Jesus is...the true vine

How many of you have sent your kids off to college?  Do you remember that day where you unloaded all their things, maybe went to lunch, and spent a little time together before you got back on the road?  I don’t know that it’s universal, but for a lot of parents, there’s this pressure to make sure you reiterate all the most important lessons you’ve ever taught your child over the years.  You’ve spent years trying to teach them and raise them in the proper way.  You want them to be a good human being with kindness and compassion for others.  You want them to be intelligent, studious and successful and do well in school, especially if you’re footing the bill.  You want them to have fun and enjoy life, though hopefully not too much as they’re on their own for the first time.  And you’re scared to death that everything you’ve ever taught them will fly out of their brain the moment you walk out the door.  You won’t be there to caution them.  You won’t be there to help them out in a jam. You won’t be there to teach them and mold them.  Of course there’s cell phones and internet but we all know it’s not the same. It’s no where near the same as when they’re living in your house, supposedly following your rules.  So as you spend your last meal together before you go, you run through all the wisdom you have in your head.  You give tips and pointers for every possible scenario, at least all those you can cram into an hour of time.  You talk about eating well, getting good rest, going to class, being a good student, making friends, being a friend to those who are loners, being kind, being honest, helping someone who is having trouble, working hard. When in doubt, don’t do it.  Just remember where you came from and who you are. Be who you are.  Remember that and you’ll be fine.  As many topics as you might cover, it always feels like you’re missing something.  But you do you best to remind them of all the most important things they’ll need to know to be successful out on their own. 

          Now, if we look at our scripture for today, in essence, Jesus is giving his last minute pep talk to the disciples.  I don’t mean to trivialize it, but Jesus is talking to his disciples just hours before the crucifixion and he wants them to remember all that they have learned together.  They have already shared in the foot washing at the Passover meal and he has been reminding them of various lessons and emphasizing the things he wants them to know.  His death is imminent and his need to share what really matters is growing stronger.  Jesus and the 12 disciples have been together for 3 years. They have worked together, laughed together. I’m sure they've vented and even cried together.  They have built a strong repor of trust and Jesus knows he won’t be there with them forever.  He anticipates the resurrection, but even still his days are numbered and he wants them to have all they need…to be ready for the next thing. 

          So he tells them he is the vine, he is the source of who they have become and if they want to be strong, if they want to stay steadfast in God’s ways and the things Jesus has taught them, then they need to stay close to his teaching. They need to remain close to all that he has taught them.  If they do that, then they will be fruitful.  If they do that God will be glorified.  They just need to stay true to what Jesus has taught them.  Simple enough—remain in me and I will remain in you. 

          Now this teaching isn’t universal, it’s not a message to the masses, it’s a message to his disciples, to those who have chosen to follow him and be in ministry with him.  So when we look at what it means to us today we can’t apply it universally, it’s not a message for the anonymous bystanders, it’s a message for those of us who have chosen to follow Jesus and be in ministry with him.  But for us, for disciples…those who choose to follow Christ, the same truth remains—for us to stay close to Jesus and be fruitful, for us to glorify God, we have to stay connected to his teachings.  We have to do what he has taught us.  We have to live the lessons of faith that we gather on Sunday mornings and in our small groups. 

          Now that’s easy to say, but tough to do.  Jesus says, remain in me—stay close and steadfast—he doesn’t say, come back occasionally, but STAY with me.  To become like Christ, to be fruitful and to really glorify God, it’s not a once in a while, as needed, kind of thing.  It’s a round-the-clock all the time commitment. 

          We have to choose to do the things Christ has taught us:

•     to love our neighbor as ourself

•     to pray for those who persecute us

•     to include the marginalized and the outcast

•     to give selflessly

•     to be generous

•     to be compassionate

•     to extend grace

•     to be humble

•     to be faithful to God’s teaching

•     to follow the 10 commandments

          And we have to do them over and over again.  That means biting our tongue when we are angry, it means caring for the homeless man we pass on the street. It means offering help to strangers, even when it may inconvenience us. It means being forgiving even when we’ve been hurt by a friend or family member.  It means all kinds of things in our daily life where we choose to embody the love of Christ in who we are and what we do. 

          And, to really live this lesson, there’s one more thing…we have to allow that which doesn’t bear the fruit of the Spirit…the fruits of love, joy peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control….to be pruned.  If it isn’t making us more like Christ, if it isn’t glorifying God, then it needs to be pruned.  Following Christ and living his teachings isn’t just about what we add in…it’s also very much about what we cut out.  We have to submit to pruning that which is

•     greedy

•     selfish

•     prideful

•     lustful

•     vengeful

•     mean spirited

•     hard hearted

•     exclusive

•     destructive

•     tempermental

•      judgmental

•      unforgiving

•      

          If we really want to be like Christ, those things have got to go.  Now, it’d be nice if we could just make a cut and be done. But more often than not, our bad habits run deep and we have to cut them often, and repeatedly.  We have to continuously give ourselves over to Jesus as we learn to be more like him.  We have to practice his actions until they become natural and engrained in us.  And when we notice the ugly stuff…the fruitless habits that don’t give God glory starting to take root in us, we start pruning all over again. 

Jesus is....the Good Shepherd

 When I was in high school, I had an English teacher who was pretty fierce.  Her nickname, which she bore gladly, was “Evil Woman.”  She wasn’t really evil, we happen to still be close today. But she was a strict teacher and she didn’t cut any corners for her students.  In writing, she would regularly tell us, “Show don’t tell.”  She wanted us to use descriptions to convey our point, not just statements of fact.  People believe stories. They are compelled by illustrations.  Words are just words until they come alive. 

So when someone asks the question, “What is Jesus like?” We could tell them…he is kind, he is loving, he is inclusive, he is generous, he is humble, he is devoted.  Or we could show them…he is the bread of life.  He is the light of the world. He is the good shepherd.  The titles help us remember, but the stories show us who Jesus was. 

This story of the good shepherd shows us quite a lot about the nature of Jesus.  This story tells us Jesus is the shepherd and the gate. He is the one who tends the flock, and the one who lets them into a safe place for rest and protection.  Jesus is the protector, the caregiver, and the provider.  He comes to us to protect us from harm, to shield us from danger, and to care for us in all of our needs.  And where others would cut and run, he’d risk anything fighting for us because our lives matter even more than his.  That’s the nature of Jesus. 

So the bigger question becomes—why does he do it?  Verse 10 tells us, “I have come that they may have life and have it abundantly.” Jesus watches over us and cares for us not so he can profit and gain but so we can—so that we might have life and have it abundantly. The purpose of his existence, the value of his sacrifice is not for his sake, but for ours. 

He doesn’t want us to simply live, he wants us to flourish. He doesn’t want us just getting by—he wants us to be successful and fruitful.  We’re on board with that, right? So how do we get from here to there? How do we get from the mess that life offers to the abundance Jesus died for? 

We seek after him. He is the good shepherd—that means we have to follow him.  We have to heed his voice and follow his instructions. We have to go with him.  You see the shepherd can’t protect us if we refused to be near him.  We have to choose to follow the shepherd and let him lead in our lives. 

The benefit is when we are near, he cares for us, he comforts us.  A lot of people wonder how they are going to get through a particular trial or struggle. And the cliché answer is to draw close to Jesus.  But, the truth is, if we understand the nature of Jesus as good shepherd, we’d know that it’s not just a cliché, but that drawing near to him would give us peace and assurance. His voice is reassuring. He takes away our fears.  He holds us close to protect us.  I don’t mean to sound overly simplistic or like I’m throwing platitudes at you.  But I’ve experienced the peace and comfort of Christ and it’s worth having.  I’ve had a lot of moments where I was scared to death and the thing that has always helped me is prayer.  Now, I can’t explain why or how prayer works, I only know that it does.  And I know that in the scariest moment of my life, when I was rushed into an OR because Ruth was at risk when I was pregnant and they performed an emergency c-section, I needed prayer. I was petrified.  It was one of the worst experiences of my life. And I was so scared.  Rick was out of the room and the doctors were there doing 100 things to me to get me ready for surgery and I didn’t understand it all and I couldn’t control any of it, and I was scared.  I was given the meds and put on oxygen so I couldn’t talk even when Rick was allowed in.  Fear just took over.  When she came she was purple and the NICU team was already there to work on her.  There was just more fear.  It was awful and I couldn’t name it in the midst of the chaos, but afterward I knew, if that ever happens again, just pray with me.  Just say the Lord’s prayer and pray with me.  Sing the old hymns and pray with me.  There is comfort there. There is something familiar that draws me into the presence and power of God in a way that nothing else can. 

Now, there are other ways to draw close to Jesus.  Different ways will work better for different people.   We can go to him—in worship, in study to get familiar with his voice, in spending time with others who are near to him, in being in nature,  in giving to others, through music—through any of the means of grace.  And in him we can find solace and refuge from the stress and struggle of life. 

Now there are others who aren’t so invested in our welfare. Actually, they’d much rather profit from our struggles than help us through them.  They’re out to steal our joy, our strength, and our peace.  Those are the bandits. Now, they may not have a name, but they’re out there.  Bandits may be people, or they may be situations. They may be stressors, or temptations, or distractions.  They take our attention and draw us away from the shepherd. 

Remember, the bandits, whoever they may be in each of our lives, only seek to steal, kill, and destroy.  Their goal is not to build us up.  They want what’s ours. And the easiest way to get us to let it go is to convince us we don’t deserve it in the first place.  The bandits in life will denigrate us so we wouldn’t even dare believe, let alone trust, that someone like Jesus really cares about us and would do anything for us.  The bandits tell us we’re useless and worthless. They tell us we’re lazy, stupid, hopeless, and ignorant. They call us failures before we even try. They tell us we are unworthy, undeserving, and unimportant.  And most of us buy it.  Not all the words at once. We don’t have to believe it all. We just have to believe one or two for the bandits to gain power.  And unfortunately, we believe them.  We aren’t good enough, smart enough, thin enough, successful enough—we just plain don’t measure up—or so says the bandit. 

But the shepherd says something very different. He says we’re precious, important, and valuable.  We like those words, but after we’ve bought into all the other stuff, they just wash right over us. But the good shepherd tells us to stop and listen—he has a truth for us and the truth is we are so important, so incredibly valuable that there isn’t anything he wouldn’t try and do to help us and protect us.  He tells us over and over and over again:

You are worthy.

You are important.

You are beloved.

You are enough.

And as we seek after him, we have to let the other words go. We have to let Jesus’ truth speak into our lives.  We have to stop confusing his voice with other voices and their lies with his truth. We have to claim his truth for ourselves:

I am worthy.

I am important. 

I am beloved.

I am smart enough.

I am successful.

I am enough.

Remember the shepherd came and does what he does SO THAT you might have life and have it abundantly.  The question is will you choose to follow him and claim his truth for yourself? 

Jesus is...the Light of the World

This scripture tells us that Jesus is at the Feast of Tabernacles, also known as the Feast of Booths or Sukkot.  It was the 7-day Jewish holiday celebrated in the Fall that commemorated God’s care of Israel for the 40 years they were in the desert.  It was in those years that the people lived in sukka—temporary shelters or booths. And so each year, they would build these shelters again and stay in them for a week during the festival.  Now, in many ways it’s interesting that they would celebrate much of anything from the 40 years in the wilderness.  Those were not exactly the favorite years.  They were hard and tough with a lot of fussing and whining and wishing they could go back to Egypt.  And yet, every year after they arrived in the Promised Land, they gathered to remember where they had been and celebrate what God had done. 

In some ways I might call it the feast of looking back and giving thanks.  The festival elicited that from people.  But the booths—the tabernacles, made them look back in specific ways to see all that God had done since.  Because it wasn’t just getting them out of Egypt or seeing them through the wilderness, it was all that God had done since too—they could look at the land they had, the crops they raised, the homes they had built, the schools they’d constructed and all they’d become, and they could see God at work. 

The closest parallel I know of is project Chacocente.  When you’re there with the people they tell their stories and they talk about moving out of the dumps and how hard it was to transition to a new way of life.  They had to change how they related to others, how they earned money, how they structured their day, what they ate—almost everything was different. And I can imagine there were many days they felt like they were in the spiritual wilderness.  Some days they wanted to go back to the dumps.  That may seem hard for us to imagine, but for them, it was familiar and much easier than this entirely new life.  But they clung to the hope that what God had offered would be better. They persisted and have come so far.  Each family now owns their 2.6 acres outright with their home. They have a community well. They have electricity. They have the school. And each year something new happens and there’s something else to celebrate. 

If project Chacocente celebrated their own feast of Tabernacles they would invite sharing about what they went through and how hard it was AND how they persisted, how others came alongside to make this dream real—and together they would see all that God had done.

 That’s what the Jews did at sukkot—they remembered and marked time together and they celebrated all God had done among them.  Each night, they would light candles and then sing and dance together.  The candles represented the presence of God that had seen them through the trials and the darkness. 

And it was there, that Jesus taught and there he said, my words are not my own. It was there that Jesus said his words point back to God because God’s message is his message and his words are God’s words.  It was there that Jesus showed grace and pardoned the woman caught in adultery. And it was there, a few days into the festival, that Jesus said he was the light of the world.

In the midst of all the candles, all the lights that reveal how much God was with them over the years, Jesus claimed to be that light--the real light, the light that cannot be extinguished, the light of the world. 

So what does it mean to have that light in our lives?  Well, let’s go back to the story of the Israelites and their years in the desert. After the fact, they celebrated God, but in the midst of it, they struggled.  They struggled to find hope, and purpose and meaning. They knew they were on a journey, they knew that God had promised them something great, but they also knew that where they were was impossibly hard.  They were always on the move, they didn’t have a home.  They had a routine, but not one of living and relaxing and enjoying, but one of searching, wandering and seeking.  The years in the wilderness were unsettled.  They challenged their faith, their hope, and their trust in God’s provision and God’s promise for the future.  Those years are often related to years in darkness. Not because the sun was extinguished or hidden, but because they struggled to find their way, and to see what was in the distant future.

I’d venture that most of us have wandered in the darkness a time or two…literally and figuratively.  Our literal wandering helps us understand our spiritual wandering a bit better.  Imagine the darkness, even of your own home.  What happens in the darkness?  It’s hard to see.  The world becomes black and white and gray.  Often we stumble on an obstacle we didn’t know was there or didn’t remember we had moved.  And in the darkness of a new place, we struggle even more.  We aren’t familiar with where to go or how far it is from point A to point B, and often, we might become fearful, because not only can we not see what is there, we can also readily imagine what isn’t there.  Imagine a young child in a new dark place. They are often fearful, wanting extra lights on, and often calling out for help and protection.  Different sounds, or the reflection off an object catch them off guard and they aren’t fully sure what to make of them. And so we imagine all the awful things it could be.  To minimize a child’s fear, or even our own, we add a little light…maybe a night light, maybe a bathroom light, or a stove light. Or maybe we keep a flashlight with us. Whatever the source, we use light to help us navigate and to help us fear a little more secure. 

In a similar way, most of us have wandered in spiritual darkness.  In the wilderness of life, we struggle to see what’s around us. We don’t know how far it is from point A to point B.  We go slowly and cautiously, not sure of the obstacles and fearful of the dangers.  And to help us navigate and minimize our fears, we add a little light—the light of hope, the light of promise, the light of Christ, that helps us to see a little bit more of what surrounds us, and a little bit further down the path, and it chases away the shadows of fear that might plague us. 

Growing up, I don’t really remember being afraid of the dark—not specifically or in general.  But I do remember fearing at night that there was someone lurking in our dining room.  The layout of our house was that there was a hallway with 3 bedrooms and one bathroom at the back of the house. And at the front end of the hallway was the family room on one side and the dining room on the other.  In essence you could walk from one room to the other or you could go down the hall.  And at night, we turned out the lights, as you might expect.  And any night that I woke up, I would stand at my bedroom door and peer out to see if someone was at the end of the hall in the dining room and then race to the bathroom and close the door.  When I was done, I’d open the door and check again and race back to bed.  Now, there was never anyone lurking, nor had there ever been—it was all in my head.  But for years I ran from my fear.  Now, there are two bits of insanity to that story…the first is I have no idea what running down the hall would have spared me if there actually had been someone in the dining room, but the other thing is there was a light switch right next to my bedroom door…I easily could have flipped the switch and seen more than shadows and reflections and been at peace walking to and from the bathroom.  But instead, I chose to stay in the darkness and be bound by fear. 

As I’ve grown older, I’ve grown out of such fears and become much more pragmatic…if I can’t see in the dark, I turn on a light. It’s amazing how simple it is—at least in concrete terms.  But I haven’t always been so mature with my spiritual life.  I’ve found myself in darkness on more than a few occasions. And much like I did as a child, I look out and imagine all the awful things that might be there.  I run and my heart races and I’m plagued with fears.  I create a false sense of security against my imagined boogeymen.  And what I fail to realize there, just as I did as a child, was how easy it would be to shine the light on my path. I could ask for the light of the world to illuminate my path and take away my fears, but all too often, I’ve stayed bound by my fear and imagination. 

How many of us do that?  We find ourselves in a dark and scary place and instead of doing the most pragmatic thing—asking for light, we run in fear of what could be, not even what is, but what we imagine might be there lurking.  Jesus is the light. He is the one that helps us to see the path, but also the one who takes our fears and gives us greater confidence to take the next step.  When we look back on our journey and remember what we’ve been through, the places of light and hope come from Christ.  He is the light of the world. 

And when we struggle in the darkness, when we wander through the wilderness, we aren’t banished to fear and struggle, we are invited to call on the light of the world to shine on our path and help us see, to give us hope for what lies ahead, and to take away our fears—both real and imagined.