Sunday, April 28, 2024, Fifth Sunday of Easter

“Life After Easter: “A Fruitful Vineyard”

Psalm 150; Acts 8:26-40; 1 John 4:1-11; John 15:1-8

Service of Prayer and Preaching, p. 260

Hymns: #474 “Alleluia! Jesus Is Risen”; #525 “Crown Him with Many Crowns”; #903 “This Is the Day the Lord Has Made”; #463 “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today; Alleluia”

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ, 

     Grace, mercy, and peace to you, from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus.

     Have you got your garden started yet? It’s a little early yet, I know. Maybe you’ve got your plants started indoors. Gardening is fun, and good exercise for the body and the spirit, but it also takes a bit of work. I do all my gardening in planter boxes these days – easier on the knees and back – but isn’t all the work worth it for the fruit of your labors? Fresh tomatoes, cucumbers, beans, peas and summer squash, apples and peaches and berries and beautiful flowers… Can tell I’ve got gardening fever?

     Our Lord, the good Word tells us, is a gardener Himself. This world we live in is His garden; and our Father, in His very powerful spiritual way, is going about the work of plowing, planting, weeding, and watering in this place, working for the hope and promise of enjoying good fruit when the time for harvest comes. What, biblically speaking, is the spiritual fruit our Lord is asking for? John the Baptist calls to the people in Matthew 3 to “produce fruit in keeping with repentance.” St. Paul says in Galatians 5, “The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.” And Paul says in Ephesians 5, “The fruit of the light consists in all goodness, righteousness and truth.” And the writer of Hebrews says, “Let us continually offer to God a sacrifice of praise--the fruit of lips that confess His name.”

     The fruit God our Father is looking for, and working for, is saving faith in Jesus Christ, His Son. Jesus is the source of saving faith, the “planted vine” our Gospel talks about. And by the grace of God, faith has now come to be planted in us – “faith comes by hearing” – and that faith, by the grace of God, is now growing in us, and producing more faith, reproducing itself - as the Word we speak in other people’s ears plants faith in them. That’s how life goes on in this garden of God. That’s how God’s vineyard kingdom grows. May we all grow in faith and bear good fruit for God!

     Jesus says in our Gospel, "I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener.” The Father is the tiller of the soil, the worker of the ground, the one who plows and sows and waters and tends the garden of the earth. And Jesus is the True Vine. He’s the perfect seed God has planted in this very broken world. The world has become overgrown with the awful weeds of sin. St. Paul writes in Gal. 5: “The acts of the sinful nature are obvious: sexual immorality, impurity, and debauchery; idolatry and witchcraft; hatred, discord, and jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions, and envy; drunkenness and orgies and the like. I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God.” Hatred and meanness and cruelty, violence and war, sadness and sorrow and death, are the fruits that sin produces. Look at the world around you, and you’ll see that it’s so.

    The Father planted Jesus in this world - conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the virgin Mary - to be the Vine, our connection to Heaven, the source of everything loving and holy and good in the world. If this world is going to have love and hope and mercy in it, Jesus is the only hope we’ll ever have of finding it or knowing what it is. Without Jesus, this world, like the old country song says, would be nothing but “ground so poor the grass won’t grow.” Our heavenly Father wants good fruit from His world - love and joy and peace and people that care for one another. He wants us to have the joy of sharing all those loving “fruits of the Spirit”. But to have those things, we have to be “connected to the Vine;” that is, to be connected to Jesus and clinging to Him in faith. He alone can bless us with the holy water, the sweet Sacramental wine of grace, that will bring us to saving faith and keep us in it, and help us to live lives that will bear good fruit for God.

    So God the Gardener, says Jesus, does what gardeners do. “He cuts off every branch in Me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit He prunes so that it will be even more fruitful.” If you know just a little about growing grapes, you know the dead branches and non-fruit-bearing branches have to be removed. Pruning the dead and unproductive branches means more water and more nutrients will be available for the branches that will bear fruit. 

    I don’t know a lot about grapes, but a do know something about tomatoes. I know you have to clip off the suckers, those little side branches on the stem that nothing will grow on, so the water and fertilizer and such will go to the branches that grow the big ol’ tomaters I’m looking for. If I’m wasting my life’s time and energy on things that won’t help me grow in faith, God in His wisdom will prune them out of me (ouch!) If our Church is wasting time or resources on things that aren’t growing God’s Kingdom and bringing people to Christ, we need to “cut it out.” God’s purpose for us isn’t to grow a pretty plant that’s otherwise unproductive, one that only takes us space and “uses up the soil”, no matter how beautiful it is. God, good farmer that He is, wants produce from us. Being willing to be pruned means being willing to listen if God says some dead branch in us has got to go, for the sake of something better that could be.

    You’ve already been made clean, Jesus tells His disciples, by the Word you’ve heard and come to believe. You’ve been washed in Baptismal water and you’re living in grace, thanks be to God. But still, there’s so much more to be done. “Pray for the Lord of the harvest to send more workers into His harvest field,” Jesus says. “My Father’s will is that you bear much fruit, fruit that will last.” You have faith, and that’s a wonderful thing; now what will your faith produce? Bearing fruit for God is the real joy of being part of His Church and His Kingdom.

    So, “Remain in Me, and I will remain in you,” Jesus says. “No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in Me.”

A better translation of that word “remain” is the good old-fashioned word “Abide.” “Abide in me, and I will abide in you,” Jesus says. To abide means to stay, to be resolute, to be steadfast, not just to stay for a day or two, but to stay and stay and stay forever. 

    If a deer or rabbit or squirrel should chew through the stem on your tomato plant (grrrrrr), there will be no water brought up from the soil, no food for the leaves or buds or flowers, and no tasty tomatoes from that plant. And your life will bear no fruit unless you remain, and abide, and stay and stay and stay in Jesus. That means spending time in the Word and time in prayer. It means spending Sundays in worship, and receiving the Sacrament as often as you’re able. If you make it a point to “feed on Jesus” at every opportunity, I promise you will NEVER backslide or fall away from Him. If there’s a secret to living the Christian life, that’s it. 

    St. Paul once wrote to the Corinthian Church about how they’ve been neglecting and misusing the Sacrament and not counting it as important; and he told them, “That is why some of you are sick, and some of you have fallen asleep.” And that, honestly, is why the world is in the shape it’s in, and why the Church in the world seems to have so little power. There’s too many of us not attached to the Vine.

    Jesus says, “I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in Me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from Me you can do nothing.” It’s obvious now, isn’t it? Jesus is the vine, and we’re blessed by God’s grace to be part of Him. And so long as we make it the work and the joy of our lives to stay with Him (which also means to be obedient to Him, listen to Him, and do what He says), then our lives will be fruitful, and our Church will be fruitful; and won’t that be beautiful and grand?

     Apart from Jesus, we can’t do anything. In fact, without Him, we’ll wither like a dried-up branch. And such branches, says Jesus – the unproductive ones – are picked up, thrown into the fire, and burned. But that will only happen if we should ever leave Him; and that we’re not going to do. So long as we abide in Him – stay and stay and stay – His promise always stands: “If you remain in Me and My words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be given you.” If you remain and abide in Me, Jesus says, and My Word stays and abides in you, then anything will be possible for you. Anything God puts in your heart to accomplish for Him, anything we put our minds to as a Church to reach that world out there for Christ, is within our reach, so long as we stay on the Vine.

    “This is to My Father's glory,” Jesus says, “that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be My disciples.” This is My Father’s purpose and My Father’s joy. This is what will make our Father in Heaven happy and what will please Him. It’s the same thing that will please any vine dresser, or gardener, or farmer; the joy is in the fruit! The fruit is the crowning joy of the harvest. I’m looking forward to that first ripe tomato, and it’s only April. I can hardly wait! Jesus says in another place, “By their fruit you will recognize them.” They’ll know we are Christians by our love, the old Gospel song says. By our faithful and courageous witness, and by “the fruit of lips that confess His name,” our neighbors will know who we are, and the world will come to know who Jesus is. Father in Heaven, let it be!

     Apostle John, the dear man, writes to us, “Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.” That’s the fruit God is looking for. Heavenly Father, help us to do this. Help us to bear good fruit for You. May our abiding faith in Jesus bear good fruit in this Kingdom of Yours. This we ask in Jesus’ name; Amen.