Abiding with Jesus, the True Vine

I made this Facebook post this morning:  "In a few hours I will preach on John 15: 1-8, and instead of focusing on fruit and the fire that non-producing branches face, I will preach on the idea of abiding with Jesus, the true vine. Abide is a word that the writer of the Gospel of John uses frequently, and perhaps even more than we thought. The Greek word often gets translated as "believe," but "abide" might be the truer translation. How would our approach to faith change if we had heard "Abide in me" instead of "Believe in me" through the ages?"

I am thinking of all the scraggly plants I've known, plants I've been sure had died, but suddenly sprouted new leaves. I am taking one of those plants with me for a sermon visual.

Here are the closing paragraphs of my sermon on John 15: 1-8:

The Gospel of John uses the word “abide” more than any other book in the Bible, and there’s reason to think that often when translators have used the word “Believe,” that a better translation might be “Abide.” And this bit of translation goes even wider. Think about one of the more durable ideas of Heaven that we find in John, John 14: 2 where Jesus says, “ In my Father's house are many mansions”—a better translation might be dwelling places, not mansions. The Greek might be key here: Mone—dwelling places; meno—abide—same Greek root.

I am not a Greek scholar, so I’m relying on the work of others. But with that idea in mind, we could also translate the verse this way: “In my father’s house are many abiding places.” I love that language, abiding place. Even though I don’t think of vines and branches when I think of abiding places, they are images meant to convey a similar concept. One Gospel commentator puts it this way: “So the vine image is another way of talking about abiding places (places where one is deeply at home), and both the vine and the abiding places are ways of talking about love.”

These images remind us that there are many ways of being deeply at home with the Divine, in whatever incarnation we envision God. Maybe it’s centering prayer. Maybe it’s Sabbath time, where we turn off our electronics and settle in for a Sunday afternoon with the Creator and the birds. Maybe the Holy Spirit calls us to take the Good News to new places. Maybe it’s spending time returning to the parables of Jesus, thinking about what they mean for the twentieth century.

Today’s Gospel tells us that Jesus calls us to abide with him, and that process of being deeply at home with Jesus is ongoing—and it will be incomplete. At some point, we will die, and there will still be work left to do. But when we die, it will be a homecoming, not a withering, not a burning. Jesus promises that if we abide in him, we will bear good fruit. We don’t have to spend time trying to decide what kind of good fruit to bear. We don’t have to evaluate the fruit. There’s no need to judge the fruit of others. God, the master gardener, knows the needs of creation, and does the pruning, the fertilizing, the watering, the nurturing to keep the vineyard fruitful. Our task, our mission—to abide with Jesus, to let Jesus nourish us.