survive find their souls strengthened. They make for better witnesses to the work of God in them. They can produce the sweetest fruit. And yet, even if they do, that does not make them immune to the pruning shears of God.

If you drive through wine country in the winter, you will find the branches trimmed back near the root vines. By doing so, the plants will have more energy, more life force to do it all again the next season. If the vintner were to allow the branches that produced a good crop one year to remain unpruned, they would have no capacity to produce the next year. It would take too much to maintain life for the branches themselves; they would have nothing left to produce good fruit.

Sometimes we wonder in our relationship with God why our lives are difficult and painful. We interpret that only negatively, wanting instead the easy life all the time, thinking we deserve that because of our faithfulness to God. While God does not bring severe weather into our lives that damages us and breaks the skin, God is there to clean us off, even if we have to feel the knife taking away the dead stuff in order for growth to happen.

Jesus talks about God being the vinedresser that will prune us for the best possible growth. The wisest Christians know pain as pruning rather than punishment. They trust God to work in them and though them to bring about the best for everyone around them. They don’t whine about hardship; they look for how their hardship can produce good wine. They want to be good stewards of their pain. They ask not why they had to suffer but what their suffering can do for others. This is evidence of their abiding in the love of Christ, who suffered unjustly but offered himself for the redemption of the world.

Listen, mothers endure great suffering and struggle to bring us to life and to make our lives fruitful. We honor them best by abiding in their love all our lives long, staying close to them, and feeding on their wisdom. Christ endured great suffering and struggle to bring us to life eternal and to make our lives fruitful for God. We honor him best by abiding in his love all our lives long, staying close to him, and feeding on his wisdom. Always a part of his life and love, never apart.