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May 18, 2003 Sermon: "Healthy Vines/Bad Fruit" Scripture: John 15:1-8 Reverend Larry Gerber

Grapevines are unruly beasts. They prefer to grow and keep growing, sprouting a canopy made of leaves and shoots and grape clusters, similiar to what you see on your bulletin this morning. They need to be managed, just like the branches of the "true vine," Jesus Christ.

When Bob and Patty Brower traveled in France in the '70s, they fell in love with two things: the wineries and the French Country chateaus. They came home and packed up their belongings on the East Coast and headed for California, looking for a spot to start a winery of their own. They settled on 16 acres tucked away in the hills of Monterey County. They built an estate building, Chateau Julien, modeled after an actual chateau on the Swiss/French border. In 1982 they started making wine. Today they have more than 240 acres of grapes.

But there have been problems. If you want to go broke fast, go into the wine business. Yet finances are not the only challenge facing a winemaker. Of the many issues that must be addressed in making good wine, one that is frequently overlooked is canopy management.

The topic is germane to any discussion of John 15:1-8. Jesus said, "He [the Gardener] cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes" (John 15:2 NIV). That's canopy management. Here's the problem canopy management addresses: runaway growth. Vines left to themselves will sprawl out all over the place and produce huge canopies of shoots, leaves and branches, and unless that canopy is controlled, the vine won't yield much fruit or topshelf grapes. It's a counter-intuitive activity, the cutting back of the canopy, because all the greenery, all those leaves suggests that what you've got here is a very healthy vine. In fact, it's all show and no tell.

Jesus is afraid that the disciples might face this same problem. He wasn't interested in showy disciples any more than he is interested in showy churches and showy Christians today. What he is interested in is fruit — and not just fruit — excellent fruit. A vine with a huge canopy may be looking good, but it isn't doing any good.

It reminds one of the BBC comedy Keeping Up Appearances. Here, a matronly woman, Hyacinth, has but one concern in life, and that is to maintain the illusion that she is well-bred and in touch with the upper crusts of British society and the lower layers of nobility. That's why, when her neighbor drives Hyacinth to her sister's house, she instructs her neighbor to park the car in front of a well-appointed home on one street, and after asserting it is her sister's home, leaves her neighbor in the car, dashes to the door, then ducks around to the side, climbs a six-foot brick wall in her dress, heels, flowered hat and all, falls to the ground, brushes herself off and marches to her sister's actual abode — a rundown tenement building the next street over.

Hyacinth is concerned about her "canopy," the outward show. The image of the vine is used several times in Scripture as a metaphor for the relationship between God and God's people. Israel is described as the "vineyard of the Lord Almighty" in Isaiah 5, and Jesus picks up this image in John 15 in describing his relationship to his disciples. A grapevine is really a community — many individual branches interconnected and intertwined, but all designed for the sole purpose of bearing fruit. While the individual branches are important, it's the collective quality of the whole crop that determines whether the wine will be labeled as excellent, mediocre or simply sold by the box.

God, like any good winemaker, understands the need to control the canopy. The goal of canopy control is threefold: First, you want to develop a vine structure that makes picking and disease control relatively easy. With a huge covering of branches and large leaves, it is difficult to see the fruit, let alone pick it. Herein lies a problem for the church and all of us. Sometimes the external paraphernalia, rules of the church, get in the way — not of growing the fruit — but of picking it. We used to call this legalism. Our conventions and traditions sometimes keep the world from seeing the fruit, and seeing no fruit is therefore unable to pick the fruit that it cannot see. We grow under the watchful eye of the community around us. The world is full of people searching for the truth, for a sense of meaning for their lives. And we have the Good News. The fruit is hanging lush from our branches. But we tend to hide it behind the very showy and meaningless appearances of nonessential issues. Jesus called it, using another metaphor, "hiding our light under a bushel basket." The church has fine baskets. But the world doesn't need baskets; it needs light. The world doesn't need shoots, leaves and branches; it needs fruit. Are we going to allow God to pare back the canopy, to let our fruit be visible to the world walking by?

Next, you want to regulate the size and quality of the fruit. The mantra of the church for over a generation has been "church growth." Notice that Jesus doesn't call the vine to growth, he calls it to fruit. Our mantra ought to be "church fruit." When God takes the pruning shears to your life, or to the church, it's not an issue of whether you are growing, but of what you are growing. Of course there will be some fruit, but the larger issue is the quality of the fruit you are bearing. A sour grape is fruit, but it's still sour.

Finally, the aim of canopy control is to strike a balance between growing leaves and growing fruit. Without shoots, leaves and branches, you can't have fruit. We are not people without a life — and it is within that well-disciplined life that the fruit grows. God wants us to have a life. He tells us not only to get a life, but to get "an abundant life." But it must be a life under control, a life that is best suited to render the fruit of the Spirit. Where would the fruit be today without the church?

God established the church. But you've got to admit that there's a lot of canopy nonsense going on in the church these days that does little to produce good fruit, or fruit that is available for the picking. What to do? Jesus says that we must "abide" in him. He says, "I am the vine, you are the branches." God is the one who watches over the whole process. But we must abide in him. And if we go it alone, we'll dry up, become so much dead wood, and we'll be hauled away for the trash bin.

With proper canopy control, a winemaker is able to produce a wine that is a "friend to food." What Jesus is saying to his disciples is that with proper canopy control, they can produce fruit that is a "friend to faith."

Healthy vines do not always produce good fruit. In summary, one must first, take control of the plant, so as not to have vines so large that they hide the fruit, and allow disease to enter. Secondly, one wants to manage the fruit so that it is a solid good fruit, not necessarily large, and finally, one needs to prune the vine on a regular basis, making sure the surplus leaves and vines are trimmed away, so that the fruit can mature in a timely fashion, and without blemish.

The church is likened to the vine and the vine dresser, because of the three simple steps that need to be taken, in order to bear the right relationship with Jesus and the world. God is the vine dresser. Jesus is the vine. We are the branches. If we abide in him, allow pruning, and cutting away, we will bear much fruit. We cannot grow wildly on the vine. We must allow trimming and shaping. As a branch of the one true vine, we must realize that not only are we not in control, but more importantly, we must not want to be in control. Allow God, the vine dresser to come into your life today, and allow him to prune, to reshape. When we allow this to happen, the extra lush greenery will be pruned, cut away, and the product, your life, will be a healthy fruit, ready for the real show and tell. This is my beloved daughter/son, in whom I am well pleased.
Let us pray.........

Let me know what you think. The church Email is: SLUMC@att.net, Phone: 480.895.8766