Connected
Connected by Rev. L. John Gable
May 9, 2021
The past several weeks we have looked at examples of the way Jesus, the Master Storyteller and Illustration Giver, used metaphor to describe who He is and what He came to do. A metaphor being a figure of speech which uses something it is not to describe something it is, so we hear Jesus say, “I am the good shepherd” knowing that there is no record of His ever having tended sheep, even as we hear Him say, “I am the bread of life; I am the way, the truth and the life; I am the gate; I am the resurrection and the life; I am the light of the world”. While each of these is beneficial, in and of itself, in helping us understand who Jesus is and what He came to do, I find the teaching we are looking at this morning to be most helpful, most understandable, most impressive (Dale Bruner) even for those of us who are not master gardeners, or even have a green thumb at all. One does not need to have experience with plants, much less vineyards, to understand what Jesus means when He says, “I am the vine, and you are the branches.” He is speaking of a connectedness that is essential to life, be it horticultural, social or spiritual.
He begins this teaching by saying, “I am the true vine and My Father is the vinegrower.” All of Jesus’ “I am” sayings speak to the essential connectedness that He has with God the Father, and this one particularly so, as He will say elsewhere in John’s Gospel, “I and the Father are one”, a remarkable claim that only Jesus can make. Here He says, “I am the true vine”, a meaning perhaps lost to our hearing that would have jumped out for a first-century listener. Israel of old was referred to as being God’s vine and vineyard, as we read in the passage from Isaiah, designed and intended to grow and flourish and bring God’s goodness and Good News to the whole world. Jesus here is saying, “I am the fulfillment of that vision. I am the true Israel. I am the root of the matter, and just as I am connected to the Father, so you must be connected to Me, as branches are to the vine, if you are going to bear fruit for the Kingdom of God.” Again, a remarkable claim Jesus is making about Himself and what He came to do.
Jesus demonstrates His masterful use of storytelling here because this metaphor makes sense even for those of us with nothing more than a basic understanding of horticulture. Even the youngest child understands that in order for a branch to grow it must be connected to the vine, the trunk, the source of life, and without that essential connectedness it withers and dies. I had a wonderful 8th grade biology teacher from whom I learned a lot, and even now, how many years later, I still remember a question he asked on a test that I missed because I over-thought the answer. As I recall the question was “When does a plant stop growing?” That is a softball question. I don’t know what I was thinking but I gave some elaborate answer that ended up being wrong, when all he was really looking for was “when it is dead.” Stating the obvious, a plant, a tree, a branch, stops growing, stops producing fruit, when it gets cut off from its life source. Speaking horticulturally, socially or spiritually, this connectedness is essential.
So Jesus here says, “I am the vine” – I am essentially-connected to God the Father; “and you are the branches” – so it is essential that you be connected to Me; and because of your connection to Me, you are also all connected to one another.
The famed preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick, perhaps preaching on this text, offers this illustration. “We ask the leaf, ‘Are you complete in yourself?’ and the leaf answers, ‘No, my life is in the branches.’ We ask the branch, and the branch answers, ‘No, my life is in the trunk.’ We ask the trunk and it answers, ‘No, my life is in the root.” We ask the root and the root answers, ‘No, my life is in the trunk and the branches and the leaves. Keep the branches stripped of leaves and I shall die.’ “So it is”, concludes Fosdick, “with the great tree of being. Nothing is completely and merely individual.” There is an essential connectedness to all of life without which we wither and die.
Think for a moment of all of the relationships, all of the points of connection you have in your life, beginning with your family of origin. It is appropriate that we look at this lesson, today of all days, on Mother’s Day, the first and primary source of our lives. Think of parents and grandparents and siblings, of children and grandchildren; of your extended family, of aunts and uncles and cousins, all of those points of connection which have helped to shape and inform your sense of being who you are. Think of your circle of friends, past and present; of your colleagues and classmates; of your neighbors; all of these are essential points of contact and connectedness which give our lives a sense of meaning and purpose and fulfillment. Take those points of connectedness away from us and something within us begins to wither and die, doesn’t it? We know because we have experienced exactly that in the past year.
Most therapists and pastors will tell you that loneliness, in all of its various manifestations, is the problem they deal with most often, even among people who are fully engaged and seemingly living full and active lives. Toss in there a pandemic, with well-founded guidance for us to stay isolated, distanced and masked, and it is easy to see why loneliness has affected even the most positive, upbeat and optimistic among us. “I know of no more potent killer than isolation” writes Dr. Philip Zimbardo, former professor of psychology at Stanford University. “There is no more destructive influence on physical and mental health than the isolation of you from me and us from them. It has been shown to be the central agent in the etiology of depression, paranoia, schizophrenia and a wide variety of disease states.”
Much of the isolation we have experienced, are experiencing, is caused by the pandemic. Which of us has not been touched and heart-broken, either personally or anecdotally, by stories of those in hospitals and care facilities, prisons, distance or even their own homes, who have been totally cut-off from loved ones, from the intimacy of their touch and comfort, so many at the very end of their lives. We offer prayers of comfort for all those who have had to endure the heartbreaking effects of that kind of isolation.
But we need also be aware that not all of the isolation and loneliness we experience is disease-related; much of it is also of our own making. We, by choice, have, in recent decades, increasingly isolated ourselves from neighbors by building walls of wood or shrubs or berms around our homes, by closing our windows and drawing our shades, by cocooning ourselves at the end of the day and so creating our own walls of isolation. Others have chosen to isolate themselves from those with whom they disagree, politically, socially, spiritually, choosing instead to be connected only with those who look like them, act like them, think like them, believe as they do. Still others have withdrawn to the isolation of a computer screen and an on-line presence void of human contact or feeling. The effects are the same. By building walls, real and imagined, we have created a society of lonely, isolated individuals who lack the essential points of connectedness in life: with God and with others, and the devastating effects of this are evident in countless ways.
Lest you think I am talking about someone else, I am not. I am talking about us, we, the Church, the Body of Christ (do you hear the essential nature of connectedness in calling ourselves the Body of Christ?) I clipped and filed an article from a magazine printed in January, 1995 titled Cruising the Electronic Highway because I found it both fascinating and unimaginable. It was reporting on that years Consumer Electronics Show and told of a new invention called “virtual reality” which boasted of enabling its users to experience monster dunks from Shaquille O’Neil or a fast ball thrown by Roger Clemens from the privacy of your own home simply by putting on a set of virtual reality goggles. It imagined being able to read any magazine, newspaper or book from a huge electronic library and turn the pages electronically; of being able to shop electronically without ever having to leave the comfort of your own home; and of being able to view all the latest TV shows on as many as 500 channels anytime you want! I cut out the article, not only because I found it fantastically unbelievable, but because I read in to it a certain detrimental inevitability for the future of the church, even though church was nowhere mentioned in the article. I wondered then, and do still today, what would the church look like if we all experienced it from the isolation of our own homes?
Fast forward 26 years and we know what that looks and feels like, don’t we? This is exactly what we have, by necessity, experienced over the past 14 months and counting. Admittedly we have been very grateful, and still are, for the technology we have been able to use so well. The numbers of those who have experienced worship and programs with us in the past year have been staggering, people from around the country and around the globe, becoming part of the Tab family for a season.
But considering how grateful we are and how much we have gained from that sense of connectedness in isolation, we need also to consider anew what we have lost in our time apart. Admittedly, being able to log in to worship from home has been both comfortable and convenient, but consider also the deteriorating effects of isolation and loneliness we have experienced in ourselves and others, simply because we have been apart from one another. A couple approached me several weeks ago leaving worship saying, rather emotionally, that they didn’t realize how much they had missed in-person worship and how good it was to be back together again.
Think about it, we have spent the past year plus trying to figure out how to stay distanced from one another and now it is time for us to start figuring out how we can safely, comfortably, respectfully come back together again. For the past several months we have been back together in in-person worship and in-person meeting and gatherings, so let me encourage you to reconnect with us. We will continue to do our part to in making Tab safe and clean, so if you are vaccinated, willing to be respectful of the concerns of others whether they are your concerns or not, and able to return to worship and activities, I want to encourage you to do so. I’m not thinking about trying to increase our numbers, I am thinking about the importance of our getting reconnected once again, not only to God which I know can be done individually and in isolation, but that is not the way God designed us. He designed us to be related beings, connected to Him and to one another, as branches are to the vine, its source of nourishment and life, and without that essential connectedness something within us begins to wither and die.
There are so many other aspects of Jesus’ saying, “I am the vine and you are the branches” that we could touch on, but won’t today, so we will have to revisit this teaching another day, but let me close by reminding you of the purpose Jesus gives for this essential connectedness of which He speaks, us with Him and with one another: it is so that we can be fruitful, that we can bear fruit. God has designed and intends us to be fruitful in the vineyard of His Kingdom, to bear the fruit of righteousness, the evidence of living in a right relationship with Him and one another. Another text we will look at in a couple of weeks comes from Paul’s writing to the Galatians where he describes the fruit of the Spirit, prescriptively not exhaustively, as being: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.” This is the fruit that is produced in our lives when we are rightly connected to Jesus Christ and to one another, as branches are to the true vine.
And what do we experience of that connectedness? Jesus concludes this teaching, as will I, by saying, “I have said these things to you so that My joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.” Friends, this what Jesus offers us: His joy! This is what He desires that we experience in our relationship with Him: joy, the joy of belonging, the joy of abiding, the joy of being fruitful, the true joy which can only be found when we are rightly connected to the source of all of life. This experience of His joy is His desire for each of us and my prayer for each of you.