John 15:1-17

06/20/10
John 15:1-17
Hudson UMC

If you were to ask just about any Christian what is the main benefit from being a Christian, or, in other words, what do we gain by being a Christian, the answer would most likely be, “Your sins are forgiven.” This is indeed a marvelous thing, that our sins are forgiven and that we are reconciled in the eyes of God. It is an amazing thing because, if we look at ourselves with truly honest eyes, comparing ourselves with the standards that are set up, not by our society or government, but by our God, we realize that we do have sins, that we commit them day after day, that we are totally powerless to atone for even one of them because, if we were to live every day from now on in perfect obedience, it would still leave all the sins of the past untouched. We can’t go back and undo the sins we have done, so they remain. However, because of the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Christ, God has actually undone the sins we have committed and we are freed from the bondage that goes along with them.

However, in spite of the fact that most Christians will speak about their relationship with God in terms of, “I had a debt, God paid it, and now I am free,” this is only part of the picture. It is indeed a major theme of the New Testament, primarily championed by Paul in his letters to the Galatians and Romans. However, not only is this idea of “God paying our debt” not the only way the New Testament speaks about the Christian life, it is not even the primary way it does so. There are other ways to speak of the life of a Christian that emphasize other aspects. One of them is being “in Christ.” Paul uses the phrase well over a hundred times in his letters; far more than he speaks of being forgiven.

The question that we might ask when we see Paul saying that believers are “in Christ” is “what in the world does it mean to be ‘in Christ?’” Jesus here tells us what it means in such beautiful language. “I am the true vine…Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing.” When Jesus speaks about how His followers are related to Him, He uses a gardening image. He doesn’t first and foremost say, “Hey, you know all that sin you’ve got? I’ll take care of that.” Instead, He says, “You are engrafted into me, you abide in me and I abide in you. We are every bit as connected as if you were branches on a vine.”

The reason why I began this sermon with a comment about most people jumping to the forgiveness aspect of salvation is because, though the idea of justification by faith is something that was reclaimed in a powerful way in the Reformation, none of the major reformers thought that this way of thinking could exhaust the incredible depths of the reality that God has brought about in Christ. Luther spoke of a “blessed exchange,” where God takes the things that are ours, our sin, our brokenness, and our shortcomings, and gives us the things that are His, His life, His righteousness, His joy, and all kinds of other things.

It might be that the one who spoke most wonderfully about this in the years after the Reformation was John Calvin. I don’t always agree with what Calvin has to say about everything, but I absolutely love his grasp on this idea and how clearly he points out its centrality. I want to give you several quotations to help understand the significance of our being united to Christ by being engrafted to Him like a branch to the vine. “We must understand that as long as Christ remains outside of us, and we are separated from him, all that he has suffered and done for the salvation of the human race remains useless and of no value for us. Therefore, to share with us what he has received from the Father, he had to become ours and to dwell within us…For, as I have said, all that he possesses is nothing to us until we grow into one body with him. It is true that we obtain this by faith.” “Christ, when he illumines us into faith by the power of his Spirit, at the same time so engrafts us into his body that we become partakers of every good.” “We do not, therefore, contemplate him outside ourselves from afar in order that his righteousness may be imputed to us but because we put on Christ and are engrafted into his body – in short, because he desires to make us one with him. For this reason, we glory that we have fellowship of righteousness with him.” “For we await salvation from him not because he appears to us afar off, but because he makes us, ingrafted into his body, participants not only in all his benefits but also in himself.” “Thus ingrafted into him we are already, in a manner, partakers of eternal life, having entered in the Kingdom of God through hope.”

Now, you might be saying, “Who cares? We aren’t Presbyterians, we’re Methodists. Who cares what John Calvin has to say? He isn’t part of our tradition.” Actually, we Methodists owe far more to Calvin than we often admit. Even still, John Wesley, who actually started the Methodist movement, does not ignore this important idea. He said, “Christ does not give life to the soul separate from, but in and with, himself.” When he was trying to articulate his understanding of Christian Perfection, that it does not release us from relying on Christ, Wesley gave the following clarification. “In every state, we need Christ in the following respects: 1. Whatever grace we receive, it is a free gift from him. 2. We receive it as his purchase merely in consideration of the price he paid. 3. We have this grace not from Christ but in him. For our perfection is not like that of a tree, which flourishes by the sap derived from its own root, but like that of a branch, which, united to the vine, bears fruit, but severed from it, is ‘dried up and withered.’”

So, we can see that it is in the New Testament, we can see that it is strong in the Protestant reformers, we can even see that it is in our own Methodist tradition. So, what does it mean for us today? It means that God is not a God that is far away, but one that has come so very close that He has taken up residence inside of us and we inside of Him. It means that God has penetrated deeply into the very core of who we are and has brought the transforming power of God into the depths of our being, to transform us from the inside out.

As believers, our sins are not just wiped away, we are not just forgiven, but this salvation has penetrated deeply into our heart. Our lives are no longer our own, we do not stand over here while Christ is over there. Now that we have believed in the incredible love of God, that we have received the Holy Spirit who binds us to Christ like a branch on the vine, it is the blood of Christ that pumps through our veins. We cannot separate ourselves from Christ without completely renouncing everything God has done for us. We are not just in relationship with God like business partners are in relationship with each other. We are in a relationship with Christ like we are to those who are closest to us; even closer, in fact. The relationship we have with Christ is not just something that we do because it is to our advantage to do so. Instead, this relationship goes to the depths of who we are and transforms who we are.

When we are transformed by the Gospel, when we live in this deep relationship with Christ, we do not get depersonalized or dehumanized, as if being in intense relationship with God through Christ and in the Spirit somehow makes us less who we are. Instead, as people who were made for this kind of relationship, we are actually made more who we really are, who we were meant to be, when Christ abides in us and we abide in Him. Think back in your life to the time when you were most profoundly aware of the presence of Christ. It might have been during a time of prayer, or listening to a sermon when the Spirit kindled a fire in your soul through the words that were spoken, or in a time of radical transition. Was not faith in Christ and a life that is shaped by the life of God the most natural thing in the world? Did you not feel more alive, more vibrant, and more who you are than at any other time? This finding our identity in Christ is not the destruction of who we are, but the final recognition of what we were created to be.

I have been attempting to proclaim this kind of deep, penetrating relationship with Jesus, being engrafted into the life of God, not just as one other way to think about your Christian life and faith that you can take or leave, depending on how satisfied you are with the idea of justification by faith. I mean that this is the primary language used in the New Testament to speak of followers of Christ to which forgiveness is secondary. Debates have raged over what happens after we are forgiven. How hard do we have to work, how holy do we have to be, do we need to do anything at all after we have been forgiven? Those who want to preserve the fact that it is God who is doing the real work will say that forgiveness is the culmination of grace in our lives. Those who realize that the Christian life is far more dynamic and active than just forgiveness now and heaven later want to stress that we do need to keep working.

But when we actually listen to what Jesus says here, how can this question even arise? How can we even begin to say, “What do we need to do after we are forgiven?” Brothers and sisters, we have been engrafted into Christ like a branch into the vine. We can no longer live for ourselves because God has died for us. We are so connected to Christ that, if we were to be separated from Him, we would wither and fall into sin and destruction. If we are so connected to God that Christ is living His life in and through us by the power of the Spirit, we realize that it is because of this union with Christ that we are forgiven and not the other way around. We realize that, in Christ, not only are our sins implicated, but our entire lives are transformed.

So, why have we as modern Christians tended to ignore this powerful theme of the implanting of the life of God into us and living as those who are united to Christ? The theme of forgiveness rose to prominence in the Middle Ages, when people lived under a system of feudalism. There was a strict hierarchy in place and everyone had power over those under them and owed a debt of honor to those above. It was helpful to think of God as the great Lord to whom we owed a great debt of honor because of our sin. It was strongly developed during that time, but what happened later? After all, if all the Reformers emphasized our participation in and union with Christ, if they reclaimed this important belief, how have we forgotten it again?

I think that we have forgotten it because in our modern, Western culture, we like the idea of having our sins forgiven from a distance and we don’t like a God who penetrates into the depths of our humanity. So long as God remains out there, we can claim the forgiveness of our sins and God can go and do His thing and we can go and do our thing. We like to hold on to our own way of living, a way of living that is shaped by our priorities, that responds to our likes and dislikes. In short, we like being able to live the American dream, to look out into the world, see what we want, and work hard to get it. So long as God is kept at a comfortable distance, we can still do that. If God gets too close, if He takes up residence inside of us and we take up residence inside of Him, we don’t get to do whatever we want to do anymore. God wants us to live with the very life of God in us. We desperately want to be forgiven, because we realize that we need it, but what we don’t want is a God who is going to meddle with us; and meddle He does.

But what kind of meddling does God do when we get engrafted into Christ? God begins to live in and through us. No longer are we a branch that is out on its own, but grafted into the source of life. The meddling that God does is insist that we don’t live like people who are dead and cut off from real life, but to live like those who are truly alive and passionate about the world and the God who created it, who care deeply about people and the God who loves them. The meddling of God is not something that sucks the life out of us, but injects it into us. God’s life reveals the life that the world offers for what it is: shallow, joyless and never quite delivering what it promises.

Though God, when we are engrafted into Christ by the power of the Spirit and we abide in Him and He abides in us, challenges the way we live and begins to mould us and shape us, this is indeed the Gospel! For God to forgive us and then leave us as we are would be a tragedy. It would mean that God doesn’t really care about us and that, for all He cares, we can continue on in our destructive and self-destructive ways, doing our own thing, failing when we try to live the right way. God becomes nothing more than a genie, who snaps his fingers and forgives us only for us to go back out into the world and sin more and more because our nature remains fundamentally untouched.

But thanks be to God that this is not the case. God has loved us so much that He was not willing that we should continue on the path to death and destruction, that things should continue as they have always been, but instead chose to move decisively, to step in, to stand against our evil and to rescue us from our sin, not just the sin that is what we do, but the sin that is lodged deep in who we are. God has declared that things are indeed not as they should be, but that they need to be redeemed and that, if He did not bring that redemption about, we would be lost. It is like a life preserver thrown to someone who is drowning. The only way out of danger is to cling to the flotation device that connects you to the ship. Without God, we wither away and die, but when we are engrafted into Christ as a branch on a vine, we are filled with the life of God.

So, as we leave this place and go into a world that increasingly chooses rather to reject the gift of God and remain in their brokenness, let us go out and be witnesses that the life of God is better than what the world has to offer us, that God is the source of our life and it is a life that does not leave us to our own devices but transforms us so that we might know the peace that passes knowledge, that gives us strength in the midst of tribulation, and that saves us from our sin. Let us pray.

AMEN