Sermon Cloud

ESPALIER

             I know that some of you here this morning went to the Guymon Community Theatre production of Little Shop of Horrors two weeks ago.  You’ll remember that it’s a love story about a poor boy named Seymour who works in a flower shop where he loves a shop girl named Audrey who barely notices him; that is, until he becomes famous for raising an unusual carnivorous vine with a voracious appetite for blood.  As a tribute to his secret love, he names the plant Audrey II.  As Audrey II grows, it demands more and more blood to survive, compelling Seymour to commit murder in order to keep it alive.  By the end of the story, Audrey II is sucking the life out of everything that comes in contact with it, and has cloned hundreds of Audrey II seedlings bent on consuming the world.  And this is a comedy!

            I don’t think the author of Little Shop of Horrors was thinking of the parable of the True Vine when he wrote his play, but like Seymour was an unlovable person who is loved by a vine, so too we were unlovable sinners loved by Jesus, the True Vine.  But the similarities end there:

• Where Audrey II sucks the life blood out of humans, the True Vine gave his own blood to us;
• where Audrey II kills humans to live, Jesus the True Vine dies so that humans can have eternal life;
• as Audrey II clones hundreds of seedlings to destroy the world, the True Vine sends out millions of disciples to bring salvation to the world. 

            Last week Jesus said he is the “Good Shepherd” in the sense of “Model Shepherd”, and this week by  saying he is the “True Vine” it means in the sense that “true” means “real.”  He’s the “real deal” and everything else that pretends to be the source of life is a counterfeit or an imposter that will suck the life out of you as quick as any Audrey II. 

            Do you look your work as your source of meaning and purpose in life?  Ask any retired workaholic what happened to his or her self-image when there was no longer had a job to go to, and if working that hard was a choice they’d make again.  Do you see your children as your source of fulfillment?  Ask any mother who poured her life into her children how it felt when her last child left for good.  Does your spouse define who you are?  What will you do if he or she dies first?  Do you think that money is the source of your provision and security in life?  How does it feel to you now that you only have half of what you had last fall? 

            Friends, everything I just listed is an Audrey II that will use you up and then leave you for dead.  Only making Jesus your source of life, the definition of your self-image, the source of your provision and purpose and meaning will sustain you through the trials of this life. 

            Chris and the dog and I have been gardening this week – he’s expanded the patio at the manse and built some raised beds, we’ve put in some more bushes, trees and bedding plants and the dog eats whatever he can get in his mouth.  I like to plant perennials – the kinds of plants that come up by themselves each year – because my kind of gardening is pulling out plants instead of putting them in!  We’ll spend the rest of this summer and the next few years thinning out plants that have become too crowded, so that the remaining plants will have room to grow, dead-heading flowers to encourage more blooms, and pruning trees to make them stronger when the winds and the ice storms come.

            One of the hardest lessons I’ve learned about gardening is that sometimes you have to pull out living, blooming plants in order to have a healthy garden.  It’s counter-intuitive, but all of that thinning and pruning involves pulling out or cutting off live plants, not deadwood.  When we read this parable about Jesus we get all caught up in worry about our being deadwood, branches good only to be thrown into the fire.  But Jesus says that his disciple-branches weren’t chosen to be burned up, we were chosen to bear fruit.[1]  And bearing good fruit involves pruning.

            Vines are always pruned – grapevines are cut back almost to the ground for the first year or two to prevent them from bearing fruit.  This makes the vine stronger and the fruit more abundant when the vine is finally allowed to grow.  But even then the vine isn’t allowed to just ramble around wherever, it is still pruned back, because the best fruit grows closest to the main stem of the vine itself, where the nutrients are strongest and haven’t been diluted by an overgrown branch. 

            There is a pruning technique called “espalier” (esPAHLier or esPAHLyay).  That’s when the branches of a tree or a shrub are trained along a trellis or a wall into a particular shape.  The tender shoots off the trunk are bent and pruned to limit the natural upward habit of young trees, and direct their growing energy sideways onto a system of branches trained to a trellis. This creates more places for flowers and fruit to form.  Espalier is pruning for the “long haul” because it takes about 7 years of careful bending and pruning before any fruit can be harvested.  The word “espalier” means “shoulders” and that the horizontal training of branches trains the plant into a cross.  This is a good illustration of how God the Father, though the Holy Spirit, trains us into the image of Christ so we can bear fruit for the world. 

            Besides getting caught up in which branches are going to be burned up, we also get concerned about fruit-bearing.  It usually goes something like, “Gee, I’d better take that mission trip, and this fall I’ll teach Sunday School and sing in the choir because I need to be more fruitful.”  Or “I’m not very fruitful, so I’d better get to work just to make sure I’ll make it into heaven when I die.”  Well, while fruit bearing is a mark of our salvation, it is not the way to earn salvation. 

            A significant spark of the Protestant Reformation was a protest against the Roman Catholic practice of selling “indulgences.”  The Roman Catholic church taught that if a person died without enough merits – enough fruit – to get into heaven, that they would be trapped in an imaginary place called “purgatory” until someone who was still alive on earth, purchased merits for their credit from the “Treasury of Heaven” by giving money to the church – sort of buying fruit for someone else’s salad.   This is also a current practice of Islam, Baha’i and a number of other religions, where instead of focusing on our relationship to the vine, it’s all about the fruit. 

            But the trick, (and the hardest part for us), is that we don’t do anything to bear fruit.  We can’t.  Jesus said “apart from me you can do nothing;” we’d just be branches lying on the ground.  The key, then, is to get close to Jesus, stay close to Jesus, and he and his Father will do the rest.  Jesus is the vine and we are the branches, but in the text it is Jesus who is being pruned by the gardener.

            Besides making more fruit, another thing that happens when the vine is pruned, is that the vine is cleansed of disease.   The Greek word for “prune” is the same as the Greek word for “cleanse.”  So when the gardener – God the Father – prunes Jesus the True Vine, Jesus the True Vine is purified and kept clean of the disease of sin.  If we branches are firmly attached to Jesus the Vine, we, too, will be purified and kept sin-free because we share the same circulatory system – Jesus abiding in us, Jesus’ blood circulating through us, keeping us clean the way He is clean.  And as long as we remain close to Jesus, firmly attached, we will bear fruit simply because we abide in the Vine, and the Vine abides in us.

            So how are we doing at “abiding”? 

• If we are all abiding in the Vine, why aren’t the remote African and South American jungles full of Christian missionaries? 
• Why do so many, who appear to be such dedicated Christian workers burn out and fall away from the faith? 
• Why aren’t our own neighbors and co-workers all Christians?  Why didn’t we tell them? 
• Why are we not as hungry for souls as Audrey II is?

            Because we still have it backward – most of the time we’re still thinking about the fruit and not about the Vine.  We don’t become missionaries because it sounds too hard – as though we had to do the work of a missionary by ourselves; we think we have to be perfect Christians before our neighbors and friends will listen to our Christian testimony; we burn out because we are trying to bear fruit in our own strength and out of our own resources, instead of paying attention to Jesus when he says “apart from me you can do nothing!” 

            Our illustration of what “abiding in the vine” looks like comes from the unlikely place that is the latest issue of Texas Monthly, in the story of Ann and John McClamrock.

            Ann McClamrock was John’s mother.  In 1973, when John was a 17-year-old high school football player, he was paralyzed from the neck down after a tackle broke his neck.  It was a horrible tragedy.

            He should have died, but he didn’t (and these days, some might consider that a tragedy).  When the doctors had done all they could, they told his mother he should be institutionalized, but she insisted on taking him home and caring for him herself.  She quit her job, and for the next thirty-five years, John lay immobile in his bed.  “Every morning before sunrise, [Ann] got out of bed, did her makeup and hair, put on a nice dress and some perfume, and walked into John’s room.

            “She shaved him, clipped his nails, brushed his teeth, gave him a sponge bath, shampooed his hair and scratched his nose when it itched.  She fed him all of his meals…she changed his catheter and..cleaned [him] as if he was a newborn…to prevent bedsores she turned him constantly throughout the day. 

            “From Monday through Saturday she almost never left the house.  On Sunday mornings she went to mass…and afterward to the grocery store…[and] once a month [she would get her hair done].  But that was it: Every other minute was devoted to John.”[2]

            Each evening Ann would kiss him as she went off to bed, and before she turned out the light she read the same prayer of thanksgiving.  That’s right, not a prayer for healing or for strength, or even deliverance.  A prayer of thanksgiving that was printed on a card she kept by her bed.  This is what she read:

“Divine …Jesus, I know you love me and would never leave me.  I thank you for your close presence in my life…I believe in your promise of peace, blessings and freedom from want.  I place every need and care in your hands.  Lord Jesus, may I always trust in your generous mercy and love.  I want to honor and praise you, now and forever, Amen.”[3]

            Ann was being espaliered over the long haul for the long haul – trained year by year into the shape of a person who could care for an invalid for two lifetimes – and she found her strength by staying close to the Vine as her source.  She prayed that same simple prayer of thanksgiving every night for 12,775 nights between John’s accident and the day she died.

            When Ann was in her late 70’s, she began to also pray that God would let her live just one day longer than John so she could always take care of him.  When she was 88, and John was an unbelievable 51, she had a dream that he could walk again.  It was the only time she dreamed this since his accident.

            A few days after that John told his brother Henry, “We know about her prayer.  We know she doesn’t want to go first.  I need to go so she can go.”  And John, who had defied all the odds, began to intentionally  give up his will to live. 

            When they brought Ann in to see John at the last, he looked at his mother and said, “I know how hard it’s been for you.”  Ann replied, “Hard?  Johnny, it’s been an honor.” 

            Ann died eight weeks after John.  A man who lived in his bedroom, who couldn’t do anything more than speak a few breathless words and blink his eyes for a third of a century, and a mother who never left his side, had touched so many lives and borne so much fruit that there was standing room only at both of their funerals.  And neither one of them had been able to do good works in the name of Christ beyond the four walls of their little home in a neighborhood where most of the neighbors didn’t even know their names -  but even in their social isolation and physical limitations, Jesus had produced the fruit using their relationship with him and one another.  It is an example of how the church blesses the whole world just by being in it, and being faithful.

            Both mother and son had had their lives arrested by what looked to everyone around them like a tragedy, but all of her pruning had made Ann strong enough to weather the storm that didn’t stop.  Each night she drew near to the Vine to receive the strength to continue day after day.  And John – completely helpless – was able to bear fruit because he was so close to the source of his mother’s selfless strength and love.  His own pruning made him able to give up his own life so she could rest.

            Ann and John were an earthbound picture of what it looks like when Jesus abides in his Father and allows himself to be pruned; and what it looks like when we abide in Jesus the Real Vine. Jesus is the source of our strength, and Jesus gave up his own life so we could rest. 

            None of this happened on a mission field or in a Sunday School room.  It happened in the vineyard of God where Jesus was espaliered on the trellis we call the cross. 

·         Are you being pruned?  It is so you can bear fruit to benefit others from your experience and your learned compassion. 

·         Are you being espaliered – held back over and over again from your natural bent, being forced to go in a way you don’t want to go?  It is so you can produce a greater harvest when you are allowed to bear fruit at last. 

·         Are you being asked to serve as the source of strength for someone else who depends on you? It is because God has chosen you to bear his fruit.

·         Is God calling you away from your safe life, occupation and responsibilities to serve the Kingdom of God in a way that requires the seeming sacrifice of your own plans and desires?  Draw near to Jesus and live in him, and allow him to live in you and renew your strength.  You have the promise of God that this kind of obedience will result in God’s production of much fruit through your life for his glory.

            Thanks be to God for the way “He” “mothers” us all.

            Christ is risen indeed – Alleluia.