Year B
John 15:1-8
The Very Rev. Denise Vaughn
God’s Love Guides Our Lives
Presiding Bishop Michael Curry in his book “Love Is The Way,” asks the question: What is love? He goes on to answer that question throughout the book but in the very first chapter this caught my eye. He said “love is God’s GPS”. “The way of love will show us the right thing to do, every single time. It is moral and spiritual grounding –and a place of rest-amid the chaos that is often part of life. It’s how we stay decent in indecent times. Loving is not always easy, but like with muscles, we get stronger both with repetition and as the burden gets heavier. And it works, he says. It’s God’s GPS. I remember when I received my first Garmin back in 2006 while living in Austin, TX.
My mother bought it for me because every time I called her I would complain about how I was always getting myself lost trying to navigate that big city. I moved there to go to seminary from a rather small town that I had lived in for 40 years. At first, I was a bit intimidated with the technology and how to keep it secure on the dash of the car but after a while of using it, I began to wonder how I ever got along without it. It guided me to the right places and kept me from wasting a lot of time trying to find my destination. And it continued to guide my travels until we were able to get Map quest or google maps; GPS on our phone to guide us. God’s GPS, God’s love, can guide our lives as Easter people. Love can keep us from getting lost and show us the right way to go.
In today’s texts, we hear of how God uses love to extend the power and life of the resurrection into our lives so we can witness to the truth of God’s love, especially as that love has been declared through the empty tomb. This love of God lies at the heart of the life of faith and indeed love lies at the heart of all of life, John tells us in his epistle. All things begin in love, flow from love, are perfected through love, and return to love. Love pervades all. God is love and because God is love, we are free to reflect God’s love in our own love of God and neighbor.
John tells us that the love of God, born of God, insists that those who know and love God must love one another. Yet, it is extremely difficult to live with Jesus’s admonitions to love and John labors today to articulate how love comes into being and how God’s love inevitably leads into human love. So the million dollar question is how do we learn this way of love and how to love? Many would probably answer these questions by appealing to the family setting as the primary way love is experienced, modeled, and nurtured-even if all too often families fail to accomplish this task adequately.
Others might answer these questions by having us look at the larger society as the way in which attitudes toward love are shaped and lessons learned-personally along with others I would find this way of learning about love as highly inadequate. The answer John offers is quite clear: Love comes from God. God’s love is given to us in the person of Jesus, the Son of God. God sent the Son, a person, as the word of love, the sign of love; the living love of God given to us. So if, God loves us enough to send us himself in Jesus, then we ought to be able to love one another so that we might live through him and abide in the true vine.
“I am the true vine, and my Father is the vine grower, Jesus tells us today in the gospel.” Using a metaphor from nature, to help us understand who we are and how we are to live, Jesus gives us a wonderful picture of what it means to be a disciple: one that is rooted into the main vine which sustains and nurtures all the diverse, going-off-in-all-directions branches. Like a vine extending life to its branches, God extends the power and life of the resurrection into those who remain connected to Jesus. In so far as we abide in him and he in us, we will bear much fruit; in so far as we do not, we will be absolutely ineffective.
The best grapes in the vineyard are produced closest to the central vine. This is where the nutrients are the most concentrated. The lateral branches are pruned and kept short. So in order to be part of the life giving love we have received from God we have to be connected as close as we can to the central vine, Jesus. And as long as we the branches abide in Jesus, God’s love, we will witness to this love in word and deed. Our witness is that “you will bear much fruit” and become disciples, and in this God is glorified.
Yet, what precisely is the fruit we are to bear? Is it simply a matter of a love, or charity to be exercised within the church or outside of the church of which we have numerous examples given to us in the New Testament writings? Is it the care of the poor, the sick, the prisoner, the orphan, the widow, and the elderly? Is it a life of public works or missionary activity? Does it include the securing of goods to share with others? However, we seek to answer these questions we find our starting point Jesus says in the love commandment. Our lives begin in love, “as the Father has loved me, so I have loved you” and is carried out in love “that you love one another as I have loved you.”
This love command from Jesus when we seek to live it, keeps us from being inward turned and selfish or pruned. Our challenge is to stay connected to the vine so we are able to produce fruits in works of love. This has always been the challenge, we, and the church have faced through the generations; the challenge to be witnesses to the ends of the earth. Luke, in the book Acts of the Apostles, gives us a picture of this march of the gospel from Jerusalem, through Judea, into Samaria, and, today with the story of Philip, to Africa.
Philip, being directed by the Holy Spirit brings the good news to an Ethiopian a Gentile outsider. It is Philips connectedness to the vine that enables him to listen and recognize God’s leading and to act in the power of the Spirit, thereby bringing this man into the life-giving membership of God’s family through baptism. God uses Philip to extend the power of Jesus’ resurrection into North Africa. We will find, as we prayerfully listen to God, that God will use us as partners of the risen Jesus to extend the power of Jesus’ resurrection into our broken and hurting world.
Love comes as both an obligation and a gift, a gift given to us so that we can give. But directions about what to give and where to give begin in studying the Word of God and by listening to the Spirit of the risen Jesus. We must listen, and love as we are instructed. It may not be simple, but it is our highest obligation and deepest joy. Presiding Bishop Michael Curry says in his book, “The more we listen to love-let it guide us through life-the faster we find that sweet spot, that intersection where our deep gladness and the world’s hunger meet and walk the path of love together.” Love is God’s GPS leading us in the right direction and it is only as the living Jesus lives with us and we in him that through us his love spills out into the world.
John Bell and Graham Maule in their choral piece ‘I am the Vine,’ brings out the words of Jesus today in these verses: “For on your own, what can you dare? Left to yourself no sap you share. Branches that serve their own desire find themselves broken as fuel for fire. I am the Vine and you the branches, pruned and prepared for all to see; chosen to bear the fruit of heaven if you remain and trust in me.” The living Jesus, the vine that nurtures and prunes, is our ultimate hope and the hope of the whole world.