If you have ever heard a sermon from someone who was in seminary you may have noticed something in his or her sermon. And the something was that they were not content with telling you one bit of information that they had learned in seminary, but rather wanted to tell you everything that they had learned in seminary. I can honestly say that I never gave one of these sermons, not because of any great virtue of my own, but rather because my wife always reads my sermons and makes me remove any item that is not directly related to whatever was my theme that week. Anyway, that floated around in my head a bit today as I read the text from our Gospel; largely because I had so many things I wanted to say about it, that I finally had to realize that if I did, this sermon would be a sprawling mess. So let’s try and narrow it down a bit. In the interest of transparency and so that you can grade me on whether or not I wander too far afield, let me tell you my theme which is this: The necessity of both us as individuals and the church in general to abandon those things which are not producing good fruit and focus our energy on that which is.
So let’s start with a little background. In the poetical devices that Jesus uses, there are lots of agricultural ones. I am probably missing something, but broadly speaking I would put these agricultural devices into two categories. The first ones have to do with growth and are things like the parables of mustard seeds, the spreading of seeds on various soils, the planting of vineyards and so on. The others are those like what we have today which are stories of pruning. Jesus says today, “[God] removes every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit.” So agriculturally speaking we have stories of growing and stories of shrinking or pruning. Now, if I was ranking popularity of these stories, at least in our day and age, I would say that stories of growth are far more popular than stories of pruning. If you don’t believe me do this experiment, type the phrase “church growth” into Amazon and then type in the phrase “church pruning.” Actually I will save you some time. Amazon happily reported to me that “church growth” netted over 20,000 results whereas “church pruning” gave me 16 (that’s 16 as in 8+8). Church Growth is pretty popular – I mean for some more perspective I typed in the Kardashians and only got 7,000 results. And yet there it is – pruning is part of who we are as Christians. And by extension what the Church is called to do. But what does it mean to prune and why is it not really very popular?
Let’s start with the popularity question. Broadly speaking I think the answer to why pruning is less popular is that growth is fun and exciting. We like our net worth to grow, our friendships to grow, our opportunities to grow and so on. Outside of our waistline and growth that is modified by the word malignant, growing is generally something that we like. And on a more existentialist plane, growing generally requires less introspection. Which leads directly to the reason why pruning is not all that popular: it is often not fun or at least not all that exciting. Pruning, in practicality, means getting rid of parts of our personality and of our habits. It requires us to part with things that while not healthy, are still part of who we are. The things that require pruning about which Jesus speaks today can be issues like a temper, a tendency to judge others, a propensity to gossip or a drug problem. These may not be good for us, but we often like them and hold onto them because they are ours – they are part of who we are. Pruning makes us look deep inside ourselves and ask what in me is not glorifying to God and then seek to rid ourselves of those things.
When I was growing up, I would often go out to my Grandfather’s vineyards. January was generally the time of year when you had to prune. It was a fairly exacting procedure, cutting off sucker vines, tying the healthy ones in place and so on. I remember my grandfather explaining to me how it worked and what you needed to look for to determine what had a healthy future and what needed to be chopped off. He of course never let me actually do it because it was not really something that you would or should trust a 10 year old to do. But for all of those who have pruned any type of tree, the main idea is to get rid of the unhealthy or non-fruit producing parts to allow in this case the vine to channel its energy to the place that will bear good fruit. And, often in this, you may prune some vines that will produce fruit, it is just that they will not produce the best fruit. For without pruning, the vine will produce mediocre fruit at best and after enough years of neglect the mediocre and non-fruit producing parts will overwhelm the vine and nothing of value will be produced. Now, of course, such a procedure is ripe (get it) with imagery. Vines will grow if left un-pruned, in fact they will grow a whole lot, but they grow in ways that makes them of not much use for anything and ultimately they end up as a big worthless vine.
So let’s bring this back to the two agricultural metaphors that are present in Jesus’ ministry. Growth is big these days. In fact, it is something that the church has been fairly obsessed with in the past fifty or so years as Amazon attests to. But the question must be asked of whether or not we are growing anything worthwhile. Both a pruned and an un-pruned vine grow, but only one bears good fruit. And honestly I am not sure how often the church in general or individuals within the church ask if the things that we are growing are worthwhile or if we simply think that it is enough that we are growing vines, because growing is fun and requires little introspection.
There is a theory about the church, which posits that in the future we will see a smaller church. And this is not the theory of some crackpot; it was actually put forth by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger writing before he was Pope Benedict and Pope Emeritus Benedict. He had this to say about the future church, “[It] will no longer be able to inhabit many of the edifices she built in prosperity. As the number of her adherents diminishes . . . she will lose many of her social privileges. . . As a small society, [the Church] will make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members.... It will be hard-going for the Church, for the process of crystallization and clarification will cost her much valuable energy. And so it seems certain to me that the Church is facing very hard times. The real crisis has scarcely begun. We will have to count on terrific upheavals. But I am equally certain about what will remain at the end: not the Church of the political cult, which is dead already, but the Church of faith. She may well no longer be the dominant social power to the extent that she was until recently; but she will enjoy a fresh blossoming and be seen as man's home, where he will find life and hope beyond death.”
I don’t know if what he says is true. Certainly, in the West the Christian Church is shrinking. What I do know is that the Church in general and we as individuals should always think about pruning. The conclusion that Cardinal Ratzinger reaches is that this smaller church will enjoy a fresh blossoming. From the pruning much good fruit will be born – because the focus of pruning is on the fruit rather than on the growth.
Part of being a Christian is looking for ways to stop expending energy on things that are not glorifying to God. The energy that we spend being envious we should use to focus on kindness; the energy we devote to pride should instead be focused on humility; the energy spent on anger should be spent on patience and so on. Just as a vine only has so much energy, we also only have a finite amount of energy and so we should eliminate the places where our energy is devoted to things that are not glorifying to God and instead focus that energy on the things that bring Glory to God.
It might be time for the Church to get back to basics, to stop looking at itself as a corporation bent on growth at all costs and instead see itself as a place where we grow in our love and service of God. Sometimes this will be painful, it will ask us to rid ourselves of habits that are very much a part of who we are, so that we can devote ourselves more fully to God. But ultimately the Church is there to call us to serve Christ in all things, glorifying him with every ounce of our being so that we may be his both now and forevermore.