About the Author: Sunday Sermons from Sell Chapel are written by Rev. Preston Van Deursen, Director of Pastoral Care at the Masonic Village at Elizabethtown.
On September 14, 2001… three days after the tragic events of 9-11, President Bush called for a national Day of Prayer and for the ringing of bells in houses of worship across our land. Rector Daniel Paul Matthews contacted the churches in his Manhattan Parish to let them know of the President’s initiative. Matthews especially wanted to hear the bells ring out from St. Paul’s Chapel on Broadway…the oldest public building in the city. St. Paul’s is also an historic church. President George Washington prayed there during times of war. But the engineers at St. Paul’s said that it would be impossible to ring the chapel bells. They were too near the chaos of ground zero, and the chapel had been shut off from normal activity.
But one of the engineers, Mike Borrero wouldn’t take “no” for an answer. He climbed up into the Chapel’s bell tower and banged on the bell with an iron bar. Twelve times the bell pealed out through the streets of Manhattan. On the ground below, fire fighters and police officers paused in their work to take off their hats and bow their heads in reverence. One brave engineer determined that St. Paul’s Chapel would not remain silent in the midst of adversity.
There are many people that would contend that the events of 9-11 drove America closer too God. Certainly it reminded us that there are still many people in our world that are filled with hatred and malice. And it reminded us that we are not exempt from the horrors that many people in the rest of the world take for granted as part of their daily lives.
But what does it mean to be close to God? Jesus said, “I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing.” Here we have the two essential elements of Christian living: “abiding in Christ” and “bearing fruit.” Many who follow Christ seek to major in one or the other, abiding in him or bearing fruit. But Jesus says that both are critical. Notice how starkly he puts it: “I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart form me you can do nothing. Whoever dose not abide in me is thrown away like a branch and withers; such branches are gathered, thrown into the fire and burned.”
This is serious business, we cannot say that we abide in Christ without bearing fruit. For neither flourishes in isolation. When we abide, Jesus says we bear fruit.
Across our land, like never before, people are clamoring to believe in something. There is a spiritual renaissance taking place because people are longing to be closer to God. All the things of the world don’t seem to satisfy the hungry heart.
In her autobiography CLIMBING FREE, rock climber Lynn Hill shares the peril she faced in May 1989 while scaling a cliff in France. As Hill reached the top of a 72 foot ledge,
she leaned back into her harness to take a rest. Somehow, her rope wasn’t fully connected to her harness. When she leaned her weight on it, she fell backwards into space. You can imagine how terrifying this was—falling through the air with nothing to catch her. Amazingly, she survived the fall. As an expert in her field, Hill relied fully on her equipment. She had every expectation that her harness would support her full weight. Her experience illustrates the danger of putting your faith in something that may fail.
Many of us can appreciate that hard lesson. It was only a couple of years ago that experts were taking about a new economy—a stock market that would climb seemingly forever. And many people put their faith in that market for their retirement. And some hard lessons were learned.
Many other people have learned even harder lessons after pouring their all into marriages. They thought that marriage would last forever. But somewhere along the way, the harness snapped and now, much to their shock and despair, they find themselves free falling. Many people today crave to be closer to God. One reason is that other sources of security have let them down.
Why put your faith in that which is not lasting? Physical health? Talent? Intelligence? Friends? Work? They are all important. They all are valued, but they all have one thing in common. Eventually they will fail. In Christ we find a source of strength that never fails.
We may face some difficult times, but these will serve only to root us ever more firmly in his care. We crave to be close to God because in God we find the one reality that can never be taken away from us.
The late Beatle, George Harrison once said in an interview, “everything else in life can wait, but the search of God cannot.” I believe that Harrison was right. The search for God is something that cannot wait. Our lives seem empty and meaningless when God is not apart. We crave for something and we come to that realization that we long to be closer to him.
But just as we depend on God…we need to know that God depends on us. You see we abide in God, and what happens according to the gospel….we bear fruit. We cannot separate these two…abiding in God and bearing fruit.
An unknown author was describing his fascination with strawberries. Strawberries, he says, are his favorite fruit. He even loves strawberry plants. He says that he has learned a powerful lesson from a strawberry plant- a lesson he has never forgotten. He was on his hands and knees one day in his garden pulling weeds. Suddenly he noticed something he had seen hundreds of times before but never caught the significance of it. It was the “runners” on the strawberry plants.
He says that form the main vine of a strawberry plant a number of slender shoots extend like arms in all directions. These shoots are thin, green stems creeping along the ground, being pushed out by that mysterious power in the mother plant. After reaching out about 6 inches, the end if one of those runners will penetrate the ground and develop roots like the mother plant. Then the leaves if a new baby plant will shoot upward. All the while, before the infant plant is able to sustain itself, it receives nourishment from the apparent through the “runner.” When the new growth is firmly fixed in the ground, the “runner” resumes its journey and reaches out another 6 inches, still nourished by the original clump of berries. Then the process is repeated. And while one plant is multiplying, there are several others doing the same thing in different directions. The writer says , as he observed this process going on, he forgot all about the weeds and saw only the mother plant sending out its runners. This, he says, caused him to cry out, “O, God, make me like those strawberries, reaching out in an effort to multiply and bring forth fruit.” This is the logical culmination of being close to God—We bear fruit.
What is the fruit we are to bear? It is life in the image of Christ—his love, his acceptance, his forgiveness, his compassion reflected in us. For example, it is simply impossible in the Christian understanding of life to be close Christ without reflecting Jesus’ love for the least and lowly.
A man wrote to Billy Graham’s newspaper column sometime back and expressed his regrets: “I want to serve God, but I’m too old to go back to school and become a missionary or a minister or something like that. Why didn’t I listen to God years ago,” he asked, “when I was much younger?”
Reverend Graham wrote back that the man had missed out on numerous blessings by not following God in his youth. But Graham said, it is never too late to serve God. And it isn’t necessary to enter the ministry, he continued. He wrote, “Every day you probably come in contact with people who will never enter a church or talk to a pastor, and God wants to use you to point then to Christ.” He charged the man with two tasks: to grow spiritually, and to ask God to show him how to share his faith with others. In this way he could serve God faithfully in the last years of his life.
We are never too old to serve Christ, or too young. He is looking for people who desire to draw close to him, but then are willing to reach out to others in Christ-like love.
So this is the challenge of today’s lesson form scripture: Are you close to God? Are you bearing fruit?
A Bible scholar tells about a piece of wood that he keeps on his desk. He took this piece of wood from a vineyard in the San Joaquin Valley. It is a section of vine out of which grows a branch. The owner f the vineyard told him that if two people were in a tug of war using this section of the vine, it would break. However it would never break where the vine and the branch are joined together for that is the strongest point of the vine. A vine, according to this good teacher, is different from a tree. If you pull on a branch that goes into a tree it will break at the trunk of the tree—in a tree that is the weakest place. But in a grapevine that is the strongest point—where the branch is joined to the vine.
What a beautiful picture of our life in Christ. This is the one part of our life that is unbreakable. Other things may fail us. Christ will never fail us. That is why we can reach out in love to others, because we are joined to him.
