Below is the manuscript from the sermon that I gave on Sunday.
Article 16: Church Order and Unity – the life of the vine and the work of the trellis
February 13, 2011
BMC- John 15:1-16
Introduction: Bear Fruit Comic
The Vine
And so it is with our passage from John 15 this morning. We are to bear fruit. We are familiar with the vine and the branches imagery. God is the gardener. Jesus is the vine. We are the branches. In order for us to bear fruit, we must remain connected to our life source, Jesus Christ. We also will need to be pruned at times to encourage growth and those branches that are lifeless, that are not bearing fruit, will be cast into the fire.
We also see the importance of love here. As Jesus has remained in the love of his Father, so we are to remain in Jesus’ love. To do this, we are to keep his commands. Now there is certainly more to it than this, but the only commandment that Jesus instructs us with after saying that we are to keep his commands is that of loving others as Jesus has loved us. And then he offers that famous line of scripture in verse 13 that we even hear echoed within our mainstream culture, “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”
Where is it that we typically hear that line repeated? The place that I most often hear it used is in reference to a soldier that died in battle whether in service to the nation or in a particular incident in which he or she was literally killed in the act of saving a fellow soldier’s life. Now I get how that is heroic and honorable by our cultural standards. And I mean no disrespect to the sacrifices of life that have taken place in the midst of war; yet it seems to me that connecting this verse to that reality is a misrepresentation of what Jesus is really saying.
In the first place, the verse says, “to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” It does not say, “To go down swinging for one’s friends.” There is a fundamental difference between going down swinging {take the stance of a boxer}, the posture of a soldier who fights to save a life and is killed in the process; and that of laying down one’s life {lay down on the floor} which Jesus modeled. This verse says that we are to lay down our lives for our friends as a sign of love and we see that clarified in this passage and in Jesus own life.
Clarification from the passage comes in Jesus talking about love here and commanding us to love each other as he has loved us. Jesus loved everyone both his friends and his enemies. As such to say that we are showing love in the process of trying to kill our enemies, even if it is in an effort to save a friend; is not following Jesus’ command and therefore does not serve as an application of this verse. It is not a sign of love as Jesus defines it. It may be a sign of honor, of loyalty, of valor; but it is not a sign of the love that Jesus describes.
Third, Jesus modeled for us what it means to lay down one’s life for his friends. Jesus’ death on the cross was a laying down of his life for the lives of his friends. We would all agree that no greater love has been shown than that of Jesus’ love demonstrated by his death on the cross, a death that was done willingly and without retaliation. Jesus did not resist arrest by sending in his disciples as soldiers or by calling down legions of angels. In fact, when Peter drew his sword and cut off the ear of the servant, Jesus stopped him and then healed the man’s ear. Therefore, Jesus own model of sacrificial death negates the use of this verse as an application to a battlefront sacrifice, regardless of how you feel about that soldier’s sacrifice.
But the other thing that the imagery of our verse points us to this morning, may not be apparent at first glance but is inherent to the imagery. The imagery of the vine is one of community. Certainly, we all need to remain individually connected to the vine; but this is not an individual metaphor. It is not, I am the vine and you are the branch, singular. It is I am the vine and you are the branches, plural. The vine does not have just one branch in isolation. It has a myriad of branches that are in community together, all working for the same purpose of producing fruit.
Article 16 Highlights
This is what we see in Article 16: Church Order and Unity. Certainly, our faith has an individual component to it. We each need to decide for ourselves whether or not we will choose Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior. And yet, we are not seeing the whole picture if we ignore the corporate realities of our faith that our article addresses in several different ways.
It begins by naming our connectedness in the body that through the spirit becomes a dwelling place for God. Then in goes into the importance of unity. Now certainly, it would be impossible for us to all be uniform or completely homogenous and I believe that we would miss the point of the article if that is our understanding of unity. Unity does not mean that we are united in that we are all the same. Rather, it means that we are all united by our common faith in Jesus Christ, our cornerstone, and in our shared vision or purpose despite our differences.
In John 15, we read of the importance of love and here our article names the importance of love and unity in the body. Our love and our unity serve as a witness to our world. In the midst of a world that teaches hate and promotes disunity; a people of faith that operate by different standards, with love and unity; witness to the world of a different way, a gospel way. And there is power when their prayers are united together.
Moving a Mountain[1]
“A small congregation in the foothills of the Great Smokies built a new sanctuary on a piece of land willed to them by a church member. Ten days before the new church was to open, the local building inspector informed the pastor that the parking lot was inadequate for the size of the building. Until the church doubled the size of the parking lot, they would not be able to use the new sanctuary. Unfortunately, the church with its undersized lot had used every inch of their land except for the mountain against which it had been built.
“In order to build more parking spaces, they would have to move the mountain out of the back yard. Undaunted, the pastor announced the next Sunday morning that he would meet that evening with all members who had "mountain moving faith." They would hold a prayer session asking God to remove the mountain from the back yard and to somehow provide enough money to have it paved and painted before the scheduled opening dedication service the following week.
At the appointed time, 24 of the congregation's 300 members assembled for prayer. They prayed for nearly three hours. At ten o'clock the pastor said the final "Amen". "We'll open next Sunday as scheduled," he assured everyone. "God has never let us down before, and I believe He will be faithful this time too." The next morning as he was working in his study there came a loud knock at his door. When he called "come in", a rough looking construction foreman appeared, removing his hard hat as he entered.
“"Excuse me, Reverend. I'm from Acme Construction Company over in the next county. We're building a huge shopping mall. We need some fill dirt. Would you be willing to sell us a chunk of that mountain behind the church? We'll pay you for the dirt we remove and pave all the exposed area free of charge if we can have it right away. We can't do anything else until we get the dirt in and allow it to settle properly."
“The little church was dedicated the next Sunday as originally planned and there were far more members with "mountain moving faith" on opening Sunday than there had been the previous week!”
This leads us to another important aspect of our article. It also calls us to be a discerning people with prayerful openness and scriptural guidance. It suggests that “In a process of discernment, it is better to wait patiently for a word from the Lord leading toward consensus, than to make hasty decisions.” We continue to be in a process of discernment that began with our Facility Discernment weekend last April.
This week, the Facility Discernment Task Force completed its contribution to the process of developing a plan for our continued discernment about our vision. At each of our meetings, we spent time in prayer and reflection upon Matthew 10:1-16. From that reflection, we developed a plan for how we will continue to discern through prayer about our gifts and passions as well as our community needs.
Administrative Council has affirmed and accepted that plan for ongoing discernment. They are in the process of looking for those who will pick up that plan and lead us into the next stage of our discernment process in which we more carefully and thoroughly reflect on our vision and our corporate calling to ministry.
Finally, our article turns our attention beyond ourselves as a local body of believers. We are but one of many, many local congregations that meets within West Liberty, within Ohio, within the Unites States, within North America, and ultimately within the whole of planet Earth. We are connected one to another through the West Liberty Ministerium, through Ohio Conference, through Mennonite Church USA, through Mennonite World Conference, and through Christian Churches Together, to name a few. While our primary commitment is to one another and the daily ministry of our local congregation, we are also a part of something bigger that allows us to do more than we could otherwise do alone and that provides meaningful and important connections of support.
Ohio Conference
In our connection to Ohio Conference, we see a coming together, a reinforcement, of our passage and article for this morning. Our article names the fact that we are not only a community of individual believers that come together in the local congregation, but also a community of local congregations that come together in a regional conference. Ohio Conference is a tangible example of this for us.
Moreover, Ohio Conference has chosen the theme of “Abide, Love, Grow” from John 15:1-16 as its theme for its Annual Conference Assembly in Kidron March 11-12. As such, they provided some of the worship resources that we are using today and invited us to consider this passage as well.
But what seems most significant to me is the new imagery that they are drawing from this passage as a way of describing the role of conference in our congregational life and work. Ohio Conference sees each of us as branches in the vine of Jesus that makes up our congregations. But the conference also sees a bigger picture in which each congregation is one of the branches in the vine of Jesus that makes up our conference.
Given this view and the content of our article which points to our wider connections, an extension of this passage is to name the fact that vines that are grown by a gardener to produce fruit, typically have a trellis to support them and assist them in their growth and production. When the trellis is doing its job, it is providing support and networking while being mostly hidden from plain view by the leaves and fruit of the branches. In a similar way, Ohio Conference serves as a trellis to the branch of our congregation. It assists us in carrying out our ministry in the local context and being united together.
We experience this in many ways. We experience this most tangibly in the work of the Regional Pastor. Andy has assisted both the congregation and the pastors in sensing God’s call and connecting to each other in the search process. Andy also leads a monthly pastor peer gathering in which he equips us, we share with each other and we pray together. And Andy has been instrumental in my installation, Rick’s licensing and now his ordination.
The conference also provides resources for us like their newsletters, website and workshops, one of which we hosted back in October. They provide important networking to other congregations for support and partnering together as well as resources for larger ministries that we would not be able to do on our own.
Conclusion
And so Church Order and Unity is about our local congregation in the ways that we work together, discern together and are united together. But it is also about our broader connections to other congregations and larger bodies such as Ohio Conference. It is about remaining connected to the vine and living as branches that bear fruit through living out Christ’s command to love one another. May God unite us together and nurture us in growing His fruit.
Amen.
[1] www.esermons.com ChristianGlobe Illustrations, Unknown, ChristianGlobe Networks, Inc., 2001, 0-000-0000-11
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