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Sixth Sunday of Easter

John 15
9 “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. 10 If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love. 11 I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. 12 My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. 13 Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. 14 You are my friends if you do what I command. 15 I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. 16 You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit —fruit that will last—and so that whatever you ask in my name the Father will give you. 17 This is my command: Love each other.

The truth is, I’d rather be sailing. Not right at this minute, of course. I’d rather be here that anywhere else.

The definitive history of the bumper sticker has yet to be written, sadly, but I have some sense that “I’d rather be sailing” must be somewhere near the beginning of the bumper sticker story. It spawned imitators, of course, but somehow “I’d rather be yogaing” doesn’t have the same impact as “I’d rather be sailing.

I think it also speaks to the mindset of most sailors I’m aware of. I’m sure founding Cable News Network and inventing a whole new category of broadcasting was fun, but I know Ted Turner would rather be sailing. I’m sure founding Oracle and more-or-less inventing the database was engaging, but I’m certain Larry Ellison would rather be sailing. And I’m sure disgracing yourself through phone taps and influence peddling is fun, but I’m sure Rupert Murdoch would rather be sailing.

Actually, I’m not sure if Rupert Murdoch would rather be sailing. You see, in my list, rich guy number three lost an index finger sailing with rich guy number two (Sydney to Hobart) all in pursuit in the kind of prestige that rich guy number one (Turner) enjoys in the racing world, having personally helmed a winning America’s Cup race.

So why the obsessive interest in sailing? Have you looked outside? In fact, it relates to the Gospel reading today, or rather, it relates to what the Gospel reading is not.

Our schedule readings, commonly called the lectionary, sets up a familiar pattern year-by-year. It begins with Advent, awaiting the birth of Jesus, flies through Christmas, takes a turn through Egypt and the boy Jesus in the Temple, then suddenly, by the middle of January, he’s grown. It’s like those foam things they have for the kids, tiny tiny until you add some water and presto, full grown Jesus.

And where does he go? Sailing, of course. Like all good most-important-book-ever-written stories, it begins with sailing. He headed out among the fishermen of the Galilee (who were sailers first, or how would they get to the fish?) and started choosing disciples. He even does a little recreational walking on water, just to demonstrate that there is, in fact, only one superior mode of transportation across water, and that would be the Son of God walking on it.

So the disciples aret selected--we’re still in mid-January--and then there is a bunch of other stuff, then Lent and Easter, then still more stuff, and then John ends in a boat. You see, after Thomas is doubting, and after the disciples receive the Holy Spirit the first time, the remaining disciples do the only thing that helps them make sense of all that has happened, the only thing that gives them time to think through the implications of this death and new life, and that would be sailing (of course, the Gospel writer insists on calling it fishing, but we know what’s really going on).

But John 15, the passage for today, is everything that the sailing at the beginning and the sailing at the ending is not: hard lessons. Listening in, trying to understand the complexity and the implications of everything Jesus is trying to tell them, I’m sure the consensus around the campfire was “I’d rather be sailing.”

In fact, the difficult times begin for Jesus in the last part of John 11, when he must retreat from public ministry, already facing arrest and already marked for death. So what follows, chapters 12 through to very nearly the end, is an extended passion narrative, a story that the other Gospel writers compress, but John records in all its fulness.

John 15 comes under the general heading “Jesus comforts his disciples.” But this is more than just pastoral care, this is a restatement of all that he has said to them, and all that they will need to live into the time when Jesus no longer walks among them. These few verses, and the message they impart, will live in the imaginations of the disciples and eventually come down to us, that we can gain from this comfort too.

A word about the style of the verses Dr. Jim read. While they are clearly connected under the heading of love, and the love that Jesus shares through the love he knows from God, there is anm impression that no conversation could be this intense. There is an assembled quality to it, call it ‘nine verses on love,’ that John wants to share in a particular way. But this is not to diminish the passage--even as I say that it may not have been shared exactly like this--quite the opposite: what John presents makes the message more compelling.

It works like this: In a culture where important things are shared orally, passed from believer to believer before they were written down, you get passages like this. Imagine the campaign trail, were the journalists following the candidate hear the same stump speech over and over, day after day. So it was for the followers of Jesus. Not that he was running for anything, but he did go from town to town teaching people about the ways of God. That was his mission.

As he moved about, teaching anyone who would listen, he would inevitably repeat the same lessons, and the same stories, and point to the same objects, time and time again. This is how people start a movement, or in our modern example, campaign for high office. So we know that John and the others heard these love lessons repeated time and again. Therefore, when it came time to write down the Gospel, even years later, the familiar sayings and stories remain. Think of the oral history of your own family, of the favourite stories you like to share, and the way in which the telling remains constant even if the race time gets better or the other boats fall farther behind in the latest telling.

In what may be the longest introduction to a passage in the history of preaching, I’ve come to this spot to tell you that you can’t really preach John 15.9-17. These nine verse are at least nine sermons, maybe nine seasons of sermons, and cannot be preached as a whole. For all the reasons I have just shared they were not meant to preached in one go, rather you have to approach them in some other way. If we are going to use the one-verse-one-sermon approach, or even half a verse to get us to lunch before it’s too late, I guess I would begin with 16a.

16 You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit —fruit that will last.

If it turns out that you belong to the other school, the school of thought that says this passage can be preached as a whole, then you might summarize all that comes before verse 16a this way: Jesus says “my theme is love. Follow me, and you too must love, even unto death. You are a friend of God now, so love one another.”

And it is in the context of this friendship with God we hear verse 16a: “I chose you, chose you to go out and bear fruit that will last.”

The idea that we must bear fruit has a long and storied history, and looms large in the Christian imagination. Matthew, Luke and John record the story of the fig tree that produces no fruit. The first part of John 15 describes the vine and branches, and the task of producing fruit. And St. Paul uses the metaphor a few times, most notably in Romans and Colossians, insisting that we must bear fruit for God.

This is all well and good, of course, the knowledge that our faith should do something, have some tangible outcome, lead to a result. I concur that “faith without works in dead” as the Epistle of James said, but such statements contain a danger, and that danger is judgment.

Years ago I got caught in a conversation with someone far more conservative than I am, and we got on the topic of judging others. There was some mutual recognition that there is danger in judging others, since it inevitably turns back on you. The conversation led to something he said that turns out to be a quote from a long-ago evangelist who said “I’m not judging people, I’m just a fruit inspector.”

Ah, yes you are. But just now, as I think back on the conversation and the discomfort I felt with that particular turn of phrase I realize I am judging too, judging the judger who thought he was being clever but was doing the thing we all seem to excel at, judging others.
So how do believers seek to produce the fruit that will last without descending into the judgment that inevitably follows everytime we being to talk about the outcome of faith? How do we talk fruit without becoming fruit inspectors?

First of all, we begin with the assumption that only God can truly assess the fruit of our labour, only God gets to determine how effectively we have lived out our faith. Yes, we can usually spot a sinner a mile off, but that’s another sermon altogether. But fruit, meaning the betterment that follows faith quickly becomes a contest, something better left to the perfect discernment of God.

Second, the fruit is really God’s doing anyhow. One of the key learnings of the missiological movement on recent years is that God’s church doesn’t have a mission, rather God’s mission has a church. See what some clever person did there? It used to be form God’s church and find a mission, now it’s find God’s mission and be the church that serves it. In other words, a mission will not appear simply because believers gather, rather God sets out a mission and believers gather around it.

Whatever we achieve, and however we respond to that mission, it is always God’s work that needs hands, always the power of God to heal and transform that needs to be proclaimed to a weary world. This is good news, thanks be to God. Amen.

posted by michael jacob kooiman @ 2:02 PM