Vine and Branch

John 15:1-8

September 6, 2026 • Mount Pleasant UMC

My career as a viticulturist was short-lived. I bet you didn’t know I had such a career! Maybe you don’t even know what a viticulturist is, so let me explain. Professor Google tells me that a viticulturist is someone who focuses on growing and studying grapes, mainly for the purpose of making wine. Their primary job, the professor goes on, is to check the vine health and the soil, to make sure water is provided and to choose the best day to pick the fruit. So, basically, according to the good professor, as a viticulturist I was a failure across the board.

When we moved into the parsonage in Portage, the previous pastor told me she had just planted a grapevine in the backyard. Obviously, she hadn’t planned to move but the Bishop had other ideas, and so she blessed me with a grapevine. And I was kind of excited. I had never had a grapevine. So I began to have visions of making grape juice for communion at the church. I was told it would take three years for the vines to produce grapes so I tended the vines every year and waited. And then year three rolled around and I was excited. When would the grapes come? Year three passed with no grapes. So did year four. I think about year five we got these tiny little dots that looked like they might become grapes, but instead they withered on the vine. And that was when I got frustrated and tore the vine out. Cut it down to the roots. If it wasn’t going to give me grapes, I was done. And then I went to Israel for a couple of weeks and you know what I found when I got back? No, not grapes. More vines. They grew back with a vengeance. And I gave up. We got lots and lots of vines and leaves from that grapevine but not a single grape in ten years. As I said, my career as a viticulturist was short-lived. And pretty much a failure.

I don’t know that Jesus ever grew any grapevines—he was a builder, after all—but he certainly would have been familiar with viticulture. Grapes are grown in abundance in his homeland of Israel, still to this day. They are commonly grown on terraces in that near-desert environment. Wine has been produced in that area for centuries as it was and is a staple at the middle eastern dinner table. It was so prevalent that the vine and the grape had become part of the Jewish religious heritage, deeply ingrained into their faith as a symbol of Israel dating back to the Old Testament prophets (cf. Barclay, The Gospel of John—Volume 2, pg. 172). Isaiah had said, “The vineyard of the Lord Almighty is the nation of Israel…” (Isaiah 5:7). And so when Jesus, on his last night with the disciples, starts talking about vines and branches, the disciples would have known exactly what he was talking about. He was talking about their faith.

This morning, after taking a “midterm break” last Sunday, we are jumping back into our series “Broken Signposts,” seven things taken from the Gospel of John that, if repaired, if lived out, would help make sense of the world. Just to jog your memory, so far we’ve talked about love, justice, freedom and beauty, all of which are ideas that are very broken in our world today. And I’ve been asking the question as we’ve journeyed through these: what if even just God’s people lived life by these signposts? How might the world be different? Today that question becomes even more important, I think, as we explore the signpost labeled “spirituality.”

A lot of people don’t like that word, but let me tell you why we’re using it today. Even though a lot of people want to try to deny it today, we are spiritual people. We try to run from it, ignore it, call it something else or just act like it doesn’t matter, but deep inside, we have a spiritual nature. And so some people today like to say, “I’m spiritual, but not religious.” I’m not really sure what that means, but it is true, as the polls tell us, “religion” is for the past. “Spirituality” is on the rise today. However, it’s a rather bland, generic spirituality. It’s said that Henry Ford once said customers who wanted to buy his Model T could have any color they liked, as long as it was black. For a growing number of people today, you can have any spirituality as long as it’s not Christian (Wright, Broken Signposts, pgs. 62-63).

Whether we admit it or not, we all worship something. If it’s not God, then we might fall back onto the classic trio of money, sex or power. Today, though, there is a rising worship of the self. We have this idea that what matters is what we feel, that we have this “secret inner core, a ‘real self,’ which needs to be identified and allowed to express itself” (Wright 64). This is not a new idea; it is as old as time itself. It’s also not a religion that leads anywhere, really. Christian songwriter Rich Mullins described it this way many years ago:

They said, "Boy, you just follow your heart”

But my heart just led me into my chest

They said, "Follow your nose”

But the direction changed every time I went and turned my head

(“The Maker of Noses,” 1992).

Self is a religion of self-discovery, but that makes it a hard faith to oppose. Who’s going to argue with what I “feel” about myself? Who’s going to challenge you when you are busy “finding yourself”? We’ve even developed technology to allow you to be whoever you think you are. Online you can be anyone you want to be. And you can change who you are with a few clicks of the mouse. It’s a great faith because in “finding yourself,” you don’t have to deal with the real, messy world. If you spirituality is about self-enlightenment, then you don’t have to deal with anything or anyone beyond yourself. Your object of worship is me, myself and I and that’s always available (cf. Wright 64-65).

And yet. And yet that is not the way God made us to be. That’s not the way God made the world. The longing within us toward spirituality is real. But “finding myself” is not the answer. Rather, it’s to respond to the glimpses of heaven on earth God has put all around us (cf. Wright 65). The poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning put it this way:

Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God,
But only he who sees takes off his shoes;
The rest sit round and pluck blackberries.

And this is where we come back to the vine. Not the blackberry vine, but rather the grape vine. Jesus and his disciples, the eleven that are left after Judas has departed from the final meal, are walking in the dark from one end of the Kidron Valley to the other. Their destination is a garden called Gethsemane, where Jesus will be betrayed and arrested. But as they walk, he has some important things to share with his friends and John gives us the most complete account of that evening as Jesus tries to comfort his closest friends on the night before his death. So as they walk along the valley, they would be walking along the walls surrounding the Temple Mount, the place that represented God’s presence on Earth. As I mentioned, the vine was an image deeply rooted in the Jewish faith representing the people of Israel, and it is said that on one of the walls of the Temple there was a golden carved grapevine. One story is that wealthy men would often gold so that it could be moulded into a grape or a whole cluster of grapes (depending, I suppose, on how much gold you gave) and added to the vine (Barclay 172; Wright 72; Card, John: The Gospel of Wisdom, pg. 167). Today, I imagine they would have put a plaque on that grape that said who donated it, maybe hold a dedication ceremony. So it’s possible that Jesus and the disciples are walking by that big, beautiful grapevine with the golden grapes when he says to his friends, “I am the true vine…you are the branches” (15:1, 5).

There are two sides to this vine and branch imagery that Jesus uses here. The first, and perhaps most painful, is the image of pruning, cutting off branches that do not produce fruit. The purpose of a grapevine is to do what? Produce grapes, of course. And if a branch—or in my case, all the branches—isn’t actually producing fruit, what is it doing? It’s taking all the nutrients and water and failing to fulfill its purpose. It’s using but not producing. And so Jesus says the gardener, who is his Father, will “cut off every branch…that bears no fruit” (15:2). And here’s another thing the disciples would have known: once that branch is cut off, it’s useless. Branches from a vineyard were not used for anything. One commentator says it’s the very definition of “good for nothing.” The wood was too soft to be used for anything, and it was forbidden to be used even for the fire when offering a sacrifice. “The only thing that could be done with the wood pruned out of a vine was to make a bonfire out of it and destroy it” (Barclay 174). Branches that were once part of the vine are separated, thrown out and destroyed because if they’re not producing fruit, they are good for nothing.

Then there’s the other side of this vine and branch picture, and that’s the branches that are producing fruit, the ones that are doing what they were made for. So what happens to them? They are pruned. Wait, what? They’re doing what they are meant to do! You mean to tell me they are also cut off? Well, not exactly. The word Jesus uses here can also mean “cleans,” and the idea is that they are trimmed, cut back, not completely cut off. My vines got out of control and ended up with just leaves and useless branches. I didn’t trim them back so the vine just invested all its energies in growing things that weren’t its main purpose. But a pruned branch, where the extraneous parts are cut off but the branch is left connected to the vine, will produce a healthy crop—and, eventually, good wine.

But a branch only fulfills its purpose if it remains connected to the vine. “I am the vine,” Jesus says, “you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing” (15:5). A few weeks ago, I heard a statement from the late Dallas Willard that I then posted on Facebook (because that’s what you do). Willard said this: “Without God you can do nothing; and if you do nothing, it's without God.” Jesus said we can do nothing without him. Spirituality—true spirituality in which we find our purpose and the meaning in our life—requires that we stay connected to Jesus. The word in the translation we read this morning is “remain;” other translations have it as “abide.” It means to inhabit, dwell, linger, continue, or hang on among other things (McKnight, John, pgs. 251-252). It means the branch needs the vine because the vine is the way the branch gets nourishment and is able to produce fruit. We need Jesus like we need air and water. This final night, Jesus is warning his disciples because the next day, they will be tempted to disconnect, to run away, to deny they even knew him (one of them will actually do that on this very night). Stay connected, he tells them. Apart from me you can do nothing.

A little later in this conversation, Jesus changes the status of these disciples in a way. All through the evening he has had one command that he keeps coming back to: love one another. The essence of staying connected to Jesus, of being a disciple of Jesus, is loving others the way Jesus has loved you (15:12). But remember that loving someone in that way is not just having warm, mushy feelings toward them. It’s not seeing what you can get out of them. Loving others the way Jesus loves you is being willing to give your life for them (15:13). He says there is no greater love than that, and then he says something to these eleven men that I’m willing to bet no other rabbi had ever said to his students: “I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. I have called you friends…” (15:15). Friends! The essence of true spirituality is being a friend with Jesus. And while that sounds all nice and cozy, he has also told them this right before saying that: “You are my friends if you do what I command” (15:14). This is not about some vague acquaintance or someone you only see occasionally. This isn’t Facebook friendship or some sort of long-distance relationship. Friendship with Jesus requires following his command. His singular command: love each other the way I loved you. Spirituality is friendship with Jesus, not about some inner peace or personal quest to find ourselves. Spirituality is doing what Jesus commands. Only when Jesus’ friends live that way will the world see the God who made them, who loves them and who wants to spend eternity with them.

When we stay connected to Jesus, we will produce fruit. Now, note that it is not our doing more things or working harder or somehow summoning up the energy that produces fruit. Our job, our spirituality, is to abide, to stay connected to Jesus. The vine produces the fruit through the branch when it stays connected. The branch doesn’t produce fruit; the vine does. Just so with us. When we stay connected, Jesus will produce fruit through us for a dying and broken world. And what kind of fruit? No, you’re not going to start sprouting grapes off the ends of your fingers, but how cool would that be? No, in the letter to the Galatians, the Apostle Paul tells us what kind of “fruit” is produced by those who stay connected. He calls it the “fruit of the sprit,” evidence that we are connected and that God is at work in our lives. Paul writes this: “The fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control” (Galatians 5:22-23). A good exercise to sort of discern our connection to the vine is to ask: are those things growing in me more and more? Am I more loving, joyful, peaceful and so on than I was last week? Last month? Last year? Again, it’s not about working up more energy to grow the fruit. Jesus will grow the fruit when we stay connected. You are the branch; he is the vine. And that is the secret to true and lasting spirituality.

Actual branches don’t have to wonder how to stay connected to the vine. None of the branches on the grapevine in my backyard ever asked how to stay connected. However, in our role as branches, we have this disturbing tendency to try to disconnect, to go our own way. We seem to think that we can exist all by ourselves, that somehow we can find spiritual nourishment inside of ourselves. But as Jesus points out, the disconnected branch withers (15:6). It cannot survive apart from the vine. Nor can we survive, spiritually, without being connected to Jesus. So how do we abide? By practicing what have been called spiritual disciplines, practices that connect us to God and, when done in community, to each other. N. T. Wright says it well: “We abide when we pray together, when we read Scripture, when we meet together, when we worship together, when we partake of the Lord’s supper together, and when we share life with one another” (McKnight 252). It’s as simple, and as hard, as that. And I would add that, as a church, we provide all of those opportunities every week to get connected. We pray together every Saturday morning in the Chapel. We read Scripture, we worship, we meet together every Sunday in this place and on other occasions as well. Most weeks we provide a list of Scriptures to read each day so that, even though we might not physically be together, we can be on the same page and reading the same Scriptures, allowing God’s Word to shape us together. We have various small groups, including a couple of new ones that will be starting in about a week and a half, that allow us to be together and share life together. And in October, we’re planning an all-church fall party that will allow fun and fellowship to co-exist. Yes, even fun things can connect us to each other and to Jesus. All of those things are essential to a Jesus-centered spirituality, to friendship with Jesus.

And one more thing from that list: every month, we share together in the Lord’s Supper, or communion, or the eucharist. Call it what you want, Jesus had given his disciples this very practice on that same night, something for them to come back to, a meal that would connect them to each other and to him. In some way, the fruit of the earth (bread) and the fruit of the vine (wine, or in our case, grape juice) come together to remind us of his sacrifice and also to connect us with him. This meal is spiritual life; it’s a recentering, a reminder of our friendship with Jesus. So this morning, I invite you to come to the Lord’s table with just a simple gratitude for being connected to the vine. The answer to your spiritual search is not inside of you. The answer, as it always is, is Jesus. Let’s pray and prepare our hearts for holy communion.