John 15:1-11
The Things That Spark Joy
James Sledge October
25, 2020
 |
| The True Vine, Adam Cope, 2010 |
This method involves gathering all your belongings together, one category at a time. For example, you might start with your clothes or books or mementos. You go through each item in the category and discard any to do not “spark joy.”
Regardless of whether or not you plan to do some decluttering, what are the things that spark joy for you? Joy strikes me as something deeper, more profound than happiness, and in John’s gospel, Jesus speaks repeatedly about joy during his final evening with the disciples. We heard a couple of those in the last verse of our reading this morning. “I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.”
I have said these things… These things must be what we should hold onto in order to have Jesus’ joy within us. So what are these things? No doubt they include some things we didn’t hear this morning about Jesus’ oneness with the Father and the promise of the Holy Spirit. But our reading gives some specific instructions. We are to abide in Jesus, bear fruit, become disciples, and keep Jesus’ commandments. Jesus tells us these things so that his joy will be in us and our joy will be full, complete.
That brings me back to the question of what brings you joy. Despite the popularity of Marie Kondo and the idea of decluttering, our culture works very hard to convince us that happiness, joy, and fulfillment come from acquisition. We need bigger, better, and fancier, more excitement, more power, more status, more, more, more. But Jesus speaks becoming disciples and obeying him, of being branches, bearing fruit, and being pruned so we bear more fruit.
I’ve told the story before of the one and only time I ever pruned grapevines. The vines were at my grandparent’s house, and I had eaten grapes from them and helped make jelly from those grapes when I was a child. But when I grew older, there were no more grapes.
When my elder daughter was little, I recalled those grapes, thinking it would be nice for her to enjoy them, maybe even make some jelly. I asked my grandfather about the grapevines. Had they simply gotten old and quit producing? “No, they are fine,” he said. It was just that he had not kept up with pruning them as he had gotten older and developed health problems. If I wanted to pick grapes and make jelly, we would need to prune them in early spring.
And so when the time came, my grandfather sat in a chair, directing my work. He could not see very well, but he soon realized that I wasn’t being nearly aggressive enough. “You’ve got to cut them back hard,” he said. “You need to get rid of all that growth from last year, cutting it back until there’s not much more than the main vines left.”
That seemed harsh. I would be cutting off a lot of healthy looking vines, but with his encouragement, I cut more and more, ending up with rather naked looking main vines. I wondered if I might have damaged them, but before long, those vines began to put out shoots which became branches, gradually filling the wire supports. Then the grapes began to form.Later that year my daughter and I picked grapes and, with my grandmother’s help, made jelly.
For many years those vines had spread and covered the wire supports with healthy looking, leaf filled branches, but no grapes. The vines had seemed to flourish, but they did not do what they were meant to do, bear fruit.
I recently ran across this quote from C.
S. Lewis. “It is no disparagement to the
garden to say it will not fence and weed itself, nor prune its own fruit trees,
nor roll and cut its own lawns...It will remain a garden only if someone does
all these things to it.”[1]
_________________________________________________________________________________
In modern times, Christianity has been turned into a belief system. Obviously there are certain things that Christians must believe. We need to believe that God loves us and wants what’s best for us, that Jesus shows us the depths of God’s love and how to live life as it is meant to be lived. But the faith we are called to is something much deeper than believing in Jesus. It is trusting Jesus to be our Lord and Master, doing as he says, following as disciples, discovering true, abundant, joyful life by abiding in him and bearing much fruit.
We are called to trust that we are incomplete without being connected to Jesus, and that God must work on us, like a gardener pulling weeds or a vineyard worker who prunes the vines so that we can bear the fruit we are meant to bear.
Belief systems are neat and tidy. They are manageable and can made to fit into whatever sort of life we choose to live. Christian faith that is only a belief system is religious window dressing, veneer tacked onto lives shaped mostly by systems of acquisition and production, of constant busyness and competition, of relentless worry and anxiety that we are not good enough, rich enough, educated enough, entertained enough, pretty enough, accomplished enough, important enough, and on and on and on. Such lives never have enough time, enough energy, enough money to keep up, and adding a bit of religion or spirituality simply adds one more thing to the already overwhelming mix.
But Jesus does not ask us to add a little religion to our lives. He invites us to discover completely new lives, reshaped and transformed in him. Such lives are deeply rooted in Jesus and focused on bearing fruit. That requires pruning, paring away some things so that we are better able to bear fruit.
Are we branches, joined together in community, abiding in Jesus and pruned by God so we can be disciples who bear much fruit? Stewardship season may provide a helpful measuring stick for answering such questions. I know, stewardship is often just church speak for institutional fund raising. We talk about it for a month or so, ask everyone to tell us their giving plans for the coming year, then come up with a budget based on the results. Sometimes I wonder why we don’t just call it “Fundraising Season.”
But genuine stewardship is about faithfulness, about how we are utilizing God’s gifts of life, creation, time, money, and more. Are we using them in ways that help us fulfill our true purpose? Or have we bought into the false narratives of consumerism, individualism, and scarcity where we must out compete neighbor so we will be good enough, rich enough, important enough, and so on? If stewardship for us is about how much money we can bear to part with to keep the church running, about the time and energy we can spare from the other, more important parts of our lives, if stewardship for us is nothing joyful but a painful process of letting go of things we’d rather keep for ourselves, we have our answer.
Jesus says that abiding in him, becoming his disciples, obeying him, being pruned and bearing much fruit will lead us into deep joy, will make our joy complete and full. But Jesus’ call is, and has always been, profoundly counter-cultural. That call insists that much we have learned from our culture, from the world, and even from institutional religion about what will make us happy, joyful, and fulfilled is simply wrong. It insists that we will find our true purpose, deep joy, and abundant life through the strange ways Jesus shows us. Dare we trust that the things he tells us are true and will make our joy complete?
No comments:
Post a Comment