Spiritual Viticulture

5 Easter  B         May 6, 2012

Acts 8:26-40 Psalm 22:24-30
1 John 4:7-21  John 15:1-8

Lectionary Link 

 What do you think about the metaphors found in the Gospel of John?  Last week, we read that Jesus is the Good Shepherd and that we are sheep.

 And this week we get bumped down in metaphors from the animal and human kingdom into the plant kingdom.

  This week Jesus is the Vine and we are branches.

  Sheep and branches; how are the metaphors of the Gospel of John working for you?  What we learn about metaphors is that they cannot represent  complete one to one correspondence, they have their limitation and so one has to simply get the insights and move on.

  There is something wonderful about nature metaphors.  They leave lots of room for probabilities and they honor organic processes in life.  Sometime all we can do is to represent the mystery of the unknowable with a nature metaphor.

   The discourse on the Vine and the branches include the age old subject matter of nature versus nurture or nature and nurture.

  What is the telling factor in have a great yield in agriculture?  Is it the hybrid of seed or plant or is it the environment and the type of environmental controls performed by the gardener?  And what about unpredictable timing of climatic events such as rain, storms, wind, drought or insect or other animal pests?

  A gardener, a vine grower will try to exert controls and factor in responses to probable ranges of occurrences in order to maximize the yield of the crop.  The goal is the get as much fruit as possible, but just not quantity of fruit, quality fruit as well.

  The Vine and branch metaphor is descriptive of the organic process in application to the life of human behaviors.  What is the goal for human behavior?  What are the metrics of success in human behavior?  Different vocations have different metrics of success.

  The Gospel of John is a book dedicated to spiritual transformation and so the excellent fruit desired in the spiritual life are the fruits of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, goodness, meekness, self-control and faith.

  We have in this model of spiritual life some insights for how we deal with all of the things over which we had no choice.  We did not choose our parents, nor our genetic natures.   We did not choose the communities where we were raised.  We had very little control over many aspects of the environment of our lives.  We were "thrown" into life situations.  We depended upon mentors to give us our bearing within the situations within which we were "thrown."  We could not choose all of our mentors or peers.  We did not always have perfect or even adequate mentors or peers.  And we may have had excellent mentors or peers but who were too fearful to let us learn from our own mistakes.

  The Vine and Branch metaphor provides us some insights about understanding our lives in a way that we can take a degree of authorial action, no matter how many things in our lives that we did not have an initial choice about.

  The secret of the Vine and Branch discourse is the insight about finding within ourselves a very deep connectedness with the Risen Christ.  Christ is the Vine and we are the branches.  The sap of the Holy Spirit is the inner life that can course through us to energize our lives.

  The Vine and Branch discourse holds us to a very high standard.  You and I are required to find a deep Essential Spirit present within our lives which helps us to adopt and integrate all of the contingent and unpredictable things which happen to us.

  Something bad happen to us?  Some serious loss?  Some sense of personal impairment, lack or short-coming?  How can you and I come to an empowered view of our lives when we know that we are not exempt from a wide range of conditions in our lives?  How can we come to view the things which happen to us as merely the pruning actions of God so that we might be brought to better quality of life performance?  Pruning implies the pain of loss and cutting and discarding.   It takes lots of time and subsequent exercise in faith to integrate our experiences of pain, lack and loss.  Sometimes we can only know the value of pruning after there is quality of fruit.  We thin our gardens and we prune our trees even though it seems destructive to cut the branches.  Yet we know the outcome of effective pruning.

  The insight of the occurrences over which we have no control is that we can come in our lives of faith to interpret them as providential pruning for future success.  How many of us have had events which seemed like profound loss and failure when they occurred but later we have been able to look back and see that we have learned and integrated the events to excellence in the transformation of our lives.  I don't think that we go back and wish that bad things happened to us; we don't go back and say God made them happen; all we do with subsequent faith is to say, since it did happen, I did not give up and I have come to better life performance because of it.

  How can we come to integrate everything in our life through faith?  I think we have to have an experience of a quality of life beyond our nature or our nurture.   As we develop our natures, our gifts and natural abilities in interaction with our nurturing environments, we need something greater than our natural gifts or the negative or positive aspects of our environments.  We know there are people who have ideal supportive environment who end up being really poor life performers.  We know that there are people who are challenged by nature and by their environments who end up with seeming heroic outcomes.  What is the secret to dancing well with all of the probabilities in our lives that make up our nature and our environments?

   I believe the secret is finding the "God-aspect" of our nature, the deep place within us which is the intersection with  the image God in our life.   It is Holy Spirit life; it is the Risen Christ life, it is the experience of knowing we have a Spiritual nature beyond our human nature which enables us to resist the over-determination of our human nature and the unhelpful influences within our environment.

  Let us ask ourselves what are a factors which inform our human natures today and the imprint which we have received in our environments of nurture?  In the midst of all of the probabilities of our lives, have we been able to find this inner sap of a deeper life which has given us the ability to produce the good fruit of excellent life performance?

Well, not yet, because  we are still called to even better life performance.

  But let us get over our life pity parties.  Woe is me, I'm not 7 foot and I can't play center in the NBA.  Woe is me.  I was born at the wrong place in the wrong time to the wrong people.  I did not have the adequate opportunities in life to excel.  Woe is me, I was born as the wrong person to live with the wrong people.  We can really get into self-pity by viewing our lives as having been over-determined by things that we did not have choice or control over.

  How do we get over this pity?  By the discovery of our deep, deep identity with Nature of God's Presence within us as the Holy Spirit.  And then from the energy of the Spirit we forgive the world and all in it for not being omni-competent to our needs and we arise to reinterpret our seeming pitiful history with new insights of the providence of faith, because we came to discover our true identities as sons and daughters of God.

  Once we discover the determining power of being sons and daughters of God, our standards of success and excellence will change.  We may no longer regard being wealthy to be the highest standard of success, we may cherish just having a contented peaceful and gentle heart able to sleep restfully at night.  We may savor friendships, joys, beauty and generosity as defining truly successful and fruitful lives.

  The Vine and Branch metaphor insight is an invitation for each us to find the deep life of God's Spirit coursing within us and when that happens we will find that we will redefine success in life as love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, goodness and faith.

  And to manifest these fruitful virtues is truly the successful life.  Amen.