One of the many things that life with toddlers is teaching me is the power of a name.  To be able to say what something is opens up all the possibilities for understanding it, for using it, for asking for what we need.  Communication itself is based on the ability to call things by agreed-upon names.

My agreed-upon name now is “mommy.”  In fact, I have grown so accustomed to thinking of and speaking of myself in this way that in a group of adults recently, I nearly said, “Mommy wants some coffee.” 

Almost as good as receiving my new name from the lips of toddlers has been to witness their growing to know and respond to their own names.  Of course with twins this can be a bit tricky, as they tend to over-identify with each other.  If you ask Rob his name, he will say, “Rob.”  If you ask Charlie his name, he will say, “Rob.” Self-differentiation can be a daunting task for any of us.

It is at such an early age that we first begin to learn who we are, or at least who others say we are.  To say our own names, to claim who we are, is a power like no other.  To watch an almost two year-old thump his chest and say his own name is a reminder of the deep satisfaction that comes with announcing to the world who we really are.

The problem for many of us as we grow older, is that we lose that delighted sense of our own identity.  Or we may feel like we never had a real sense of ourselves to begin with.  Or maybe we spend our whole lives trying to live up to other people’s definitions of who we are.  For many of us, the subject of personal identity is filled with a sense of longing, or anxiety, or restlessness, or sadness.  To come to an awareness and acceptance of one’s true self can be a painful and difficult work, and one that some people never can manage. 

In the Gospel of John, we get the story of a man who had a firm sense of who he was.  John’s Jesus speaks with power and authority, and he seems always to be telling folks who he is.  In fact, in John’s Gospel, Jesus says the words “I am” no fewer than 54 times. 

Seven of those times are called the “I Am” statements, and they refer to his speaking of himself in metaphor.  “I am a door; I am bread; I am light; I am a shepherd; I am the way, the truth and the life; I am the resurrection and the life.”  This morning we see the last of these word pictures of who he is for us, the last one he offered, the night before his death.  “I am the vine,” he says.  And perhaps he knew of our own struggles with who we are and who we are meant to be, because in this case, he doesn’t stop with telling us who he is; he tells us who we are as well.  “I am the vine, you are the branches.”

It is a word for any who are on the fundamental search for self, which most of us are.  And though Jesus speaks with authority, he does not speak as an authoritarian.  This is not a rigid statement of who he thinks we are, imposed on us; it is an invitation of who we could become, opened to us.  “Abide in me,” Jesus beckons, “as I abide in you.”    

The image of vine and branches is familiar and simple.  But, as is often the case with Jesus’ words in John’s Gospel, there is a whole world, layered and beautiful and dense, in this one picture.  Christ the Vine, God the vinegrower, we the branches. It’s a picture that invites us to get inside it, to walk around in it, to taste its truth in a way that it then gets inside us, and to bear its truth in a way that can then be tasted by others.

You can see the grapevine, can’t you?  Strong wood, twisted like a braid, rooted in the ground, growing up towards the sun and branching out towards the horizon.  The leafy limbs reach out, entwined with each other, growing together like a thick, shady ceiling above the ground.  From the branches burst forth little clusters of flowers, sometimes clusters of several hundred.  These become beautiful bunches of juicy grapes, purple or green or red, hanging heavy from the branches, for any to take and eat. 

It is a picture of who we are meant to be and what business we are to be about.  At the most basic level, it is an invitation. If you are my people, Jesus says, then you are like those branches.  Joined to me, fused into my own being, feeding on me.  My life flows into you and through you, so that out of you comes good fruit, beautiful life.  If you stay connected to me, if you stay in relationship with me, you will not only be nourished, you will nourish others with the fruit you bear.  Abide in me, as I abide in you.

Apart from the vine, a branch is nothing but a stick – dry, brittle, dead.  What makes a branch produce fruit is the sap of the vine coursing through it.  It is a pure and gorgeous picture of what it means to belong to Jesus. 

Of course, it is an affront to modern sensibilities to hear him say, “Apart from me, you can do nothing.”  We try so hard to be good, and we’d like to think of ourselves as good people.  But if we are honest, we know something more than that.  We know that even our best efforts at doing the right thing are mixed with self-serving motives.  And there is something else that is true, too – however virtuous we may be, it is neverenough.  Because what the world needs isn’t virtue.  It’s love.  And while we can make ourselves as virtuous as can be, we cannot make ourselves love, not in the way that the world needs.  Love is the fruit that Jesus means for us to bear.

Apart from me, he says, you can’t do it.  And he’s right.  In the face of all we deal with – disappointment, discouragement, disillusionment, fatigue – in the face of it all, it is so hard to muster honest, self-giving, healing, reconciling love.  But when we join our lives to his, love flows from somewhere beyond us to pass through us like the life-force from the vine through the branch.  And something flowers in our lives that is not of our own doing. 

Many of you know the remarkable story of Corrie Ten Boom, the Dutch Christian Holocaust survivor who, with her family, saved many Jews from certain death, a work they did because of their Christian faith.  Corrie and her family were sent to concentration camps for their work with the underground rescue efforts; four of her family members died there.  In 1944, Corrie was released from her concentration camp the day before all the women prisoners there were put to death; she later found out her release was due to a clerical error.

After her release, Corrie went around the world preaching the gospel, emphasizing forgiveness and reconciliation.  In 1947, after speaking at a church in Germany, she came face-to-face with one of the former guards from the concentration camp where she had been sent.  In her 1971 autobiography, she writes about the difficult encounter, during which the man told her he had become a Christian and knew that God had forgiven him.  Then he asked her, “Will you forgive me?”  He stood with his hand stretched out to her, and she stood there wrestling with what she calls the most difficult thing she had ever had to do.  She writes:
   

This is the central meaning of the picture Jesus drew of the vine and its branches.  He meant it as an         invitation to place our life in his so that he could place his love in us.  Intimately, organically connected to     him, we bear the fruit of love, a fruit that is for the healing and nourishment of the whole world.

There is more than just beauty in the picture Jesus draws.  There is pain, too.  He tells of how God, the vinegrower, will cut off every branch that bears no fruit, and that every branch that does bear fruit will be pruned in order to make it bear more.    What is startling about this is that either way – fruit or no fruit – either way we get the knife. 

What we tend to want from our spirituality is to “find” ourselves in such a way as to bring about happiness, personal fulfillment, peace, inner harmony.  What we get from Jesus is the sharp reminder that a life of real relationship with him will involve a cutting away of what is not essential.  If we refuse to feed on Christ the vine and refuse to fulfill our vocation of bearing fruit, we run the risk of being cut off from him.  In a sense, we do the cutting ourselves – by rejecting what he has to offer, by rejecting what he calls us to.  Bearing fruit is not an “optional extra”2 for Christians – it is the central commitment.  Being in an actual relationship with Jesus is also not an “optional extra” just for those who are sentimental or extra-fervent – it is the central commitment.] To have a personal relationship with Christ and to bear the results of that relationship in our lives – this is our calling, this is our identity and our only one. 

What Jesus also says is that a cutting comes to us even when we’re bearing good fruit.  You who are gardeners know the value of pruning.  Grape-growers have to be particularly severe.  In order for new fruit to come, 80-90% of the previous year’s growth must be cut away.  If it doesn’t happen, shoots will come out of the old wood, but they will not grow fruit.  The only way towards more fruit is a ruthless and drastic pruning.

If you’ve ever been through a kind of pruning in your life, you know that you are not the one who gets to decide what stays and what goes.  We are not talking about some sort of personal self-help renovation, whereby we discipline ourselves towards an improved life.  It is God alone who discerns fruitfulness, and God alones who decides what needs cutting. 

N.T. Wright, the Anglican Bishop of Durham, England, writes: 
The genuine spirituality to which this passage invites us is not one of unfettered personal development,     fulfilling all the potential we might discover within ourselves.  It is one in which, as we follow Jesus and         come to know him personally for ourselves, we find him calling us to submit to the pruning-knife, to cut         out some things from our lives which are good in themselves … in order that other things may flourish.          Pruning is always painful.  It’s a kind of bereavement.  But the vinedresser is never closer to the vine,         never more intimately concerned with it, than when wielding the pruning-knife.3

This kind of intimacy may be more than we bargained for.  What we want is comfort and peace.  What Jesus promises is a deep relationship that will challenge us, confront us, even cause us pain at times, but will also fill us with a vitality and a love, a beauty and a fruitfulness that will transform our lives, our church, and even our world.  Not through our doing, but through his life and love coursing through us.

The question is, do we want that?  Are we willing to abide in him?  Are we able to accept his definition of who we really are?  Not toddlers who can barely say our own names.  Not rootless adults searching for ourselves on some sort of self-guided, self-absorbed quest for personal identity.  But branches rooted in Christ the Vine, bearing the fruit of real love for the whole world to taste and see.

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1 Corrie Ten Boom.  The Hiding Place. Excerpt found at: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/questionofgod/voices/boom.html

2 N.T. Wright.  "The Vine and the Branches."  Sermon at Westminster Abbey.  May 2003.

3 Ibid.