Fifth Sunday of Easter

Fifth Sunday of Easter (B)

 April 29, 2018

Text: John 15:1-8

He is risen!  He is risen, indeed!  Alleluia!

            Christ is the Vine.  You are the branches.  You have been grafted into Christ the Vine from wild, fruitless plants.  That is to say, by the preaching of the Gospel and Holy Baptism, the Holy Spirit brought you to saving faith in Jesus Christ, grafted you into the Vine.  And now you receive all your nourishment and life from Him.  If you abide in Him, remain connected to Him, you will bear much fruit.  That is the Promise.  Your life will be of infinite worth, because Christ, who shed His blood to purchase you for Himself, will use your life to accomplish His saving will for others.  You’ll raise your children in the faith.  You’ll talk about Jesus to friends and family.  You’ll give your time, talents, and treasures to the Church and to missions.  You’ll love your neighbor.  Which is to say, you’ll do good works, because those good works will flow from faith in Christ.  You’ll put love for your neighbor into action by seeking to live according to God’s Commandments, honoring your parents and other authorities, not murdering but seeking your neighbor’s bodily welfare, not committing adultery but living in chastity and fidelity to your spouse, not stealing but helping to improve and protect your neighbor’s possessions and income, not giving false testimony but speaking the truth in love while defending your neighbor’s reputation and putting the best construction on his words and actions.  That’s the fruit, and you can only bear that fruit in Jesus. 

            For while you may keep those commandments outwardly apart from faith in Christ, and it may look like good fruit, it’s just an illusion.  The fruit looks beautiful and good for food on the outside, but inside it is rotten and full of death.  Like some grapes my wife and I purchased from Walmart the other day (nothing against Walmart produce, we just picked up the wrong sack of grapes).  They were good for nothing but to be thrown away.  We couldn’t eat them.  The difference between the fruit of believers and unbelievers is not one of outward appearance.  In fact, the unbeliever’s fruit may look shinier than the believer’s!  But in the end, it is this that makes the difference: The believer’s fruit has been grown from its connection to Christ.  It has been fed and enlivened by Christ, by His resurrection life.  And whatever imperfection and evil we add to the fruit has all been perfected and made good by the obedience and sin-atoning work of Jesus.  The unbeliever only has the best fruit he can grow by himself, which is good for nothing but to be thrown away.  And that’s what Jesus says will happen.  The branch that does not bear fruit or is not connected to Jesus will be thrown into the fire and burned.  That is to say, the unbeliever will go to hell.  Yes, there is a hell.  We don’t like to talk about it, but we have to, because Jesus does.  There is a real hell, and those who don’t believe in Christ really go there.  And this won’t be because of lack of fruit, lack of good works.  Rather, it will be because the branch is dead, because of the lack of Christ.

            It all depends on Christ the Vine!  Our life, our eternal fate, depends on our connection by faith to Christ the Vine.  Our works, whether they are truly good works before the Father, or useless and dead works, depend on whether or not we are connected by faith to Christ the Vine.  The works, the fruits, are evidence of the life that flows into us and fills us from Christ.  Any good we do is all Christ.  Apart from Him all we can do is nothing.  And this teaches us the proper relationship between salvation and works.  We cannot do works unless we are already saved by grace.  We can do them outwardly by ourselves, but they won’t be pleasing to God, because inside they will be dead.  But once we have been grafted into Christ by the Holy Spirit’s converting us to faith in Him, then the life of the risen Christ flows into us and we start doing works that are truly pleasing to God, not because they’re so good in and of themselves, but on account of faith, on account of Christ.  So all of this is to say, we are not saved by doing good works.  We are not saved by faith AND good works.  Doing good works does not prepare us for faith.  When it comes to how we are saved, works have no place in the discussion.  Our salvation is wholly by grace, through God-given faith in Christ, who won our forgiveness and life on the cross.  It comes completely from outside of us.  But then it works its way into us.  The resurrection life of Christ flows into us, and we grow, and after we grow, then we begin to bear fruit.  First the branch must grow, then the branch can blossom and produce a good crop.  In this way we can say we are saved by faith alone, but faith is never alone.  It always overflows in good works, works of love toward the neighbor.

            And from this, too, we learn what is truly a good work.  It is not the work itself, but that it flows from faith, that it is connected to Christ.  A good work is something commanded by God, flowing from faith in Christ, in love for your neighbor.  Notice first of all that we don’t invent good works, like saying the Lord’s Prayer ten times while standing on one foot (an actual example), or maybe less ridiculous but more applicable, not dancing or playing cards or going to the theater or drinking beer or whatever it is that the Church has forbidden from time to time in order to increase your personal holiness.  Those things aren’t commanded by God.  Stop inventing things to do.  You have enough to do in the Ten Commandments.  Just give those a try.  And you do it because that’s what faith naturally does.  You want to please your heavenly Father now that the Holy Spirit has turned you.  You want to serve your Savior.  Faith is a living, busy, active thing, says Luther.  It does not ask if good works are to be done, but it is already and incessantly doing them.  And it is doing them out of love for the neighbor, because faith recognizes that God doesn’t need our good works.  There is nothing we can add to God or give Him that He doesn’t already possess.  But our neighbor does need our good works.  Our neighbor does need us to keep the Commandments, to feed him when he’s hungry and not murder him, to not commit adultery with his wife or her husband (or fornicate with his future wife or her future husband), to help him keep his property and not to take it away from him, and in fact, to bless him by generously lending and recklessly giving to him so that he is enriched all the more.  So if you want to do a good work, you look to the Ten Commandments, and you put those to work for you in faith toward God and fervent love toward your neighbor.

            The thing about fruit-bearing plants, though (and those of you who are gardeners or farmers know more about this than I do), is that they require pruning to be healthy.  Jesus says those branches that don’t bear fruit will be cut off, cast into hell.  But those that do bear fruit, which is to say, those united to Him by faith, will be pruned.  Parts of them will be cut off.  And as you can imagine, that hurts.  This is the holy cross Jesus is talking about.  In this case, not His cross, by which our salvation is won, but the crosses He lays upon us, the sufferings of body, mind, and soul by which He shapes us into the Christians He would have us be.  He molds us to look like Him: Cruciform.  For our health.  For our good.  It doesn’t feel like good at the time.  We may never know why a particular cross had to be borne, why we were pruned in a particular way, why the Lord cut a particular part off.  It’s really not our business.  He’s in charge.  He knows what He’s doing.  We wouldn’t get it if He told us the whys and the wherefores.  We just have to trust Him.  What is painful helps us grow.  And it helps us produce fruit. 

            So Christ is the Vine, you are the branches, and it all depends on you abiding in Him, remaining connected, by faith, and the result is that you produce much fruit.  Vital, it is, to abide in Him.  And how do you do that?  I’ll bet you know the answer.  We all grow together here in the Vineyard that is the holy Christian Church where Christ the Vine nourishes us with His gifts in Word and Sacrament.  We’re grafted in by Baptism.  That’s what happened to the Ethiopian eunuch in our first reading (Acts 8:26-40).  Philip preached to Him.  He preached Christ right out of the Scriptures, Isaiah 53, and he instructed him in the faith.  And apparently he told the eunuch about the surpassing greatness of Holy Baptism, for when they came to the water, the eunuch entreated Philip to baptize him.  And once we’re baptized, we live firmly rooted in that Baptism, which is to say, in Christ the Vine.  We are nourished by His Word and by His body and blood.  That is how we abide in Him.  By His means of grace, the Word and the Sacraments.  And so, it is all His gift, from start to finish.  He connects us to Himself, grafts us in by His Spirit working faith in us by the Word and Baptism.  And He keeps us connected to Himself by His Word and Supper.  And we produce fruit.  That’s what happens.  We are pruned, to be sure, but we grow and thrive, always and only in Christ.  Now, we can cut ourselves off.  We can not make use of the nourishment Christ our Vine gives us here in His vineyard.  We can not come to Church.  But that would be spiritual suicide, and we know what happens to the dead branches.  Why would we do that?  Just rejoice that you are here.  By grace.  By God’s love.  By the will of your Father.  By the mercy of Christ.  By the Holy Spirit’s calling you by the Gospel and sanctifying you with His gifts.  Yes, here we are home.  Here we are in the Vineyard.  Here we are in Christ.  And here we call upon the Father and He hears and answers.  God keep us all in Christ, attached to the Vine, so that His life flow through us and bear much fruit.  For He is risen!  He is risen, indeed!  Alleluia!  In the Name of the Father, and of the Son (+), and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.