Mothers, Vinedressers, Patience and Pruning
The Rev. Mark Sherwindt, Pastor
Zion Evangelical Lutheran Church
The Fifth Sunday of Easter: May 13-14, 2006
I have an evergreen tree just to the north side of my driveway that has had a dead branch about eye high for a couple of years now. I also have a hawthorn tree at the corner of the house that needs some trimming. I'm not much on pruning. I'm not sure when to do it. I don't know how much to cut back. I'm sure I'll kill it if I try to mess with it. When fall comes around, I'm pretty sure that that's not a good time for trimming a tree back for fuller, richer growth; and now another spring has sprung, with those same challenges posed by the evergreen and the hawthorn.
Our Gospel reports that Jesus is the vine, and we are the branches. God is the vinedresser, which means that God prunes the tree so that every branch will bear more fruit. Vinedressers know that dead branches need to be pruned, because they expose the tree to insects and disease, and they burden the tree with dead weight. Pruning is crucial to the health of a tree as a complex system designed to transform the resources of sun and soil into new life, good fruit, to the glory of God and for the benefit of all. I've got to confess that this image of the vine in John is not a parable that I like nearly as much as the one about that softie in Luke, where Jesus talks about a fruitless fig tree. “A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none. 'Cut it down! Why should it be wasting space and soil?' But the gardener replied, 'Oh no, sir, let it alone for just a little while longer. Give it some more time. We'll dig a hole around it, fill it with manure, and wait for next year. Maybe it'll come around.'” [Luke13:6-8] Now that's my kind of vinedresser. Give it time, and maybe, just maybe, with time and prayer, it'll come around. That's the kind of vinedresser my mother would have been. Come to think of it, that's the kind of vinedresser she was.
About a week and a half ago, I flew back to Connecticut to attend the funeral of one of my cousins. I don't really get back to Connecticut much, mostly for funerals, and this was the first funeral that signaled that it was no longer aunts and uncles, but cousins in my generation that were next in line, so to speak. I hadn't seen many of the folks at this gathering since my mother's funeral, when I preached at the church service. During that sermon, I talked about the fact that I was the youngest in my family. Many of the folks at the funeral service I attended were friends with my older sisters and brother, and they knew me only through the stories that filtered down about that mischievous youngest kid who turned our mother's hair past gray to white! Now, in all honesty, my mother was older when I was born. She was gray before I had a chance to do anything about it. But the people in Old Saybrook enjoyed reminiscing about a promise that my mother made when I was born somewhat prematurely, her pledge to dedicate one of her sons to God's service if God was gracious enough to nurse me to health.
It was pretty clear very from early on that I was not that son. My older brother, a model Boy Scout, earning its highest awards, entered a pre-seminary program in college, and was on his way to ministry … until he had second-thoughts … and the service grabbed him during the height of the Viet Nam War. He even excelled through that detour in life, becoming a 1st Lieutenant in the United States Army. In the meantime, I was driving my Sunday School teachers crazy. I didn't know anything about grace then, but apparently I was receiving a whole lot of it! My Pastor confessed to me that as a Lutheran, he had never asked a parishioner to go to confession, but in my case he was willing to make an exception! What a turnaround, when my perfectly responsible older brother had a change of heart; and I wound up, after graduating from Connecticut's number one party school, heading off to the seminary. I was the unlikeliest candidate for the call to Christian ministry of anyone I knew, and anyone who knew me!
Oh, don't get me wrong. I had potential. And that is precisely the point! The vinedresser that Jesus is talking about in John takes his clippers to branches that aren't producing, and he might even take his hacksaw to branches that are just wasting space, doing nothing. But in my case, it was a much different story. My mother was the softie in Luke. “Give it more time. We'll dig a bigger hole, fill it with more manure, and wait till next year.” What do you know, next year came around and somehow I found my way, or should I say, God found my way; and the potential that I'd been playing with found that doing what God had in mind was quite engaging. Everyone at that funeral service I attended in Connecticut knew that it all went back to that desperate promise pledged at birth by my mother who hoped that through the nurture of prayer and plenty of patience God might somehow transform His investment of manure into the gifts of ministry.
All of you know that I have been getting some great mileage out of this Daily Devotional Guide for Easter that the members of Zion wrote for our congregational family. There are some great stories connecting mothers and sons, like Carol Rossbach and Gregg Evanoff, and others connecting mothers and daughters, like Evelyn Moore and Susan Heyard. As it turns out, Lisa Roman has a wonderful meditation for today, which inspired one of our prayers this morning. Mabel Kolarik has a great contribution written for yesterday. She remembered her Sunday School teachers encouraging her to thank God in prayer for the many blessings through which God adds so many more blessings to our lives - blessings like love, the strength that comes through friendship, the peace and comfort that can be ours when we realize that at those times when we're walking along the shoreline of life, and we notice just one set of footprints in the sand beneath and behind us, it's not because we're carrying on alone, but because our feet have not even touched the sand.
All of us know that familiar poem Footprints. It's in this Devotional Guide. “One night a man had a dream. He dreamed he was walking along the beach with the Lord. Across the sky flashed scenes from his life. For each scene he noticed two sets of footprints in the sand, one belonging to him and the other is the Lord. When the last scene flashed before him, he looked back at the footprints; he noticed that many times along the path of his life there was only one set of footprints. He also noticed that it happened at the very lowest and saddest times in his life. This really bothered him, and he questioned the Lord about it. 'Lord, you said you'd be there, that you'd walk with me along life's way. But I've noticed that during those troublesome times in life, there's only one set of footprints! I don't understand.' The Lord replied, 'My precious child, I love you and would never leave you. During those times of trial and struggle, when you see only one set of footprints, it's not because you walked alone. It was then that I carried you” - and God carries us still.
Many of us have that poem in the form of a wall-hanging at home. My mother had a plaque in our hallway at home. It was a decoupage with one of the verses from our Second Lesson, “Beloved, let us love one another because love is from God; and everyone who loves is born of God, and knows God, for God is love.” I learned about that love through my mother's life of quiet trust, through “the look” I often got, through the patience that she practiced to perfection. Hers was the faith and the life that made the sacrifice of love real, the made the servant's heart that John talked about and Jesus lived actual. Hers was the face that made God's promise to be with us a word that could be believed, a pledge that could be trusted.
I was rummaging through some boxes in our basement last night, looking for that wall-hanging so that I might hold it up for you to see this morning. Right next to that box were lots of other boxes, some filled with piles of books that we read to our children, books that may have been read to us. So, I looked more closely for that one book, which is the first I ever read, the first book that all of us read. And there it was, not in that box, but in my mind. I will call it our book to the world. Picture in your mind's eye two clear panes of glass bound together by the hands that held us as a baby. That's the book, which according to just about all developmental psychologists, is the first book we read, with our eyes wide open like two panes of glass looking up at our mother's face. Those were the eyes that taught us to see the world. Hers was the smile that told us that we were precious, created by God, and of inestimable value. That was the face, and the life, that taught us about God's love.
Today calls our attention to love. The Fifth Sunday of Easter calls our attention to God's love as we read about it in the Scriptures. Mother's Day calls our attention to the love of those special persons in our midst who made God's love real and alive. There's a prayer on the first page of our bulletin that captures this connection perfectly. “There is no love like a mother's love, no stronger bond on earth, like the precious bond that comes from God, to a mother when she gives birth. A mother's love is forever strong, never changing for all time, and when her children need her most, a mother's love will shine. God bless these special mothers, God bless them every one, for all the tears and heartache, and for the special work they've done. When her days on earth are over, a mother's love lives on through many generations, with God's blessings on each one. Be thankful for our mothers, for they love with a higher love from the power God has given, and the strength from up above.” What more can we say, except … Amen!