Sermon 17th July
Today, one of our Lay Readers, Simon Brindley, preaches based on the gospel of John 15 verses 1-8.
One of the many things that strikes me about John’s gospel, along with just how deep and profound and poetic it feels, is how Jesus takes the ordinary things around him and uses them either just as an illustration or as a means to healing or other miracles. If you were at Ashburnham last weekend, one of the things that kept coming out of Cameron’s teaching was Jesus taking ordinary, familiar things, like a few fish and loaves of bread, or some dirt from the ground, or some water in jars, and transforming them and the stories and accounts that resulted can still have a really deep impact on us. I wonder what he would have used today if he’d been walking around the streets of Lambeth – burgers at McDonald’s maybe, or the 68 bus. Would he have said, “I am the good security guard” as he walked across Halfords car park? Would he have commented on Boris Bikes or the Royal Family or the collapse of the News of the World or a famous footballer’s baby daughter?
Because all he was doing when he spoke of the sheep or the vine was pointing to things immediately around him that were part of the daily lives of the people who were listening, things that they really knew and understood. That way what he had to say would really strike home. Life in 1st century Palestine may have been politically complicated with the Roman occupation and tension between the occupying forces, local Jewish political leaders and Jewish religious leaders, but day-to-day it was probably very simple. It was hot. It was dusty. Food was simple but probably wholesome. The sheep grazed on the hillsides and most people got by, finding enough, they hoped, from the fields or the lakes to feed their families and hoping no one became ill.
It doesn’t say in John’s gospel where Jesus was when he told his followers, “I am the real vine, my Father is the gardener and you are the branches.” I like to think he may have been just walking in the fields. Or they may have just finished sharing a meal in a long, dusky evening….but vines and their grapes would have been on everyone’s land. So they knew all about them and each would have thought about the vines that were familiar to them. We were in Greece recently, just a few hundred miles from where Jesus spoke these words so I was watching out for the vines. Some were younger, small bushes standing in rows with the branches trained off to either side by the gardener, some were large and very old, the branches going off the main stem about 8-10 feet in the air, for yards and yards, supported by wires or the sides of buildings. One of those older vines had split, right down the middle and a huge gap had opened up in the main trunk. I wondered how on earth the water still flowed through the narrow, gnarled strips of wood on either side of that gap, up from the ground, because the grapes still hung in abundance on the branches.
If they had been outside perhaps Jesus pointed to a nearby piece of land with a man tending his vines. “Look” you can imagine him saying, “if you want to be my disciples, you need to be very careful. See that branch on that vine….it is weighed down with bunches of grapes and the gardener is tending it and protecting it. But look at that one over there, can you see it has dried up and there is no fruit on it. See the gardener chopping it off and throwing it in a pile with the other dead branches. If you want to be my disciples, don’t get cut off from me and from what I have taught you. If you want to bear fruit, you need me. You need the relationship between you and me to be strong and you won’t get anywhere just on your own. “Remain in me and I will remain in you” is the way the NIV translation puts it and the same word is used in the Good News. “Remain in me…..” What is Jesus getting at, “Remain in me…….”??
A famous Christian woman of the last century, a writer, a Dutch woman called Corrie ten Boom who lived through the Nazi occupation of Holland during the Second World War wrote a book called “Not Good if Detached”. She was talking about bus tickets that she saw on her travels in America after the war that had two parts. But if one part got detached from the other the ticket was no good and you couldn’t use it. So half the ticket had written on it “Not good if Detached”. If I remember correctly – it’s a while since I read the whole book - she was urging her readers in the same way as Jesus urged his disciples, to stay very close to their Lord…don’t get detached. “The branch of the vine can only give fruit through Him. Without Him we can do nothing” is the way she puts it in the beginning of the book.
Corrie ten Boom and her family were just ordinary Christian people before the war but they decided to help some of the Jewish victims of Nazi oppression in Holland. In the end the entire family was arrested and only she survived internment in Ravensbruck concentration camp. But she learned to trust and to obey, to stay close and to pray, through everything that life threw at her. She learned, she says, that before their dreadful experiences they “had believed, but now they knew that the light of Jesus Christ is stronger than the deepest darkness.” And she had a big impact for many years after the war as she travelled around the world, telling her story. [St Pauls: I’ve got it here if anyone wants to borrow it after the service…..].
I was really moved this week at work....last week we were all getting really, really stressed over a very difficult court case we are involved in with a highly litigious and aggressive solicitor on the other side who threw so many serious allegations at my young colleague, let’s call him Stephen, that I feared Stephen might be driven off sick or to the edge of a breakdown. He wasn’t sleeping he told me and his wife was in tears when he got home and told her how nasty it was all getting….and Stephen is a pretty robust and down to earth character. He had just been driven, over many, many months, to the edge of what he could cope with. So I felt really burdened last weekend at Ashburnham and shared this with various friends there and spent some time praying. Stephen is also a Christian and on Monday I got in to find an email saying that he had prayed over the weekend about all that was going on and he really felt the burdens had lifted. He wanted to share with me that prayer really works and to encourage me in my own faith! I wonder whether we had both been trying too much for the last few months in our own strength and forgetting to take our burdens to the one who really understands, the one who knows because he has been here, the one who has been through it all….”Bring your offerings, however small, of loaves and fish to me and let me transform them” says Jesus to the boy in the crowd of 5000. “Let me into your boat in the storm and we will get to the other side together” says Jesus to his disciples. “Do not let your hearts be troubled…. Trust in God; trust also in me.”
At Ashburnham, in case you have not been there before, the buildings stand overlooking a lake and surrounded by acres of beautiful woodlands. So I thought I would walk through the woods and bring home a dry branch and a green branch that I could use as illustrations. I found the dry branch OK and here it is, and it took me a minute or two to realise why it was not going to be easy to find a green branch on the woodland floor..because the green branches are still attached to the trees and it is really difficult to wrench one off and I decided it would be wrong to try. The sap keeps them alive and strong and attached and difficult to break. They remain attached to the tree, like the branches of the vine that keep bearing grapes..
So if Jesus is the real vine and we are the branches, how do we remain in him..how do we stay strong and attached to Him? What is it that makes the difference?
Jesus gives his disciples at least two or three clues in this passage from John’s gospel. “If you remain in me and my words remain in you,” he says in verse 7, “then you will ask for anything you wish and you shall have it.” “If my words remain in you….” I think Jesus wants us to read and to study and to keep coming back to his teaching, his words, as spoken in these precious gospels, these astonishing survivors from the first hundred years or so after Jesus’ death. “Read your Bibles” he might say to us. Let the Bible become familiar to you so that it influences your everyday life and your actions and becomes part of you. “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly”, it says in the New International Version of Colossians chapter 3 verse 16. Why not today decide, if you do not do so already, to start opening your Bible every day, or at least every weekday. Saturday might be a day off and Sunday a day for Church anyway! You might concentrate on the gospels or the Psalms perhaps if you find them the most helpful….and just see what God might be trying to say to you each day. I opened my New Living Translation (hold it up) just briefly last Monday morning before I went in to work to find that email from my colleague we’re calling Stephen and at 1 Corinthians chapter 4, verse 2 it said that “a person who is put in charge as a manager must be faithful.” It was precisely what I needed to hear that day when I had been wondering whether I still had the energy to go on and on supporting my team through their difficulties.
“If my words remain in you, then you will ask for anything you wish and you shall have it.” Of course we know that prayer is not a slot machine, but our experience is that when we really do try to be faithful, when we really do try to live according to Jesus’ teaching then in so many ways we see prayers answered. To spend some time in prayer each day…or maybe just each weekday, because Saturday is a day off and Sunday a day for Church! …is that one of the ways that Jesus is calling us down the centuries to remain in Him? If our faith is fundamentally a relationship, then as with any relationship we need to talk. Should we try to move forward as pray-ers from today? It was only when someone in church said in a meeting many years ago “Well if the Christians are not praying – for the community and for the world and for people they know who are in need – that I finally got my act together and bought a small notebook and started to spend just a few minutes each morning praying. This one is the latest version and for some reason my little Bible and my little prayer notebook have got completely stuck together in the last fortnight or so. I think the cover of the Bible is disintegrating for some reason and just getting sticky, but I thought it was a good illustration. Prayer and Bible reading, Bible reading and prayer.
Then thirdly, in verse 10, just on from the main passage today, Jesus says to his hearers, “If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have obeyed my Father’s commands and remain in his love. It is not just the thinking and the praying, it is when you put what I say into practice, Jesus seems to be saying, that you will continue to know that closeness of relationship that I describe as “remaining in me”. Of course we all know that this can be hard…it would be quite wrong to suggest otherwise and thank God that forgiveness lies at the heart of the Christian good news, but are our lives not richer when we do try to do what Jesus commands us to do? “This then is what I command you: love one another” is how Jesus sums it up at the end of this little section of John’s gospel, at verse 17.
Remain in me and you will bear fruit, is then Jesus’ promise to his disciples. Learn that the invitation to live with me alongside you in your life is not to restrict you and burden you or tie you down, it is to bless you because I know what is best for you.
The warning, in Jesus’ words today, is that cut off from him we will dry up and like the dry branch [break it] no longer bear fruit.
The promise, on the other hand, is of much fruit, and fruit in our lives that endures, lives of real and lasting value. Yes, we know this is not easy, it would be wrong to suggest otherwise, but I do believe it is worth keep coming back to and working for, because Jesus gives us glimpses of what is possible in our lives, our relationships, our communities, He gives us glimpses of glory.
The vine I liked best on our holiday in Greece is in a little village called Halki on the island of Naxos. It’s a place we have been to 3 or 4 times. The village centre is on a small hill, some of the old buildings are still in ruins but some have been restored and sell really beautiful pottery and wooden gifts carved from olive wood (I think Phil Brooks and Jenny got something from there yesterday at their wedding). There is a beautiful old distillery where they make a traditional liqueur from large fruit like lemons and a little traditional barbers using a cut-throat razor. And in the tiny centre of the village square is a small café with all the seats set out across the square. Up the side of the café grows a very old vine and the roof of the café is effectively formed by the branches of that vine spread out across all the tables and loaded with bunches and bunches of grapes. It is a beautiful and peaceful place, a picture for me of the kind of image Jesus wanted to encourage in the minds eyes of those who were listening to him that day. Think of the best vine you know he seems to me to be saying. That is what I want your lives to be like. The gardener will come along every now and then and prune you, but only so you can bear even more fruit…
[I have left at the back of the church this morning a bowl of water…if you want to, if you feel you need to, as you leave, I would invite you just quietly to dip your finger in the water and to touch it… perhaps to your head, perhaps to your hands (probably best not to your mouth, for health and safety reasons!), as a way of physically making some reconnection with Jesus Christ this morning and allowing any part of your life that has become dry to become stronger again as you seek to remain in Him, to remain strong….]
Amen
One of the many things that strikes me about John’s gospel, along with just how deep and profound and poetic it feels, is how Jesus takes the ordinary things around him and uses them either just as an illustration or as a means to healing or other miracles. If you were at Ashburnham last weekend, one of the things that kept coming out of Cameron’s teaching was Jesus taking ordinary, familiar things, like a few fish and loaves of bread, or some dirt from the ground, or some water in jars, and transforming them and the stories and accounts that resulted can still have a really deep impact on us. I wonder what he would have used today if he’d been walking around the streets of Lambeth – burgers at McDonald’s maybe, or the 68 bus. Would he have said, “I am the good security guard” as he walked across Halfords car park? Would he have commented on Boris Bikes or the Royal Family or the collapse of the News of the World or a famous footballer’s baby daughter?
Because all he was doing when he spoke of the sheep or the vine was pointing to things immediately around him that were part of the daily lives of the people who were listening, things that they really knew and understood. That way what he had to say would really strike home. Life in 1st century Palestine may have been politically complicated with the Roman occupation and tension between the occupying forces, local Jewish political leaders and Jewish religious leaders, but day-to-day it was probably very simple. It was hot. It was dusty. Food was simple but probably wholesome. The sheep grazed on the hillsides and most people got by, finding enough, they hoped, from the fields or the lakes to feed their families and hoping no one became ill.
It doesn’t say in John’s gospel where Jesus was when he told his followers, “I am the real vine, my Father is the gardener and you are the branches.” I like to think he may have been just walking in the fields. Or they may have just finished sharing a meal in a long, dusky evening….but vines and their grapes would have been on everyone’s land. So they knew all about them and each would have thought about the vines that were familiar to them. We were in Greece recently, just a few hundred miles from where Jesus spoke these words so I was watching out for the vines. Some were younger, small bushes standing in rows with the branches trained off to either side by the gardener, some were large and very old, the branches going off the main stem about 8-10 feet in the air, for yards and yards, supported by wires or the sides of buildings. One of those older vines had split, right down the middle and a huge gap had opened up in the main trunk. I wondered how on earth the water still flowed through the narrow, gnarled strips of wood on either side of that gap, up from the ground, because the grapes still hung in abundance on the branches.
If they had been outside perhaps Jesus pointed to a nearby piece of land with a man tending his vines. “Look” you can imagine him saying, “if you want to be my disciples, you need to be very careful. See that branch on that vine….it is weighed down with bunches of grapes and the gardener is tending it and protecting it. But look at that one over there, can you see it has dried up and there is no fruit on it. See the gardener chopping it off and throwing it in a pile with the other dead branches. If you want to be my disciples, don’t get cut off from me and from what I have taught you. If you want to bear fruit, you need me. You need the relationship between you and me to be strong and you won’t get anywhere just on your own. “Remain in me and I will remain in you” is the way the NIV translation puts it and the same word is used in the Good News. “Remain in me…..” What is Jesus getting at, “Remain in me…….”??
A famous Christian woman of the last century, a writer, a Dutch woman called Corrie ten Boom who lived through the Nazi occupation of Holland during the Second World War wrote a book called “Not Good if Detached”. She was talking about bus tickets that she saw on her travels in America after the war that had two parts. But if one part got detached from the other the ticket was no good and you couldn’t use it. So half the ticket had written on it “Not good if Detached”. If I remember correctly – it’s a while since I read the whole book - she was urging her readers in the same way as Jesus urged his disciples, to stay very close to their Lord…don’t get detached. “The branch of the vine can only give fruit through Him. Without Him we can do nothing” is the way she puts it in the beginning of the book.
Corrie ten Boom and her family were just ordinary Christian people before the war but they decided to help some of the Jewish victims of Nazi oppression in Holland. In the end the entire family was arrested and only she survived internment in Ravensbruck concentration camp. But she learned to trust and to obey, to stay close and to pray, through everything that life threw at her. She learned, she says, that before their dreadful experiences they “had believed, but now they knew that the light of Jesus Christ is stronger than the deepest darkness.” And she had a big impact for many years after the war as she travelled around the world, telling her story. [St Pauls: I’ve got it here if anyone wants to borrow it after the service…..].
I was really moved this week at work....last week we were all getting really, really stressed over a very difficult court case we are involved in with a highly litigious and aggressive solicitor on the other side who threw so many serious allegations at my young colleague, let’s call him Stephen, that I feared Stephen might be driven off sick or to the edge of a breakdown. He wasn’t sleeping he told me and his wife was in tears when he got home and told her how nasty it was all getting….and Stephen is a pretty robust and down to earth character. He had just been driven, over many, many months, to the edge of what he could cope with. So I felt really burdened last weekend at Ashburnham and shared this with various friends there and spent some time praying. Stephen is also a Christian and on Monday I got in to find an email saying that he had prayed over the weekend about all that was going on and he really felt the burdens had lifted. He wanted to share with me that prayer really works and to encourage me in my own faith! I wonder whether we had both been trying too much for the last few months in our own strength and forgetting to take our burdens to the one who really understands, the one who knows because he has been here, the one who has been through it all….”Bring your offerings, however small, of loaves and fish to me and let me transform them” says Jesus to the boy in the crowd of 5000. “Let me into your boat in the storm and we will get to the other side together” says Jesus to his disciples. “Do not let your hearts be troubled…. Trust in God; trust also in me.”
At Ashburnham, in case you have not been there before, the buildings stand overlooking a lake and surrounded by acres of beautiful woodlands. So I thought I would walk through the woods and bring home a dry branch and a green branch that I could use as illustrations. I found the dry branch OK and here it is, and it took me a minute or two to realise why it was not going to be easy to find a green branch on the woodland floor..because the green branches are still attached to the trees and it is really difficult to wrench one off and I decided it would be wrong to try. The sap keeps them alive and strong and attached and difficult to break. They remain attached to the tree, like the branches of the vine that keep bearing grapes..
So if Jesus is the real vine and we are the branches, how do we remain in him..how do we stay strong and attached to Him? What is it that makes the difference?
Jesus gives his disciples at least two or three clues in this passage from John’s gospel. “If you remain in me and my words remain in you,” he says in verse 7, “then you will ask for anything you wish and you shall have it.” “If my words remain in you….” I think Jesus wants us to read and to study and to keep coming back to his teaching, his words, as spoken in these precious gospels, these astonishing survivors from the first hundred years or so after Jesus’ death. “Read your Bibles” he might say to us. Let the Bible become familiar to you so that it influences your everyday life and your actions and becomes part of you. “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly”, it says in the New International Version of Colossians chapter 3 verse 16. Why not today decide, if you do not do so already, to start opening your Bible every day, or at least every weekday. Saturday might be a day off and Sunday a day for Church anyway! You might concentrate on the gospels or the Psalms perhaps if you find them the most helpful….and just see what God might be trying to say to you each day. I opened my New Living Translation (hold it up) just briefly last Monday morning before I went in to work to find that email from my colleague we’re calling Stephen and at 1 Corinthians chapter 4, verse 2 it said that “a person who is put in charge as a manager must be faithful.” It was precisely what I needed to hear that day when I had been wondering whether I still had the energy to go on and on supporting my team through their difficulties.
“If my words remain in you, then you will ask for anything you wish and you shall have it.” Of course we know that prayer is not a slot machine, but our experience is that when we really do try to be faithful, when we really do try to live according to Jesus’ teaching then in so many ways we see prayers answered. To spend some time in prayer each day…or maybe just each weekday, because Saturday is a day off and Sunday a day for Church! …is that one of the ways that Jesus is calling us down the centuries to remain in Him? If our faith is fundamentally a relationship, then as with any relationship we need to talk. Should we try to move forward as pray-ers from today? It was only when someone in church said in a meeting many years ago “Well if the Christians are not praying – for the community and for the world and for people they know who are in need – that I finally got my act together and bought a small notebook and started to spend just a few minutes each morning praying. This one is the latest version and for some reason my little Bible and my little prayer notebook have got completely stuck together in the last fortnight or so. I think the cover of the Bible is disintegrating for some reason and just getting sticky, but I thought it was a good illustration. Prayer and Bible reading, Bible reading and prayer.
Then thirdly, in verse 10, just on from the main passage today, Jesus says to his hearers, “If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have obeyed my Father’s commands and remain in his love. It is not just the thinking and the praying, it is when you put what I say into practice, Jesus seems to be saying, that you will continue to know that closeness of relationship that I describe as “remaining in me”. Of course we all know that this can be hard…it would be quite wrong to suggest otherwise and thank God that forgiveness lies at the heart of the Christian good news, but are our lives not richer when we do try to do what Jesus commands us to do? “This then is what I command you: love one another” is how Jesus sums it up at the end of this little section of John’s gospel, at verse 17.
Remain in me and you will bear fruit, is then Jesus’ promise to his disciples. Learn that the invitation to live with me alongside you in your life is not to restrict you and burden you or tie you down, it is to bless you because I know what is best for you.
The warning, in Jesus’ words today, is that cut off from him we will dry up and like the dry branch [break it] no longer bear fruit.
The promise, on the other hand, is of much fruit, and fruit in our lives that endures, lives of real and lasting value. Yes, we know this is not easy, it would be wrong to suggest otherwise, but I do believe it is worth keep coming back to and working for, because Jesus gives us glimpses of what is possible in our lives, our relationships, our communities, He gives us glimpses of glory.
The vine I liked best on our holiday in Greece is in a little village called Halki on the island of Naxos. It’s a place we have been to 3 or 4 times. The village centre is on a small hill, some of the old buildings are still in ruins but some have been restored and sell really beautiful pottery and wooden gifts carved from olive wood (I think Phil Brooks and Jenny got something from there yesterday at their wedding). There is a beautiful old distillery where they make a traditional liqueur from large fruit like lemons and a little traditional barbers using a cut-throat razor. And in the tiny centre of the village square is a small café with all the seats set out across the square. Up the side of the café grows a very old vine and the roof of the café is effectively formed by the branches of that vine spread out across all the tables and loaded with bunches and bunches of grapes. It is a beautiful and peaceful place, a picture for me of the kind of image Jesus wanted to encourage in the minds eyes of those who were listening to him that day. Think of the best vine you know he seems to me to be saying. That is what I want your lives to be like. The gardener will come along every now and then and prune you, but only so you can bear even more fruit…
[I have left at the back of the church this morning a bowl of water…if you want to, if you feel you need to, as you leave, I would invite you just quietly to dip your finger in the water and to touch it… perhaps to your head, perhaps to your hands (probably best not to your mouth, for health and safety reasons!), as a way of physically making some reconnection with Jesus Christ this morning and allowing any part of your life that has become dry to become stronger again as you seek to remain in Him, to remain strong….]
Amen
posted by Sharren Taylor at 8:57 am
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