1
Rev. Dr. Jan Gregory-Charpentier
United Parish of Upton
May 3, 2015
John 15:1-8
Grounded in God
So, Ron and I are starting to think about beginning to get ready to take
the first steps that will eventually lead to us packing up and moving house. Can
you sense my ambivalence? After living in a ten room house for almost fifteen
years we have a lot of stuff to go through. There are the boxes in the attic eaves
that are full of our college papers and textbooks; sewing supplies and boxes of
fabric that I just know I’ll get to “someday;” the kids’ art projects from preschool
on up; the baby furniture we just couldn’t bear to part with and hope to hand
on to grandchildren; the ski clothing, though none of us have skied in several
years; my grandmother’s china I don’t particularly like but can’t bring myself to
take to the Goodwill. And that’s just the attic eaves. We are starting to think
about beginning to get ready to take the first steps that will eventually lead to
packing up and moving. But first we are in desperate need of some good, oldfashioned pruning. We need to get rid of what we no longer need or use –some
of it quite beloved and meaningful, even –to be light and nimble enough to
follow the path and go in the direction we believe God is asking us to go.
Jesus employs the metaphor of pruning in his well-known “I am the vine,
you are the branches” speech. The word itself – “pruning” – is a little scary. It
2
sounds to our ears like pain and punishment. Like unwanted loss. Like harsh
discipline. But listen again to what Jesus says: “Every branch that bears fruit, God
prunes to help it bear more fruit.” Pruning – quite the opposite of punishment – is
what fruitful vines – and people for that matter – need in order to be even more
fruitful. The Vinedresser lovingly tends and, yes, prunes only the braches that are
richly, deeply, intimately connected and already abiding in the true vine.
I try to keep that in mind as I start to think about beginning to get ready
for taking the first steps that will eventually help me to let go of that soup tureen
we received as a wedding present but have maybe used three times in 30 years
of marriage, or that shelf of books that I loved reading but will not read again, or
that little hall desk that used to be in my parents’ house when I was growing up
but now serves mostly as a surface on which to deposit clutter. Letting go won’t
be easy. Letting go will require tolerating some discomfort. But letting go will
allow us to be leaner, and stronger, and more deeply grounded in God rather
than in our stuff.
And that’s how it is with grapevines, too. If the vinedresser left his or her
vine unpruned it would become overgrown and spindly, spending its efforts on
tendrils and leaves, not reserving its best energy for what it was made for:
luscious, beautiful fruit. An unpruned vine grows weaker rather than stronger
because it starts spreading itself too thin, expanding in all directions and
therefore diffusing its life energy rather than concentrating it.
Does any of that sound familiar? “Spreading itself too thin?” “Going in too
3
many directions?” “Diffusing life energy rather than concentrating it?” Jesus has
a suggestion. “Abide in me as I abide in you.” That word “abide” means to stay,
to remain, to live in. Jesus says to bear the fruit we were born to bear we need
only do one thing: abide in him. Pretty simple, pretty plain. “Abide in me.” But I
admit, to my ears, that simple piece of advice comes as both good and bad
news. It’s bad news because I much prefer doing than abiding. I like the active
role, the hands-on tasks, the self-determined path. “Abiding” is passive,
“abiding” is dependent, “abiding” is static. As one preacher put it, “Christianity is
a lousy religion for the ‘do-it-yourself’ crowd.”1 Abiding means letting Someone
Else do for us. And like toddlers, we often resist being helped. We want to “do it
self!”
But when I can get over my two-year old tantrums and insistence on
doing it by myself, abiding comes as amazingly good news to my ears. Abiding
means God is already holding me, already grounding me, already feeding,
nourishing and supplying me with all I need to be a strong, healthy, fruit-bearing
branch. Abiding in Christ the True Vine invites us to understand that the Divine is
not something “up there” we need to stretch ourselves towards and reach for
and maybe attain. No, the Divine, God’s love, and power, and Spirit, and
energy is right here, under our feet, the soil we are grounded in, flowing into us
as naturally as earth and water feed the roots of a well-planted vine.
“Spirituality,” then, drawing life and sustaining strength from God, is not a matter
1
Nadia Bolz-Weber, “I Want to Be a Sunflower for Jesus.” www.thq.wearesparkhouse.org
4
of doing more, or being better, but simply allowing the flow to happen. Letting
the richness and refreshment of God that is already naturally and abundantly
there for us move unhindered through us.
And that brings us back to pruning. Unlike some sort of “Father Knows
Best” model of “This is for your own good” kind of punitive discipline, pruning (in
the way I believe Jesus is using the word) means that whatever it is that is
hindering the flow of God’s Spirit in us, whatever is blocking our being deeply
watered and fully nourished, needs to go, needs to be removed. Sometimes
healing and growth come from binding up, making stronger, reinforcing. But
Jesus, who walked among the hills and vineyards of Galilee from which deep,
rich wine was produced, so deep and rich he compared it to his own lifeblood –
Jesus knew that sometimes healing and growth can only come from pruning,
letting go, lovingly and wisely cutting back and returning to one’s roots.
This message meets us at every level: individually, congregationally, and
even nationally. There comes a time when we need to jettison baggage and
burdens that no longer serve us, some quite beloved and meaningful, even. But
they are stunting our growth and diminishing our fruitfulness. You may have a
sense of what it is in your life that needs to be pruned. As a congregation we,
too, need from time to time to assess what is essential to our being church and
what is extraneousness. That kind of discernment can only be done well when it
is done with love, listening, and prayer. And even as a society, we go through
seasons of growth and pruning, some of them quite painful but still necessary. I
5
would humbly suggest that part of what is gripping, and tearing at our national
life right now, is (in part) the long overdue pruning of our systemic racism. It is not
easy. It requires tolerating some discomfort, like looking at our institutions and
ourselves and examining our prejudices and our privilege. But if we as a people
and a nation are ever going to get beyond the diseased legacy of slavery and
legitimized discrimination, we are going to have to endure the removal of some
of our cherished illusions. Like the illusion that everyone begins life at the same
starting line. That our justice system is color blind, or our media are unbiased.
That we have earned our well-being and deserve our position in society, and
therefore some other people haven’t and don’t. It is more than high time to
prune those diseased assumptions as hard and as challenging as that is to do.
Pruning – whether it’s moving house, growing up, becoming emotionally
mature, or recovering from racism – is meant to take what is essentially goo and
healthy, grounded in God and fruitful – our lives, our marriages, our churches,
our country - and make them even stronger and healthier. Pruning is not
punishment. Pruning is an act of love and tender care. And I am starting to think
about beginning to be ready to take the first steps that will eventually lead to
being a leaner, stronger, purer, better me. I think that’s all Jesus is really asking.
“Abide in me,” he says, “and I’ll do the rest.”
Amen.