God the Vinedresser -- Sermon for Mother's Day 2006

Sometime in the late Fifth Century, the area of the Roman Empire called "Gaul," what we now know as "France," suffered a drought and, while there doesn't seem to have been wide-spread famine, there was apparently some belt-tightening required. After the drought had continued for several years, a local bishop decided to hold special prayers after the Spring planting was completed. He called for three days of fasting, prayer and supplication just before the Feast of the Ascension; these fell on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday since the Ascension is always celebrated on a Thursday, the fortieth actual day after the celebration of Christ's Resurrection. He called these "Les Jours du Rogation," Rogation Days.

"Rogation" is a funny sort of word that we don't use very often, although we know it as part of the word "interrogation," which simple means "asking." The Rogation Days were set aside to ask God to bless the farmers and their farms, to ask God to grant a fine harvest from the seed which had just been planted, to thank God for the bounty of the earth anticipated in the Fall.

Rogation Days seemed like such a good idea, that they were adopted not only in that Bishop's diocese but throughout the French church and, eventually, throughout western Christianity. They seemed like such a good idea in fact that the Sixth Sunday of Easter, which is next, which immediately precedes them, was taken over by this activity of seeking God's blessings on farms and harvests, and came to be called "Rogation Sunday." Today is not Rogation Sunday – next Sunday is and, since I won’t be here next Sunday, I thought I’d give you that little bit of church history today.

Actually, what made me think of Rogation Sunday this week is that our Easter season lectionary this year is a little bit out of alignment! The lesson I just read from St. John's Gospel, in which Jesus describes God the Father as a vintner, a keeper of a vineyard, and the pruner of grape vines, is the traditional Rogation Day lesson, but this year, for some reason, we find it in the lectionary for today.

Today also happens to be Mothers' Day. As I thought about the juxtaposition of the image of God as vine dresser with the reality of motherhood, I was reminded of a time in my life when pruning and maternal (or actually grand-maternal) activity coincided.

It was the summer of my tenth year. I was spending it, as I had spent many Summers, with my paternal grandparents in Winfield, Kansas. My cousins Bob, a year older than I, and Randy, a year younger, were also there. We decided we wanted to build a tree house and so we asked our grandfather if we could and he said we could, so we did.

Apparently there was some miscommunication. I'm not sure what tree Granddad thought we would build our fort in, but we knew exactly where we wanted it .... in my Grandmother Edna's prize cherry tree! That was a great cherry tree. Grammy made all sorts of things from the fruit of that tree ... she made cherry pies and cherry cobblers, canned cherries, cherry preserves, even a cherry cordial (for medicinal purposes only, of course, as befit a good Methodist).

Well, building a tree house in the cherry tree required a good deal of pruning .... pruning my grandparents described as "butchering." Grammy was just about as mad as I ever saw her get. It seems funny to me now to look back at the vision of a 4'11" white haired woman administering corporal punishment to three large pre-teen boys ... but she did it and, believe me, it wasn't funny at the time.

Not quite a year later, Grammy admitted she had to apologize to us because, it seems, that cherry tree had been in need of a rather drastic pruning. The next Spring cherry harvest after our tree house construction was the largest she had ever had. Bushels and bushels of cherries ... lots and lots of pies and cobblers and preserves and, I suppose, gallons of that medicinal cordial.

And that, of course, is the point of pruning: to encourage the production of more and better fruit. Which brings us to today's Gospel lesson in which Jesus says, "I am the vine. You are the branches. My father is the vine dresser and he's going to cut some of you completely away and the rest of you he's going to trim back a bit and encourage you to produce spiritual fruit."

I know nothing about the care of grapevines, which is the image our Lord uses here. So I went on the Internet and found a Web Site that details the care of grapevines. According to this Web page, the pruning of grapevines is a cyclic three-year process. If you want to prune, it says, you must follow a three-year plan. The first pruning comes right after planting; the vine is pruned back to one to three buds. The second Spring, after the shoots are 6" long, you select the strongest shoot to form the permanent trunk. It lives. The rest get cut off. The survivor is anchored loosely to a post and allowed to grow. The second Summer, the vine dresser selects the strongest branches and ties them to the trellis. In the third year, four canes are selected to grow; these will produce the fruit for that year. After the third year, in late winter, the vineyard keeper cuts out the old canes and replaces them by tying new canes to the trellis. This process is then repeated year after year, cutting out old unproductive canes and allowing strong new canes to grow to produce a strong vine which will yield good fruit. .

The goal of motherhood is the same: to produce a strong child who will yield good fruit. This requires the skillful pruning back of habits, behaviors, and attitudes that are nonproductive or, worse, inhibit the growth of good fruit.

The fruits God the vine dresser seeks to be produced by the branches of his vine, that is to be produced by you and me, are well-known to us. St. Paul listed many of them in his epistles: "love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control" (Gal. 5:22-23); "all that is good and right and true" (Eph. 5:9); and "every good work" (Col. 1:10). The fruits a mother seeks to find produced by her children are the same.

As I thought about God's work, and a mother's work, in terms of this "pruning" metaphor, I could contrast the production of my grandmother's cherry tree, and other fruit trees she had in her garden, with the apple trees Evelyn and I used have growing on the back part of our property in Kansas. We ignored those trees: we didn't water them, fertilize them, or pay much attention to them... and we certainly didn't prune them. Grammy Edna's trees produced wonderfully full, sweet, luscious fruit; our apple trees produced shriveled up, bitterly tart, tiny wild fruit. A mother's work, like God's, is to produce the spiritual equivalent of my grandmother's cherries.

But, one must speak a word of caution about the vine dresser's (and a mother's) expectations. Charles Ryrie, the American evangelical Bible scholar, wrote about Christians bearing fruit in his book So Great Salvation. First, he says, "Every Christian will bear spiritual fruit. Somewhere, sometime, somehow." But, he cautions,

This does not mean that a believer will always be fruitful. Certainly we can admit that if there can be hours and days when a believer can be unfruitful, then why may there not also be months and even years when he can be in that same condition? Paul exhorted believers to engage in good works so they would not be unfruitful (Titus 3:14). Peter also exhorted believers to add the qualities of Christian character to their faith lest they be unfruitful (2 Peter 1:8). Obviously, both of those passages indicate that a true believer might be unfruitful. And the simple fact that both Paul and Peter exhort believers to be fruitful shows that believers are not always fruitful.

God knows this and so, like the vine dresser who tends the vineyard and prunes and trains the vines over a period of years, God is patient. So to must mothers (and fathers) be patient. It may take some time, perhaps a long, long time, for your efforts to pay off, but pay off they will.

Ryrie goes on, "a certain person's fruit will [not] necessarily be outwardly evident. Even if I know the person and have some regular contact with him, I still may not see his fruit. * * * His fruit may be very private or erratic, but the fact that I do not see it does not mean it is not there." God sees whether there is fruit; mothers can sometimes see it when others can't. Don't be too critical of the way another mother or father seems to be rearing her or his children; perhaps they, like God, can see some fruit you cannot. And Mom and Dad ... you may not even be able to see the fruit; don't despair -- keep on with your best efforts, with the hard work of tending and pruning -- perhaps only God will see the fruit of your labors produced by that child, but see it God will.

Finally, cautions Ryrie, "My understanding of what fruit is and therefore what I expect others to bear may be faulty and/or incomplete." Most lists that we humans devise are too short, too selective and too prejudiced; even St. Paul's lists couldn't include everything. "God," says Ryrie, "likely has a much more accurate and longer list than most of us do." God's children, you and I, I think, probably surprise God from time to time with the fruits we bear; I know for certain that our children surprise us. Moms (and Dads) be open to the surprises you'll get from your kids -- they may bear fruits you can't even dream of!

This great old Victorian stained-glass window of ours here [referring to a large window behind the church's altar] is an illustration of St. Paul's sermon to the Athenians in which he tells them that their altar “to an unknown god” is really an alter to God in Christ. In that sermon Paul says, "We are all God's offspring." He is, thus, reminding the Athenians of the words of their own philosophers, but he is also stating the great and wonderful truth of Christianity ... that we are not merely creatures, but children of God. So it is in any and every parent-child relationship that we see some of the qualities and characteristics of the relationship that God wishes to have with us.

John Killinger, a now-retired Methodist seminary professor, has written several books, one of which several of us studied a few months ago as we were learning about prayer. One of his books is Lost in Wonder, Love and Praise includes this affirmation:

I believe in Jesus Christ, the Son of the Living God, who was born of the promise to a virgin named Mary. I believe in the love Mary gave her Son, that caused her to follow him in his ministry and stand by his cross as he died. I believe in the love of all mothers, and its importance in the lives of the children they bear. It is stronger than steel, softer than down, and more resilient than a green sapling on the hillside. It closes wounds, melts disappointments, and enables the weakest child to stand tall and straight in the fields of adversity. I believe that this love, even at its best, is only a shadow of the love of God, a dark reflection of all that we can expect of him, both in this life and the next. And I believe that one of the most beautiful sights in the world is a mother who lets this greater love flow through her to her child, blessing the world with the tenderness of her touch and the tears of her joy.

So on this day we ask God the vinedresser to bless all mothers as they go about tending and pruning their children, encouraging them to produce the good and healthy fruits of love, forbearance, patience, good works, righteousness, and all the rest. Amen!